Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Showing posts with label education. Show all posts
Friday 31 December 2021
Monday 6 December 2021
Wednesday 28 July 2021
Saturday 24 April 2021
Teacher Cancelled by Eton for Controversial Lecture Speaks Out
The Patriarchy Paradox - the controversial video
Friday 2 April 2021
Sunday 14 February 2021
Distorting Narratives for Nation States
Nadeem F Paracha in The Dawn
In the last few years, my research, in areas such as religious extremism, historical distortions in school textbooks, the culture of conspiracy theories and reactionary attitudes towards science, has produced findings that are a lot more universal than one suspected.
This century’s second decade (2010-2020) saw some startling political and social tendencies in Europe and the US, which mirrored those in developing countries. Before the mentioned decade, these tendencies had been repeatedly commented upon in the West, as if they were entirely specific to poorer regions. Even though many Western historians, while discussing the presence of religious extremism, superstition or political upheavals in developing countries, agreed that these existed in developed countries as well, they insisted that these were only largely present in their own countries during their teething years.
In 2012, at a conference in London, I heard a British political scientist and an American historian emphasise that the problems that developing countries face — i.e. religiously-motivated violence, a suspect disposition towards science, and continual political disruption — were present at one time in developed countries as well, but had been overcome through an evolutionary process, and by the construction of political and economic systems that were self-correcting in times of crisis. What these two gentlemen were suggesting was that most developing countries were still at a stage that the developed countries had been two hundred years or so ago.
However, eight years after that conference, Europe and the US, it seems, have been flung back two hundred years in the past. Mainstream political structures there have been invaded by firebrand right-wing populists, dogmatic ‘cultural warriors’ from the left and the right are battling it out to define what is ‘good’ and what is ‘evil’ — in the process, wrecking the carefully constructed pillars of the Enlightenment era on which their nations’ whole existential meaning rests — the most outlandish conspiracy theories have migrated from the edges of the lunatic fringe into the mainstream, and science is being perceived as a demonic force out to destroy faith.
Take for instance, the practice of authoring distorted textbooks. Over the years, some excellent research cropped up in Pakistan and India that systematically exposed how historical distortions and religious biases in textbooks have contributed (and still are contributing) to episodes of bigotry in both the countries. During my own research in this area, I began to notice that this problem was not restricted to developing countries alone.
In 1971, a joint study by a group of American and British historians showed that out of the 36 British and American school textbooks that they examined, no less than 25 contained inaccurate information and ideological bias. In 2007, the American sociologist James W. Loewen surveyed 18 American history texts and found them to be “marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies.” He published his findings in the aptly titled book Lies My Teacher Told Me.
In 2020, 181 historians in the UK wrote an open letter demanding changes to the history section of the British Home Office’s citizenship test. The campaign was initiated by the British professor of history and archeology Frank Trentmann. A debate on the issue, through an exchange of letters between Trentmann and Stephen Parkinson, a former Home Office special adviser, was published in the August 23, 2020 issue of The Spectator. Trentmann laments that the problem lay in a combination of errors, omissions and distortions in the history section pages, which were also littered with mistakes.
Not only are historical distortions in textbooks a universal practice, but the many ways that this is done are equally universal and cut across competing ideologies. In Textbooks as Propaganda, the historian Joanna Wojdon demonstrates the methods that were used by the state in this respect in communist Poland (1944-1989).
The methods of distortions in this case were similar to the ones that were used in various former communist dictatorships such the Soviet Union and its satellite states in East Europe, and in China. The same methods in this context were also employed by totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany, and in fascist Italy and Spain.
And if one examines the methods of distorting history textbooks, as examined by Loewen in the US and Trentmann in the UK, one can come across various similarities between how it is done in liberal democracies and how it was done in totalitarian set-ups.
I once shared this observation with an American academic in 2018. He somewhat agreed but argued that because of the Cold War (1945-1991) many democratic countries were pressed to adopt certain propaganda techniques that were originally devised by communist regimes. I tend to disagree. Because if this were a reason, then how is one to explain the publication of the book The Menace of Nationalism in Education by Jonathan French Scott in 1926 — almost 20 years before the start of the Cold War?
Scott meticulously examined history textbooks being taught in France, Germany, Britain and the US in the 1920s. It is fascinating to see how the methods used to write textbooks, described by Scott as tools of indoctrination, are quite similar to those applied in communist and fascist dictatorships, and how they are being employed in both developing as well as developed countries.
In a nutshell, no matter what ideological bent is being welded into textbooks in various countries, it has always been about altering history through engineered stories as a means of promoting particular agendas. This is done by concocting events that did not happen, altering those that did take place, or omitting events altogether.
It was Scott who most clearly understood this as a problem that is inherent in the whole idea of the nation state, which is largely constructed by clubbing people together as ‘nations’, not only within physical but also ideological boundaries.
This leaves nation states always feeling vulnerable and fearing that the glue that binds a nation together, through largely fabricated and manufactured ideas of ethnic, religious or racial homogeneity, will wear off. Thus the need is felt to keep it intact through continuous historical distortions.
In the last few years, my research, in areas such as religious extremism, historical distortions in school textbooks, the culture of conspiracy theories and reactionary attitudes towards science, has produced findings that are a lot more universal than one suspected.
This century’s second decade (2010-2020) saw some startling political and social tendencies in Europe and the US, which mirrored those in developing countries. Before the mentioned decade, these tendencies had been repeatedly commented upon in the West, as if they were entirely specific to poorer regions. Even though many Western historians, while discussing the presence of religious extremism, superstition or political upheavals in developing countries, agreed that these existed in developed countries as well, they insisted that these were only largely present in their own countries during their teething years.
In 2012, at a conference in London, I heard a British political scientist and an American historian emphasise that the problems that developing countries face — i.e. religiously-motivated violence, a suspect disposition towards science, and continual political disruption — were present at one time in developed countries as well, but had been overcome through an evolutionary process, and by the construction of political and economic systems that were self-correcting in times of crisis. What these two gentlemen were suggesting was that most developing countries were still at a stage that the developed countries had been two hundred years or so ago.
However, eight years after that conference, Europe and the US, it seems, have been flung back two hundred years in the past. Mainstream political structures there have been invaded by firebrand right-wing populists, dogmatic ‘cultural warriors’ from the left and the right are battling it out to define what is ‘good’ and what is ‘evil’ — in the process, wrecking the carefully constructed pillars of the Enlightenment era on which their nations’ whole existential meaning rests — the most outlandish conspiracy theories have migrated from the edges of the lunatic fringe into the mainstream, and science is being perceived as a demonic force out to destroy faith.
Take for instance, the practice of authoring distorted textbooks. Over the years, some excellent research cropped up in Pakistan and India that systematically exposed how historical distortions and religious biases in textbooks have contributed (and still are contributing) to episodes of bigotry in both the countries. During my own research in this area, I began to notice that this problem was not restricted to developing countries alone.
In 1971, a joint study by a group of American and British historians showed that out of the 36 British and American school textbooks that they examined, no less than 25 contained inaccurate information and ideological bias. In 2007, the American sociologist James W. Loewen surveyed 18 American history texts and found them to be “marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies.” He published his findings in the aptly titled book Lies My Teacher Told Me.
In 2020, 181 historians in the UK wrote an open letter demanding changes to the history section of the British Home Office’s citizenship test. The campaign was initiated by the British professor of history and archeology Frank Trentmann. A debate on the issue, through an exchange of letters between Trentmann and Stephen Parkinson, a former Home Office special adviser, was published in the August 23, 2020 issue of The Spectator. Trentmann laments that the problem lay in a combination of errors, omissions and distortions in the history section pages, which were also littered with mistakes.
Not only are historical distortions in textbooks a universal practice, but the many ways that this is done are equally universal and cut across competing ideologies. In Textbooks as Propaganda, the historian Joanna Wojdon demonstrates the methods that were used by the state in this respect in communist Poland (1944-1989).
The methods of distortions in this case were similar to the ones that were used in various former communist dictatorships such the Soviet Union and its satellite states in East Europe, and in China. The same methods in this context were also employed by totalitarian regimes in Nazi Germany, and in fascist Italy and Spain.
And if one examines the methods of distorting history textbooks, as examined by Loewen in the US and Trentmann in the UK, one can come across various similarities between how it is done in liberal democracies and how it was done in totalitarian set-ups.
I once shared this observation with an American academic in 2018. He somewhat agreed but argued that because of the Cold War (1945-1991) many democratic countries were pressed to adopt certain propaganda techniques that were originally devised by communist regimes. I tend to disagree. Because if this were a reason, then how is one to explain the publication of the book The Menace of Nationalism in Education by Jonathan French Scott in 1926 — almost 20 years before the start of the Cold War?
Scott meticulously examined history textbooks being taught in France, Germany, Britain and the US in the 1920s. It is fascinating to see how the methods used to write textbooks, described by Scott as tools of indoctrination, are quite similar to those applied in communist and fascist dictatorships, and how they are being employed in both developing as well as developed countries.
In a nutshell, no matter what ideological bent is being welded into textbooks in various countries, it has always been about altering history through engineered stories as a means of promoting particular agendas. This is done by concocting events that did not happen, altering those that did take place, or omitting events altogether.
It was Scott who most clearly understood this as a problem that is inherent in the whole idea of the nation state, which is largely constructed by clubbing people together as ‘nations’, not only within physical but also ideological boundaries.
This leaves nation states always feeling vulnerable and fearing that the glue that binds a nation together, through largely fabricated and manufactured ideas of ethnic, religious or racial homogeneity, will wear off. Thus the need is felt to keep it intact through continuous historical distortions.
Thursday 24 December 2020
Covid prompts a new approach to economic growth
An FT Editorial
The coronavirus pandemic means that 2020 will go down in history as the year with one of the deepest plunges in national income on record. In the UK, which has one of the longest continuous logs of economic output, gross domestic product looks likely to have fallen around a tenth this year, making for the biggest recession in three centuries. Yet even these figures, however eye-watering, do not capture the true collapse in wellbeing, which must be the ultimate goal of economic policy.
In theory, gross domestic product adds up everything that a country produces in one year. The fall in national income during 2020 is easy to explain: interruptions to normal economic activity have meant that far less has been produced. In this regard the drop in gross domestic product will capture some of the missed outings and trips to the cinema, the cancelled holidays and all the meals and drinks with friends that had to be postponed.
There is, however, plenty that the figures miss. To aggregate the value of very different activities that take place in an economy statisticians use market prices — allowing them to compare the production of both apples and oranges on a common scale. But the absence of these prices for much of healthcare and education in many countries — statisticians merely impute their production from how much the government spends on them — means the disruptions to schools and delays in administering non-coronavirus medical care is missed. Spending on healthcare might have risen but on a net basis societies got far less for their money.
On the other hand, public parks and other green spaces have become much more important but their contribution to the economy will not be registered as part of GDP. Unpaid labour too, those who tried to teach their children at home, sewed personal protective equipment or baked banana bread, will not appear in the story of the year told by national income figures. Nor will the drop in air pollution or the volunteers who took care of neighbours.
Even an accurate counting of the drop in production this year would still miss the psychological damage done by prolonged isolation and loneliness; the “hidden pandemic” of mental health problems. That suggests the solution would not be to expand the definition of gross domestic product to include the production it misses but to consider focusing on wellbeing directly.
All the same, the experience of this year — when governments shut down their economies in order to protect public health — has shown that economic growth has not been prioritised above all else. Already, a wider definition of wellbeing than a pure economic one is implicitly being used to inform policy. Daily count cases and death rates have played a much bigger role in policymaking than quarterly growth figures. Suggestions that health measures represent a trade-off with economic fortunes have also been overplayed. The best way of protecting jobs this year has been keeping the virus under control: New Zealand, which managed to remain virtually virus-free thanks to an early and strict lockdown, is reaping the economic rewards.
This will remain true when the pandemic has passed. A healthy and well-educated workforce is one of the most important prerequisites to growth and secure, well-paid, high quality jobs are among the best foundations to protect mental wellbeing. Unemployment and poor-quality work can easily destroy people’s sense of self-worth while a robust private sector is essential to provide the tax revenues for health and education. The goal should be to create the kind of society where economic growth and wellbeing go hand in hand.
Thursday 19 March 2020
Can computers ever replace the classroom?
With 850 million children worldwide shut out of schools, tech evangelists claim now is the time for AI education. But as the technology’s power grows, so too do the dangers that come with it. By Alex Beard in The Guardian
For a child prodigy, learning didn’t always come easily to Derek Haoyang Li. When he was three, his father – a famous educator and author – became so frustrated with his progress in Chinese that he vowed never to teach him again. “He kicked me from here to here,” Li told me, moving his arms wide.
Yet when Li began school, aged five, things began to click. Five years later, he was selected as one of only 10 students in his home province of Henan to learn to code. At 16, Li beat 15 million kids to first prize in the Chinese Mathematical Olympiad. Among the offers that came in from the country’s elite institutions, he decided on an experimental fast-track degree at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai. It would enable him to study maths, while also covering computer science, physics and psychology.
In his first year at university, Li was extremely shy. He came up with a personal algorithm for making friends in the canteen, weighing data on group size and conversation topic to optimise the chances of a positive encounter. The method helped him to make friends, so he developed others: how to master English, how to interpret dreams, how to find a girlfriend. While other students spent the long nights studying, Li started to think about how he could apply his algorithmic approach to business. When he graduated at the turn of the millennium, he decided that he would make his fortune in the field he knew best: education.
In person, Li, who is now 42, displays none of the awkwardness of his university days. A successful entrepreneur who helped create a billion-dollar tutoring company, Only Education, he is charismatic, and given to making bombastic statements. “Education is one of the industries that Chinese people can do much better than western people,” he told me when we met last year. The reason, he explained, is that “Chinese people are more sophisticated”, because they are raised in a society in which people rarely say what they mean.
Li is the founder of Squirrel AI, an education company that offers tutoring delivered in part by humans, but mostly by smart machines, which he says will transform education as we know it. All over the world, entrepreneurs are making similarly extravagant claims about the power of online learning – and more and more money is flowing their way. In Silicon Valley, companies like Knewton and Alt School have attempted to personalise learning via tablet computers. In India, Byju’s, a learning app valued at $6 billion, has secured backing from Facebook and the Chinese internet behemoth Tencent, and now sponsors the country’s cricket team. In Europe, the British company Century Tech has signed a deal to roll out an intelligent teaching and learning platform in 700 Belgian schools, and dozens more across the UK. Their promises are being put to the test by the coronavirus pandemic – with 849 million children worldwide, as of March 2020, shut out of school, we’re in the midst of an unprecedented experiment in the effectiveness of online learning.
But it’s in China, where President Xi Jinping has called for the nation to lead the world in AI innovation by 2030, that the fastest progress is being made. In 2018 alone, Li told me, 60 new AI companies entered China’s private education market. Squirrel AI is part of this new generation of education start-ups. The company has already enrolled 2 million student users, opened 2,600 learning centres in 700 cities across China, and raised $150m from investors. The company’s chief AI officer is Tom Mitchell, the former dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and its payroll also includes a roster of top Chinese talent, including dozens of “super-teachers” – an official designation given to the most expert teachers in the country. In January, during the worst of the outbreak, it partnered with the Shanghai education bureau to provide free products to students throughout the city.
Though the most ambitious features have yet to be built into Squirrel AI’s system, the company already claims to have achieved impressive results. At its HQ in Shanghai, I saw footage of downcast human teachers who had been defeated by computers in televised contests to see who could teach a class of students more maths in a single week. Experiments on the effectiveness of different types of teaching videos with test audiences have revealed that students learn more proficiently from a video presented by a good-looking young presenter than from an older expert teacher.
When we met, Li rhapsodised about a future in which technology will enable children to learn 10 or even 100 times more than they do today. Wild claims like these, typical of the hyperactive education technology sector, tend to prompt two different reactions. The first is: bullshit – teaching and learning is too complex, too human a craft to be taken over by robots. The second reaction is the one I had when I first met Li in London a year ago: oh no, the robot teachers are coming for education as we know it. There is some truth to both reactions, but the real story of AI education, it turns out, is a whole lot more complicated.
At a Squirrel AI learning centre high in an office building in Hangzhou, a city 70 miles west of Shanghai, a cursor jerked tentatively over the words “Modern technology has opened our eyes to many things”. Slouched at a hexagonal table in one of the centre’s dozen or so small classrooms, Huang Zerong, 14, was halfway through a 90-minute English tutoring session. As he worked through activities on his MacBook, a young woman with the kindly manner of an older sister sat next to him, observing his progress. Below, the trees of Xixi National Wetland Park barely stirred in the afternoon heat.
A question popped up on Huang’s screen, on which a virtual dashboard showed his current English level, unit score and learning focus – along with the sleek squirrel icon of Squirrel AI.
“India is famous for ________ industry.”
Huang read through the three possible answers, choosing to ignore “treasure” and “typical” and type “t-e-c-h-n-o-l-o-g-y” into the box.
“T____ is changing fast,” came the next prompt.
Huang looked towards the young woman, then he punched out “e-c-h-n-o-l-o-g-y” from memory. She clapped her hands together. “Good!” she said, as another prompt flashed up.
Huang had begun his English course, which would last for one term, a few months earlier with a diagnostic test. He had logged into the Squirrel AI platform on his laptop and answered a series of questions designed to evaluate his mastery of more than 10,000 “knowledge points” (such as the distinction between “belong to” and “belong in”). Based on his answers, Squirrel AI’s software had generated a precise “learning map” for him, which would determine which texts he would read, which videos he would see, which tests he would take.
As he worked his way through the course – with the occasional support of the human tutor by his side, or one of the hundreds accessible via video link from Squirrel AI’s headquarters in Shanghai – its contents were automatically updated, as the system perceived that Huang had mastered new knowledge.
Huang said he was less distracted at the learning centre than he was in school, and felt at home with the technology. “It’s fun,” he told me after class, eyes fixed on his lap. “It’s much easier to concentrate on the system because it’s a device.” His scores in English also seemed to be improving, which is why his mother had just paid the centre a further 91,000 RMB (about £11,000) for another year of sessions: two semesters and two holiday courses in each of four subjects, adding up to around 400 hours in total.
“Anyone can learn,” Li explained to me a few days later over dinner in Beijing. You just needed the right environment and the right method, he said.
For a child prodigy, learning didn’t always come easily to Derek Haoyang Li. When he was three, his father – a famous educator and author – became so frustrated with his progress in Chinese that he vowed never to teach him again. “He kicked me from here to here,” Li told me, moving his arms wide.
Yet when Li began school, aged five, things began to click. Five years later, he was selected as one of only 10 students in his home province of Henan to learn to code. At 16, Li beat 15 million kids to first prize in the Chinese Mathematical Olympiad. Among the offers that came in from the country’s elite institutions, he decided on an experimental fast-track degree at Jiao Tong University in Shanghai. It would enable him to study maths, while also covering computer science, physics and psychology.
In his first year at university, Li was extremely shy. He came up with a personal algorithm for making friends in the canteen, weighing data on group size and conversation topic to optimise the chances of a positive encounter. The method helped him to make friends, so he developed others: how to master English, how to interpret dreams, how to find a girlfriend. While other students spent the long nights studying, Li started to think about how he could apply his algorithmic approach to business. When he graduated at the turn of the millennium, he decided that he would make his fortune in the field he knew best: education.
In person, Li, who is now 42, displays none of the awkwardness of his university days. A successful entrepreneur who helped create a billion-dollar tutoring company, Only Education, he is charismatic, and given to making bombastic statements. “Education is one of the industries that Chinese people can do much better than western people,” he told me when we met last year. The reason, he explained, is that “Chinese people are more sophisticated”, because they are raised in a society in which people rarely say what they mean.
Li is the founder of Squirrel AI, an education company that offers tutoring delivered in part by humans, but mostly by smart machines, which he says will transform education as we know it. All over the world, entrepreneurs are making similarly extravagant claims about the power of online learning – and more and more money is flowing their way. In Silicon Valley, companies like Knewton and Alt School have attempted to personalise learning via tablet computers. In India, Byju’s, a learning app valued at $6 billion, has secured backing from Facebook and the Chinese internet behemoth Tencent, and now sponsors the country’s cricket team. In Europe, the British company Century Tech has signed a deal to roll out an intelligent teaching and learning platform in 700 Belgian schools, and dozens more across the UK. Their promises are being put to the test by the coronavirus pandemic – with 849 million children worldwide, as of March 2020, shut out of school, we’re in the midst of an unprecedented experiment in the effectiveness of online learning.
But it’s in China, where President Xi Jinping has called for the nation to lead the world in AI innovation by 2030, that the fastest progress is being made. In 2018 alone, Li told me, 60 new AI companies entered China’s private education market. Squirrel AI is part of this new generation of education start-ups. The company has already enrolled 2 million student users, opened 2,600 learning centres in 700 cities across China, and raised $150m from investors. The company’s chief AI officer is Tom Mitchell, the former dean of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and its payroll also includes a roster of top Chinese talent, including dozens of “super-teachers” – an official designation given to the most expert teachers in the country. In January, during the worst of the outbreak, it partnered with the Shanghai education bureau to provide free products to students throughout the city.
Though the most ambitious features have yet to be built into Squirrel AI’s system, the company already claims to have achieved impressive results. At its HQ in Shanghai, I saw footage of downcast human teachers who had been defeated by computers in televised contests to see who could teach a class of students more maths in a single week. Experiments on the effectiveness of different types of teaching videos with test audiences have revealed that students learn more proficiently from a video presented by a good-looking young presenter than from an older expert teacher.
When we met, Li rhapsodised about a future in which technology will enable children to learn 10 or even 100 times more than they do today. Wild claims like these, typical of the hyperactive education technology sector, tend to prompt two different reactions. The first is: bullshit – teaching and learning is too complex, too human a craft to be taken over by robots. The second reaction is the one I had when I first met Li in London a year ago: oh no, the robot teachers are coming for education as we know it. There is some truth to both reactions, but the real story of AI education, it turns out, is a whole lot more complicated.
At a Squirrel AI learning centre high in an office building in Hangzhou, a city 70 miles west of Shanghai, a cursor jerked tentatively over the words “Modern technology has opened our eyes to many things”. Slouched at a hexagonal table in one of the centre’s dozen or so small classrooms, Huang Zerong, 14, was halfway through a 90-minute English tutoring session. As he worked through activities on his MacBook, a young woman with the kindly manner of an older sister sat next to him, observing his progress. Below, the trees of Xixi National Wetland Park barely stirred in the afternoon heat.
A question popped up on Huang’s screen, on which a virtual dashboard showed his current English level, unit score and learning focus – along with the sleek squirrel icon of Squirrel AI.
“India is famous for ________ industry.”
Huang read through the three possible answers, choosing to ignore “treasure” and “typical” and type “t-e-c-h-n-o-l-o-g-y” into the box.
“T____ is changing fast,” came the next prompt.
Huang looked towards the young woman, then he punched out “e-c-h-n-o-l-o-g-y” from memory. She clapped her hands together. “Good!” she said, as another prompt flashed up.
Huang had begun his English course, which would last for one term, a few months earlier with a diagnostic test. He had logged into the Squirrel AI platform on his laptop and answered a series of questions designed to evaluate his mastery of more than 10,000 “knowledge points” (such as the distinction between “belong to” and “belong in”). Based on his answers, Squirrel AI’s software had generated a precise “learning map” for him, which would determine which texts he would read, which videos he would see, which tests he would take.
As he worked his way through the course – with the occasional support of the human tutor by his side, or one of the hundreds accessible via video link from Squirrel AI’s headquarters in Shanghai – its contents were automatically updated, as the system perceived that Huang had mastered new knowledge.
Huang said he was less distracted at the learning centre than he was in school, and felt at home with the technology. “It’s fun,” he told me after class, eyes fixed on his lap. “It’s much easier to concentrate on the system because it’s a device.” His scores in English also seemed to be improving, which is why his mother had just paid the centre a further 91,000 RMB (about £11,000) for another year of sessions: two semesters and two holiday courses in each of four subjects, adding up to around 400 hours in total.
“Anyone can learn,” Li explained to me a few days later over dinner in Beijing. You just needed the right environment and the right method, he said.
Derek Haoyang Li, the founder of Squirrel AI, at a web summit in Lisbon. Photograph: Cody Glenn/Sportsfile via Getty Images
The idea for Squirrel AI had come to him five years earlier. A decade at his tutoring company, Only Education, had left him frustrated. He had found that if you really wanted to improve a student’s progress, by far the best way was to find them a good teacher. But good teachers were rare, and turnover was high, with the best much in demand. Having to find and train 8,000 new teachers each year was limiting the amount students learned – and the growth of his business.
The answer, Li decided, was adaptive learning, where an intelligent computer-based system adjusts itself automatically to the best method for an individual learner. The idea of adaptive learning was not new, but Li was confident that developments in AI research meant that huge advances were now within reach. Rather than seeking to recreate the general intelligence of a human mind, researchers were getting impressive results by putting AI to work on specialised tasks. AI doctors are now equal to or better than humans at analysing X-rays for certain pathologies, while AI lawyers are carrying out legal research that would once have been done by clerks.
Following such breakthroughs, Li resolved to augment the efforts of his human teachers with a tireless, perfectly replicable virtual teacher. “Imagine a tutor who knows everything,” he told me, “and who knows everything about you.”
In Hangzhou, Huang was struggling with the word “hurry”. On his screen, a video appeared of a neatly groomed young teacher presenting a three-minute masterclass about how to use the word “hurry” and related phrases (“in a hurry” etc). Huang watched along.
Moments like these, where a short teaching input results in a small learning output, are known as “nuggets”. Li’s dream, which is the dream of adaptive education in general, is that AI will one day provide the perfect learning experience by ensuring that each of us get just the right chunk of content, delivered in the right way, at the right moment for our individual needs.
One way in which Squirrel AI improves its results is by constantly hoovering up data about its users. During Huang’s lesson, the system continuously tracked and recorded every one of his key strokes, cursor movements, right or wrong answers, texts read and videos watched. This data was time-stamped, to show where Huang had skipped over or lingered on a particular task. Each “nugget” (the video to watch or text to read) was then recommended to him based on an analysis of his data, accrued over hundreds of hours of work on Squirrel’s platform, and the data of 2 million other students. “Computer tutors can collect more teaching experience than a human would ever be able to collect, even in a hundred years of teaching,” Tom Mitchell, Squirrel AI’s chief AI officer, told me over the phone a few weeks later.
The speed and accuracy of Squirrel AI’s platform will depend, above all, on the number of student users it manages to sign up. More students equals more data. As each student works their way through a set of knowledge points, they leave a rich trail of information behind them. This data is then used to train the algorithms of the “thinking” part of the Squirrel AI system.
This is one reason why Squirrel AI has integrated its online business with bricks-and-mortar learning centres. Most children in China do not have access to laptops and high-speed internet. The learning centres mean the company can reach kids they otherwise would not be able to. One of the reasons Mitchell says he is glad to be working with Squirrel AI is the sheer volume of data that the company is gathering. “We’re going to have millions of natural examples,” he told me with excitement.
The dream of a perfect education delivered by machine is not new. For at least a century, generations of visionaries have predicted that the latest inventions will transform learning. “Motion pictures,” wrote the American inventor Thomas Edison in 1922, “are destined to revolutionise our schools.” The immersive power of movies would supposedly turbo-charge the learning process. Others made similar predictions for radio, television, computers and the internet. But despite small successes – the Open University, TV universities in China in the 1980s, or Khan Academy today, which reaches millions of students with its YouTube lessons – teachers have continued to teach, and learners to learn, in much the same way as before.
There are two reasons why today’s techno-evangelists are confident that AI can succeed where other technologies failed. First, they view AI not as a simple innovation but as a “general purpose technology” – that is, an epochal invention, like the printing press, which will fundamentally change the way we learn. Second, they believe its powers will shed new light on the working of the human brain – how repetitive practice grows expertise, for instance, or how interleaving (leaving gaps between learning different bits of material) can help us achieve mastery. As a result, we will be able to design adaptive algorithms to optimise the learning process.
UCL Institute of Education professor and machine learning expert Rose Luckin believes that one day we might see an AI-enabled “Fitbit for the mind” that would allow us to perceive in real-time what an individual knows, and how fast they are learning. The device would use sensors to gather data that forms a precise and ever-evolving map of a person’s abilities, which could be cross-referenced with insights into their motivational and nutritional state, say. This information would then be relayed to our minds, in real time, via a computer-brain interface. Facebook is already carrying out research in this field. Other firms are trialling eye tracking and helmets that monitor kids’ brainwaves.Get the Guardian’s award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morning
The supposed AI education revolution is not here yet, and it is likely that the majority of projects will collapse under the weight of their own hype. IBM’s adaptive tutor Knewton was pulled from US schools under pressure from parents concerned about their kids’ privacy, while Silicon Valley’s Alt School, launched to much fanfare in 2015 by a former Google executive, has burned through $174m of funding without landing on a workable business model. But global school closures owing to coronavirus may yet relax public attitudes to online learning – many online education companies are offering their products for free to all children out of school.
Daisy Christodoulou, a London-based education expert, suggests that too much time is spent speculating on what AI might one day do, rather than focusing on what it already can. It’s estimated that there are 900 million young people around the world today who aren’t currently on track to learn what they need to thrive. To help those kids, AI education doesn’t have to be perfect – it just needs to slightly improve on what they currently have.
In their book The Future of the Professions, Richard and Daniel Susskind argue that we tend to conceive of occupations as embodied in a person – a butcher or baker, doctor or teacher. As a result, we think of them as ‘too human’ to be taken over by machines. But to an algorithm, or someone designing one, a profession appears as something else: a long list of individual tasks, many of which may be mechanised. In education, that might be marking or motivating, lecturing or lesson planning. The Susskinds believe that where a machine can do any one of these tasks better and more cheaply than the average human, automation of that bit of the job is inevitable.
The point, in short, is that AI doesn’t have to match the general intelligence of humans to be useful – or indeed powerful. This is both the promise of AI, and the danger it poses. “People’s behaviour is already being manipulated,” Luckin cautioned. Devices that might one day enhance our minds are already proving useful in shaping them.
In May 2018, a group of students at Hangzhou’s Middle School No 11 returned to their classroom to find three cameras newly installed above the blackboard; they would now be under full-time surveillance in their lessons. “Previously when I had classes that I didn’t like very much, I would be lazy and maybe take naps,” a student told the local news, “but I don’t dare be distracted after the cameras were installed.” The head teacher explained that the system could read seven states of emotion on students’ faces: neutral, disgust, surprise, anger, fear, happiness and sadness. If the kids slacked, the teacher was alerted. “It’s like a pair of mystery eyes are constantly watching me,” the student told reporters.
The previous year, China’s state council had launched a plan for the role AI could play in the future of the country. Underpinning it were a set of beliefs: that AI can “harmonise” Chinese society; that for it to do so, the government should store data on every citizen; that companies, not the state, were best positioned to innovate; that no company should refuse access to the government to its data. In education, the paper called for new adaptive online learning systems powered by big data, and “all-encompassing ubiquitous intelligent environments” – or smart schools.
At AIAED, a conference in Beijing hosted by Squirrel AI, which I attended in May 2019, classroom surveillance was one of the most discussed topics – but the speakers tended to be more concerned about the technical question of how to optimise the effectiveness of facial and bodily monitoring technologies in the classroom, rather than the darker implications of collecting unprecedented amounts of data about children. These ethical questions are becoming increasingly important, with schools from India to the US currently trialling facial monitoring. In the UK, AI is being used today for things like monitoring student wellbeing, automating assessment and even in inspecting schools. Ben Williamson of the Centre for Research in Digital Education explains that this risks encoding biases or errors into the system and raises obvious privacy issues. “Now the school and university might be said to be studying their students too,” he told me.
While cameras in the classroom might outrage many parents in the UK or US, Lenora Chu, author of an influential book about the Chinese education system, argues that in China anything that improves a child’s learning tends to be viewed positively by parents. Squirrel AI even offers them the chance to watch footage of their child’s tutoring sessions. “There’s not that idea here that technology is bad,” said Chu, who moved from the US to Shanghai 10 years ago.
Rose Luckin suggested to me that a platform like Squirrel AI’s could one day mean an end to China’s notoriously punishing gaokao college entrance exam, which takes place for two days every June and largely determines a student’s education and employment prospects. If technology tracked a student throughout their school days, logging every keystroke, knowledge point and facial twitch, then the perfect record of their abilities on file could make such testing obsolete. Yet a system like this could also furnish the Chinese state – or a US tech company – with an eternal ledger of every step in a child’s development. It is not hard to imagine the grim uses to which this information could be put – for instance, if your behaviour in school was used to judge, or predict, your trustworthiness as an adult.
The idea for Squirrel AI had come to him five years earlier. A decade at his tutoring company, Only Education, had left him frustrated. He had found that if you really wanted to improve a student’s progress, by far the best way was to find them a good teacher. But good teachers were rare, and turnover was high, with the best much in demand. Having to find and train 8,000 new teachers each year was limiting the amount students learned – and the growth of his business.
The answer, Li decided, was adaptive learning, where an intelligent computer-based system adjusts itself automatically to the best method for an individual learner. The idea of adaptive learning was not new, but Li was confident that developments in AI research meant that huge advances were now within reach. Rather than seeking to recreate the general intelligence of a human mind, researchers were getting impressive results by putting AI to work on specialised tasks. AI doctors are now equal to or better than humans at analysing X-rays for certain pathologies, while AI lawyers are carrying out legal research that would once have been done by clerks.
Following such breakthroughs, Li resolved to augment the efforts of his human teachers with a tireless, perfectly replicable virtual teacher. “Imagine a tutor who knows everything,” he told me, “and who knows everything about you.”
In Hangzhou, Huang was struggling with the word “hurry”. On his screen, a video appeared of a neatly groomed young teacher presenting a three-minute masterclass about how to use the word “hurry” and related phrases (“in a hurry” etc). Huang watched along.
Moments like these, where a short teaching input results in a small learning output, are known as “nuggets”. Li’s dream, which is the dream of adaptive education in general, is that AI will one day provide the perfect learning experience by ensuring that each of us get just the right chunk of content, delivered in the right way, at the right moment for our individual needs.
One way in which Squirrel AI improves its results is by constantly hoovering up data about its users. During Huang’s lesson, the system continuously tracked and recorded every one of his key strokes, cursor movements, right or wrong answers, texts read and videos watched. This data was time-stamped, to show where Huang had skipped over or lingered on a particular task. Each “nugget” (the video to watch or text to read) was then recommended to him based on an analysis of his data, accrued over hundreds of hours of work on Squirrel’s platform, and the data of 2 million other students. “Computer tutors can collect more teaching experience than a human would ever be able to collect, even in a hundred years of teaching,” Tom Mitchell, Squirrel AI’s chief AI officer, told me over the phone a few weeks later.
The speed and accuracy of Squirrel AI’s platform will depend, above all, on the number of student users it manages to sign up. More students equals more data. As each student works their way through a set of knowledge points, they leave a rich trail of information behind them. This data is then used to train the algorithms of the “thinking” part of the Squirrel AI system.
This is one reason why Squirrel AI has integrated its online business with bricks-and-mortar learning centres. Most children in China do not have access to laptops and high-speed internet. The learning centres mean the company can reach kids they otherwise would not be able to. One of the reasons Mitchell says he is glad to be working with Squirrel AI is the sheer volume of data that the company is gathering. “We’re going to have millions of natural examples,” he told me with excitement.
The dream of a perfect education delivered by machine is not new. For at least a century, generations of visionaries have predicted that the latest inventions will transform learning. “Motion pictures,” wrote the American inventor Thomas Edison in 1922, “are destined to revolutionise our schools.” The immersive power of movies would supposedly turbo-charge the learning process. Others made similar predictions for radio, television, computers and the internet. But despite small successes – the Open University, TV universities in China in the 1980s, or Khan Academy today, which reaches millions of students with its YouTube lessons – teachers have continued to teach, and learners to learn, in much the same way as before.
There are two reasons why today’s techno-evangelists are confident that AI can succeed where other technologies failed. First, they view AI not as a simple innovation but as a “general purpose technology” – that is, an epochal invention, like the printing press, which will fundamentally change the way we learn. Second, they believe its powers will shed new light on the working of the human brain – how repetitive practice grows expertise, for instance, or how interleaving (leaving gaps between learning different bits of material) can help us achieve mastery. As a result, we will be able to design adaptive algorithms to optimise the learning process.
UCL Institute of Education professor and machine learning expert Rose Luckin believes that one day we might see an AI-enabled “Fitbit for the mind” that would allow us to perceive in real-time what an individual knows, and how fast they are learning. The device would use sensors to gather data that forms a precise and ever-evolving map of a person’s abilities, which could be cross-referenced with insights into their motivational and nutritional state, say. This information would then be relayed to our minds, in real time, via a computer-brain interface. Facebook is already carrying out research in this field. Other firms are trialling eye tracking and helmets that monitor kids’ brainwaves.Get the Guardian’s award-winning long reads sent direct to you every Saturday morning
The supposed AI education revolution is not here yet, and it is likely that the majority of projects will collapse under the weight of their own hype. IBM’s adaptive tutor Knewton was pulled from US schools under pressure from parents concerned about their kids’ privacy, while Silicon Valley’s Alt School, launched to much fanfare in 2015 by a former Google executive, has burned through $174m of funding without landing on a workable business model. But global school closures owing to coronavirus may yet relax public attitudes to online learning – many online education companies are offering their products for free to all children out of school.
Daisy Christodoulou, a London-based education expert, suggests that too much time is spent speculating on what AI might one day do, rather than focusing on what it already can. It’s estimated that there are 900 million young people around the world today who aren’t currently on track to learn what they need to thrive. To help those kids, AI education doesn’t have to be perfect – it just needs to slightly improve on what they currently have.
In their book The Future of the Professions, Richard and Daniel Susskind argue that we tend to conceive of occupations as embodied in a person – a butcher or baker, doctor or teacher. As a result, we think of them as ‘too human’ to be taken over by machines. But to an algorithm, or someone designing one, a profession appears as something else: a long list of individual tasks, many of which may be mechanised. In education, that might be marking or motivating, lecturing or lesson planning. The Susskinds believe that where a machine can do any one of these tasks better and more cheaply than the average human, automation of that bit of the job is inevitable.
The point, in short, is that AI doesn’t have to match the general intelligence of humans to be useful – or indeed powerful. This is both the promise of AI, and the danger it poses. “People’s behaviour is already being manipulated,” Luckin cautioned. Devices that might one day enhance our minds are already proving useful in shaping them.
In May 2018, a group of students at Hangzhou’s Middle School No 11 returned to their classroom to find three cameras newly installed above the blackboard; they would now be under full-time surveillance in their lessons. “Previously when I had classes that I didn’t like very much, I would be lazy and maybe take naps,” a student told the local news, “but I don’t dare be distracted after the cameras were installed.” The head teacher explained that the system could read seven states of emotion on students’ faces: neutral, disgust, surprise, anger, fear, happiness and sadness. If the kids slacked, the teacher was alerted. “It’s like a pair of mystery eyes are constantly watching me,” the student told reporters.
The previous year, China’s state council had launched a plan for the role AI could play in the future of the country. Underpinning it were a set of beliefs: that AI can “harmonise” Chinese society; that for it to do so, the government should store data on every citizen; that companies, not the state, were best positioned to innovate; that no company should refuse access to the government to its data. In education, the paper called for new adaptive online learning systems powered by big data, and “all-encompassing ubiquitous intelligent environments” – or smart schools.
At AIAED, a conference in Beijing hosted by Squirrel AI, which I attended in May 2019, classroom surveillance was one of the most discussed topics – but the speakers tended to be more concerned about the technical question of how to optimise the effectiveness of facial and bodily monitoring technologies in the classroom, rather than the darker implications of collecting unprecedented amounts of data about children. These ethical questions are becoming increasingly important, with schools from India to the US currently trialling facial monitoring. In the UK, AI is being used today for things like monitoring student wellbeing, automating assessment and even in inspecting schools. Ben Williamson of the Centre for Research in Digital Education explains that this risks encoding biases or errors into the system and raises obvious privacy issues. “Now the school and university might be said to be studying their students too,” he told me.
While cameras in the classroom might outrage many parents in the UK or US, Lenora Chu, author of an influential book about the Chinese education system, argues that in China anything that improves a child’s learning tends to be viewed positively by parents. Squirrel AI even offers them the chance to watch footage of their child’s tutoring sessions. “There’s not that idea here that technology is bad,” said Chu, who moved from the US to Shanghai 10 years ago.
Rose Luckin suggested to me that a platform like Squirrel AI’s could one day mean an end to China’s notoriously punishing gaokao college entrance exam, which takes place for two days every June and largely determines a student’s education and employment prospects. If technology tracked a student throughout their school days, logging every keystroke, knowledge point and facial twitch, then the perfect record of their abilities on file could make such testing obsolete. Yet a system like this could also furnish the Chinese state – or a US tech company – with an eternal ledger of every step in a child’s development. It is not hard to imagine the grim uses to which this information could be put – for instance, if your behaviour in school was used to judge, or predict, your trustworthiness as an adult.
Students leaving a gaokao college entrance exam in Hangzhou, China. Photograph: Imaginechina/Rex/Shutterstock
On the one hand, said Chu, the CCP wants to use AI to better prepare young people for the future economy, and to close the achievement gap between rural and urban schools. To this end, companies like Squirrel AI receive government support, such as access to prime office space in top business districts. At the same time, the CCP, as the state council put it, sees AI as “opportunity of the millennium” for “social construction”. That is, social control. The ability of AI to “grasp group cognition and psychological changes in a timely manner” through the surveillance of people’s movements, spending and other behaviours means it can play “an irreplaceable role in effectively maintaining social stability”.
The surveillance state is already penetrating deep into people’s lives. In 2019, there was a significant spike in China in the registration of patents for facial recognition and surveillance technology. All new mobile phones in China must now be registered via a facial scan. At the hotels I stayed in, Chinese citizens handed over their ID cards and checked in using face scanners. On the high-speed train to Beijing, the announcer repeatedly warned travellers to abide by the rules in order to maintain their personal credit. The notorious social credit system, which has been under trial in a handful of Chinese cities ahead of an expected nationwide roll out this year, awards or detracts points from an individual’s trustworthiness score, which affects their ability to travel and borrow money, among other things.
The result, explained Chu, is that all these interventions exert a subtle control over what people think and say. “You sense how the wind is blowing,” she told me. For the 12 million Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, however, that control is anything but subtle. Police checkpoints, complete with facial scanners, are ubiquitous. All mobile phones must have Jingwang (“clean net”) app installed, allowing the government to monitor your movements and browsing. Iris and fingerprint scans are required to access health services. As many as 1.5 million Uighurs, including children, have been interned at some point in a re-education camp in the interests of “harmony”.
As we shape the use of AI in education, it’s likely that AI will shape us too. Jiang Xueqin, an education researcher from Chengdu, is sceptical that it will be as revolutionary as proponents claim. “Parents are paying for a drug,” he told me over the phone. He thought tutoring companies such as New Oriental, TAL and Squirrel AI were simply preying on parents’ anxieties about their kids’ performance in exams, and only succeeding because test preparation was the easiest element of education to automate – a closed system with limited variables that allowed for optimisation. Jiang wasn’t impressed with the progress made, or the way that it engaged every child in a desperate race to conform to the measures of success imposed by the system.
One student I met at the learning centre in Hangzhou, Zhang Hen, seemed to have a deep desire to learn about the world – she told me how she loved Qu Yuan, a Tang dynasty romantic poet, and how she was a fan of Harry Potter – but that wasn’t the reason she was here. Her goal was much simpler: she had come to the centre to boost her test scores. That may seem disappointing to idealists who want education to offer so much more, but Zhang was realistic about the demands of the Chinese education system. She had tough exams that she needed to pass. A scripted system that helped her efficiently master the content of the high school entrance exam was exactly what she wanted.
On stage at AIAED, Tom Mitchell had presented a more ambitious vision for adaptive learning that went far beyond helping students cram for mindless tests. Much of what he was most excited by was possible only in theory, but his enthusiasm was palpable. As appealing as his optimism was, though, I felt unconvinced. It was clear that adaptive technologies might improve certain types of learning, but it was equally obvious that they might narrow the aims of education and provide new tools to restrict our freedom.
Li insists that one day his system will help all young people to flourish creatively. Though he allows that for now an expert human teacher still holds an edge over a robot, he is confident that AI will soon be good enough to evaluate and reply to students’ oral responses. In less than five years, Li imagines training Squirrel AI’s platform with a list of every conceivable question and every possible response, weighting an algorithm to favour those labelled “creative”. “That thing is very easy to do,” he said, “like tagging cats.”
For Li, learning has always been like that – like tagging cats. But there’s a growing consensus that our brains don’t work like computers. Whereas a machine must crunch through millions of images to be able to identify a cat as the collection of “features” that are present only in those images labelled “cat” (two triangular ears, four legs, two eyes, fur, etc), a human child can grasp the concept of “cat” from just a few real life examples, thanks to our innate ability to understand things symbolically. Where machines can’t compute meaning, our minds thrive on it. The adaptive advantage of our brains is that they learn continually through all of our senses by interacting with the environment, our culture and, above all, other people.
Li told me that even if AI fulfilled all of its promise, human teachers would still play a crucial role helping kids learn social skills. At Squirrel AI’s HQ, which occupies three floors of a gleaming tower next door to Microsoft and Mobike in Shanghai, I met some of the company’s young teachers. Each sat at a work console in a vast office space, headphones on, eyes focused on a laptop screen, their desks decorated with plastic pot plants and waving cats. As they monitored the dashboards of up to six students simultaneously, the face of a young learner would appear on the screen, asking for help, either via a chat box or through a video link. The teachers reminded me of workers in the gig economy, the Uber drivers of education. When I logged on to try out a Squirrel English lesson for myself, the experience was good, but my tutor seemed to be teaching to a script.
Squirrel AI’s head of communications, Joleen Liang, showed me photos from a recent trip she had taken to the remote mountains of Henan, to deliver laptops to disadvantaged students. Without access to the adaptive technology, their education would be a little worse. It was a reminder that Squirrel AI’s platform, like those of its competitors worldwide, doesn’t have to be better than the best human teachers – to improve people’s lives, it just needs to be good enough, at the right price, to supplement what we’ve got. The problem is that it is hard to see technology companies stopping there. For better and worse, their ambitions are bigger. “We could make a lot of geniuses,” Li told me.
On the one hand, said Chu, the CCP wants to use AI to better prepare young people for the future economy, and to close the achievement gap between rural and urban schools. To this end, companies like Squirrel AI receive government support, such as access to prime office space in top business districts. At the same time, the CCP, as the state council put it, sees AI as “opportunity of the millennium” for “social construction”. That is, social control. The ability of AI to “grasp group cognition and psychological changes in a timely manner” through the surveillance of people’s movements, spending and other behaviours means it can play “an irreplaceable role in effectively maintaining social stability”.
The surveillance state is already penetrating deep into people’s lives. In 2019, there was a significant spike in China in the registration of patents for facial recognition and surveillance technology. All new mobile phones in China must now be registered via a facial scan. At the hotels I stayed in, Chinese citizens handed over their ID cards and checked in using face scanners. On the high-speed train to Beijing, the announcer repeatedly warned travellers to abide by the rules in order to maintain their personal credit. The notorious social credit system, which has been under trial in a handful of Chinese cities ahead of an expected nationwide roll out this year, awards or detracts points from an individual’s trustworthiness score, which affects their ability to travel and borrow money, among other things.
The result, explained Chu, is that all these interventions exert a subtle control over what people think and say. “You sense how the wind is blowing,” she told me. For the 12 million Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, however, that control is anything but subtle. Police checkpoints, complete with facial scanners, are ubiquitous. All mobile phones must have Jingwang (“clean net”) app installed, allowing the government to monitor your movements and browsing. Iris and fingerprint scans are required to access health services. As many as 1.5 million Uighurs, including children, have been interned at some point in a re-education camp in the interests of “harmony”.
As we shape the use of AI in education, it’s likely that AI will shape us too. Jiang Xueqin, an education researcher from Chengdu, is sceptical that it will be as revolutionary as proponents claim. “Parents are paying for a drug,” he told me over the phone. He thought tutoring companies such as New Oriental, TAL and Squirrel AI were simply preying on parents’ anxieties about their kids’ performance in exams, and only succeeding because test preparation was the easiest element of education to automate – a closed system with limited variables that allowed for optimisation. Jiang wasn’t impressed with the progress made, or the way that it engaged every child in a desperate race to conform to the measures of success imposed by the system.
One student I met at the learning centre in Hangzhou, Zhang Hen, seemed to have a deep desire to learn about the world – she told me how she loved Qu Yuan, a Tang dynasty romantic poet, and how she was a fan of Harry Potter – but that wasn’t the reason she was here. Her goal was much simpler: she had come to the centre to boost her test scores. That may seem disappointing to idealists who want education to offer so much more, but Zhang was realistic about the demands of the Chinese education system. She had tough exams that she needed to pass. A scripted system that helped her efficiently master the content of the high school entrance exam was exactly what she wanted.
On stage at AIAED, Tom Mitchell had presented a more ambitious vision for adaptive learning that went far beyond helping students cram for mindless tests. Much of what he was most excited by was possible only in theory, but his enthusiasm was palpable. As appealing as his optimism was, though, I felt unconvinced. It was clear that adaptive technologies might improve certain types of learning, but it was equally obvious that they might narrow the aims of education and provide new tools to restrict our freedom.
Li insists that one day his system will help all young people to flourish creatively. Though he allows that for now an expert human teacher still holds an edge over a robot, he is confident that AI will soon be good enough to evaluate and reply to students’ oral responses. In less than five years, Li imagines training Squirrel AI’s platform with a list of every conceivable question and every possible response, weighting an algorithm to favour those labelled “creative”. “That thing is very easy to do,” he said, “like tagging cats.”
For Li, learning has always been like that – like tagging cats. But there’s a growing consensus that our brains don’t work like computers. Whereas a machine must crunch through millions of images to be able to identify a cat as the collection of “features” that are present only in those images labelled “cat” (two triangular ears, four legs, two eyes, fur, etc), a human child can grasp the concept of “cat” from just a few real life examples, thanks to our innate ability to understand things symbolically. Where machines can’t compute meaning, our minds thrive on it. The adaptive advantage of our brains is that they learn continually through all of our senses by interacting with the environment, our culture and, above all, other people.
Li told me that even if AI fulfilled all of its promise, human teachers would still play a crucial role helping kids learn social skills. At Squirrel AI’s HQ, which occupies three floors of a gleaming tower next door to Microsoft and Mobike in Shanghai, I met some of the company’s young teachers. Each sat at a work console in a vast office space, headphones on, eyes focused on a laptop screen, their desks decorated with plastic pot plants and waving cats. As they monitored the dashboards of up to six students simultaneously, the face of a young learner would appear on the screen, asking for help, either via a chat box or through a video link. The teachers reminded me of workers in the gig economy, the Uber drivers of education. When I logged on to try out a Squirrel English lesson for myself, the experience was good, but my tutor seemed to be teaching to a script.
Squirrel AI’s head of communications, Joleen Liang, showed me photos from a recent trip she had taken to the remote mountains of Henan, to deliver laptops to disadvantaged students. Without access to the adaptive technology, their education would be a little worse. It was a reminder that Squirrel AI’s platform, like those of its competitors worldwide, doesn’t have to be better than the best human teachers – to improve people’s lives, it just needs to be good enough, at the right price, to supplement what we’ve got. The problem is that it is hard to see technology companies stopping there. For better and worse, their ambitions are bigger. “We could make a lot of geniuses,” Li told me.
Sunday 15 September 2019
Never mind ‘tax raids’, Labour – just abolish private education
As drivers of inequality, private schools are at the heart of Britain’s problems. Labour must be bold and radical on this writes Owen Jones in The Guardian
No grammar schools, lots of play: the secrets of Europe’s top education system
Unless this rotten system is abolished, Britain will never be free of social and political turmoil. It is therefore welcome – overdue, in fact – to read the Daily Telegraph’s horrified front-page story: “Corbyn tax raid on private schools”.
The segregation of children by the bank balances of their parents is integral to the class system, and the Labour Against Private Schools group has been leading an energetic campaign to shift the party’s position. The party is looking at scrapping the tax subsidies enjoyed by private education, which are de facto public subsidies for class privilege: moves such as ending VAT exemptions for school fees, as well as making private schools pay the rates other businesses are expected to. If the class system has an unofficial motto, it is “one rule for us, and one rule for everybody else”. Private schools encapsulate that, and forcing these gilded institutions to stand on their own two feet should be a bare minimum.
More radically, Labour is debating whether to commit to abolishing private education. This is exactly what the party should do, even if it is via the “slow and painless euthanasia” advocated by Robert Verkaik, the author of Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain. Compelling private schools to apply by the same VAT and business rate rules as others will starve them of funds, forcing many of them out of business.
Private education is, in part, a con: past OECD research has suggested that there is not “much of a performance difference” between state and private schools when socio-economic background is factored in. In other words, children from richer backgrounds – because the odds are stacked in their favour from their very conception – tend to do well, whichever school they’re sent to. However unpalatable it is for some to hear it, many well-to-do parents send their offspring to private schools because they fear them mixing with the children of the poor. Private schools do confer other advantages, of course: whether it be networks, or a sense of confidence that can shade into a poisonous sense of social superiority.
Mixing together is good for children from different backgrounds: the evidence suggests that the “cultural capital” of pupils with more privileged, university-educated parents rubs off on poorer peers without their own academic progress suffering. Such mixing creates more well-rounded human beings, breaking down social barriers. If sharp-elbowed parents are no longer able to buy themselves out of state education, they are incentivised to improve their local schools.
Look at Finland: it has almost no private or grammar schools, and instead provides a high-quality local state school for every pupil, and its education system is among the best performing on Earth. It shows why Labour should be more radical still: not least committing to abolishing grammar schools, which take in far fewer pupils who are eligible for free school meals.
Other radical measures are necessary too. Poverty damages the educational potential of children, whether through stress or poor diet, while overcrowded, poor-quality housing has the same impact too. Gaps in vocabulary open up an early age, underlining the need for early intervention. The educational expert Melissa Benn recommends that, rather than emulating the often narrow curriculums of private schools, there should be a move by state schools away from exam results: a wrap-around qualification could include a personal project, community work and a broader array of subjects.
In the coming election, Labour has to be more radical and ambitious than it was 2017. At the very core of its new manifesto must be a determination to overcome a class system that is a ceaseless engine of misery, insecurity and injustice.
Britain is a playground for the rich, but this is not a fact of life – and a commitment to ending private education will send a strong message that time has finally been called on a rotten class system.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn at the TUC Congress in Brighton. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images
The British class system is an organised racket. It concentrates wealth and power in the hands of the few, while 14 million Britons languish in poverty.
If you are dim but have rich parents, a life of comfort, affluence and power is almost inevitable – while the bright but poor are systematically robbed of their potential. The well-to-do are all but guaranteed places at the top table of the media, law, politics, medicine, military, civil service and arts. As inequality grows, so too does the stranglehold of the rich over democracy. The wealthiest 1,000 can double their fortunes in the aftermath of financial calamity, while workers suffer the worst squeeze in wages since the Napoleonic wars. State support is lavished on rich vested interests – such as the banks responsible for Britain’s economic turmoil – but stripped from disabled and low-paid people. The powerful have less stressful lives, and the prosperous are healthier, expecting to live a decade longer than those living in the most deprived areas.
The British class system is an organised racket. It concentrates wealth and power in the hands of the few, while 14 million Britons languish in poverty.
If you are dim but have rich parents, a life of comfort, affluence and power is almost inevitable – while the bright but poor are systematically robbed of their potential. The well-to-do are all but guaranteed places at the top table of the media, law, politics, medicine, military, civil service and arts. As inequality grows, so too does the stranglehold of the rich over democracy. The wealthiest 1,000 can double their fortunes in the aftermath of financial calamity, while workers suffer the worst squeeze in wages since the Napoleonic wars. State support is lavished on rich vested interests – such as the banks responsible for Britain’s economic turmoil – but stripped from disabled and low-paid people. The powerful have less stressful lives, and the prosperous are healthier, expecting to live a decade longer than those living in the most deprived areas.
No grammar schools, lots of play: the secrets of Europe’s top education system
Unless this rotten system is abolished, Britain will never be free of social and political turmoil. It is therefore welcome – overdue, in fact – to read the Daily Telegraph’s horrified front-page story: “Corbyn tax raid on private schools”.
The segregation of children by the bank balances of their parents is integral to the class system, and the Labour Against Private Schools group has been leading an energetic campaign to shift the party’s position. The party is looking at scrapping the tax subsidies enjoyed by private education, which are de facto public subsidies for class privilege: moves such as ending VAT exemptions for school fees, as well as making private schools pay the rates other businesses are expected to. If the class system has an unofficial motto, it is “one rule for us, and one rule for everybody else”. Private schools encapsulate that, and forcing these gilded institutions to stand on their own two feet should be a bare minimum.
More radically, Labour is debating whether to commit to abolishing private education. This is exactly what the party should do, even if it is via the “slow and painless euthanasia” advocated by Robert Verkaik, the author of Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain. Compelling private schools to apply by the same VAT and business rate rules as others will starve them of funds, forcing many of them out of business.
Private education is, in part, a con: past OECD research has suggested that there is not “much of a performance difference” between state and private schools when socio-economic background is factored in. In other words, children from richer backgrounds – because the odds are stacked in their favour from their very conception – tend to do well, whichever school they’re sent to. However unpalatable it is for some to hear it, many well-to-do parents send their offspring to private schools because they fear them mixing with the children of the poor. Private schools do confer other advantages, of course: whether it be networks, or a sense of confidence that can shade into a poisonous sense of social superiority.
Mixing together is good for children from different backgrounds: the evidence suggests that the “cultural capital” of pupils with more privileged, university-educated parents rubs off on poorer peers without their own academic progress suffering. Such mixing creates more well-rounded human beings, breaking down social barriers. If sharp-elbowed parents are no longer able to buy themselves out of state education, they are incentivised to improve their local schools.
Look at Finland: it has almost no private or grammar schools, and instead provides a high-quality local state school for every pupil, and its education system is among the best performing on Earth. It shows why Labour should be more radical still: not least committing to abolishing grammar schools, which take in far fewer pupils who are eligible for free school meals.
Other radical measures are necessary too. Poverty damages the educational potential of children, whether through stress or poor diet, while overcrowded, poor-quality housing has the same impact too. Gaps in vocabulary open up an early age, underlining the need for early intervention. The educational expert Melissa Benn recommends that, rather than emulating the often narrow curriculums of private schools, there should be a move by state schools away from exam results: a wrap-around qualification could include a personal project, community work and a broader array of subjects.
In the coming election, Labour has to be more radical and ambitious than it was 2017. At the very core of its new manifesto must be a determination to overcome a class system that is a ceaseless engine of misery, insecurity and injustice.
Britain is a playground for the rich, but this is not a fact of life – and a commitment to ending private education will send a strong message that time has finally been called on a rotten class system.
Sunday 28 July 2019
What if NaMo was India’s PM in 1947?
By Girish Menon
Pervez Hoodbhoy, one of few famed Pakistan scientists, asked whether India could have launched Chandrayaan2 if Modi was India’s Prime Minister in 1947? I thought this was an extremely important question in an era when all things Nehruvian and Indirayian are being rubbished without any concern for facts.
Meghnad Desai, an economist of renown, in his latest piece in the Indian Express provides a stark example. Desai tries to create the impression that it was the private sector that was responsible for India’s lead in the space programme. Desai states that despite Nehru’s inclinations towards the public sector he listened to Sarabhai, who came from an industrialist family and had a market orientation, and this resulted in the successful space programme.
What Desai ignores is that ISRO has always been a public sector organisation. It was not started by the Sarabhai family and subsequently nationalised by a socialist Nehru or Indira.
A recent edition of the Guardian (How the state runs business in China) talked about how members of China’s Communist Party are involved in the management of all large companies operating in China. This includes western multinationals as well. And China is poised to be the world’s largest economy with its firms ready to compete with global corporates. Free market ideologues deliberately ignore such facts.
In India’s case, the spokespersons of the ruling corporatocracy fail to admit that the industrialists post independence viz. Tatas and Birlas did not have the capital nor the knowhow to launch the industrial revolution and it was left to Nehru to use tax payer money to launch the education and scientific revolution whose benefits India is now reaping.
The case I am making is that there are good public sector organisations as well as bad ones. The bad ones could be shut down due to their continuous reliance on government subsidies. But as the so far botched privatisation of Air-India has shown, India’s private sector enthusiasts have not shown any enthusiasm to take over and turn around such firms. Instead, they would like instant money spinners or public sector firms which can be cannibalised for instant profit.
Even in the case of bad public sector firms, if a systematic analysis of their sickness is carried out many will reveal that their problems often are not within the firm but lie outside with their political masters. In Air-India’s case the decisions by Praful Patel to favour Jet Airways and to destroy the public sector firm have led to its current state.
On the other hand, it is worthwhile to study the case of Jet Airways the private sector darling of free market India. It is now bankrupt despite all the favours given to it including flying rights and free aviation fuel.
There are so many instances of India’s preferred industrialists being given favourable loans, government lands and other subsidies and yet not contributing to reducing the burgeoning unemployment question. All of this is swept under the carpet as the current administration prepares to make a distress sale of the public sector.
India’s private sector has not provided global leadership in any area. While we await to see what Anil Ambani’s defence company will do, Indians must rejoice Chandrayaan2 while not forgetting that it is a public sector firm that is a world leader in rockets and satellite technology.
Sunday 30 June 2019
The science of influencing people: six ways to win an argument
Hidebound views on subjects such as the climate crisis and Brexit are the norm – but the appliance of science may sway stubborn opinions writes David Robson in The Guardian
Illustration: Getty Images/Observer Design
“I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters of religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s,” wrote Mark Twain.
Having written a book about our most common reasoning errors, I would argue that Twain was being rather uncharitable – to monkeys. Whether we are discussing Trump, Brexit, or the Tory leadership, we have all come across people who appear to have next to no understanding of world events – but who talk with the utmost confidence and conviction. And the latest psychological research can now help us to understand why.
Consider the “illusion of explanatory depth”. When asked about government policies and their consequences, most people believe that they could explain their workings in great detail. If put to the test, however, their explanations are vague and incoherent. The problem is that we confuse a shallow familiarity with general concepts for real, in-depth knowledge.
Besides being less substantial than we think, our knowledge is also highly selective: we conveniently remember facts that support our beliefs and forget others. When it comes to understanding the EU, for instance, Brexiters will know the overall costs of membership, while remainers will cite its numerous advantages. Although the overall level of knowledge is equal on both sides, there is little overlap in the details.
Simply asking why people support or oppose a policy is pointless. You need to ask how something works to have an effect
Politics can also scramble our critical thinking skills. Psychological studies show that people fail to notice the logical fallacies in an argument if the conclusion supports their viewpoint; if they are shown contrary evidence, however, they will be far more critical of the tiniest hole in the argument. This phenomenon is known as “motivated reasoning”.
A high standard of education doesn’t necessarily protect us from these flaws. Graduates, for instance, often overestimate their understanding of their degree subject: although they remember the general content, they have forgotten the details. “People confuse their current level of understanding with their peak knowledge,” Prof Matthew Fisher of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, says. That false sense of expertise can, in turn, lead them to feel that they have the licence to be more closed-minded in their political views – an attitude known as “earned dogmatism”.
Little wonder that discussions about politics can leave us feeling that we are banging our heads against a brick wall – even when talking to people we might otherwise respect. Fortunately, recent psychological research also offers evidence-based ways towards achieving more fruitful discussions.
“I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters of religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s,” wrote Mark Twain.
Having written a book about our most common reasoning errors, I would argue that Twain was being rather uncharitable – to monkeys. Whether we are discussing Trump, Brexit, or the Tory leadership, we have all come across people who appear to have next to no understanding of world events – but who talk with the utmost confidence and conviction. And the latest psychological research can now help us to understand why.
Consider the “illusion of explanatory depth”. When asked about government policies and their consequences, most people believe that they could explain their workings in great detail. If put to the test, however, their explanations are vague and incoherent. The problem is that we confuse a shallow familiarity with general concepts for real, in-depth knowledge.
Besides being less substantial than we think, our knowledge is also highly selective: we conveniently remember facts that support our beliefs and forget others. When it comes to understanding the EU, for instance, Brexiters will know the overall costs of membership, while remainers will cite its numerous advantages. Although the overall level of knowledge is equal on both sides, there is little overlap in the details.
Simply asking why people support or oppose a policy is pointless. You need to ask how something works to have an effect
Politics can also scramble our critical thinking skills. Psychological studies show that people fail to notice the logical fallacies in an argument if the conclusion supports their viewpoint; if they are shown contrary evidence, however, they will be far more critical of the tiniest hole in the argument. This phenomenon is known as “motivated reasoning”.
A high standard of education doesn’t necessarily protect us from these flaws. Graduates, for instance, often overestimate their understanding of their degree subject: although they remember the general content, they have forgotten the details. “People confuse their current level of understanding with their peak knowledge,” Prof Matthew Fisher of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, says. That false sense of expertise can, in turn, lead them to feel that they have the licence to be more closed-minded in their political views – an attitude known as “earned dogmatism”.
Little wonder that discussions about politics can leave us feeling that we are banging our heads against a brick wall – even when talking to people we might otherwise respect. Fortunately, recent psychological research also offers evidence-based ways towards achieving more fruitful discussions.
Ask ‘how’ rather than ‘why’
Thanks to the illusion of explanatory depth, many political arguments will be based on false premises, spoken with great confidence but with a minimal understanding of the issues at hand. For this reason, a simple but powerful way of deflating someone’s argument is to ask for more detail. “You need to get the ‘other side’ focusing on how something would play itself out, in a step by step fashion”, says Prof Dan Johnson at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. By revealing the shallowness of their existing knowledge, this prompts a more moderate and humble attitude.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Anti-Brexit protester Steve Bray and a pro-Brexit protester face off outside parliament earlier this year. Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images
In 2013, Prof Philip Fernbach at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and colleagues asked participants in cap-and-trade schemes – designed to limit companies’ carbon emissions – to describe in depth how they worked. Subjects initially took strongly polarised views but after the limits of their knowledge were exposed, their attitudes became more moderate and less biased.
It’s important to note that simply asking why people supported or opposed the policy – without requiring them to explain how it works – had no effect, since those reasons could be shallower (“It helps the environment”) with little detail. You need to ask how something works to get the effect.
If you are debating the merits of a no-deal Brexit, you might ask someone to describe exactly how the UK’s international trade would change under WTO terms. If you are challenging a climate emergency denier, you might ask them to describe exactly how their alternative theories can explain the recent rise in temperatures. It’s a strategy that the broadcaster James O’Brien employs on his LBC talk show – to powerful effect.
Fill their knowledge gap with a convincing story
If you are trying to debunk a particular falsehood – like a conspiracy theory or fake news – you should make sure that your explanation offers a convincing, coherent narrative that fills all the gaps left in the other person’s understanding.
Consider the following experiment by Prof Brendan Nyhan of the University of Michigan and Prof Jason Reifler of the University of Exeter. Subjects read stories about a fictional senator allegedly under investigation for bribery who had subsequently resigned from his post. Written evidence – a letter from prosecutors confirming his innocence – did little to change the participants’ suspicions of his guilt. But when offered an alternative explanation for his resignation – to take on another role – participants changed their minds. The same can be seen in murder trials: people are more likely to accept someone’s innocence if another suspect has also been accused, since that fills the biggest gap in the story: whodunnit.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Sajid Javid and Rory Stewart taking part in a BBC TV debate earlier this month. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA
The persuasive power of well-constructed narratives means that it’s often useful to discuss the sources of misinformation, so that the person can understand why they were being misled in the first place. Anti-vaxxers, for instance, may believe a medical conspiracy to cover up the supposed dangers of vaccines. You are more likely to change minds if you replace that narrative with an equally cohesive and convincing story – such as Andrew Wakefield’s scientific fraud, and the fact that he was set to profit from his paper linking autism to MMR vaccines. Just stating the scientific evidence will not be as persuasive.
Reframe the issue
Each of our beliefs is deeply rooted in a much broader and more complex political ideology. Climate crisis denial, for instance, is now inextricably linked to beliefs in free trade, capitalism and the dangers of environmental regulation.
Attacking one issue may therefore threaten to unravel someone’s whole worldview – a feeling that triggers emotionally charged motivated reasoning. It is for this reason that highly educated Republicans in the US deny the overwhelming evidence.
You are not going to alter someone’s whole political ideology in one discussion, so a better strategy is to disentangle the issue at hand from their broader beliefs, or to explain how the facts can still be accommodated into their worldview. A free-market capitalist who denies global warming might be far more receptive to the evidence if you explain that the development of renewable energies could lead to technological breakthroughs and generate economic growth.
Appeal to an alternative identity
If the attempt to reframe the issue fails, you might have more success by appealing to another part of the person’s identity entirely.
Someone’s political affiliation will never completely define them, after all. Besides being a conservative or a socialist, a Brexiter or a remainer, we associate ourselves with other traits and values – things like our profession, or our role as a parent. We might see ourselves as a particularly honest person, or someone who is especially creative. “All people have multiple identities,” says Prof Jay Van Bavel at New York University, who studies the neuroscience of the “partisan brain”. “These identities can become active at any given time, depending on the circumstances.”
You are more likely to achieve your aims by arguing gently and kindly. You will also come across better to onlookers
It’s natural that when talking about politics, the salient identity will be our support for a particular party or movement. But when people are asked to first reflect on their other, nonpolitical values, they tend to become more objective in discussion on highly partisan issues, as they stop viewing facts through their ideological lens.
You could try to use this to your advantage during a heated conversation, with subtle flattery that appeals to another identity and its set of values; if you are talking to a science teacher, you might try to emphasise their capacity to appraise evidence even-handedly. The aim is to help them recognise that they can change their mind on certain issues while staying true to other important elements of their personality.
Persuade them to take an outside perspective
Another simple strategy to encourage a more detached and rational mindset is to ask your conversation partner to imagine the argument from the viewpoint of someone from another country. How, for example, would someone in Australia or Iceland view Boris Johnson as our new prime minister?
Prof Ethan Kross at the University of Michigan, and Prof Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, have shown that this strategy increases “psychological distance” from the issue at hand and cools emotionally charged reasoning so that you can see things more objectively. During the US presidential elections, for instance, their participants were asked to consider how someone in Iceland would view the candidates. They were subsequently more willing to accept the limits of their knowledge and to listen to alternative viewpoints; after the experiment, they were even more likely to join a bipartisan discussion group.
FacebookTwitterPinterest The front pages of two New York newspapers on Friday 2 June 2017, as Donald Trump pledged to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement. Photograph: Richard B Levine/Alamy
This is only one way to increase someone’s psychological distance, and there are many others. If you are considering policies with potentially long-term consequences, you could ask them to imagine viewing the situation through the eyes of someone in the future. However you do it, encouraging this shift in perspective should make your friend or relative more receptive to the facts you are presenting, rather than simply reacting with knee-jerk dismissals.
Be kind
Here’s a lesson that certain polemicists in the media might do well to remember – people are generally much more rational in their arguments, and more willing to own up to the limits of their knowledge and understanding, if they are treated with respect and compassion. Aggression, by contrast, leads them to feel that their identity is threatened, which in turn can make them closed-minded.
Assuming that the purpose of your argument is to change minds, rather than to signal your own superiority, you are much more likely to achieve your aims by arguing gently and kindly rather than belligerently, and affirming your respect for the person, even if you are telling them some hard truths. As a bonus, you will also come across better to onlookers. “There’s a lot of work showing that third-party observers always attribute high levels of competence when the person is conducting themselves with more civility,” says Dr Joe Vitriol, a psychologist at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. As Lady Mary Wortley Montagu put it in the 18th century: “Civility costs nothing and buys everything.”
Thursday 13 June 2019
Higher Education in The USA: Rigged from inside and outside?
Edward Luce in The FT
“Nothing is fun until you are good at it,” said Amy Chua in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Eight years later the Yale professor continues to display her prowess.
This week Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, Ms Chua’s daughter, was hired as a Supreme Court clerk by Brett Kavanaugh — the judge for whom her mother vouched during his stormy Senate hearings last autumn.
Ms Chua is a shrewd string-puller. A Supreme Court clerkship sets up a young lawyer for life. Whether she is enjoying the publicity is another matter. Overnight the Chuas have turned into emblems of what Americans distrust about their meritocracy.
There is much more where that came from. What Ms Chua did was brazen. The liberal academic offered a very public endorsement of the conservative Mr Kavanaugh. As the head of the Yale committee that steers graduates into highly-coveted clerkships, Ms Chua boosted his credibility with her endorsement.
But the apparent quid pro quo was legal. Actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, on the other hand, are accused of having broken the law.
The first is alleged to have paid $500,000 to fake athletics records that would help her two daughters enter the University of Southern California. The second has pleaded guilty to paying $15,000 to cheat on her daughter’s standardised admission test. Both Hollywood actresses, and one of their husbands, face likely jail in the “Operation Varsity Blues” scandal.
Americans would be forgiven for blurring the moral of these tales.
On pure arithmetic, the average American’s chances of entering a top university are tiny if they are born into the wrong home. Studies show that an eighth grade (14-year-old) child from a lower income bracket who achieves maths results in the top quarter is less likely to graduate than a kid in the upper income bracket scored in the bottom quarter. This is the reverse of how meritocracy should work. Children from the wealthiest 1 per cent take more Ivy League places than the bottom 60 per cent combined. Being born under a roof like Ms Chua’s — with two high-achieving parents obsessed with your success — is almost impossible to match.
That is how most of the world works. The US has erected three additional barriers. The first is legacy places. In contrast to most other democracies, America’s top universities credit an applicant if a parent, or grandparent, went to the school. A better name for this would be “hereditary preference”, which is antithetical to America’s creed. Roughly one in six Ivy League places are taken by children of alumni. This sharply reduces the places available to children of talent from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The second is affirmative action. The courts will soon rule on an Asian-American class action suit alleging that Harvard University discriminated against them. A significant — though artfully selected — share of places are reserved for children of Hispanic and African-American backgrounds. The fact that some of those are also legacy applicants adds a layer of irony. Whichever way it goes, the case is likely to end up in the Supreme Court. Mr Kavanaugh, who is a legacy graduate of Yale, could prove the decisive vote on whether affirmative action will survive. That prospect, too, is rich in irony.
The third barrier is brute wealth. If you endow a library, or a medical lab, the university will bend over backwards to admit your child. A prime example is Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, whose poor SAT scores critics perceive may have been outweighed by his father’s $2.5m donation to Harvard. The US tax system even rewards such palm-greasing by making it tax-deductible. The fact that the best universities are richer than some countries (Harvard’s $38bn endowment is larger than the GDPs of El Salvador and Nicaragua combined) is no check on their ambitions. They always want more.
The most egregious figure in the college admissions scandal is William McGlashan, a former partner at TPG, the private equity firm. He allegedly offered a bribe of $250,000 to get his son into a top university. His job was to head TPG’s social impact unit — capitalism’s virtue signalling arm.
You do well by doing good, goes the saying. Which brings us back to Ms Chua. The best restraint on any elite is its sense of shame. Without that code, anything is possible. Everyone in America seems to know the system is rigged. The real distinction is whether you rig things from inside the law or outside.
“Nothing is fun until you are good at it,” said Amy Chua in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Eight years later the Yale professor continues to display her prowess.
This week Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld, Ms Chua’s daughter, was hired as a Supreme Court clerk by Brett Kavanaugh — the judge for whom her mother vouched during his stormy Senate hearings last autumn.
Ms Chua is a shrewd string-puller. A Supreme Court clerkship sets up a young lawyer for life. Whether she is enjoying the publicity is another matter. Overnight the Chuas have turned into emblems of what Americans distrust about their meritocracy.
There is much more where that came from. What Ms Chua did was brazen. The liberal academic offered a very public endorsement of the conservative Mr Kavanaugh. As the head of the Yale committee that steers graduates into highly-coveted clerkships, Ms Chua boosted his credibility with her endorsement.
But the apparent quid pro quo was legal. Actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman, on the other hand, are accused of having broken the law.
The first is alleged to have paid $500,000 to fake athletics records that would help her two daughters enter the University of Southern California. The second has pleaded guilty to paying $15,000 to cheat on her daughter’s standardised admission test. Both Hollywood actresses, and one of their husbands, face likely jail in the “Operation Varsity Blues” scandal.
Americans would be forgiven for blurring the moral of these tales.
On pure arithmetic, the average American’s chances of entering a top university are tiny if they are born into the wrong home. Studies show that an eighth grade (14-year-old) child from a lower income bracket who achieves maths results in the top quarter is less likely to graduate than a kid in the upper income bracket scored in the bottom quarter. This is the reverse of how meritocracy should work. Children from the wealthiest 1 per cent take more Ivy League places than the bottom 60 per cent combined. Being born under a roof like Ms Chua’s — with two high-achieving parents obsessed with your success — is almost impossible to match.
That is how most of the world works. The US has erected three additional barriers. The first is legacy places. In contrast to most other democracies, America’s top universities credit an applicant if a parent, or grandparent, went to the school. A better name for this would be “hereditary preference”, which is antithetical to America’s creed. Roughly one in six Ivy League places are taken by children of alumni. This sharply reduces the places available to children of talent from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The second is affirmative action. The courts will soon rule on an Asian-American class action suit alleging that Harvard University discriminated against them. A significant — though artfully selected — share of places are reserved for children of Hispanic and African-American backgrounds. The fact that some of those are also legacy applicants adds a layer of irony. Whichever way it goes, the case is likely to end up in the Supreme Court. Mr Kavanaugh, who is a legacy graduate of Yale, could prove the decisive vote on whether affirmative action will survive. That prospect, too, is rich in irony.
The third barrier is brute wealth. If you endow a library, or a medical lab, the university will bend over backwards to admit your child. A prime example is Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, whose poor SAT scores critics perceive may have been outweighed by his father’s $2.5m donation to Harvard. The US tax system even rewards such palm-greasing by making it tax-deductible. The fact that the best universities are richer than some countries (Harvard’s $38bn endowment is larger than the GDPs of El Salvador and Nicaragua combined) is no check on their ambitions. They always want more.
The most egregious figure in the college admissions scandal is William McGlashan, a former partner at TPG, the private equity firm. He allegedly offered a bribe of $250,000 to get his son into a top university. His job was to head TPG’s social impact unit — capitalism’s virtue signalling arm.
You do well by doing good, goes the saying. Which brings us back to Ms Chua. The best restraint on any elite is its sense of shame. Without that code, anything is possible. Everyone in America seems to know the system is rigged. The real distinction is whether you rig things from inside the law or outside.
Tuesday 11 June 2019
How India could sidestep the Middle Income Trap
Rathin Roy - Economic Adviser to the Indian Government
Sunday 13 January 2019
Britain’s private school problem
While many agree that private education is at the root of inequality in Britain, open discussion about the issue remains puzzlingly absent. In their new book, historian David Kynaston and economist Francis Green set out the case for change in The Guardian
The existence in Britain of a flourishing private-school sector not only limits the life chances of those who attend state schools but also damages society at large, and it should be possible to have a sustained and fully inclusive national conversation about the subject. Whether one has been privately educated, or has sent or is sending one’s children to private schools, or even if one teaches at a private school, there should be no barriers to taking part in that conversation. Everyone has to live – and make their choices – in the world as it is, not as one might wish it to be. That seems an obvious enough proposition. Yet in a name-calling culture, ever ready with the charge of hypocrisy, this reality is all too often ignored.
For the sake of avoiding misunderstanding, we should state briefly our own backgrounds and choices. One of our fathers was a solicitor in Brighton, the other was an army officer rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel; we were both privately educated; we both went to Oxford University; our children have all been educated at state grammar schools; in neither case did we move to the areas (Kent and south-west London) because of the existence of those schools; and in recent years we have become increasingly preoccupied with the private-school issue, partly as citizens concerned with Britain’s social and democratic wellbeing, partly as an aspect of our professional work (one as an economist, the other as a historian).
In Britain, private schools – including their fundamental unfairness – remain the elephant in the room. It would be an almost immeasurable benefit if this were no longer the case. Education is different. Its effects are deep, long-term and run from one generation to the next. Those with enough money are free to purchase and enjoy expensive holidays, cars, houses and meals. But education is not just another material asset: it is fundamental to creating who we are.
What particularly defines British private education is its extreme social exclusivity. Only about 6% of the UK’s school population attend such schools, and the families accessing private education are highly concentrated among the affluent. At every rung of the income ladder there are a small number of private-school attenders; but it is only at the very top, above the 95th rung of the ladder – where families have an income of at least £120,000 – that there are appreciable numbers of private-school children. At the 99th rung – families with incomes upwards of £300,000 – six out of every 10 children are at private school. A glance at the annual fees is relevant here. The press focus tends to be on the great and historic boarding schools – such as Eton (basic fee £40,668 in 2018–19), Harrow (£40,050) and Winchester (£39,912) – but it is important to see the private sector in the less glamorous round, and stripped of the extra cost of boarding. In 2018 the average day fees at prep schools were, at £13,026, around half the income of a family on the middle rung of the income ladder. For secondary school, and even more so sixth forms, the fees are appreciably higher. In short, access to private schooling is, for the most part, available only to wealthy households. Indeed, the small number of income-poor families going private can only do so through other sources: typically, grandparents’ assets and/or endowment-supported bursaries from some of the richest schools. Overwhelmingly, pupils at private schools are rubbing shoulders with those from similarly well-off backgrounds.
They arrange things somewhat differently elsewhere: among affluent countries, Britain’s private‑school participation is especially exclusive to the rich. In Germany, for instance, it is also low, but unlike in Britain is generously state-funded, more strongly regulated and comes with modest fees. In France, private schools are mainly Catholic schools permitted to teach religion: the state pays the teachers and the fees are very low. In the US there is a very small sector of non-sectarian private schools with high fees, but most private schools are, again, religious, with much lower fees than here. Britain’s private-school configuration is, in short, distinctive.
A famous image of school privilege: Harrovians Peter Wagner and Thomas Dyson and local schoolboys George Salmon, Jack Catlin and George Young photographed outside Lord’s cricket ground in 1937 by Jimmy Sime. Photograph: Jimmy Sime/Allsport
There are, of course, some very real contextual factors to these bald and striking figures. Any study must take account of where the children are coming from. Nevertheless, the picture presented by several studies is one of relatively small but still significant effects at every stage of education; and over the course of a school career, the cumulative effects build up to a notable gain in academic achievements.
Yet academic learning and exam results are not all there is to a quality education, and indeed there is more on offer from private schools. At Harrow, for example, its vision is that the school “prepares boys… for a life of learning, leadership, service and personal fulfilment”. It offers “a wide range of high-level extracurricular activities, through which boys discover latent talent, develop individual character and gain skills in leadership and teamwork”. Lesser-known schools trumpet something similar. Cumbria’s Austin Friars, for example, highlights a well-rounded education, proclaiming that its alumni will be “creative problem-solvers… effective communicators… and confident, modest and articulate members of society who embody the Augustinian values of unity, truth and love...”
If, on the whole, Britain’s private schools provide a quality education in both academic and broader terms, how do they deliver that? Four areas stand out.
First, especially small class sizes are a major boon for pupils and teachers alike. Second, the range of extracurricular activities and the intensive cultivation of “character” and “confidence” are important. Third, the high – and therefore exclusive – price tag sustains a peer group of children mainly drawn from supportive and affluent families. And fourth, to achieve the best possible exam results and the highest rate of admission to the top universities, “working the system” comes into play. Far greater resources are available for diagnosing special needs, challenging exam results and guiding university applications. Underpinning all these areas of advantage are the high revenues from fees: Britain’s private schools can deploy resources whose order of magnitude for each child is approximately three times what is available at the average state school.
The relevant figures for university admissions are thus almost entirely predictable. Perhaps inevitably, by far the highest-profile stats concern Oxbridge, where between 2010 and 2015 an average of 43% of offers from Oxford and 37% from Cambridge were made to privately educated students, and there has been no sign since of any significant opening up. Top schools, top universities: the pattern of privilege is systemic, and not just confined to the dreaming spires. Going to a top university, it hardly needs adding, signals a material difference, especially in Britain where universities are quite severely ranked in a hierarchy.
Ultimately, does any of this matter? Why can one not simply accept that these are high-quality schools that provide our future leaders with a high-quality education? Given the thorniness – and often invidiousness – of the issue, it is a tempting proposition. Yet for a mixture of reasons – political and economic, as well as social – we believe that the issue represents in contemporary Britain an unignorable problem that urgently needs to be addressed and, if possible, resolved. The words of Alan Bennett reverberate still. Private education is not fair, he famously declared in June 2014 during a sermon at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. “Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should.”
Consider these three fundamental facts: one in every 16 pupils goes to a private school; one in every seven teachers works at a private school; one pound in every six of all school expenditure in England is for the benefit of private-school pupils.
The crucial point to make here is that although extra resources for each school (whether private or state) are always valuable, that value is at a diminishing rate the wealthier the school is. Each extra teacher or assistant helps, but if you already have two assistants in a class, a third one adds less value than the second. Given the very unequal distribution of academic resources entailed by the British private school system, it is unarguable that a more egalitarian distribution of the same resources would enhance the total educational achievement. There is, moreover, the sheer extravagance. Multiple theatres, large swimming pools and beautiful surroundings with expensive upkeep are, of course, nice to have and look suitably seductive on sales brochures – but add relatively little educational value.
Further inefficiency arises from education’s “positional” aspect. The resources lift up children in areas where their rank position on the ladder of success matters, such as access to scarce places at top universities. To the considerable extent this happens, the privately educated child benefits but the state-educated child loses out. This lethal combination of private benefit and public waste is nowhere more apparent than in the time and effort that private schools devote to working the system, to ease access to those scarce places.
What about the implications for our polity? The way the privately educated have sustained semi-monopolistic positions of prominence and influence in the modern era has created a serious democratic deficit. The unavoidable truth is that, by and large, the increasingly privileged and entitled products of an elite private education have – almost inevitably – only a limited and partial understanding of, and empathy with, the realities of everyday life as lived by most people. One of those realities is, of course, state education. It marked some kind of apotheosis when in July 2014 the appointment of Nicky Morgan (Surbiton High) as education secretary meant that every minister in her department at that time was privately educated.
On social mobility, there has been in recent years an abundance of apparently sincere, well-meaning rhetoric, not least from our leading politicians. “Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world,” laments David Cameron in 2015. “Here, the salary you earn is more linked to what your father got paid than in any other major country. We cannot accept that.” In 2016 Jeremy Corbyn declares his movement will “ensure every young person has the opportunities to maximise their talents”, while Theresa May follows on: “I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege; where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like.” Rather like corporate social responsibility in the business world, social mobility has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie causes that it is almost rude not to utter warm words about.
Yet the mismatch between such sentiments and policymakers’ practical intentions is palpable. The Social Mobility Commission, with cross-party representation, reported regularly on what government should do, but in December 2017 all sitting members resigned in frustration at the lack of policy action in response to their recommendations.
The underlying reality of our private-school problem is stark. Through a highly resourced combination of social exclusiveness and academic excellence, the private-school system has in our lifetimes powered an enduring cycle of privilege. It is hard to imagine a notable improvement in our social mobility while private schooling continues to play such an important role. Allowing, as Britain still does, an unfettered expenditure on high-quality education for only a small minority of the population condemns our society in seeming perpetuity to a damaging degree of social segregation and inequality. This hands-off approach to private schools has come to matter ever more, given over the past half-century the vastly increased importance in our society of educational credentials. Perhaps once it might have been conceivable to argue that private education was a symptom rather than a cause of how privilege in Britain was transferred from one generation to the next, but that day is long gone: the centrality of schooling in both social and economic life – and the Noah’s flood of resources channelled into private schools for the few – are seemingly permanent features of the modern era. The reproduction of privilege is now tied in inextricably with the way we organise our formal education.
Ineluctably, as we look ahead, the question of fairness returns. If private schooling in Britain remains fundamentally unreconstructed, it will remain predominantly intended and destined for the advantage of the already privileged children who attend.
We need to talk openly about this problem, and it is time to find some answers. Some call for the “abolition” of private schools – whatever that might mean. We do not call for that, because we think it is better – and feasible – to harness for all the good qualities of private schools. Feasible reforms are available; these do not require excessive commitments from the Treasury, but do require a political commitment.
We are, however, under no illusions about the task of reform. The schools’ links with powerful vested interests are close and continuous. London’s main clubs (dominated by privately educated men) would be one example; the Church of England (closely connected with many private schools, from Westminster downwards) would be another. Or take the City of London, where in that historic and massively wealthy square mile not only do individual livery companies have an intimate involvement with a range of private schools, but the City corporation itself supports an elite trio in Surrey and London (City of London, City of London school for girls, City of London Freemen’s school). While as for the many hundreds of individual links between “top people” and private schools, often in the form of sitting on governing bodies, it only needs a glance at Who’s Who to get the gist. The term “the establishment” can be a tiresome one, too often loosely and inaccurately used, but in the sense of complementary networks of people at or close to the centres of power and wealth, it actually does mean something.
All of which leaves the private schools almost uniquely well placed to make their case and protect their corner. They have ready access to prominent public voices speaking on their behalf, especially in the House of Lords; they enjoy the passive support of the Church of England, which is distinctly reluctant to draw attention to the moral gulf between the aims of ancient founders and the socioeconomic realities of the present; and of course, they have no qualms about utilising all possible firepower, human as well as media and institutional, to block anything they find threatening.
The great historian EP Thompson wrote more than half a century ago about The Peculiarities of the English. Historically, those peculiarities have been various, but the most important – and pervasive in its consequences – has been social class. Of course, things to a degree have changed since Thompson’s time. The visible distinctions of dress and speech have been somewhat eroded, if far from obliterated; the obvious social manifestations of a manufacturing economy have been replaced by the more fluid forms of a service economy; the increasing emphasis of reformers and activists has been on issues of gender and ethnicity; and a series of politicians and others have sought to assure us that we are moving into “a classless society”. Yet the fundamental social reality remains profoundly and obstinately otherwise. Britain is still a place where more often than not it matters crucially not only to whom one has been born, but where and in what circumstances one has grown up.
It would be manifestly absurd to pin the blame entirely on the existence over the past few centuries of a flourishing private-school sector. Even so, given that these schools have been and still are places that – when the feelgood verbiage is stripped away – ensure that their already advantaged pupils retain and extend their socio‑economic advantages in later life, common sense places them squarely in the centre of the frame.
Is it possible in Britain over the next 10 or 20 years to build a sufficiently widespread consensus for reform? Or, at the very least, to begin to have a serious, sustained, non-name-calling, non-guilt-ridden national conversation on the subject of private education? A poll we commissioned from Populus shows a virtually landslide majority for a perception of unfairness about private education, indicating that public opinion is potentially receptive to grappling with the issue and what to do about it. The poll reveals, moreover, that even those who have been privately educated, or have chosen to educate their own children privately, are more likely than not to have a perception of unfairness.
The question of what to do about a sector educating only some 6% of our school population might seem relatively trifling, and difficult to prioritise (especially in challenging economic circumstances), compared with say the challenges of quality teacher recruitment across the state sector or the whole vital area of early-years learning. Yet it would be a huge mistake to underestimate the seriously negative educational aspects of the current dispensation and to continue to marginalise the private-school question. The private schools’ reach is very much broader than their minority share of school pupils implies. Unless some radical reform is set in train, an unreconstructed private-school system, with its enormous resource superiority and exclusiveness hanging over the state system as a beacon for unequal treatment and privilege, would make it hard to sustain a fully comprehensive and fair state education system.
Ultimately, the issue is at least as much about what kind of society one might hope the Britain of the 2020s and 2030s to be. A more open society in which upward social mobility starts to become a real possibility for many children, not just a few lucky ones? A society in which the affluent are not educated in enclaves, and in which schooling for the affluent is not funded at something like three times the level of schooling for the less affluent? A society in which the pursuit through education of greater equality of life chances, seeking to harness the talents of all our children, is a matter of real and rigorous intent? A society in which there is a just relationship between the competing demands of liberty and equity, and in which we are, to coin a phrase, all in it together? For the building of such a society, or anything even remotely close, the issue of private education is pivotal, both symbolically and substantively. The reform of private schools will not alone be sufficient to achieve a good education system for all, let alone the good society; but it surely is a necessary condition. At this particular moment in our island story, the future seems peculiarly a blank sheet. Everything is potentially on the table. And for once, that has to include the engines of privilege. For if not now, when?
• Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem by Francis Green and David Kynaston is published by Bloomsbury on 7 February (£20). To order a copy for £17.60 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
How to do it: feasible reform options
There are broadly two types of option: those that handicap private schools, making them less attractive to parents, and those that envisage “crossing the tracks” – some form of integration with the state-school sector. Some reforms would have much more of an impact than others.
1. Handicaps
Contextual admissions to universities Where universities, especially the high-status ones, make substantial allowances for candidates’ school background; alternatively, as another method of positive discrimination, some form of a quota system.
Upping the cost Where the fees are substantially raised, making some parents switch away from the private-school sector and opt for state schools. Even though tax subsidies are not huge, the government could reduce them, for example by taking away charitable status (from those schools that are charities) or by requiring that all schools pay business rates in full (as in Scotland from 2020).
Alternatively, something that would “hurt” a bit more, government could directly tax school fees (as in Labour’s manifesto pledge to impose VAT or in Andrew Adonis’s proposed 25% “educational opportunity tax”).
2. Crossing the tracks
There are several proposed schemes for enabling children from low-income families to attend private schools. Mainly, these would leave it to schools to choose how they select their pupils. Some are relatively small in scope, including a proposal from the Independent Schools Council that would involve no more than 2% of the private-school population. Others are more ambitious: the Sutton Trust’s Open Access Scheme proposes that all places at about 80 top private secondary day schools would be competed for on academic merit. The government would subsidise those who could not afford the fees.
In another type of partial integration, schools would select a proportion of state-funded pupils according to the Schools Admissions Code, meaning that the government or local government would set the principles for selection and the extra places would become an extension to the state system. We suggest a Fair Access Scheme, where the schools would be obliged initially to recruit one-third of their pupils in this way, with a view to the proportion rising significantly over time.
The existence in Britain of a flourishing private-school sector not only limits the life chances of those who attend state schools but also damages society at large, and it should be possible to have a sustained and fully inclusive national conversation about the subject. Whether one has been privately educated, or has sent or is sending one’s children to private schools, or even if one teaches at a private school, there should be no barriers to taking part in that conversation. Everyone has to live – and make their choices – in the world as it is, not as one might wish it to be. That seems an obvious enough proposition. Yet in a name-calling culture, ever ready with the charge of hypocrisy, this reality is all too often ignored.
For the sake of avoiding misunderstanding, we should state briefly our own backgrounds and choices. One of our fathers was a solicitor in Brighton, the other was an army officer rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel; we were both privately educated; we both went to Oxford University; our children have all been educated at state grammar schools; in neither case did we move to the areas (Kent and south-west London) because of the existence of those schools; and in recent years we have become increasingly preoccupied with the private-school issue, partly as citizens concerned with Britain’s social and democratic wellbeing, partly as an aspect of our professional work (one as an economist, the other as a historian).
In Britain, private schools – including their fundamental unfairness – remain the elephant in the room. It would be an almost immeasurable benefit if this were no longer the case. Education is different. Its effects are deep, long-term and run from one generation to the next. Those with enough money are free to purchase and enjoy expensive holidays, cars, houses and meals. But education is not just another material asset: it is fundamental to creating who we are.
What particularly defines British private education is its extreme social exclusivity. Only about 6% of the UK’s school population attend such schools, and the families accessing private education are highly concentrated among the affluent. At every rung of the income ladder there are a small number of private-school attenders; but it is only at the very top, above the 95th rung of the ladder – where families have an income of at least £120,000 – that there are appreciable numbers of private-school children. At the 99th rung – families with incomes upwards of £300,000 – six out of every 10 children are at private school. A glance at the annual fees is relevant here. The press focus tends to be on the great and historic boarding schools – such as Eton (basic fee £40,668 in 2018–19), Harrow (£40,050) and Winchester (£39,912) – but it is important to see the private sector in the less glamorous round, and stripped of the extra cost of boarding. In 2018 the average day fees at prep schools were, at £13,026, around half the income of a family on the middle rung of the income ladder. For secondary school, and even more so sixth forms, the fees are appreciably higher. In short, access to private schooling is, for the most part, available only to wealthy households. Indeed, the small number of income-poor families going private can only do so through other sources: typically, grandparents’ assets and/or endowment-supported bursaries from some of the richest schools. Overwhelmingly, pupils at private schools are rubbing shoulders with those from similarly well-off backgrounds.
They arrange things somewhat differently elsewhere: among affluent countries, Britain’s private‑school participation is especially exclusive to the rich. In Germany, for instance, it is also low, but unlike in Britain is generously state-funded, more strongly regulated and comes with modest fees. In France, private schools are mainly Catholic schools permitted to teach religion: the state pays the teachers and the fees are very low. In the US there is a very small sector of non-sectarian private schools with high fees, but most private schools are, again, religious, with much lower fees than here. Britain’s private-school configuration is, in short, distinctive.
Some of the public figures of the past 20 years to have attended private schools (l-r from top): Tony Blair, former Bank of England governor Eddie George, Princess Diana, Prince Charles, Charles Spencer, businesswoman Martha Lane Fox, Dominic West, James Blunt, former Northern Rock chairman Matt Ridley, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, George Osborne, Jeremy Paxman, fashion journalist Alexandra Shulman, footballer Frank Lampard, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and cricketer Joe Root. Composite: Rex, Getty
And so what, accordingly, does Britain look like in the 21st century? A brief but expensive history, 1997–2018, offers some guide. As the millennium approaches, New Labour under Tony Blair (Fettes) sweeps to power. The Bank of England under Eddie George (Dulwich) gets independence. The chronicles of Hogwarts school begin. A nation grieves for Diana (West Heath); Charles (Gordonstoun) retrieves her body; her brother (Eton) tells it as it is. Martha Lane Fox (Oxford High) blows a dotcom bubble. Charlie Falconer (Glenalmond) masterminds the Millennium Dome. Will Young (Wellington) becomes the first Pop Idol. The Wire’s Jimmy McNulty (Eton) sorts out Baltimore. James Blunt (Harrow) releases the bestselling album of the decade. Northern Rock collapses under the chairmanship of Matt Ridley (Eton). Boris Johnson (Eton) enters City Hall in London. The Cameron-Osborne (Eton-St Paul’s) axis takes over the country; Nick Clegg (Westminster) runs errands. Life staggers on in austerity Britain mark two. Jeremy Clarkson (Repton) can’t stop revving up; Jeremy Paxman (Malvern) still has an attitude problem; Alexandra Shulman (St Paul’s Girls) dictates fashion; Paul Dacre (University College School) makes middle England ever more Mail-centric; Alan Rusbridger (Cranleigh) makes non-middle England ever more Guardian-centric; judge Brian Leveson (Liverpool College) fails to nail the press barons; Justin Welby (Eton) becomes top mitre man; Frank Lampard (Brentwood) becomes a Chelsea legend; Joe Root (Worksop) takes guard; Henry Blofeld (Eton) spots a passing bus. The Cameron-Osborne axis sees off Labour, but not Boris Johnson+Nigel Farage (Dulwich)+Arron Banks (Crookham Court). Ed Balls (Nottingham High) takes to the dance floor. Theresa May (St Juliana’s) and Jeremy Corbyn (Castle House prep school) face off. Prince George (Thomas’s Battersea) and Princess Charlotte (Willcocks) start school.
The statistics also tell a story. The proportion of prominent people in every area who have been educated privately is striking, in some cases grotesque. From judges (74% privately educated) through to MPs (32%), the numbers tell us of a society where bought educational privilege also buys lifetime privilege and influence. “The dogged persistence of the British ‘old boy”’ is how a 2017 study describes the traditional dominance of private-school alumni in British society. This reveals the fruits of exploring well over a century of biographical data in Who’s Who, that indispensable annual guide to the composition of the British elite. For those born between the 1830s and 1920s, roughly 50-60% went to private schools; for those born between the 1930s and 1960s, the proportion was roughly 45-50%. Among the new entrants to Who’s Who in the 21st century, the proportion of the privately educated has remained constant at around 45%. Going to one of the schools in the prestigious Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) still gives a 35 times better chance of entering Who’s Who than if one has not attended an HMC school; while those attending the historic crème de la crème, the so-called Clarendon Schools (Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors’, Rugby, St Paul’s, Shrewsbury, Westminster, Winchester), are 94 times more likely to join the elite than any ordinary British-educated person.
Even if one’s child never achieves celebrity, sending him or her to a private school is usually a shrewd investment – indeed, increasingly so, to judge by the relevant longitudinal studies of two different generations. Take first the cohort born in 1958: in terms of those with comparable social backgrounds, demographic characteristics and early tested skills, and different only in what type of school they attended when they were 11, by the time they were in their early 30s (around 1990) the privately educated were earning 7% more than the state-educated. Compare that with those born in 1970: by the same stage (the early 2000s), the gap between the two categories – again, similar in all other respects – had risen to 21% in favour of the privately educated.
The only realistic starting point for an analysis lies with the assertion that, in the modern era, most of these schools are of high quality, offering a good educational environment. They deploy very substantial resources; respect the need for a disciplined environment for learning; and give copious attention to generating a positive and therefore motivating experience. This argument – the resources point aside – is not an altogether easy one for the left to accept, against a background of it having historically been undecided whether (in the words of one Labour education minister’s senior civil servant in the 1960s) “these schools are so bloody they ought to be abolished, or so marvellous they ought to be made available to everyone”. We do not necessarily accept that all private schools are “marvellous”; but by and large we recognise that, in their own terms of fulfilling what their customers demand, they deliver the goods.
Above all, private schools succeed when it comes to preparing their pupils for public exams – the gateways to universities. In 2018 the proportion of private-school students achieving A*s and As at A-level was 48%, compared with a national average of 26%; while for GCSEs, in terms of achieving an A or grade seven or above, the respective figures were 63% and 23%. At both stages, GCSE and A-level, the gap is invariably huge.
The statistics also tell a story. The proportion of prominent people in every area who have been educated privately is striking, in some cases grotesque. From judges (74% privately educated) through to MPs (32%), the numbers tell us of a society where bought educational privilege also buys lifetime privilege and influence. “The dogged persistence of the British ‘old boy”’ is how a 2017 study describes the traditional dominance of private-school alumni in British society. This reveals the fruits of exploring well over a century of biographical data in Who’s Who, that indispensable annual guide to the composition of the British elite. For those born between the 1830s and 1920s, roughly 50-60% went to private schools; for those born between the 1930s and 1960s, the proportion was roughly 45-50%. Among the new entrants to Who’s Who in the 21st century, the proportion of the privately educated has remained constant at around 45%. Going to one of the schools in the prestigious Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) still gives a 35 times better chance of entering Who’s Who than if one has not attended an HMC school; while those attending the historic crème de la crème, the so-called Clarendon Schools (Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors’, Rugby, St Paul’s, Shrewsbury, Westminster, Winchester), are 94 times more likely to join the elite than any ordinary British-educated person.
Even if one’s child never achieves celebrity, sending him or her to a private school is usually a shrewd investment – indeed, increasingly so, to judge by the relevant longitudinal studies of two different generations. Take first the cohort born in 1958: in terms of those with comparable social backgrounds, demographic characteristics and early tested skills, and different only in what type of school they attended when they were 11, by the time they were in their early 30s (around 1990) the privately educated were earning 7% more than the state-educated. Compare that with those born in 1970: by the same stage (the early 2000s), the gap between the two categories – again, similar in all other respects – had risen to 21% in favour of the privately educated.
The only realistic starting point for an analysis lies with the assertion that, in the modern era, most of these schools are of high quality, offering a good educational environment. They deploy very substantial resources; respect the need for a disciplined environment for learning; and give copious attention to generating a positive and therefore motivating experience. This argument – the resources point aside – is not an altogether easy one for the left to accept, against a background of it having historically been undecided whether (in the words of one Labour education minister’s senior civil servant in the 1960s) “these schools are so bloody they ought to be abolished, or so marvellous they ought to be made available to everyone”. We do not necessarily accept that all private schools are “marvellous”; but by and large we recognise that, in their own terms of fulfilling what their customers demand, they deliver the goods.
Above all, private schools succeed when it comes to preparing their pupils for public exams – the gateways to universities. In 2018 the proportion of private-school students achieving A*s and As at A-level was 48%, compared with a national average of 26%; while for GCSEs, in terms of achieving an A or grade seven or above, the respective figures were 63% and 23%. At both stages, GCSE and A-level, the gap is invariably huge.
A famous image of school privilege: Harrovians Peter Wagner and Thomas Dyson and local schoolboys George Salmon, Jack Catlin and George Young photographed outside Lord’s cricket ground in 1937 by Jimmy Sime. Photograph: Jimmy Sime/Allsport
There are, of course, some very real contextual factors to these bald and striking figures. Any study must take account of where the children are coming from. Nevertheless, the picture presented by several studies is one of relatively small but still significant effects at every stage of education; and over the course of a school career, the cumulative effects build up to a notable gain in academic achievements.
Yet academic learning and exam results are not all there is to a quality education, and indeed there is more on offer from private schools. At Harrow, for example, its vision is that the school “prepares boys… for a life of learning, leadership, service and personal fulfilment”. It offers “a wide range of high-level extracurricular activities, through which boys discover latent talent, develop individual character and gain skills in leadership and teamwork”. Lesser-known schools trumpet something similar. Cumbria’s Austin Friars, for example, highlights a well-rounded education, proclaiming that its alumni will be “creative problem-solvers… effective communicators… and confident, modest and articulate members of society who embody the Augustinian values of unity, truth and love...”
If, on the whole, Britain’s private schools provide a quality education in both academic and broader terms, how do they deliver that? Four areas stand out.
First, especially small class sizes are a major boon for pupils and teachers alike. Second, the range of extracurricular activities and the intensive cultivation of “character” and “confidence” are important. Third, the high – and therefore exclusive – price tag sustains a peer group of children mainly drawn from supportive and affluent families. And fourth, to achieve the best possible exam results and the highest rate of admission to the top universities, “working the system” comes into play. Far greater resources are available for diagnosing special needs, challenging exam results and guiding university applications. Underpinning all these areas of advantage are the high revenues from fees: Britain’s private schools can deploy resources whose order of magnitude for each child is approximately three times what is available at the average state school.
The relevant figures for university admissions are thus almost entirely predictable. Perhaps inevitably, by far the highest-profile stats concern Oxbridge, where between 2010 and 2015 an average of 43% of offers from Oxford and 37% from Cambridge were made to privately educated students, and there has been no sign since of any significant opening up. Top schools, top universities: the pattern of privilege is systemic, and not just confined to the dreaming spires. Going to a top university, it hardly needs adding, signals a material difference, especially in Britain where universities are quite severely ranked in a hierarchy.
Ultimately, does any of this matter? Why can one not simply accept that these are high-quality schools that provide our future leaders with a high-quality education? Given the thorniness – and often invidiousness – of the issue, it is a tempting proposition. Yet for a mixture of reasons – political and economic, as well as social – we believe that the issue represents in contemporary Britain an unignorable problem that urgently needs to be addressed and, if possible, resolved. The words of Alan Bennett reverberate still. Private education is not fair, he famously declared in June 2014 during a sermon at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. “Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should.”
Consider these three fundamental facts: one in every 16 pupils goes to a private school; one in every seven teachers works at a private school; one pound in every six of all school expenditure in England is for the benefit of private-school pupils.
The crucial point to make here is that although extra resources for each school (whether private or state) are always valuable, that value is at a diminishing rate the wealthier the school is. Each extra teacher or assistant helps, but if you already have two assistants in a class, a third one adds less value than the second. Given the very unequal distribution of academic resources entailed by the British private school system, it is unarguable that a more egalitarian distribution of the same resources would enhance the total educational achievement. There is, moreover, the sheer extravagance. Multiple theatres, large swimming pools and beautiful surroundings with expensive upkeep are, of course, nice to have and look suitably seductive on sales brochures – but add relatively little educational value.
Further inefficiency arises from education’s “positional” aspect. The resources lift up children in areas where their rank position on the ladder of success matters, such as access to scarce places at top universities. To the considerable extent this happens, the privately educated child benefits but the state-educated child loses out. This lethal combination of private benefit and public waste is nowhere more apparent than in the time and effort that private schools devote to working the system, to ease access to those scarce places.
What about the implications for our polity? The way the privately educated have sustained semi-monopolistic positions of prominence and influence in the modern era has created a serious democratic deficit. The unavoidable truth is that, by and large, the increasingly privileged and entitled products of an elite private education have – almost inevitably – only a limited and partial understanding of, and empathy with, the realities of everyday life as lived by most people. One of those realities is, of course, state education. It marked some kind of apotheosis when in July 2014 the appointment of Nicky Morgan (Surbiton High) as education secretary meant that every minister in her department at that time was privately educated.
On social mobility, there has been in recent years an abundance of apparently sincere, well-meaning rhetoric, not least from our leading politicians. “Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world,” laments David Cameron in 2015. “Here, the salary you earn is more linked to what your father got paid than in any other major country. We cannot accept that.” In 2016 Jeremy Corbyn declares his movement will “ensure every young person has the opportunities to maximise their talents”, while Theresa May follows on: “I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege; where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like.” Rather like corporate social responsibility in the business world, social mobility has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie causes that it is almost rude not to utter warm words about.
Yet the mismatch between such sentiments and policymakers’ practical intentions is palpable. The Social Mobility Commission, with cross-party representation, reported regularly on what government should do, but in December 2017 all sitting members resigned in frustration at the lack of policy action in response to their recommendations.
The underlying reality of our private-school problem is stark. Through a highly resourced combination of social exclusiveness and academic excellence, the private-school system has in our lifetimes powered an enduring cycle of privilege. It is hard to imagine a notable improvement in our social mobility while private schooling continues to play such an important role. Allowing, as Britain still does, an unfettered expenditure on high-quality education for only a small minority of the population condemns our society in seeming perpetuity to a damaging degree of social segregation and inequality. This hands-off approach to private schools has come to matter ever more, given over the past half-century the vastly increased importance in our society of educational credentials. Perhaps once it might have been conceivable to argue that private education was a symptom rather than a cause of how privilege in Britain was transferred from one generation to the next, but that day is long gone: the centrality of schooling in both social and economic life – and the Noah’s flood of resources channelled into private schools for the few – are seemingly permanent features of the modern era. The reproduction of privilege is now tied in inextricably with the way we organise our formal education.
Ineluctably, as we look ahead, the question of fairness returns. If private schooling in Britain remains fundamentally unreconstructed, it will remain predominantly intended and destined for the advantage of the already privileged children who attend.
We need to talk openly about this problem, and it is time to find some answers. Some call for the “abolition” of private schools – whatever that might mean. We do not call for that, because we think it is better – and feasible – to harness for all the good qualities of private schools. Feasible reforms are available; these do not require excessive commitments from the Treasury, but do require a political commitment.
We are, however, under no illusions about the task of reform. The schools’ links with powerful vested interests are close and continuous. London’s main clubs (dominated by privately educated men) would be one example; the Church of England (closely connected with many private schools, from Westminster downwards) would be another. Or take the City of London, where in that historic and massively wealthy square mile not only do individual livery companies have an intimate involvement with a range of private schools, but the City corporation itself supports an elite trio in Surrey and London (City of London, City of London school for girls, City of London Freemen’s school). While as for the many hundreds of individual links between “top people” and private schools, often in the form of sitting on governing bodies, it only needs a glance at Who’s Who to get the gist. The term “the establishment” can be a tiresome one, too often loosely and inaccurately used, but in the sense of complementary networks of people at or close to the centres of power and wealth, it actually does mean something.
All of which leaves the private schools almost uniquely well placed to make their case and protect their corner. They have ready access to prominent public voices speaking on their behalf, especially in the House of Lords; they enjoy the passive support of the Church of England, which is distinctly reluctant to draw attention to the moral gulf between the aims of ancient founders and the socioeconomic realities of the present; and of course, they have no qualms about utilising all possible firepower, human as well as media and institutional, to block anything they find threatening.
The great historian EP Thompson wrote more than half a century ago about The Peculiarities of the English. Historically, those peculiarities have been various, but the most important – and pervasive in its consequences – has been social class. Of course, things to a degree have changed since Thompson’s time. The visible distinctions of dress and speech have been somewhat eroded, if far from obliterated; the obvious social manifestations of a manufacturing economy have been replaced by the more fluid forms of a service economy; the increasing emphasis of reformers and activists has been on issues of gender and ethnicity; and a series of politicians and others have sought to assure us that we are moving into “a classless society”. Yet the fundamental social reality remains profoundly and obstinately otherwise. Britain is still a place where more often than not it matters crucially not only to whom one has been born, but where and in what circumstances one has grown up.
It would be manifestly absurd to pin the blame entirely on the existence over the past few centuries of a flourishing private-school sector. Even so, given that these schools have been and still are places that – when the feelgood verbiage is stripped away – ensure that their already advantaged pupils retain and extend their socio‑economic advantages in later life, common sense places them squarely in the centre of the frame.
Is it possible in Britain over the next 10 or 20 years to build a sufficiently widespread consensus for reform? Or, at the very least, to begin to have a serious, sustained, non-name-calling, non-guilt-ridden national conversation on the subject of private education? A poll we commissioned from Populus shows a virtually landslide majority for a perception of unfairness about private education, indicating that public opinion is potentially receptive to grappling with the issue and what to do about it. The poll reveals, moreover, that even those who have been privately educated, or have chosen to educate their own children privately, are more likely than not to have a perception of unfairness.
The question of what to do about a sector educating only some 6% of our school population might seem relatively trifling, and difficult to prioritise (especially in challenging economic circumstances), compared with say the challenges of quality teacher recruitment across the state sector or the whole vital area of early-years learning. Yet it would be a huge mistake to underestimate the seriously negative educational aspects of the current dispensation and to continue to marginalise the private-school question. The private schools’ reach is very much broader than their minority share of school pupils implies. Unless some radical reform is set in train, an unreconstructed private-school system, with its enormous resource superiority and exclusiveness hanging over the state system as a beacon for unequal treatment and privilege, would make it hard to sustain a fully comprehensive and fair state education system.
Ultimately, the issue is at least as much about what kind of society one might hope the Britain of the 2020s and 2030s to be. A more open society in which upward social mobility starts to become a real possibility for many children, not just a few lucky ones? A society in which the affluent are not educated in enclaves, and in which schooling for the affluent is not funded at something like three times the level of schooling for the less affluent? A society in which the pursuit through education of greater equality of life chances, seeking to harness the talents of all our children, is a matter of real and rigorous intent? A society in which there is a just relationship between the competing demands of liberty and equity, and in which we are, to coin a phrase, all in it together? For the building of such a society, or anything even remotely close, the issue of private education is pivotal, both symbolically and substantively. The reform of private schools will not alone be sufficient to achieve a good education system for all, let alone the good society; but it surely is a necessary condition. At this particular moment in our island story, the future seems peculiarly a blank sheet. Everything is potentially on the table. And for once, that has to include the engines of privilege. For if not now, when?
• Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem by Francis Green and David Kynaston is published by Bloomsbury on 7 February (£20). To order a copy for £17.60 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
How to do it: feasible reform options
There are broadly two types of option: those that handicap private schools, making them less attractive to parents, and those that envisage “crossing the tracks” – some form of integration with the state-school sector. Some reforms would have much more of an impact than others.
1. Handicaps
Contextual admissions to universities Where universities, especially the high-status ones, make substantial allowances for candidates’ school background; alternatively, as another method of positive discrimination, some form of a quota system.
Upping the cost Where the fees are substantially raised, making some parents switch away from the private-school sector and opt for state schools. Even though tax subsidies are not huge, the government could reduce them, for example by taking away charitable status (from those schools that are charities) or by requiring that all schools pay business rates in full (as in Scotland from 2020).
Alternatively, something that would “hurt” a bit more, government could directly tax school fees (as in Labour’s manifesto pledge to impose VAT or in Andrew Adonis’s proposed 25% “educational opportunity tax”).
2. Crossing the tracks
There are several proposed schemes for enabling children from low-income families to attend private schools. Mainly, these would leave it to schools to choose how they select their pupils. Some are relatively small in scope, including a proposal from the Independent Schools Council that would involve no more than 2% of the private-school population. Others are more ambitious: the Sutton Trust’s Open Access Scheme proposes that all places at about 80 top private secondary day schools would be competed for on academic merit. The government would subsidise those who could not afford the fees.
In another type of partial integration, schools would select a proportion of state-funded pupils according to the Schools Admissions Code, meaning that the government or local government would set the principles for selection and the extra places would become an extension to the state system. We suggest a Fair Access Scheme, where the schools would be obliged initially to recruit one-third of their pupils in this way, with a view to the proportion rising significantly over time.
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