CLIMATE CHANGE, MIGRANTS AND POLITICAL "COOLNESS"

When it was "cool" and politically correct to show oneself concerned with climate change, summits and protocols like Kyoto were used to single out the "bad guys" of the world who would not sign them.  After a few years though, it turned out that hardly any of the "nice" signatories of those documents was able to fulfill their targets, and those who did, managed only by buying quotas from smaller less developed countries, so basically defeating the whole purpose of the system they had signed up to.

I wondered then who was more honest: those who whitewashed their faces by signing the protocols and pointed fingers at those who didn't, but then never lived up to their fake principles, or those who openly admitted upfront that they would not meet those targets and refused to sign.

Now I have a sense of dejá-vu when I remember how those who opposed the open door policies for the EU regarding refugees and migrants were labelled as bigots, racists, heartless and a long list of ugly names by those "nice" and "charitable" people who now pay their way out of the problem, sending the migrants to Turkey of all places, who take them in exchange for money and aren't even able to guarantee to them the most basic human rights. The same human rights that had so loudly been invoked to give the now clearly false impression that everyone is welcome...

In both issues (climate change and migration) it's people's lives that are being messed with. Being forced to comply with Kyoto or to sell emission quotas wrecks the livelihood of many people who exist here and now - climate change is not only about the potential damage to our grand-grand children in 100 years who do not exist yet. Being deceived into thinking that migrating to Europe is an option and then be sent to Turkey wrecks lives, too. Lives which are already at the limit of what one can endure. Not like those who sit behinds desks, have business in Panama and preach about being "humane".

In both issues, I am not defending one option or the other, I am just pointing out hypocrisy. Kudos to those who were consequent in defending the "cool" options and followed through - whoever you are. I can't see you.

COFFEE and HOUSES

It was about time that competition drove coffee shops to start offering more reasonably priced coffee on the streets. (see http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/starbucks-trialling-1-filter-coffees-7659869)  For a few years there was almost no way to drink a coffee in a city centre without paying outrageous prices around £3. Such prices were thought for customers who would be paying not only for the actual drink, but for the "experience" of spending a while in a specifically branded coffee shop, such as Starbucks and Costa. 

Other sellers soon thought they could ask for similar prices without offering the same experience - often for a take-away coffee in a cardboard cup. The problem has been - and will still be for a while - that there were people willing to pay £3 for a coffee from any seller, so for some time it seemed they could get away with this.

I always refused to pay such prices and was gladly surprised to see more and more shops offering coffee for £1 on the streets  - still a disproportionate price for a product that barely costs more than 25p including all overheads like salaries, rent and maintenance - but at least a reasonable price to have this service "on the go". Obviously the coffee bubble is bursting and competition is bringing coffee sellers to their senses.

Needless to elaborate on: it is also about time the same happens to the new housing bubble. Society doesn't seem learn: after the economic crisis, ultimately caused by such a housing bubble, we seem to want to get back to the old ways and prices are again soaring to surreal amounts. Just as with coffee - the problem are those thoughtless citizens who keep being willing to pay such prices. As long as there is someone willing to pay a price, I can't blame the seller for taking the money!

Can we fix education in the UK?

NOTE: AS THIS POST IS HAVING FREQUENT UPDATES AND ADDITIONS, IT HAS BECOME A NEW BLOG ON ITS OWN. PLEASE GO TO flawedandcorrupt.blogspot.com TO SEE THE LATEST POSTS.

In education, parents and teachers have to work together for the benefit of the children. No one would argue with that. However, in modern Europe this obvious principle is in crisis. In continental Europe and the USA the alliance between parents and teachers has broken down with parents siding with pupils to challenge grades and discipline, blaming teachers and even suing them. This is well reflected in this cartoon that has been circulating in the internet for a while now.

Here in the UK this cartoon does not apply. The alliance between teachers and parents has broken down with teachers aligning – or being selected to align – with a Machiavellianly perverse system, perfectly designed to perpetuate itself, in which schools have ceased to be concerned with student learning, and instead look at their own performance indicators and reputation.

And so we ended up with a system of target levels (up to year 9) and tiered examinations (from Year 10), in which students are set targets at the beginning of a course on the basis of a convoluted and cumbersome combination of parameters related to previous attainment, destined to obscure any clear criterion. The process is so obscure that schools pay specialised agencies to do it. The students are then measured against these targets instead of objective benchmarks, and the school can boast that most of their student are "on target". Targets are naturally revised periodically and set low enough so that success rate is high. Student learning and progress come second, if they matter at all.

Under the disguise of adaptation to the students' different abilities and the promotion of personal responsibility, their own progress is left in their own hands with the predictable outcome of a vast majority choosing to work as little as possible. They soon realise that less work is rewarded with lower targets, and even the best intentioned ones soon lose interest in working when they see they can instead have a great time with less effort in studying. There is nothing surprising there - just human nature. Defending this system is at best a naive assumption that teenage students will have their professional future in mind, but, as indicated above, I am more inclined to see it as a deliberate manoeuvre designed to make up school performance.

Another sign of this strategy is that British education has done away with textbooks. Instead, parents have to look themselves for "revision guides" or "exercise books". As was confirmed by a primary teacher to us as parents, books are not just "not recommended", teachers are not allowed to use them. It all makes sense, of course: if the intention is to avoid fixed benchmarks, having books which contain everything that is supposed to be learned at a certain level would betray the lowering of standards. Again, the absence of textbooks in education is disguised under the principle of adapting to learners' needs. Teachers are supposed to prepare tailor-made materials for every pupil or small group of pupils at similar "target levels". Apart from not being practical, or even feasible, as a collateral effect of the desired blurring of benchmarks, this removes a crucial tool to provide equal education to all across "classes" and citizens of different sociocultural backgrounds.

It all comes down to a perverse coincidence of interests between schools and pupils, who side with each other against the parents who care (which is the combination missing in the cartoon above). Teachers side with students in lowering demand. With this system schools can fake their results and at the same time students can get away with working as little as possible, taking home reports full of nice paragraphs from teachers always praising how well they are doing... towards their target levels. To make the charade credible, sometimes reports contain warnings against work being below target, but both teachers and students know that there is nothing to worry about: by the time of the next report targets will have been lowered and they will again be doing brilliantly.

For example, students can be submitted to GCSE exams at foundation and higher tiers, but the school's performance is only measured against the results of those in higher tiers, so schools only prepare those students they deem to be a guarantee of good marks for higher tier GCSEs, exposing the rest to a second class education, with less content, lower demand and capped marks at a C (this is changing now to numeric marks but the principles are exactly the same).

In my own experience with one of my sons I witnessed how he was brainwashed into believing he'd never achieve anything higher than a C. He was given foundation classes, set foundation homework and explicitly advised not to even attempt higher tier questions. His achievement, his career, his life, were capped by teachers who preferred to play safe with the school's reputation than to make the least effort to stretch students little by little to their full potential. The school's walls and website are lined with phrases saying exactly the contrary, that students are there to work to their full potential, and that no one would be left behind. But the reality is quite different. Once we fought and succeeded in having our son exposed to higher tier papers, he started to get Bs, As and even an A* within just a few weeks. I expected improvement, but not so fast. And it must be said that our determination in having him exposed to the full set of contents and higher exams is not an interest in him getting higher marks, but in giving our sons the opportunity to break the vicious circle of low aspirations being rewarded with less demanding work.

Teachers who knew other ways of configuring education and would therefore be more likely to see through these tactics have long been displaced by a generation of younger, inexperienced teachers who have not known other ways to grade students and therefore do not even begin to understand what is talked about when someone speaks to them along the lines of what I have written here.

Children without parents that put the foot in the door like us are condemned to be used --in the worst sense of the word-- by schools to whitewash their reputation in the form of Ofsted reports and the like. When they later in life come to realise that they have been let down by the very institution in whose hands society had placed their education - who will then be held accountable?

OCTOBER 15, 2015 UPDATE:
I have been listening to various opinions around the news that a school in Kent is opening a Grammar School extension, so circumventing the ban on opening new ones. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-34535778

The debate is whether Grammar Schools are good for society, and the argument against goes saying that such schools do not necessarily benefit the best pupils in an area, but mainly those whose parents have money and resources to support their children to pass the admission exams.

So Grammar Schools are bad because they play into the class divide. Well, isn't the "regular" school system doing the same, according to what I have explained above? Only those children with parents who care and can afford extra tuition, or spending their own time working intensively with them, will really succeed - the others will be deceived into thinking they did well ("on target") and bound for a surprise in the real world out there...

If one is against Grammar Schools, then be coherent, and challenge the current school system as well - it is doing exactly the same thing!

Science Communication as an Anomaly

Honest, I´m not trying to shoot myself in the foot. It´s just a combination of my liking of being a little provocative and my physicist's tendency to find symmetry.

So the point of this post is to put in writing what I had the chance to discuss in public last June 26 at a Science Café in the Café Retro in Copenhagen. In fact, perhaps it should be called a "Science Communication Café", as we were invited to discuss the state of the art in Science Communication. 

In my 5 minute contribution I suggested that Science Communication may have as its aim to disappear, just as feminist or other pro-equality groups ultimately work towards a society where they are not needed. 

The reality is that there are no "Architecture-Cafés", "Economy Festivals", "Law Fairs" or "History Famelabs" around. Professionals of these fields do not feel the need to establish the communication of their areas of work as a professional discipline on its own. And it´s not that they do not have their own share of controversial issues that affect society.

One of the usual aims of communicating science to the public is to promote science careers, as in most countries there is a lack of new blood to replace retiring scientists. Once this is achieved, this argument for science communication will no longer exist.

Another aim of science communication is to make science part of culture on the same footing as other areas of knowledge. Again, if/once this is achieved, this aim will dissipate.

Then there are the other aims for science communication - the need for science to be accountable to society, the need for citizens to be well informed when making choices in their lives or when voting... so there seems still be scope for science communication... BUT:

In parallel to all this it is also generally acknowledged that it is scientists themselves who should go out there and communicate their science. Perhaps not each single one of them, but audiences certainly prefer to have access to active scientists to learn about science.

So if this goal is achieved as well, what room is left for science communicators? What can they do that can not be done by a combination of scientists and PR & marketing teams of their research centres? 

I look forward to your opinions...!

Science Communication is like Sex

Or: The Prostitution of Science Communication and its fallacies

The argument goes like this: the morally accepted consensus is that sex should not be paid for. When it is, and it becomes a business, we call it prostitution.

So if you think, like me, that science communication should not be paid for, you will agree that charging for attendance at public science events is rather like prostitution (of science communication).

For those of you who do not agree with the premise that science communication should not be paid for, here are some arguments, and responses to the common counterarguments which will spring to your mind immediately.

But first some clarification. I am not saying that the work of those providing and delivering science communication should not be paid. Like anyone else, they deserve to be paid for their work. I am just saying that the "end user" should not be charged.

The first argument for “free for all” science communication is at the heart of what we keep telling ourselves are the main reasons to do science communication in the first place. The cultural argument, the economic argument, the democratic argument, the accountability argument... all of these rest on the foundation that science communication needs to reach everyone. How then can we accept at the same time that certain events be only attended by those who can afford it?

The second argument is that precisely those who are willing to pay the price and therefore are interested enough to make the effort are those who need it least. They are already interested, and the science communication activity will be preaching to the converted. Out of their interest, they would certainly have sought out the information about the topic at hand by themselves. They certainly need to be catered for, but not in way that excludes others.

This argument dissipates a common fallacy regarding ticketing that says that charging is necessary in order to select who will get to attend an event with a limited number of places. Organising such an activity only for those who are interested enough to pay defeats the whole purpose of science communication. There are ways to make sure that only a certain number of people attend without discriminating against those who can't afford it. For example, tickets could be given out on a first come first served basis.

A typical counterargument will say that at events like the Cheltenham Science Festival there are sufficient free activities to ensure that all get their share of science communication. That is the reply I got from them when I expressed my discomfort about events that were charged for. My response to this fallacy is a very simple question: are you happy that science communication contributes to the discriminatory paradigm of first-class and second-class citizens? If the answer is yes, then I guess there is not much we can talk about...

Another common argument is the fallacy that science is culture, and if people pay for theatre, movies or concerts, why should they not pay for an event at a science festival. The fallacy lies in that the job of actors, moviemakers and musicians is to perform in public, and their income comes from the tickets sold. The scientists' job is to do research, and their income comes from taxpayers and in some cases the revenue generated by their products. To pay to listen to scientists communicating science would be the same as paying for musicians talking about their music, or for listening to actors giving interviews. So yes, science may be culture, but science communication is not culture just as the making-of of a movie is not culture, the movie is.

To make matters worse, an event like the Cheltenham Sience Festival has various big sponsors, a large number of volunteers giving up their time to help out, and exhibitors are charged to be present (which is an absurdity in itself). So if the exhibitor is charged, and those attending the activity are charged – who is making all that money? Venue hire, insurance and the like certainly do not justify this level of income. I wonder what those volunteers would think if the penny dropped and they realised that they are giving their time for free for others to make a substantial profit out of it.

The icing of the cake comes when the event one has paid for turns out to be a one hour-long advertisement. As much as I admire Jim Al-Khalili and enjoy his outreach, when I attended a session entitled Quantum Biology I found myself being sold a book and read out of it – with the possibility of buying a signed copy included.

Another fallacious argument is that people do not value what does not cost, and that charging for tickets is a way of making sure people turn up. That people only value what they pay for is mainly true for material objects, so people will take more care for things they have paid for or would have to pay for if they break them. But is it less true for events – if they made the effort of getting to the venue, or to pick up the free tickets beforehand, they have shown interest already and invested their time, so it is very unlikely that they will not turn up. And if they didn’t, then there would be many others on site happy to take their place.

I may be asked whether I am implying that science books for example should be free, then. This can sound as a valid objection to my argument, but again, a fallacy lurks behind it. Books are written by authors and one pays for the book because writing books is an activity whose product is what is paid for, assuming certain quality. When a scientist writes a book they are acting as writers, and as such they deserve payment just like any other writer does. If the book is badly written, they won't make much profit and it will be entirely their fault. In addition, books can be accessed free of charge in libraries, so the elitist element is no longer present, whereas a single live event that is ticketed, once it is over, will only have been enjoyed by the privileged few who could afford it.