The Education Vector

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 17

The Education Vector¶

April 1995

Editor Ian Clark

This Education Vector has been reprinted from VECTOR Vol.11 No.4. VECTOR is the Quarterly Journal of the British APL Association. For more information about the British APL Association, please contact: Anthony Camacho, [address and telephone number omitted].

Contents¶

Ian Clark, IAC/Human Interfaces, [address, telephone number and e-mail address omitted]

Editorial¶

This Nonsense Has Got To Stop!¶

Hands up who never heard that from their old headmaster. A young acquaintance of mine recently described morning assembly as "two hymns and a telling-off", so things haven't changed much since my schooldays.

So it's a novelty to hear the good old message in the mouths of school governors, but this time directed at central government. Now school governors, like local authorities (who are inclined to forget it) are creatures of Parliament, with no constitutionally independent right to exist. It's not as if the UK is a federation of counties — it isn't. Like Rutland, they can be made to disappear and reappear at will. If school governors embark on a campaign of mass disobedience (a distinct likelihood at the time of writing), the government might understandably feel aggrieved at having its hand bitten by the ones it has nurtured as a power independent of the local education authority.

But it's one thing to be a creature of Parliament, and quite another thing to have a school to run. Alarm and despondency is the inevitable result of having inadequate resources (and nobody has actually attempted to defend their adequacy) further squeezed by a national teachers' pay settlement which central government refuses to fund. School governors must be feeling that their localised power is nothing more than the power to take responsibility for a crisis not of their making. They must be wondering whether their sole reason-to-be, indeed the sole reason-to-be of any institution set up in the last twenty years by the Masters of the UK (till God wills) has been — not the better achievement of their nominated goals, but the fragmentation of non-ministerial power for no greater purpose than to sap the power of local authorities, indeed of any public body capable of effectively opposing the ministerial will. Meanwhile the ministry tells all-and-sundry that there's plenty of dead wood to chop in local government administration before one needs to go sacking teachers.

Now let us view this lake of blood from the vantage point of the very people this government has claimed to champion — the little guys of industry. Let us further restrict the discussion to the industry of producing educational materials for schools. Of all the victims of this sorry state-of-affairs, maybe they will be the least lamented, but like the canary down the coalpit their demise may amount to more than one little bundle of feathers. It might point to something unfriendly in the atmosphere. It's no part of this publication to pamphleteer on the wider aspects of social engineering, but to encourage diversity in educational computing, for much the same reasons as we'd all like to encourage biodiversity in the environment. Monocultures mean mega-species mean mega-diseases.

To begin with, the innovation of letting schools manage their own budgets seemed a godsend to suppliers. The bigger they were, the more of a godsend it seemed, since promotion of their goods was henceforth going to rely on marketing muscle rather than on pleasing a small number of discriminating gatekeepers. Hitherto, like the NHS for drugs, there was effectively a single customer — the network of LEA centres which did a good job of buying new computer products for schools, encouraging the exploration of these products by working teachers and publishing catalogues in which the little product got as much space as the heavyweights. Then all of a sudden a vast amount of money was put into the hands of schools governing bodies, money which we are invited to imagine was being squandered on layers of administrators in County Hall, or perhaps on painting buildings that were already the right colour, mending roofs which it would have been cheaper to put a bucket under, or paying senior staff over the odds, most of whose work could be done by a cheaper recruit from today's flexible labour market. New suppliers flocked to the marketplace, big as well as small.

A stroll around the educational shows of the last two years showed a huge investment in promoting basically pedestrian products. Pedagogically pedestrian, but graphically gargantuan — but at the end of the day glitzy graphics are only part of the packaging. We all ought to play more poker, because then we'd understand what is meant by "upping the ante" — making it more expensive for new players to buy into the game. Now, with this throttling squeeze on school budgets we shall see educational products (whether books or software) going the way of cornflakes. More and more attractive packaging and less and less nourishment in the contents, because nourishment comes from a varied diet. Ultimately the innovatory suppliers will die out and a few big players will spend huge sums on competing with each other for a shrinking school budget with a dwindling library of rapidly obsolescent multimedia products. On the home front, Sega and Nintendo will place fantastically powerful hardware in the hands of our youngsters, capable of delivering all the educational principles past ages have had no end of trouble imparting. All to be used for — what? Making the blood and guts fly on even more convincing trajectories? And still mathematics teachers appeal to me for a good straightforward product to teach pupils how to balance brackets and multiply out expressions.

It's not as if the money isn't there. Why do school supplies have to compete with a proper remuneration for the practitioners? Our public utilities have shown how it is possible to keep gas, water and electricity flowing into our homes, yet still be flush with profits and able to pay their top men what they're worth. How about paying teachers what they're worth? Is it beyond the wit of our lords and masters at the same time to keep the educational supplies flowing into our schools? Although we'd feel the pinch sooner, it would do us, the people of Britain, far less harm in the long run to have our gas, water and electricity turned off for a week than to screw down the supply of educational resources to our children. Yet the former could pay for the latter many times over.

This nonsense has got to stop. Otherwise creative British sources of educational materials will dry up and we'll be left with wall-to-wall "Arthur's Teacher Trouble".

Errata¶

We apologise for the following errors: In "More about Fractional Series" by John Sutton (Education VECTOR, October 1994, pp30-31), on the right hand side of equation 1 the 'n' should be in upper case. Mr Sutton's address should also have been shown as "[address omitted]". In "The Common Mean and APL" (Jan 95 pp21-23) the right-hand side of the 8th equation should read \((x_i + y_i)/2\), and at the bottom of page 22 it should read \(1/\sqrt{2}\).

How to Get Hold of J¶

Vector, with its offspring Education Vector, has endeavoured to promote the J language with ample coverage in this and past issues, since we feel it is an important development of APL. However, some educational readers might not be aware that they can get hold of the language free of charge:

J Release 2 is now a fully-fledged product and can be obtained running on a number of platforms (IBM PC Windows and DOS) from I-APL Ltd., 56, The Crescent, Milton, Weston-super-Mare, Avon, BS22 8DU. It costs £55 for this "Personal Edition", plus postage, quite a reasonable price for the professional development system it has become.

However J Version 7 is still available as shareware, and we recommend this to educational newcomers to the language. Disks can be obtained from: I-APL Ltd. for £5. Both PC and Macintosh versions are available. However, for copyright reasons, manuals are no longer available for J Version 7. Instead we recommend the articles in this and back issues of Education Vector to give an introduction to the language. "Programming in J" by K.E. Iverson is still available from I-APL Ltd. for £10.00 plus postage and packing.