Sweden falls behind in maths and physics [in Swedish]

This is my response to the following article in Swedish about the deteriorating performance of Swedish school students in the international TIMMS survey.

http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/svenska-elever-samre-pa-matte-1.1010663

What do you expect?? Skolorna är utsvultna när det gäller budget, klasstorlek, ungarnas framtidsstro, lärarmotivation, ledningars pedagogiska insikt, osv. Utbildningspolitiker fattar noll o tror att man kan lyfta sig i håret. Att man genom att satsa på ett socialt urval som utnämnas till elit kan uppnå bättre resultat än genom att satsa helhjärtat på att höja genomsnittet. Att vi i en otrygg, orättvis, fördummande och våldsam kultur kan vänta oss att elever ska uppträda som små ljus i klassrummet. Att lärare kan entusiasmera eleverna när klassrumet är stökigt o lärarna själva går på knä. Vi får göra som USA (som alltid) och importera studenter och familjer från Asien för att höja vår statistik. D v s tills alla kvalicerade jobb i landet försvunnit dit o vi nöjer oss med att vara billig arbetskraft som utför legotillverkning.

[Schools are starved when it comes to budgets, class sizes, the kids' faith in the future, teacher motivation, the educational insight of school managements, etc. Education politicians understand nothing and think that we can lift ourselves by our bootstraps. That promoting a selected social group and calling it an elite will achieve better results than putting a real effort into raising the average. That we can expect pupils to behave like angels in the classroom in an insecure, unjust, stupefying and violent culture. That teachers will be able to inspire pupils when classrooms are tense and disturbed and the teachers themselves are worn down. We'll have to imitate the US (as always) and import students and families from Asia to improve our statistics. That is, until all the advanced jobs in the country have been exported there and we make do with providing cheap labour power doing assembly on demand.]

The economic "recovery" in Europe

Bit by bit through the piece - and thanks B for posting it!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/8358227.stm

The eurozone economy has emerged from recession after growing between

July and September, figures have shown.
...

However, both France and Germany grew by less than expected, a sign
of how tentative signs of recovery remain.

A temporary halt in the fall is called a recovery - this clutching at straws.

The European Union as a whole - which includes non-eurozone countries
such as the UK and Sweden - also emerged from recession, growing 0.2%
in the third quarter.
...

Oh, well, everything's hunky-dory, then.

The UK, Europe's second largest economy, has now contracted for six
consecutive quarters, the first time this has happened since
quarterly figures were first recorded in 1955.

That's 54 years ago. I was around then, most other people weren't. So ever since then, the economy's been healthier? It's been growing and thriving - growing is thriving, right? So the country (not us) is stronger and wealthier than it's ever been. Then why all the whimpering by the rich and powerful? Why the growing poverty? All this strength and prosperity - and the strong and the prosperous are unable to take a paltry per cent or two of less growth than usual?

ANALYSIS
...

(Well, what passes for analysis among the witch doctors and the village gossips...)

Economists are quick to point
out that a great deal of the growth is thanks to economic stimulus
packages which are bolstering European economies. Germany alone is
currently lending 85bn euros of its taxpayers' money.

All this strength and prosperity - and they're putting everybody in hock for decades? Cos it's not just the taxpayers, it's everyone who is dependent on taxes for a decent life and sometimes life itself. Sorry - my mistake - everybody except the rich and powerful who got us into the mess in the first place. They're the ones who'll be sending the cops and the army in to collect the debts over the next few decades.

Nobody can even
guess what will happen to growth when national governments stop
pumping credit into the system - as the European Commission is urging
them to do within two years.

Oh yes we can. And it's not pretty. Companies surviving on corporate welfare will be thrown into the mass graves of bankruptcy. Contraction will turn from suffocating squeeze to strangulation and bonecrushing. People relying on wages from these companies to stay alive

will starve and sleep on pavements and try and sell matches in the streets. I won't say what a lot of the women will be doing.

And the magical thing is that the debt will remain and be called in.

Economists had expected Germany to grow by 0.8% in the third quarter,
and France's growth was only half what had been predicted.

...

Tut, who would ever imagine economists could be so misguided in their expectations? I mean they've been right all along so far, haven't they? With growing world prosperity, the American dream of the fifties - Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin - is now flourishing everywhere. So many countries have reached economic "lift-off" thanks to US inspired economic remedies, thanks to Milton Friedman, the IMF and the World Bank. And the US Armed Forces beating back all the bad guys out to prevent the spread of prosperity, of democracy, of hope, of freedom.

France and Germany may have been less hard hit than the UK by the
global economic slowdown because their financial sectors, which were
at the heart of the crisis, account for a smaller proportion of their
economies.

But the financial sectors weren't and aren't at the heart of the crisis. They're just the most sensitive to its arrival. The heart of the crisis is the excess of capital, the excess of productive capacity, the glut of goods on the market. Too much prosperity for capitalism to digest. If the heart of the crisis was financial, the billion-dollar handouts would have had everything back in full swing again by now.

I'll say that again - too much prosperity for capitalism to handle.

Stronger exports and consumer spending, as well as government
stimulus packages, have contributed to the growth in the eurozone's
largest economies.

And the smallest economies? And the rest of the world? Africa, Latin America, China?

And when the borrowed money funding all this runs out? When there's not even a market for Chinese goods?

Cheers,

Chops

(Too many rhetorical questions leaving too many stones half-turned... Not a very satisfactory way of arguing. Too much irony - same problem.)

China (and a little bit of Zizek over there in the corner)

Hi AA,

Bit by bit this time...

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009, AA wrote:

Choppa,

You got it ass backward again. China is a hypercapitalist rightwing
dictatorship. Much more capitalist than Taiwan and Singapore were in
the 1970s. China is a hypercapitalist country in which the corrupt
party-government-industry-and-business elite controls the economy and
brutally quashes dissent.

No such thing as hyper-capitalism. The driving mechanisms of capitalism are the same everywhere capital exists. The differences between capitalist societies are all a question of regime or the proportion of holdover economic forms (common land, subsistence farming by individual peasants, etc) or pre-socialist forms (general health care or education under state ownership) sticking in the gullet of universal capitalist privately owned production for profit. NB not production for a surplus, for more wealth than went into the production process in the first. This kind of production is universal to human society.

There are early forms of capitalism under states run a feudal ruling class, and even under slave-owning ruling classes (like Rome and Ancient Greece). And there are late forms of capitalism developing in states with a bourgeois-capitalist ruling class. Like monopoly capital (breaking the free market, individual ownership of the classic pattern). In our day this is so late it's turning rotten, and rotting the world as it goes. And then there are holdover forms of capitalism in non-capitalist states, like the USSR and Yugoslavia used to be. These include small businesses or peasant production owned by private individuals, but on sufferance. And, most interesting in China, joint ventures with capitalist monopolies. Where the foreign capital is also on sufferance. This is obvious because as soon as one of these corporations becomes non grata it gets kicked out. Hell, this even happens in capitalist countries like post-USSR-Russia. Look at what happened to BP in Kamchatkca. Or India which still has a law requiring national ownership of 51%.

Unprofitable businesses are allowed to go
under. The gap between rich and poor is huge and it's growing. China's
Gini coefficient is, in fact, higher than the U.S.A's and the U.K.'s
(the real income gap is higher than the Gini index, which is based on
official statistics, suggests:
<https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172.html>).
There's no health care system except for those who can afford it, and
many can't. Education is for those who can afford it, and many can't.

All true, except maybe for strategically important state enterprises. But this doesn't define a mode of production. It describes a regime that must be removed by hook or by crook.

Read that again, AA, in case you think I'm an apologist for the present legacy Maoist bureaucratic regime. Removed by hook or crook. By violent revolution. I think that goes farther than any programme you would propose or support for China. The current regime is worse for socialism than Hitlerite fascism was for capitalism. Nazism didn't threaten the capitalist basis of society. Whereas the rotten Chinese regime actually poses an acute threat to the non-capitalist basis of the Chinese system. Like the Russian bureaucracy did in the USSR. Rather than let power pass to the workers producing the wealth they handed it over to imperialism. But Russia being what it is, the Nomenklatura hung on grimly enough to its positions of privilege and control to ensure that the power came into its hands even by legislation and the economic imperatives of capitalism. And boy did they enrich themselves. Since post-Soviet production was so concentrated to start with, the oligarchs sprang up like mushrooms. Built-in monopoly distortion.

If China goes the same way you'll see this even more dramatically. But it hasn't got there yet. It can be stopped by a revolution that smashes the power of the bureaucracy. The conditions for a violent uprising on a national scale are there already - it's already happening on a local scale. And the loyalty of the rank and file troops is very unreliable. But the conditions for a real political revolution removing the politically rotten bureaucracy and replacing it with democratic workers power are not in place. The theoretical schooling about socialism, about the Russian revolution, about revolutionary Marxism, and about the Stalinist counter-revolution is flimsy to say the least (though it should be borne in mind that the Chinese should never be underestimated - Trotskyists were among the most valued aides of Chou En Lai, and hid their political loyalties. You'll know what a degree of political intelligence and diplomatic skill that requires, Paul!). So the betting at the moment is on an even more grotesque betrayal of socialist principles than happened in Russia, riding on the back of a much more extensive explosion of popular anger.

The government is very popular in China because export-led industry is
extremely productive, the average income of the middle class is
growing, and so is the size of the middle class as a whole.

Popular among the "middle class" maybe - I'd call it the labour aristocracy/bureaucracy. Big quasi-private plutocrats in China are a weird hybrid in class terms.

The thing is, that China (like the USSR in its day) exists in a world economy still dominated by imperialist juggernaut powers like the US. The rulers in the USSR finally buckled under this pressure after seven decades of survival. The situation has been called living in the shadow of imperialism, and the greater the pressure, the darker the night.

Better get some work done.

Yeah... ;-)

Zizek writes a lot of nonsense, particularly (in the last couple of
years) about Confucianism and Chinese history. But he strikes me as
very intelligent and essentially honest, which is rare for a public
intellectual of his stature, and entertaining, which is even rarer.

Honesty has got nothing to do with it, really. The truth is more powerful than sincerity or authenticity ("I'm American/Chinese, so I know what's happening in the US/China better than you, foreign devil!" Compare my sig: "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es." - they don't know it, but they do it.)

As for intelligence, I give you Henry Kissinger, or any of the guys working on nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, or any of the reactionary historians or economists or whatever working at any prestigious university. Or any US lawyers worth their million dollar fees.

I'll grant you entertaining - if you like that kind of entertainment ;-) ("This is the kind of book that will be liked by people who like this kind of book")

"A lot of nonsense" - well, no disagreement there.

Chops

Continuing yesterday's discussion re Zizek

Continuing yesterday's discussion on Slavoj Zizek:

*************************

On Thu, Nov 12, 2009 AA wrote:

Choppa,

By ubiquitous I meant that Zizek's writings and musings are popping up
all over the place, in all sorts of countries. That authoritarianism
and dictatorship are perfectly compatible with capitalism is not news
to those of us who have some personal and historical experience of
both.

And by the way, "all diction and no dick" is how I would describe your
criticism of Zizek. What's the substance of your criticism of this
particular article of his? I say this and I ask as one of your fans.

You have it ass backward: capitalism _can_ work when combined with
authoritarianism. But as always it works for a privileged minority.

*************************

My response:

Hi AA,

You write:

And by the way, "all diction and no dick" is how I would describe your

criticism of Zizek. What's the substance of your criticism of this

particular article of his? I say this and I ask as one of your fans.

You have it ass backward: capitalism _can_ work when combined with

authoritarianism. But as always it works for a privileged minority.

The substance of my criticism is that the article is glib in relation to economics and socio-politics.

In economics he says nothing about what gives state-owned and state-run non-capitalist societies their growing power and staying power. This not only refers to China but to the Soviet Union before it was sold out in 1990 by the bureaucrats who had usurped the regime under Stalin and kept it in their grasp since then. I say this because imperialist "economists" have been claiming from the very start (1917) that the non-capitalist system was unworkable and theoretically impossible (like, say, the flight of the bumblebee). Yet the state, degenerate as it was politically, still survived for seven decades and made huge advances in that time, despite huge hostile pressure from imperialism. It beat the US into space, for instance, and provided security of employment, health care and education for all, despite the shortcomings - just compare this with the health-care record, unemployment and literacy record of capitalist countries like the US, Brazil, India, Chile, Colombia, Thailand, etc.

China was deformed from the start, but a workers (non-capitalist) state from the get-go.

It is NOT more capitalist than the capitalists, it uses capitalist investment under centralized state control - big difference. The wealth being siphoned off by the bureaucrats at the top is an indication that they're not likely to take the Soviet road any time soon. Which means that a popular revolution there could be a damn sight bloodier than the Soviet collapse.

These perspectives are ignored by SZ. As are the reasons for the capitalist crisis, especially the overproduction at the root of it - a glut leading to unsold goods, leading to the evaporation of collateral for the Jacob's Ladders of debt erected in the bubble and burst imperialist and imperialist-dominated capitalist nations. This includes the overproduction of capital, leading to a worldwide fall in the rate of profit, necessitating (this is historically well-founded) the destruction of "surplus" capital to raise the rate of profit to "acceptable" levels. Previous solutions to this on the world scale involved have been the two World Wars. Not a pleasant prospect.

Like I said, glib, and also unimaginative - although this won't be noticed by his blinkered philistine audience ("Western public opinion") in imperialist media. So, "look at me and how dangerous my ideas are!". About as original and insipid as the egregious Fabians in early 20th century Britain - GB Shaw and HG Wells for instance. Shaw was dickless in more than a metaphorical sense. Wells however was described by Trotsky - a good judge of people - as a puffed-up self-important petty-bourgeois rabbit.

My dick is neither here nor there, or perhaps both, in this respect - I'm not a public figure.

I might use diction and rhetoric, but not to ingratiate myself as a hinterlectual the way so many of our Zizek's do. In fact I hate their shibboleth diction. Pre-digested junk so to speak. Reconstituted cows arse a la McDonalds, in a permanent circulation of shit.

And if SZ thinks things are so dreadful, where are his proposals for change??

Sweetness and Light,

Chops

Here's one for Slavoj Zizek...

The link to the whole article is at the end of the quote...

*************

AA wrote:

From a New York Times op-ed piece by the ubiquitous Slavoj Zizek:

One can also argue that, when the Communist regimes collapsed, the
disillusioned former Communists were effectively better suited to run
the new capitalist economy than the populist dissidents. While the
heroes of the anti-Communist protests continued to dwell in their
dreams of a new society of justice, honesty and solidarity, the former
Communists were able to ruthlessly accommodate themselves to the new
capitalist rules and the new cruel world of market efficiency,
inclusive of all the new and old dirty tricks and corruption.

A further twist is added by those countries in which Communists
allowed the explosion of capitalism, while retaining political power:
they seem to be more capitalist than the Western liberal capitalists
themselves. In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won over Communism,
but the price paid for this victory is that Communists are now beating
capitalism in its own terrain.

This is why today's China is so unsettling: capitalism has always
seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosion
of capitalism in the People's Republic, many analysts still assume
that political democracy will inevitably assert itself.

But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself to
be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? What
if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of
economic development, but its impediment?

If this is the case, then perhaps the disappointment at capitalism in
the post-Communist countries should not be dismissed as a simple sign
of the "immature" expectations of the people who didn't possess a
realistic image of capitalism.

When people protested Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the large
majority of them did not ask for capitalism. They wanted the freedom
to live their lives outside state control, to come together and talk
as they pleased; they wanted a life of simplicity and sincerity,
liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and the
prevailing cynical hypocrisy.

More here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html

*************

Zizek is a poseur farouche. Scaring the knickers off the philistines with his pseudo-Marxist aura.

He knows nothing about historical forces and nothing about economic forces. But he can suck up the popular gabble of the salons like a sponge and squirt it back out again like a true charlady. Or better, he can gobble up the gabble, half-digest it, and shit it out again with his own special texture and odour added.

He's all diction and no dick, so to say. A tame castrato in the bourgeois/academic press. He makes even Tariq Ali look good ;-)

What does "ubiquitous" mean, AA? Slimy? Slithery? Is it the same as "iniquitous"? Or "you-be-quiet-ous"?

As for the big question: "Can authoritarian capitalism work better than free-market capitalism?", of course it can't. Too many distortions of healthy processes - or what pass for healthy processes under capitalism. Nazism was authoritarian capitalism. Capitalism without the "free and equal" exchange of capital (in this case, money) for labour power becomes slavery in a more concrete sense than "wage-slavery", and slave labour is notoriously unproductive and unmanageable, even when it's got more slave-drivers whipping it than you can shake a scourge at. Imperialist capitalism is like a wobbling jelly of congealed blood. And if we don't lance it soon it'll burst all over us. The blood is infected...

Cheers

Chops

The Hammer and the Cross - a book review

Here's a really terrible review of a new history of the Vikings. As I say in my comment, I only hope it doesn't reflect the book itself. It would take a whole article to deal with the misconceptions underlying the piece. I ran out of space in the end, so I couldn't add that the reviewer buys into the myth of the Vikings and Old Germans being shrouded in the mists of time and ancient forests, instead of making it clear that they were quick to throw off outworn rags for bright new cloaks, and that they kept what was essential to their culture regardless of outward forms. And that this essential core - the social and military cohesion of a tightly-knit free people - was volcanic enough to metamorphose the petrified crust of the decaying Roman Empire into new and stronger rock. In other words, their *modernizing* impact was crucial to the history of Europe "as we know it". Forget the peeling paint, and look at those foundations!

***********************

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article6894257.ece

The Times review by Dan Jones

The Victorians were fond of the Vikings. In 1869, the year that the Cutty Sark was launched, R.M. Ballantyne published a popular novel called Erling the Bold: a Tale of the Norse Sea Kings, which drew heavily on the Icelandic sagas of the Scandinavian peoples who lived in northern Europe during much of the early Middle Ages. In its preface he wrote: “Very much of the religious, civil, and political liberty which we enjoy at the present time — the liberty of the press, freedom of speech, the influence of public opinion over public affairs and many of our cherished institutions . . . in short, the spirit of the age and the germs of the British Constitution — may be traced to the Norsemen of old; those sturdy Vikings . . . who marauded, conquered and settled in this country at various times between the 5th and the 11th centuries.”

This was romantic cobblers, designed to please patriotic schoolboys. But there was plenty of it around. The Vikings were regularly portrayed as a lusty, seafaring nation whose hearty interest in colonising other countries was tempered with an earthy sense of fair play. Or, in 19th-century terms, the sort of ancestor worth having.

Times change. These days, the Vikings have been relegated to the second tier of civilisations worth raving about. (One BBC bigwig recently told me that the only TV history worth commissioning is on “dinosaurs, Egyptians, Romans and Nazis”.) Their deeds seem either cartoonish or obscure; if most people have any knowledge of them at all, it is the peculiar smell remembered from childhood visits to the Jorvik Viking Centre in York.

So let’s refresh. The people we call the Vikings originated as polytheistic heathens from Scandinavia between the 8th and 12th centuries. Their name evokes a seabound wandering, with warmaking, settlement and piracy all implied. They wandered westward to Greenland and the fringes of America, and eastward to the Baltic and Russia. They raided and settled in Ireland and in southern Italy. They threatened the post-Carolingian Frankish kingdom along its coast, over land, and even with raids up the Seine. They encountered the Muslim people in the Spanish peninsula and North Africa.

Their earliest contact with Britain came in 793, when they landed amid violent storms at the great monastery on Lindisfarne. The monks there may have had as little as an hour’s notice of their arrival. When they touched land there was no reckoning with them.

A 12th-century chronicle described the raid: “The pagans from the northern regions came . . . like stinging hornets . . . and slaughtered not only beasts of burden, sheep and oxen, but even priests and deacons, and companies of monks and nuns. [They] laid ] everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted steps, dug up the altars and seized all of the treasure of the holy church. They killed some of the brothers, took some away with them in fetters . . . some they drowned in the sea.”

It is a violent picture, and it is with violence that the Vikings are frequently associated. War, trial by ordeal, slave-taking and animal and human sacrifice were integral to their culture. Yet beneath this was a complex heathen spiritualism, which gave way by the end of the Viking age to a generally adopted Christianity.

This change from heathendom to Christendom is the chief concern of Robert Ferguson’s new history of the Vikings. Thor’s hammer and Christ’s cross bear obvious structural similarities and, during the 400 years covered by Ferguson’s intricate and thoughtful work, the two gradually dissolve into one another.

Ferguson’s main achievement in this book is not to throw the seafaring baby out with the salty bathwater. In revising the credulous mumbo-jumbo celebrated by the Victorians, the temptation must have been to disregard most of what is written in the sagas and chronicles on the grounds that they were written either centuries after the events they describe, or else from the perspective of those who had quaked before the prow of a longboat as the cow-pie helmets hove into view.

This temptation is admirably resisted. Rather than being sceptically dismissed, the narrative sources are cross-examined against extensive archaeological, genetic and physical sources. Runes, ships and relics are key witnesses in decoding the quasi-mythical stories about heroes whom Ferguson accepts from the outset we can never truly know. In maintaining some semblance of narrative thread, Ferguson says he has had to make certain “concessions to the idiom of legend”, but the judgment he exercises in doing so seems to me pitch-perfect.

And so we have heroes and villains restored tentatively to life. There is a noble attempt to delineate men such as Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, Ivar the Boneless and Harald Bluetooth from the myths that have subsequently become them. The journey from hammer to cross, undertaken under the auspices of these men, their ancestors and contemporaries, is a fascinating one. And if occasionally the story feels fragmented and the cast of characters weak, it is because we are following a historian picking his way through a mist destined never fully to lift.

But why should we still care about the Vikings? Unlike the Victorians, we now have little instinctively in common with our Scandinavian cousins, save perhaps a fondness for binge-drinking, Ikea furniture and — if Michael Gove gets his way — state-devolved secondary education.

Perhaps it is because Ferguson’s book shows us our present de-Christianisation in reverse. As Europe slinks back into heathendom after a millennium of relative godliness, now is a good time to consider how our hairy-breeched ancestors got us where we are; and what it is we are now leaving behind.

The Hammer and the Cross: A New History of the Vikings by Robert Ferguson

Alan Lane, £30; 480pp

***********************

What to say? I only hope the book in question bears no responsibility whatever for the review. There's no evidence given for the dismissive swipe at Ballantyne's remarks on liberties of expression and popular involvement in public affairs. The geography's wonky - "they wandered eastward to the Baltic". Well, well. Ask the Swedish Vikings how far they had to wander to reach the Baltic. They penetrated far more deeply inland than just Russia, the embryo of which they founded. They reached Constantinople along the rivers - no salt water there. So "even with raids up the Seine" made me burst out laughing. The review ignores their core activity of trading. And treats "settlement" as a mere detail. But the Vikings didn't just "threaten" the Franks, they conquered an important chunk of their realm - Normandy. Their settlements, as we know, had a huge impact on the future development of Europe. In a broader perspective, unmentioned here, the Scandinavian expeditions were part of the pan-German migrations. As in England and Normandy the German peoples brought with them their social and military institutions. These made them almost unstoppable, but the less essential one weren't sacrosanct. They adapted to the conquered societies. The old religion was dumped for the wealth of Christianity. Pure expediency. The old local mechanisms for managing business were ditched for Roman bureaucracy and money... but the democratic ethos (among the free-born of course) of leaders being first among equals remained and gave us the progressive aspects of feudalism. The Vikings made a big contribution to this process. As for religion, the Vikings, as long as they remained Vikings, were intransigent holdouts. Irreducible until the pivotal years for Europe of around 1050. Then the new Europe at last convinced them. The Hammer didn't dissolve into the Cross, it was traded in.

Why Johnny can't hypothesize, and the US can't do education

An excerpt reported in Scientific American from a panel discussion on US education moderated by someone from the Wall Street Journal. Doomed from the start.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=why-johnny-cant-hypothesize-a-discu-2009-10-26&sc=DD_20091027

My comment follows.

*****************

[...]

"The most important thing is to bring to K-12 education college graduates who excel in math and sciences," added Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education. Whereas other countries recruit teachers from the top tier of graduates, he said, "America is recruiting our teachers generally from the bottom third."

Convincing star college scientists to enter the field of K-12 education can be a hard sell, especially when comparing salaries of public school teachers with those elsewhere in the science industry. Universities entice great minds with pay that is more competitive within the field—physicists generally earning more than humanities instructors to reflect jobs outside of the ivory tower. Public schools, however, pay teachers based on seniority and education rather than field.

Aside from upping the competitiveness of science and math teacher salaries, most of the panelists agreed that competition among schools needed to be increased. "Competition is extremely weak with respect to most education contexts," said Christopher Edley, dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, and former member of the Obama education transition team. He and others noted that schools should be brought into more direct competition with each other (in part by expanding student choices through the creation of charter schools). Advances in science or math education are often not embraced as quickly as those in private industry because schools and instructors have little external incentive to improve their product (other than meeting basic proficiency requirements).

Competition, however, shouldn't entirely overtake the role of regulation, concluded Edley. "This is a huge, huge industry," he said. "Ultimately, you're going to have to use competition to identify the innovations that work, but then… require of low-performing schools that they adopt best practices." The education policy debate, noted Murray, is not unlike that currently taking place over health care: Do you create an environment with forced competition or place more emphasis on regulation?

*************

The US is a slime of worms when it comes to education. A miniscule elite (artificially fed from other countries) and an overwhelmingly undereducated, falsely educated and just plain uneducated general public. The solutions suggested here will be less than useless.

As long as the goal is a few top brains, the rest of us get nothing.  Instead, the States should aim to develop the best possible knowledge and skills at the middle of the Gaussian curve mentioned by Fyngyrs. This would not only give a much broader foundation for the best performers to rise from, but also give underachievers a much more attainable target. It's also a damn sight more democratic. And it requires a completely different focus from the US. One that makes sure that ALL schools regardless of location or intake turn out an equally high standard of "product" - our kids, the next generation. It's been done (in Sweden, for instance) and it can and should be done everywhere. But there's no chance at all of  this happening in the US under the tyranny of profit-driven capitalism. It' s not dog-eat-dog competition that's the answer, but supportive emulation.

Brains, astrocytes and octopuses

From Scientific American, about brain cells called glia, that could well be more important to thought than neurons.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-root-of-thought-what&sc=DD_20091027

My comment follows.

*********

The Root of Thought: What Do Glial Cells Do?
Nearly 90 percent of the brain is composed of glial cells, not neurons. Andrew Koob argues that these overlooked cells just might be the source of the imagination

[...]

LEHRER: Could you describe some of the early experiments that first led scientists to reconsider the role of glial cells?

KOOB: Glial experiments didn't get going until the 1960s. All scientists knew about glia was that if you put neurons in petri dish, you had to have glia, or neurons would die. Then, Stephen W. Kuffler at Harvard, for reasons unknown, decided to test Pedro's accepted theory of insulation. This was around same time that cell counts in the brain revealed glial cells to be nearly 90% of the brain (this is where the neuron based idea that we only use 10% of our brain comes from). Kuffler is notable because he ironically established the Harvard 'neuro' biology department while he was performing these groundbreaking glial experiments. Anyway, Kuffler took astrocytes from the leech and mud puppy and added potassium, something that is known to flow out of neurons after they are stimulated. He thought this would confirm Pedro's theory that glial cells were insulators. What he found instead was that the electrical potential of glial cells responded to potassium. Kuffler and colleagues found that astrocytes exhibited an electrical potential, much like neurons. They also discovered in the frog and the leech that astrocytes were influenced by neuronal ion exchange, a process long held to be the chemical counterpart to thought. Since then many researchers have completed experiments on the communicatory ability of glial cells with neurons, including in the late 80s and early 90s when it was discovered glial cells respond to and release 'neuro' transmitters.

LEHRER: Why are calcium waves important?

KOOB: In short, calcium waves are how astrocytes communicate to themselves. Astrocytes have hundreds of 'endfeet' spreading out from their body. They look like mini octopi, and they link these endfeet with blood vessels, other astrocytes and neuronal synapses. Calcium is released from internal stores in astrocytes as they are stimulated, then calcium travels through their endfeet to other astrocytes. The term 'calcium waves' describes the calcium release and exchange between astrocytes and between astrocytes and neurons. Scientists at Yale, most notably Ann H. Cornell-Bell and Steven Finkbeiner, have shown that calcium waves can spread from the point of stimulation of one astrocyte to all other astrocytes in an area hundreds of times the size of the original astrocyte. Furthermore, calcium waves can also cause neurons to fire. And calcium waves in the cortex are leading scientists to infer that this style of communication may be conducive to the processing of certain thoughts. If that isn't convincing, it was recently shown that a molecule that stimulates the same receptors as THC can ignite astrocyte calcium release.

LEHRER: You suggest that glia and their calcium waves might play a role in creativity. Could you explain?

KOOB: This idea stems from dreams, sensory deprivation and day dreaming. Without input from our senses through neurons, how is it that we have such vivid thoughts? How is it that when we are deep in thought we seemingly shut off everything in the environment around us? In this theory, neurons are tied to our muscular action and external senses. We know astrocytes monitor neurons for this information. Similarly, they can induce neurons to fire. Therefore, astrocytes modulate neuron behavior. This could mean that calcium waves in astrocytes are our thinking mind. Neuronal activity without astrocyte processing is a simple reflex; anything more complicated might require astrocyte processing. The fact that humans have the most abundant and largest astrocytes of any animal and we are capable of creativity and imagination also lends credence to this speculation.

*************************

choppam at 03:48 PM on 10/29/09
First - "octopi" is a terrible false-learned plural of "octopus". Like the equally terrible false-learned plural "virii" (or a dozen variants) for "virus". The "i" plural is a Latin plural for certain words ending in "us" (not all by a long chalk). "Servus" - slave, plural "servi". "Virus" is a neuter noun in Latin, meaning poison/slime/stink. It doesn't have a plural, and if it did, it wouldn't be "i". Same sort of thing with "octopus". It's from the Greek for "eight-foot" (cf Oedipus - swell-foot). The Oxford English Dictionary (the big one) explains this, and gives the plural as either "octopodes" - the archaic really learned variety, or "octopuses", the normal English-style plural (like "viruses"). "Antipodes" has the same Greek inspired plural - it's an interesting word - look it up!
Second - I love the way this article shows us how we are fighting our way towards an understanding of important things that have been with us for a very long time - like, say, the universe. The object of study remains there for us to examine, regardless of our ideas about it. But the better we get to know it, the better we can relate ourselves to it, and even if we can't control it in any important way, we can use our knowledge to avoid injury and pain, and to increase pleasure and well-being.
Neither the universe nor the brain gives a toss if our attitude is one of worship or contempt. But they can both serve us better if we release them from the mind-forged manacles (mistaken hypotheses or superstitions) we've clapped on them.

Hope for humanity!

Just look at this energy!
You won't believe what can be done with skipping ropes and young legs!
So there's hope even in the US at an army and navy basketball game. China, North Korea... and Ohio.
The girls are 4th and 8th graders from an Ohio school district, and call themselves Firecrackers....
Sit back and take a deep breath...

http://www.bookwormroom.com/2009/10/21/something-to-shake-up-even-the-most-blase/

C

Learning: "in at the deep end"?

An extract from an article in Scientific American "Getting It Wrong":

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-it-wrong

Some readers may look askance at the use of word pairs, even though it is a favorite tactic of psychologists. In another article , in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied,Lindsey Richland, Nate Kornell and Liche Kao asked the same question, but they used more educationally relevant text material (an essay on vision). Students were asked to read the essay and prepare for a test on it. However, in the pretest condition they were asked questions about the passage before reading it such as “What is total color blindness caused by brain damage called?” Asking these kinds of question before reading the passage obviously focuses students’ attention on the critical concepts. To control this “direction of attention” issue, in the control condition students were either given additional time to study, or the researchers focused their attention on the critical passages in one of several ways: by italicizing the critical section, by bolding the key term that would be tested, or by a combination of strategies. However, in all the experiments they found an advantage in having students first guess the answers. The effect was about the same magnitude, around 10 percent, as in the previous set of experiments.

This work has implications beyond the classroom. By challenging ourselves to retrieve or generate answers we can improve our recall . Keep that in mind next time you turn to Google for an answer, and give yourself a little more time to come up with the answer on your own.

Students might consider taking the questions in the back of the textbook chapter and try to answer them before reading the chapter. (If there are no questions, convert the section headings to questions. If the heading is Pavlovian Conditioning, ask yourself What is Pavlovian conditioning?). Then read the chapter and answer the questions while reading it. When the chapter is finished, go back to the questions and try answering them again. For any you miss, restudy that section of the chapter. Then wait a few days and try to answer the questions again (restudying when you need to). Keep this practice up on all the chapters you read before the exam and you will be have learned the material in a durable manner and be able to retrieve it long after you have left the course.

************************
My response:

Lots of useful comments!
Joney makes an interesting point:
"Unfortunately, the experimenters and the author of the article have confused getting right answers with learning. Remembering a piece of information does not mean that it is worth knowing in the first place or that you will ever use it again." I'm not sure they do, though. Not in the content-focused article test, even if the content of the article might not be very stimulating. Remember there are control groups in all the experiments, so the futility factor would be the same for both groups.
Getting things wrong/Failing to solve a problem can be useful a) if you want to get them right/solve it, b) if you know it can be done, and c) if you've got a sporting chance.
Most people know more than they know ;-) The thing is to show them they do, and show them that they can mobilize this knowledge over the board to tackle any problem that comes their way.
If you can get the pre-emptive questions to stimulate learner curiosity, you're home and dry. If you use them to bust their teeth out, you're not.
Frinstance, I once used a Latin poem by Catullus (with lots of love and kissing and ignoring wagging fingers) in a class of 14-year-olds at a school in Sweden in a Swedish lesson. Literature. Most of the class were non-Swedes, including several Latinos. With the help of the Latinos (Spanish being so closely related to Latin) we worked out key words, like life and love and kiss. Then we chorus-read it, to get the swing of things. Etc. It worked like a charm. They knew more than they knew. A Latin poem for 14-year-olds in an immigrant-rich school (second poorest district in Sweden, too, as it happens)!
I'd have generalized the piece a bit more though.
People hate being taught, but they love learning.

Onions and Whisky - McDonalds in Iceland

From the mailing list, again, about McDonalds closing down in Iceland:

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 13:07, IH quoted a BBC news item:

Besides the economy, McDonald's blamed the
"unique operational complexity" of doing business
in an isolated nation with a population of just 300,000.

Bollocks.

The franchises are run by a firm called Lyst,
with owner Jon Gardar Ogmundsson saying the decision was "not taken lightly".

"Lyst" means "appetite" cognate with "lust". "Lust not taken lightly" - go Velvet Underground.

"It just makes no sense. For a kilo of onion,
imported from Germany, I'm paying the equivalent
of a bottle of good whisky," he added.

Ah, the nostalgia - reminds me of when I was there in 1985. Most goods marked with "units" - say "5" - whose money equivalent changed by the hour with the inflation. This morning, times 2 equals 10 koruna, this afternoon, times 2.5 equals 12.50.

A can of crushed tomatoes cost around 4 dollars.

Iceland's banks collapsed at the height of the

global credit crisis - wrecking the country's
economy and forcing it to rely on an $10bn (£6.1bn) international aid package.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/8327185.stm

Usual media lies about capitalist society, its economy, and our choices. No "forcing" about it at all. Iceland could have thrown those responsible into a geyser, or into the maw of a volcano, or just chained them up outside McDonalds for the duration. Instead the government patted them on the cheek, called them naughty boys, and put the people of Iceland into hock for the foreseeable future so the Reichenscheisse (rich shits) would feel no pain.

Same story in Latvia, Lithuania and the Ukraine. Oh, and in the US, the UK, Germany, France... ad nauseum.

C

--
Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es.

Death by a thousand cuts - The Titanic Syndrome

From a mailing list:

The Titanic Syndrome, the film by Nicolas
Hulot and Jean-Albert Lièvre, which will be out
on [French] screens October 7, will upset people.
This environmental documentary shows almost no
nature: Breaking with the postcard aesthetic
customary in the genre, the film confronts the
hard reality of poverty and injustice. It
attempts, uneasily, to say that the vertiginous
deterioration of the biosphere is the result of a
social order become insane, one which makes the
weak, the poor and the exploited bear its consequences.

The film repeats that the key to escaping
this sort of destructive logic is in the
reduction of rich countries' material
consumption. Let us bet that this discourse,
harsher than that of "little gestures for the
planet," will garner a mixed reception. And
should Nicolas Hulot begin to upset people?

The strength of his persona is to remain
popular by going right to the tip of what French
society - or more precisely, the media system
that provides access to French society - agrees to hear at any given moment.

Thus, for a decade, he has little by little
hardened his speech: At first, sounding the alarm
over the scope of the environmental disaster, he
then sought to involve citizens, then brought the
question into political terrain. He now succeeds
in demonstrating that ecology is first of all a
social issue, and criticizes - but in terms that
remain very general - "capitalism."

In the commentary that clothes the images,
he says: "I am lost." Lost? I telephone him to
understand. He answers: "I'm lost because I don't
understand that so much energy should be
necessary to put what is obvious before our
elites. People who have a sometimes dazzling
intelligence have blind spots, that is, they
don't manage to understand that their economic model will not succeed."

That's Nicolas Hulot's problem, and,
consequently, our problem: He believes that
political action today is inspired by the pursuit
of the common good. But he forgets the strength
of interests: individual and class interests.
What Hulot calls the elites are today an
oligarchy. The oligarchy does not want to hear
about the obvious facts of environmental crisis
and social disintegration because the principle
objective of the oligarchy is to maintain its own
interests and privileges. It does not concern
itself with the common good insofar as it does
not challenge the oligarchy's own position.

When one is a nice person, it's difficult to
absorb the fact that others are not all so nice.
Nicolas Hulot is about to do that, and,
especially, about to draw the appropriate
conclusions. That is: to speak in vague terms
about "capitalism" no longer, but to plunge a
knife into the flesh of class selfishness. He can
do it. But he knows that then, all of a sudden, a
number of media and of more low profile powers
will suddenly find that he has many flaws.

http://www.truthout.org/1006099

Films are for a mass market. And it's amazing how sometimes people grab a subtext and take it much farther than the surface action and message would appear to warrant. In this sense it's often better to see films as pointers, as signposts to an alternative direction than to take them literally. It's events and solutions outside the cinema that make a real difference, and just making a small hole in the media armour protecting the rotten core of the current system can show people that it's possible, and that it's also possible to make similar holes in the real-life armour protecting the rich and powerful. Not only small holes either but much bigger ones.

So the more the merrier. Michael Moore's documentaries, satirical films like Wag the Dog or even Mars Attacks, Ken Loach's work, and now The Titanic Syndrome, they all add up to more than the sum of each individual stabbing.

The death of a thousand cuts for the lying presentation of *our* world by *their* media. The lies have been exposed for decades in well-researched and cogently argued books by writers and analysts like Chomsky (eg "9-11" "Manufacturing Consent", "Profit Over People") and Pilger (eg Freedom Next Time), and eye-witness accounts like Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins. But these are not mass market works, and make an impact on an avant garde of independent and critical readers. Films can make a mass impact.

C

Disenfranchised EU subjects

A common situation getting commoner (from a mailing list):

>So my question is: are you active in or do you pay attention to your
>local municipal political scene?

These are the only elections I am allowed to take
part in, apart from European elections, but I own
I haven't much paid attention to who was who and
proposed what on a community level, especially as
what politics propose during election campaigns
is basically only geared towards getting your vote.
I voted according to my old family traditions and
beliefs, but that is no longer valid.
I feel more in tune with alternative currents
now, ecologists, anti-consumerists etc. and will
have to look into this more closely. Next elections are far away.

I

I'm a disenfranchised citizen of a leading nondemocratic EU country, too. But everyone in the European Urine is disenfranchised - how many have had a chance to affect the adoption of the Lismal Treaty with a vote? How many will have a chance to affect the choice of an EU President? Blair as our highest representative?

C

Gagging over gagging

The links here *are* chilling (Groucho's word)...


"Sue the fuck out of 'em" is the favourite motto of the Corporate Killers if they can't kill their critics.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/26/spreading-toxic-injunctions

For the general method see:

http://www.johnperkins.org/

(He's the author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman)

For a hilarious take on the killers of cultural life, check out:

http://www.chillingeffects.org/resource.cgi?ResourceID=31

Current example of this disgusting attitude is the Warner Brothers attack on Ms Marmitelover's planned Harry Potter evening at her occasional restaurant.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/oct/25/harry-potter-lawyers-ban-restaurant

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/oct/26/harry-potter-halloween-warner-lawyers

C

Mary Beard's Don's Life Blog Book just out

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2009/10/its-a-dons-life-the-book/comments/page/2/#comments

Just love the cover with its homage to Monty Python! And for once it's not just a pretty face - though I hope it'll prove an attractive one and lure punters in. They won't be able to put it down... but let's hope the price is as spot-on as the cover.

Can't wait to get my fingers in there - hope there's lot of nice pictures!

POSTED BY: XJY | 22 OCT 2009 10:08:31

XJY -- Lots? No. Well-chosen? Yes.

POSTED BY: MARY BEARD | 22 OCT 2009 10:16:41