more ambiguity for the classroom

Following on from this post on ambiguous headlines:
Jay Doubleyou: ambiguous newspaper headlines

... here is an excellent lesson the subject:

Is This Headline Clear? Learning About Ambiguity and Clarity From Headlines

 

By AMANDA CHRISTY BROWN and HOLLY EPSTEIN OJALVO

 FEBRUARY 4, 2010 2:53 PMFebruary 4, 2010 2:53 pm

Overview | What is the purpose of headlines? What factors sometimes render them ambiguous, confusing or misleading? What role does grammar play in clarity? In this lesson, students review and revise ambiguous headlines to make them clearer, consider what makes headlines effective and generate tips and guidelines. Various related activities are provided for journalism, English language arts and English language learning.

Materials | Computers with Internet access (optional), handouts.

Warm-Up | Distribute Headline Headaches! (PDF), which offers a list of ambiguously written (and humorous) headlines, and tell students to work in pairs to parse each one according to the directions. Then, discuss each headline, the errors and resulting humor, as well as their suggested fixes. Ask: Why do you think these sorts of miscommunications happen often in headlines? Jot down ideas on the board, and then explain that they will now read more about the reasons why ambiguities frequently crop up in headlines.

Related | In “Crash Blossoms,” Ben Zimmer discusses the humor that can result from ambiguous headlines and the coinage of the phrase “crash blossoms” to describe them:

In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like Robert Browning, inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities. Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”

For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.

Read the column with your class, using the questions below.

Questions | For discussion and reading comprehension:

1. What about headline-writing conventions (and other “compressed” forms, like telegrams, texts and tweets) makes it likely that headlines include phrases that can be read different ways?
2. What is a neologism?
3. What is the “garden-path phenomenon”? Have you experienced it while reading?
4. How and why is the English language “especially prone to such ambiguities”?
5. What words in this column are unfamiliar to you? How can you use context clues to help you figure out their meanings?

Activity | Delve further into headlines and their purpose and function. Ask: What are the purposes of headlines? What can we learn from them? How do they convey information? Why is clarity important?

Prompt students to consider elementslike verb tense (use of present tense to convey a recent event and past tense to convey something that happened longer ago), word omission, capitalization, punctuation, active voice and so on. They should also discuss the differences in tone and style between news and opinion headlines and between print and online headlines.

To punctuate this discussion with real-world examples, consult the Poynter Online blog post “1,000 Headlines in 460 Days” and the headline resources provided, including an archive of Poynter’sHeadline of the Day feature. In addition, many school newspapers are found here. And for fun, you might throw in some examples from The Onion.

Following this discussion, choose among the following activities, depending on your discipline, curriculum and students’ learning needs:

Journalism: Read, print out or project the Caucus blog post on various headlines about the Henry Louis Gates arrest and resulting controversy. Invite students to compare the headlines Peter Baker compiled. Ask: What effect is each of these publications striving for in their selected headlines? What does their use of humor suggest about the story? Is humor appropriate, given the situation? What might you write?

For another, more thorough comparison of headlines from a single story, check out “So Many Headlines, So Few Zingers.”

Tell students they will be comparing headlines in different publications of the same basic news story, using the Newseum’s Front Pages. Before class, choose a major news story, represented in a good number of newspapers. Ask students find and list five different headlines for the story. In small groups, ask students to discuss if each headline is effective and why or why not. Then, reconvene as a class to debrief.

Alternatively, have students look at today’s New York Times front page or at the home page of NYTimes.com – or both – and discuss which headlines “work,” which don’t, and why.

If you haven’t already, look together at tips and guidelines about effective headline writing from Poynter Online, the American Copy Editors Society or No Train No Gain.

Finally, drawing on class discussion and the resources above, engage students in creating a list of characteristics of effective headlines to close class.

English Language Arts: Remind students of grammar’s role in creating clear headlines and sentences. Return to their answers on the handout Headline Headaches! and work together to generate a list of reasons, including specific grammatical reasons, ambiguities often appear in headlines.

The list might include, for example, structure and word sequence (“Killer Sentenced to Die for Second Time in 10 Years”), multiple meanings and connotation (“Puerto Rican teen named mistress of the universe”), grammar errors (“State: Don’t need to write that good”) and more.

Provide students with headlines, using the resources listed above, for finding examples of the errors they come up with, and to find errors to generate more items for their list. They might also generate some tips on how to avoid such errors.

Post the list in the classroom and have students find more examples of such errors from newspapers and magazines, as well as from classroom texts and even perhaps their writing drafts, to add to the board.

English Language Learning/English as a Second Language: Use the front page of The New York Times eitheronline, or in print, to have students try any of the following:

• Cut out five headlines and the first paragraph of each article and mix them separately in an envelope. Students try to match the headline to the correct first paragraph and explain their choices.
• Students work in pairs to choose a headline from The Times and, without reading the article, explain what they think it means. Which headlines on the front page were clearest? Why? Which were confusing, or might be confusing to someone just learning English (In general, Times news headlines are more straightforward than the often-playful headlines on feature articles, and the front page features a mixture of both.) Have them choose one headline that was difficult for them and rewrite it using simpler or more direct wording.
• Students cut out and recombine words from individual Times headlines to create a new, grammatically correct headline for an imaginary news story. For example, from the front page of Feb. 4, 2010, students could use “Toyota Says Prius Brakes Had Design Problems, “Rebuilding Effort in Haiti Turns Away From Tents,”“For Scots, a Scourge Unleashed by a Bottle” and “Pakistani Scientist Found Guilty of Shootings,” to create “Scientist Says Scourge Found in Tents.”

Going Further | Here are ways to take this activity further, depending on your curriculum:

Journalism: Students use their new knowledge of what makes effective headlines to write or revise headlines for their own publication.

E.L.A.: Students work in pairs or groups to create grammatically unambiguous headlines. These headlines might be about a book the class is reading (for example, they write one headline for each scene in a Shakespeare play), or about a community or school event. For a greater challenge, students might write two versions of each original headline, one that is clear and elegant, and another that is in some way ambiguous or misleading.

To continue this discussion and the effects that technology is having on grammar and written expression, share the Times article“Language as a Blunt Tool of the Digital Age.”

Alternatively, students read the neologisms on the Schott’s Vocab blog, like “Goldilocks devices,” “publicy” and “wocial.” (They can also read the archives of a long-running neologism contest run by the Washington Post columnist Bob Levey.) Using these blog entries as models, they create their own neologisms.

E.L.L./E.S.O.L.: Students bring in any print or online headlines that confuse them and work as a class to parse the headlines and rewrite them for greater clarity and simplicity.

Standards | From McREL, for grades 6 to 12:

Language Arts
1. Uses the general skills and strategies of the writing process.
5. Uses the general skills and strategies of the reading process.
7. Uses the general skills and strategies to understand a variety of informational texts.
8. Uses listening and speaking strategies for different purposes.
10. Understands the characteristics and components of the media.

Life Skills: Working With Others
1. Contributes to the overall effort of a group.
4. Displays effective interpersonal communication skills.

Life Skills: Thinking and Reasoning
3. Effectively uses mental processes that are based on identifying similarities and differences.

Arts and Communication
1. Understands the principles, processes and products associated with arts and communication media.
2. Knows and applies appropriate criteria to arts and communication products.
3. Uses critical and creative thinking in various arts and communication settings.
4. Understands ways in which the human experience is transmitted and reflected in the arts and communication.

Is This Headline Clear? Learning About Ambiguity and Clarity From Headlines - NYTimes.com
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how not to review a book on slavery

Book reviews are not normally the focus of political controversy:

‘The Economist’ Has a Slavery Problem

Multiple commentaries from the journal show a pattern of making sure white people aren’t taken for total villains when discussing slavery.

Greg Grandin 

September 9, 2014  

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(AP photo/Bill Haber) 

A few months ago, my recent book The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World received a lukewarm review in The Economist. The title of the unsigned review, “Slavery: Not Black or White,” was odd, calling to mind a parody of an Onionheadline: “Nietzsche: Not Good or Evil.” After all, slavery, a centuries-long institution involving the buying and selling of tens of millions of human beings, did in fact result in divvying up the diversity of much of the world’s population into those two colors. The review itself was written in that smarmy style that makes US corporate managers and hedge funders swoon, identified some time ago by James Fallows as “colonial cringe.” Readers on this side of the Atlantic assign an Oxbridge accent to the text, which “involves a stance so cocksure of its rightness and superiority that it would be a shame to freight it with mere fact.” Another critic said the magazine is written by young people trying to sound old.

The Empire of Necessity tries to establish the dependent relationship of slavery to the capitalist revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in all of the Americas, north and south, and presumes to use Herman Melville as embodying the moral complexities of that relationship. In other words, there’s a lot going on in the book. But the reviewer seemed only excited to find a few instances confirming that the trans-Atlantic slave system was not universally, 100 percent, absolutely, totally, categorically, “a matter of white villains and black victims.” “As is commonly supposed.” “Blacks,” he or she was happy to report, “profited from the Atlantic slave trade.”

The reviewer then complained about the book’s gloominess: “Unfortunately, the horrors in Mr Grandin’s history are unrelenting. His is a book without heroes. The brave battlers against the gruesome slave business hardly get a look in, although it was they who eventually prevailed.” One might think that “brave battlers” would be a good description of the group of West Africans who led the slave-ship revolt that is the book’s set piece. Having endured horrific captivity and transport, forced not just across the Atlantic but the whole American continent into the Pacific, the deception they managed to pull off under extremely hostile conditions was, I’d say, heroic.

Slavery might not be black or white, but bravery and morality apparently are: whites possess those qualities, a possession that merits historical consideration; blacks don’t, at least according to The Economist. The Empire of Necessity didn’t “credit” William Wilberforce, the white reformist MP, or white abolitionist evangelicals and Quakers, for ending slavery. Nor, the reviewer points out, did I make mention of the British Royal Navy freeing “at least 150,000 west Africans from slave ships during the 19th century.” The book isn’t about abolition, or, for that matter, the British Royal Navy. No matter. “The British historians,” wrote the great historian of slavery, Eric Williams, “wrote as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.” So too, apparently, anonymous Economist reviewers.

Then last week another review appeared that made it clear that The Economist has, well, a race problem. Also published without a byline, this one is of Ed Baptist’s wonderful The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, and is even more of an apologia for white resentment, if not supremacy (by which only white folks have virtues worthy of historical commentary). It had to have been by the same critic, for it uses nearly exactly the same victim/villainy opposition as scaffolding: “Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.” This time, though, the Internet responded with a barrage of snark (“@TheEconomist asks the tough question: why are black people victims in a book about slavery?” #notallwhites #notallslavemasters) that, remarkably, forced the editors to withdraw the review and apologize for its apologia: “Apology: In our review … we said: ‘Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains.’ There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system…” Glad we got that cleared up.

The review of Baptist’s book in fact had other problems than what its editors apologized for. Baptist provides meticulous, extensive and comprehensive evidence that capitalism and the wealth it created was absolutely dependent on the forced labor of Africans and African-Americans, downplaying culturalist arguments for Western prosperity, of the kind rehearsed by historians such as Niall Ferguson. This seemed to particularly irk the reviewer, who asserted that Baptist “overstates his case when he dismisses ‘the traditional explanations’ for America’s success,” including its “individualistic culture, Puritanism,” and “ingenuity.” Here, the reviewer adopts exactly the “cocksure” tone Fallows long ago described, unburdened by the need to actually make a counter-argument or provide evidence. An assertion pronounced in crisp English is as good as its word.

So a pattern is detected, one reaching back much further than the review of my book. In the 1860s,The Economist stood nearly alone among liberal opinion in Britain in supporting the Confederacy against the Union, all in the name of access to cheap Southern “Blood Cotton” (ironically, the title of the Baptist review) and fear of higher tariffs if the North triumphed. “The Economist was unusual,” writes an historian of English public opinion at the time; “Other journals still regarded slavery as a greater evil than restrictive trade practices.”

Since the Baptist review appeared, only to be quickly withdrawn, other historians, such as Mark Healey, have dug up reviews with similar problems. The Economist seems committed to making sure that white people aren’t taken for total villains and darker-skinned folks held accountable for their share of world’s inequities. It also seems dedicated to make sure the economic system created by slavery is denied its parentage, and on insisting that the miseries that continue to be produced by neoliberal capitalism can only be cured by more neoliberal capitalism. A few years ago, for instance, the magazine upbraided the Laurent Dubois, in hisbook on the history of Haiti, for, you guessed it, dismissing cultural explanations for the country’s poverty and focusing instead on structural issues. Haitians need to be held responsible for “their society’s underdevelopment,” and the best way to end their misery is to stop clinging to substance production and accommodate themselves to “specialised wage labour for a global market.”

The reviewing practices of The Economist are opaque, its reviewers shrouded in collective anonymity and endowed with the timeless authority of the “Royal We.” “In our review … ” started off its Baptist recantation. But who was the author of the reviews of The Empire of Necessity and The Half Has Never Been Told? A staff writer? A professional historian? Of slavery? Of the United States? Of the British Empire?

If so, why not be a “brave battler” and stop hiding behind the neoliberal plural. Have the courage of your convictions and come out. An apology and withdrawal isn’t enough. Release the name of the reviewer.

Greg Grandin 

September 9, 2014  

‘The Economist’ Has a Slavery Problem | The Nation
The Economist just defended slave owners - Vox

We're looking very much at the style of this journal:
"The Economics of the Colonial Cringe," about The Economist magazine; Washington Post, 1991 - The Atlantic
The Debatable Land: Bush, Ahmadinejad and The Economist
Cringe and whinge — Crooked Timber

See also:
Jay Doubleyou: every town and city in britain profited from the slave trade
Jay Doubleyou: bristol and slavery
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education: dumbing us down

Looking at educational achievements, we can compare the UK and East Asia:
BBC News - England's young adults trail world in literacy and maths

But should the UK be learning from the Far East:
Jay Doubleyou: rote learning
Jay Doubleyou: panic in the west over educational achievements in the far east
Great Divergence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

When it comes to the apprenticeship system, we can also compare the UK and Germany:
BBC News - You're hired: How the apprentice gets ahead in Germany
Apprenticeships: Keeping up with the Schmidts | The Economist
BBC News - 'The best engineers come from Germany'
BBC News - Can German business ideas revive the UK economy?

But should we be considering the German education as a 'model'?

A little history:
Prussian reforms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Land of Frankenstein

The particular utopia American believers chose to bring to the schoolhouse was Prussian. The seed that became American schooling, twentieth-century style, was planted in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers bested the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena. When your business is renting soldiers and employing diplomatic extortion under threat of your soldiery, losing a battle like that is pretty serious. Something had to be done.

The most important immediate reaction to Jena was an immortal speech, the "Address to the German Nation" by the philosopher Fichte—one of the influential documents of modern history leading directly to the first workable compulsion schools in the West. Other times, other lands talked about schooling, but all failed to deliver. Simple forced training for brief intervals and for narrow purposes was the best that had ever been managed. This time would be different.

In no uncertain terms Fichte told Prussia the party was over. Children would have to be disciplined through a new form of universal conditioning. They could no longer be trusted to their parents. Look what Napoleon had done by banishing sentiment in the interests of nationalism. Through forced schooling, everyone would learn that "work makes free," and working for the State, even laying down one’s life to its commands, was the greatest freedom of all. Here in the genius of semantic redefinition¹ lay the power to cloud men’s minds, a power later packaged and sold by public relations pioneers Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee in the seedtime of American forced schooling.

The Land of Frankenstein - John Taylor Gatto

The Prussian Reform Movement

The devastating defeat by Napoleon at Jena triggered the so-called Prussian Reform Movement, a transformation which replaced cabinet rule (by appointees of the national leader) with rule by permanent civil servants and permanent government bureaus. Ask yourself which form of governance responds better to public opinion and you will realize what a radical chapter in European affairs was opened. The familiar three-tier system of education emerged in the Napoleonic era, one private tier, two government ones. At the top, one-half of 1 percent of the students attended Akadamiensschulen,¹where, as future policy makers, they learned to think strategically, contextually, in wholes; they learned complex processes, and useful knowledge, studied history, wrote copiously, argued often, read deeply, and mastered tasks of command.

The next level, Realsschulen, was intended mostly as a manufactory for the professional proletariat of engineers, architects, doctors, lawyers, career civil servants, and such other assistants as policy thinkers at times would require. From 5 to 7.5 percent of all students attended these "real schools," learning in a superficial fashion how to think in context, but mostly learning how to manage materials, men, and situations—to be problem solvers. This group would also staff the various policing functions of the state, bringing order to the domain. Finally, at the bottom of the pile, a group between 92 and 94 percent of the population attended "people’s schools" where they learned obedience, cooperation and correct attitudes, along with rudiments of literacy and official state myths of history.

This universal system of compulsion schooling was up and running by 1819, and soon became the eighth wonder of the world, promising for a brief time—in spite of its exclusionary layered structure—liberal education for all. But this early dream was soon abandoned. This particular utopia had a different target than human equality; it aimed instead for frictionless efficiency. From its inception Volksschulen, the people’s place, heavily discounted reading; reading produced dissatisfaction, it was thought. The Bell-school remedy was called for: a standard of virtual illiteracy formally taught under state church auspices. Reading offered too many windows onto better lives, too much familiarity with better ways of thinking. It was a gift unwise to share with those permanently consigned to low station.

The Prussian Reform Movement - John Taylor Gatto

>>> This is a video of the above:



The Prussian Connection to American Schooling (Part 1), by John Taylor Gatto - YouTube

This is Gatto speaking:



John Gatto Prussian Education - YouTube

>>> Are we being made stupid?



The New Dumbness, by John Taylor Gatto - YouTube
Dumbing Down of UK Education While Pretending to Improve It - YouTube

>>> Particularly interesting from Gatto:



Human Resources: Gatto explains the seedy origin of public education-indoctrination - YouTube
Jay Doubleyou: john taylor gatto: on video
Jay Doubleyou: dumbing us down

>>> A nice graphic from 4 minutes (after one of the most famous graduation speeches) from Ken Robinson (from the RSAnimate series):



Public "Education" has become indoctrination and distraction - YouTube
RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms - YouTube

It seems to be about the 'engineering of people':
Jay Doubleyou: social engineering
HUMAN RESOURCES: Social Engineering In The 20th Century -- by Scott Noble - YouTube
The Scientific Management of America (Part 1), by John Taylor Gatto - YouTube
The Scientific Management of America (Part 2), by John Taylor Gatto - YouTube

John Taylor Gatto is a relative of the inventor of Taylorism or 'Scientific Managment':
Taylorism on ABC World Report - YouTube
Frederick Taylor- the biggest bastard ever 1 of 2 - YouTube

Ivan Illich had a lot to say about this:
Jay Doubleyou: deschooling society
Jay Doubleyou: ivan illich on education and health

As did Charles Dickens:
Jay Doubleyou: oxford graded reader and bbc film: hard times by charles dickins

Much of this is about making school compulsory. In the UK and the US it is not:
Jay Doubleyou: explaining how your country's education system works
Jay Doubleyou: homeschooling more popular in uk

To finish provocatively...

Whilst one can ask how 'the most educated country in Europe if not the world' was hypnotised by National Socialism...
The Führer Myth: How Hitler Won Over the German People - SPIEGEL ONLINE
The Wave (2008 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Wave (TV Movie 1981) - IMDb

... one can also ask how 'the land of the free' has its capital named 'Bigbrother London':
Big Brother is watching: London police to wear cameras (Wired UK)
How Big Brother watches your every move - Telegraph

... and why the British are not disturbed by the revelations by Edward Snowden:
NSA Leak SPY WARS UK media not bothered about Snowden Revelations - YouTube
Perhaps I'm out of step and Britons just don't think privacy is important | Henry Porter | Comment is free | The Observer
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neets - again

Are immigrants stealing our jobs?
Jay Doubleyou: immigration

Certainly many British people think there are more immigrants in the UK than there actually are:


As Swedish elections loom, cracks start to show in 'Nordic model' | World news | The Guardian

But maybe we just need to educate our young people:
Jay Doubleyou: immigration part 2

A NEET or neet is a young person who is "Not in Education, Employment, orTraining". The acronym NEET was first used in the United Kingdom but its use has spread to other countries including Japan and South Korea.

In the United Kingdom, the classification comprises people aged between 16 and 24 (some 16-year-olds are still of compulsory school age); the subgroup of NEETs aged 16–18 is frequently of particular focus.

NEET - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

They have been in the news:
Ofsted criticises colleges for poor record helping ‘Neets’ | Education | Guardian Professional
Watchdog warns over failures in reducing NEETs - LocalGov

Perhaps the UK needs an apprenticeship system:
Apprenticeship - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
BBC News - You're hired: How the apprentice gets ahead in Germany
Apprenticeships: Keeping up with the Schmidts | The Economist

A video comparing Germany:
BBC News - 'The best engineers come from Germany'
BBC News - Can German business ideas revive the UK economy?
BBC Radio 4 - Analysis, America: The Right Way

See also:
Jay Doubleyou: neets
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education in the uk - high university intake - low literacy rates

Kids in the UK have problems with reading and writing:
Jay Doubleyou: low literacy levels in britain

Britain has one of highest rates of university participation - yet literacy remains low



RICHARD GARNER EDUCATION EDITOR

Wednesday 10 September 2014

The drive to send more British people to university has failed to produce a rise in literacy and numeracy skills, a major international study has revealed.

Britain now has one of the highest rates of university participation in the world – yet only one in four of those students reach the highest levels of literacy, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Many students fail to improve their key skills at all during their degrees.

The findings immediately threw a question mark over the target of 50 per cent participation in higher education advocated by Tony Blair when he was Prime Minister.

“I think the massive expansion – more particularly in response to the Blair target declared in 1999 – led to a climate where it was good to go to university and it was important to get a degree irrespective of what it was in and where it was taken,” said Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment research at Buckingham University.

“That message needs to be changed by the intervention of employers saying ‘study this and you’ll get a really good highly rewarding job and we will ensure that’s the case’.”

The one in four figure for UK students with the highest standards in literacy compared to 37 per cent in Finland and Japan, 36 per cent in the Netherlands, 34 per cent in Sweden and 32 per cent in Australia.

“On the one hand in the UK you can say qualification levels have risen enormously. lots more people are getting tertiary qualifications, university degrees, but actually not all of that is visible in better skills,” said the OECD’s director general of education and skills Andreas Schleicher.

“In the UK’s global knowledge-based economy, where 80 per cent of new jobs are in high-skilled areas, employers are demanding more from their graduates, requiring them to be forward-thinking, problem-solving and entrepreneurial,” he added.

Mr Schleicher said that he would have expected the UK to perform better at the highest levels of literacy. “UK universities have a very strong reputation – you would have expected this stronger prevalence among the most highly skilled people.”

Professor Steve West, chairman of the University Alliance – made up of universities specialising in science, technology, design and the professions, said that it “shared the report’s concerns that the increase in university education had not led to better-skilled graduates”.

The report went on to reveal that one in two women in the UK now have university degrees. The latest figure for participation amongst 25 to 34-year-olds show 41 per cent going into higher education – with only 37 per cent quitting education at the end of secondary schooling. “This is a historic high [of young people attending university] for the UK,” the report adds.

Responding to the OECD report, the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan said more students were now studying subjects at school which would “open doors for them in the future”. She said she was “committed to going further faster” towards creating an education system where all young people regardless of background could flourish.

Britain has one of highest rates of university participation - yet literacy remains low - News - Student - The Independent


The puzzle of UK graduates and their low-level literacy

11 SEPTEMBER 2014 | BY JOHN MORGAN

UK adults with tertiary education ranked 12th among the OECD despite the reputation of its universities



SOURCE: ALAMY

Not as simple as ABC: the weak literacy skills of UK graduates is mystifying

The UK is ranked relatively low among the most developed nations for the literacy skills of graduates, with its performance described as “a puzzle” given the elevated reputation of its universities.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s annual Education at a Glance report, released on 9 September, this year includes a new feature: a measurement of how adults with tertiary education perform on literacy skills in each OECD nation.

Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and skills, described the measure – in which Japan, the Netherlands and Finland perform best – as offering “an important new dimension” and suggesting that “similar degrees may have a different skills value”.

Education at a Glance also reveals that the percentage of GDP spent on higher education in the UK fell – from 1.3 per cent in 2010 to 1.2 per cent in 2011, below the OECD average of 1.6 per cent. Canada overtook the US as the biggest spender on higher education, increasing its GDP spend from 2.6 per cent in 2009 to 2.8 per cent in 2010 – the latest years for which figures are available – compared with its neighbour’s static 2.7 per cent in 2011.

In terms of the report’s figures on the literacy skill levels of 25- to 64-year-olds with tertiary, secondary or below secondary education, data are drawn from the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, a new survey launched last year.

Mr Schleicher said that while the OECD was still developing “a Pisa for higher education” – the organisation’s Programme for International Student Assessment that looks at national performance on learning outcomes in schools – the PIAAC figures used in Education at a Glance“give us an initial approximation on quality of learning outcomes” for tertiary education.

On mean literacy scores, UK adults with tertiary education are ranked 12th out of 23 nations by the OECD (although the data cover just England and Northern Ireland).

On a separate measure of the proportion of adults with tertiary education achieving the highest levels of literacy, the UK was ranked eighth, with 25 per cent reaching the highest proficiency levels of 4 or 5. In Japan, the highest scoring nation, 37 per cent of adults with tertiary education reached those levels.

Mr Schleicher suggested that the UK’s low performance on mean literacy scores could be explained by the fact that there is “a lot of further education that’s called higher education in the UK”.

But the relatively low level of UK adults with tertiary education reaching the highest skill levels was less simple to explain, he said.

“If you asked if I would send my children to a Japanese or a UK university, I would always choose the UK. In fact, my son is going to a UK university.

“But it’s a puzzle. I must say I would have expected the UK to do better on the top end of the skills distribution than what we have here,” Mr Schleicher said.

He went on to say that Pisa scores showed high attainment in literacy and numeracy in Japanese schools. “And [Japanese] universities can build on that. That’s not true for the UK. If you look at the Pisa scores the UK is doing so-so,” he continued.

UK universities might “assume those skills are there, but they might not be”, he added.

The puzzle of UK graduates and their low-level literacy | News | Times Higher Education

Which brings us back to the earlier posting:
Jay Doubleyou: low literacy levels in britain

This is an ongoing problem...
See last year's international tables - and a comparison with the likes of South Korea and Finland.
Watch the video interviews:
BBC News - England's young adults trail world in literacy and maths


British education in crisis? - YouTube

And from a couple of years ago:



Age of Illiteracy: Shocking 20% UK youths struggle to read - YouTube

It's also a problem in the States:
BBC News - Downward mobility haunts US education
One In Four Americans Thinks The Sun Orbits The Earth

What can be done about it?

> Improve literacy levels in the young:
New Britain Early Literacy Campaign 9/14/10 on Vimeo
Children must learn to love reading, not just learn to read | @guardianletters | Education | The Guardian

> Provide free kindergarten schooling:
Nursery places for deprived children? Sadly the political will doesn’t exist | Lola Okolosie | Comment is free | theguardian.com

> Reduce the emphasis on university education:
BBC NEWS | Education | 'Education, education, education'

But should 'the West' follow 'the Far East'?
Jay Doubleyou: rote learning
Jay Doubleyou: panic in the west over educational achievements in the far east
Great Divergence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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free schools: sweden

The Swedish general elections have produced mixed results:
Sweden's Left Victorious in Elections - WSJ
Swedish left-wing bloc wins election - Europe - Al Jazeera English

Is it really 'the end of an era'?
Free-market era in Sweden swept away as feminists and greens plot new path | World news | The Observer

Let's look at the politics of schools in Sweden:

As Swedish elections loom, cracks start to show in 'Nordic model'

After a fling with the right, Swedes likely to renew their vows with the left on Sunday amid anger at the role of the private sector in public services

Philip Oltermann in Stockholm

The Guardian, Thursday 11 September 2014 11.15 BST
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As Sweden chooses its next government this Sunday, many presumptions about the Nordic model are being challenged. Photograph: Alamy

It might not appear the most obvious place to launch an election campaign. Most of those present are teenagers not old enough to vote, slouching on beanbags, texting or nodding their heads to the beat on their headphones.

In a classroom plastered with posters of boybands, trainee hairdressers barely look up from their model wigs as Stefan Löfven, a Social Democrat who wants to be Sweden's next prime minister, whizzes through the room.

Yet in many ways Stockholm's Grillska high school is the perfect launchpad for the centre-left party to orchestrate a political comeback after eight years out of government, the longest spell in its history. The school encapsulates Sweden's much-admired public-private approach to solving the social-budgetary conundrums facing European economies – and its shortcomings.

Formerly called John Bauergymnasiet, Grillska used to be one of Sweden's publicly funded but privately run friskolor (free schools) until its owner, the Danish private equity company Axcel, filed for bankruptcy last April.

Since then, the school has been managed – and improved – by Stockholm's Stadsmissionen, a non-profit charity. But the John Bauer scandal has made many Swedes question the pro-privatisation policies of the government, led by the Moderate party's Fredrik Reinfeldt.

The famed Nordic model, mixing universal welfare and strong unions with an open economy and free trade, has long been admired by European neighbours. Sweden's cities regularly top quality of life surveys, and its benefits system is progressive and inclusive. Sweden was the first country to introduce a gender-neutral parental leave allowance, and up to 90% of Swedish fathers now take time off to look after their babies. The World Economic Forum lists Sweden as one of the countries with the narrowest gender gaps in the world. Its economy recovered smartly from recession, and it has accepted more asylum seekers per capita than any other European country – and attitudes towards immigration have also remained more positive than anywhere else on the continent.

Its free schools have been championed by British politicians as the model to emulate, and when the banking crisis struck, it was Sweden that offered answers, having resolved its own debt mess a generation earlier. It is the only EU country that has lower public debt now than in 2006.

But with an election on Sunday, many presumptions are being challenged. Over the past three years, cracks have shown in the Nordic model, most notably with last year's riots in the suburbs of Malmö and Stockholm, and the rise of the far-right Sweden Democrats, which is polling at almost 10%. Income gaps have increased by a third, more than in any other OECD country, and unemployment benefit has fallen below the European average.

A series of scandals has made many Swedes question the private sector's role in public services. Axcel was accused of trying to maximise profits by saving on teachers' wages and lowering the teacher-student ratio below the national average; the privately run Hälsans chain of preschools was reported to serve its pupils crispbread and water for lunch, having budgeted only nine kronor (87p) a student for food.

No other state in Europe had been as generous in allowing the private sector free access to its pupils. The proportion of employees in privately provided services rose from 5% in 1993 to 23% in 2011.

"Overnight, the debate changed," said Roger Jakobsson, Grillska's head of education. "For years, people had been accusing schools run by private equity of pocketing the state's money and putting it into their offshore bank accounts. But now it looked like these companies weren't even capable of running a business properly.

The education changes ushered in by the conservative government in 1992 promised to improve the quality of teaching in Swedish schools. Instead, the Programme for International Student Assessment saw the homeland of the Nobel prize drop below the OECD average in maths, reading comprehension, natural science and problem solving. Grade inflation, meanwhile, was rampant.

The care sector also suffered a privatisation scandal in 2011, when the Dagens Nyheter newspaper reported that an elderly care centre in Koppargården, run by the private company Carema, was catastrophically neglecting its customers, allegedly weighing their diapers to see if they could be used for longer, thus ensuring maximum usage and lower costs.

In his book Folk dör här (People Die Here), the journalist Thord Eriksson pointed out that weighing diapers is common practice across the sector, arguing that the care sector's shortcomings had little to do with private or public ownership. Yet in the public eye, the narrative had changed.

Complaints about poor service and frequent delays on the high-speed train between Malmö and Stockholm also swung the mood against rail privatisation of the railways. How was it, some asked, that information centres were closing at train stations while Sweden's popular, 100% state-owned Systembolaget alcohol stores could afford staff who advised on which wine went best with reindeer stew?

The government is most likely to bear the brunt of the resentment. The rise of the Moderate party had rested on the promise of a slimmed-down version of the Nordic model, with added tax cuts. "All Swedes are Volvo cars, in a sense," said Moderate politician Anna Kinberg Batra, on the day her party launched their manifesto at Finnboda shipyard in suburban Nacka. "We are stable, some would say boring. In my party we are all proud of the fact that Sweden is known for egalitarian qualities. But we are keen to combine the Volvo with free trade and competition."

Under prime minister Reinfeldt, Sweden for the first time discovered an appetite for tax cuts. Wealth tax, income tax and corporate tax were slashed. Tax breaks for domestic services such as cleaning or babysitting (RUT) and relief on household renovations (ROT) have been popular with the middle classes. At Pressbyrån newsagents, there are now shelves brimming with interior design magazines. Moderate party posters warn of a Social Democrat victory with the slogan "RIP RUT".

But surveys show that Swedes' willingness to pay higher taxes has risen recently. As columnist Fredrik Virtanen said in Aftonbladet newspaper: "Taxes are the price we pay for civilisation. Not only is it cool to pay taxes, it's sexy."

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Yet whether the Social Democrats will automatically profit from the swing of public opinion is far from clear. While the pendulum has swung, it may have swung too far left for Löfven's Social Democrats. Many of the educational reforms being scrutinised were implemented when the centre-left was last in power.

"The Social Democrats have spent 30 years trying to learn to sail with the wind blowing from the right," said Daniel Suhonen, a political journalist with close connections to the Social Democrats. "Now the wind has turned, and they don't have their sails in the right position."

Unlike the Greens and the Left party, they have been reluctant to call for a ban on for-profit providers in the education sector. Instead, the Social Democrats insist on more quality controls: companies keen to run free schools will have to open up their books and prove that they can provide financial stability for ten years, as well as committing to a minimum student-teacher ratio.

Retaining the basic principle of free school model, at least, has plenty of support among the education establishment. Grillska's head of education Jakobsson, who used to work for private company Academedia before switching to the non-profit sector, questioned whether there would be enough charities like his to take over if for-profit providers were banned: "If you closed down all the free schools now, it wouldn't work. You would get a revolution among pupils and parents, even here in Sweden." Nearly four out of 10 upper secondary schools are now privately owned.

The direct link between Sweden's drop in education rankings and the introduction of the free school model, too, remains disputed. Pisa's own in-depth study of the country's result maintains that "the percentage of students enrolled in private schools is not related to a system's overall performance". Unlike private schools in Britain, Sweden's free schools remain non-fee-paying, and are only allowed to allocate spaces on a first-come, first-served basis.

But the Social Democrats' suggestions on how to restrain the private sector also have their critics. Some of the free schools with the best results in Sweden, such as Academedia's Vittra school in Helsingborg, have pioneered communal teaching methods that involve a much higher student-teacher ratio than those demanded by politicians.

Calling for more quality controls and oversight, as both the Moderate party and the Social Democrats have done in response to the Pisa scandal, could rob the current system of its one strength: Swedish schools, feted abroad for their autonomy, could become a lot more un-free.

At worst, the Social Democrats could end up neither solving the problem nor profiting from the scandal politically. Having announced a 35% share of the vote as its goal, the party is polling at 30%, the same result as at the 2010 election, the worst performance in its history.

Löfven, a former welder with a boxer's nose, faces the difficult challenge of trying to win back Social Democrat voters without looking like what Swedes call a betongsosse, or concrete socialist of the olden days.

The manifesto handed out at rallies, promising investments of up to 40bn kronor (£3.5bn), is entitled Dear Future and illustrated with photographs of children with safety helmets running through open fields; the Social Democrats, it insists, offer safety and freedom.

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As Swedish elections loom, cracks start to show in 'Nordic model' | World news | The Guardian

Education in Sweden is a big story:
The Big Winners From Sweden's For-Profit "Free" Schools Are Companies, Not Pupils

And it has been for some time:
Minister takes aim at free school 'profits' - The Local

It's not just the left who have been showing concern over 'free schools':

August 27, 2014 5:59 pm

Free schools: Lessons in store

By Helen WarrellAuthor alerts

The merits of Sweden’s friskola are being questioned after the country plunged in the OECD rankings

©Johan Jeppsson

Raising the level: free schools, such as those housed in the Kunskapsgalleria, have proliferated in Sweden in the past 20 years

In the Nacka shopping district in southern Stockholm is a mall filled only with high schools. The glass and steel Kunskapsgalleria, or “knowledge gallery”, looks like an ordinary retail complex, with a restaurant, café and a lofty atrium rising through five balconied floors. But the shop fronts are school gates and the advertisements promote education businesses rather than luxury merchandise. As shoppers mill through nearby arcades, a stream of backpacked youngsters flows through the building.

For the architects of Sweden’s education reforms, this nexus between teaching and commerce is the ideal of state-funded but independently run free schools, known as friskola.

Two decades on from the audacious experiment in opening up state education to the market, a fifth of pupils, or about 312,000 children, attend friskola. Of these, two-thirds go to in­stitutions run by companies rather than co-operatives or charities, and four of the 10 largest education providers are owned or backed by private equity investors.

No other European country has entrusted so much of its children’s education to private companies.

More

ON THIS STORY

• Labour blames Tories for large class sizes
• Löfven aims to return Sweden to the left
• OECD links teacher status to pupil success
• UK middle class maths pupils lag behind
• Scandinavia connects frontier to broadband

For years, the system won the admiration of free-market advocates around the world – particularly Michael Gove, the UK’s former education secretary, who declared in 2008 “we need a Swedish education system”. Education experts at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank in Washington, have looked into what US charter schools could learn from the similarly autonomous friskola. For politicians wishing to improve schools without raising taxes, Sweden seemed to have found the answer: parents had greater choice, new schools brought higher standards and spurred existing institutions to improve.

Strong test scores in the early years appeared to back up Sweden’s theory that market competition was the best way to improve results, drawing a flood of companies into the market. One teaching union leader recalls that it used to be “easier to start a free school than a fish and chip shop”.

But as friskola have proliferated, Sweden’s confidence in for-profit schools has been shaken. Traditionally top of the class in education, Sweden has tumbled in international test rankings, with the OECD’s most recent Pisa results showing scores falling dramatically in reading, maths and science to a position well below the average for developed nations.

Scandals in company-run schools have outraged parents further. Public anxiety about the state of Sweden’s schools has put its for-profit model – not just for schools but in other areas of government such as health and social care – at the top of the agenda in next month’s general election.

Jonas Sjöstedt, leader of the Left party, sums up the public’s disillusionment. “The belief [in Sweden] that deregulation is the solution for anything, from running railways to educating kids, has been huge,” he says. “This is now over. There are parts of our lives the market cannot fulfil.”

As the Conservative party in Britain considers whether to extend its free schools policy to allow profitmaking companies to run institutions, the focus is on Sweden once again – but this time for less flattering reasons.

Free schools: Lessons in store - FT.com

But what exactly is the free school model? Here's a video with the academic behind it:

Uploaded on 15 Mar 2011

As the demand for the creation of new schools gathers momentum, questions and concerns still remain. Can the 'Free Schools' model grow without a 'for-profit' motive? How can we ensure defence against the development of a two-tier system? How crucial is school accountability in ensuring a successful 'Free School' system?

Currently State Secretary in the Prime Minister's Office, Dr Mikael Sandström has played a key role in the development of the Free School project in Sweden over the past decade. In 2002 he co-wrote the report, 'School Vouchers in Practice: Competition Won't Hurt You!' with Frederik Bergström. The report examined the Swedish school voucher system, analysing the impact of free school choice created by direct competition between public and independent 'Free Schools.' Regarded as a seminal work, it concluded that results in public schools in Sweden did indeed improve as a consequence of enhanced competition.

In 2004, Policy Exchange welcomed Dr Sandström's work in the report, Hands up for school choice! Lessons from school voucher schemes at home and abroad, which called for the introduction of a Free School model in the UK, a message that was later reiterated in the 2009 report, A guide to school choice reforms.

"A Swedish Perspective on Free Schools" with Dr Mikael Sandström | 14.03.2011 - YouTube

But perhaps the most interesting take on all of this is from the students themselves:

Published on 21 Jan 2014

A report investigating if the Swedish school system is a model to follow.

Made by first year students from the free school Viktor Rydberg Gymnasium in Djursholm, Sweden:

The Swedish School system - VRG Project - YouTube
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