The Education Vector

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 25

The Education Vector¶

October 1996

Editor Ian Clark

This Education Vector has been reprinted from VECTOR Vol.13 No.2. VECTOR is the Quarterly Journal of the British APL Association. For more information about the British APL Association, please contact: Sylvia Camacho, [address and telephone number omitted].

Contents¶

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

Editorial¶

Many times over the past few years the New Scientist magazine has deplored the quality of science knowledge in Parliament and Central Government. Perhaps the fashionable 'good schools' beloved of the establishment are mostly incapable of teaching numerate disciplines to any pupils who aren't well-grounded in them already? This tempts one to suggest that any school identified as 'elite' should reserve a sizeable proportion of its places for pupils with existing numerate skills, otherwise the only qualification for rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty of tomorrow will continue to be parental ability to pay.

In Education VECTOR, we have constantly agitated for the provision of good materials in all schools to teach Science and Mathematics. Sufficient computers are simply a question of money, training to use the computers is largely a question of buying the right hardware and software in the first place, and we believe we have the software answer in APL and J. But how does one encourage those magic individuals who can actually teach Mathematics to non-mathematicians? The best we have been able to do is agitate against the massive discouragement that both good and bad teachers have had to endure in recent years.

But there's another factor, equally vital. I remember reading about an American study of the effects of giving high quality education in Mathematics (among other things) to children from deprived backgrounds. It reinforced my suspicions that the intellectual apparatus of a rich child is not necessarily any better than that of a poor child, provided the latter hasn't actually been brain-damaged by deprivation. But it laid down certain essential conditions for a child to benefit. Chief of which was "freedom from inappropriate disapproval". This of course can come from peers, or family, or even the authorities ("This isn't for the likes of you").

That's perhaps the heart of the matter in Great Britain today. Maybe it always has been. We have a culture which is hostile to any sort of 'cultured' ability, Music, Mathematics, Pure Science, whether on the playing fields of Eton or the street corners of Brixton. Whilst this culture pervades, the able pupil learns to hide his or her light under a bushel and the able teacher learns not to cast pearls before swine. Even with a deliberate programme to suppress it, it may take a generation before the practice of Thuggee, both institutionalised and informal, passes away. Only then will 'good' schools flourish, 'good' in our special sense of teaching good Science and good Mathematics to all who want it.