Christopher Pearson, and the education revolution rolls on, saving the lumpenproletariat in a free enterprise way ...

(Above: Martin Rowson, that bloody Guardian cartoonist, here, displaying a sense of irony).

It being a quiet Sunday on the pond, the time seemed right to meditate on the meaning of things ...

What to do? Read Diane Ravitch's exposure of The Myth of Charter Schools, in The New York Review of Books, or continue with Christopher Pearson's astonishing discovery that he's an educationist in the lizard Oz, as he scribbles Infants can be groomed for learning?

Happily Ravitch is a healthy dose of cod liver oil to all the blather Pearson has been offering up in recent weeks about the free market in education, and the role vouchers might play, as well as a good kick in the pants to recent films such as David Guggenheim's Waiting for "Superman" ...

In particular Ravitch tags the blame game:

At last we have the culprit on which we can pin our anger, our palpable sense that something is very wrong with our society, that we are on the wrong track, and that America is losing the race for global dominance. It is not globalization or deindustrialization or poverty or our coarse popular culture or predatory financial practices that bear responsibility: it’s the public schools, their teachers, and their unions.

But then Pearson is so befuddled that this week he argues against himself by citing evidence that poverty might have a role in education:

... he (The Spectator's Toby Young) cites a book by two educationalists at the University of Durham. One of their main findings is that the attainment of middle-class children doesn't vary much according to what school they attend. Generally they tend to do well even in poorly performing schools. In a nutshell, a language-rich preschool environment and a domestic setting to match it can inoculate kids against the damage that substandard schools do to their classmates.

Yep, one week it's vouchers will fix things, and the next it's a language rich preschool environment.

But what to do about poverty, as Ravitch asks?

According to University of Washington economist Dan Goldhaber, about 60 percent of achievement is explained by nonschool factors, such as family income. So while teachers are the most important factor within schools, their effects pale in comparison with those of students’ backgrounds, families, and other factors beyond the control of schools and teachers. Teachers can have a profound effect on students, but it would be foolish to believe that teachers alone can undo the damage caused by poverty and its associated burdens.

Sorry, poverty is a little too hard, so let's zoom off to the UK.

Pearson is rhapsodic at the way a new "pupil premium" in Britain is going to fix things, and so settles for a LibDem approach, when he might equally have been applying his fertile brain to the current woes besetting British higher education. Nick Clegg has been in a jolly old firefight, because as usual people discover that there are core promises, and then there are non-core promises (Nick Clegg: I should have been more careful in signing tuition fees pledge).

It turns out that the "pupil premium" is an attempt to incentivise schools to take poorer children ... as a way of overcoming current "league table" incentives for schools to weed out the most challenging children. And it isn't new money, but a budgetary shuffle. (Michael Gove admits pupil premium is not new money).

Well good luck to the British with their latest attempts at pulling the public education levers, in their own peculiar attempt to level the playing field, but the notion that the scheme will fix things, could only inhabit the minds of British politicians ... and Christopher Pearson, who was struck by this factoid delivered up by Clegg:

Most of it (the pupil premium) will be spent on free nursery-level education for Britain's poorest children.

The aim is to narrow in the early years the vocabulary gap between the disadvantaged young and everyone else. As Clegg put it: "Children from poor homes hear 616 words spoken an hour on average, compared to 2153 words an hour in richer homes. By the age of three, that amounts to a cumulative gap of 30 million words."

Uh huh. Sounds like an impressive factoid. Let's see the results of those who bothered to check it out:

The Cabinet Office told us it came from the book “Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children.” So, the DPM was actually talking about the educational opportunities of kids across the Atlantic. And a quick flick through the book reveals it’s actually based on a sample of just 42 American children – and that the research was undertaken in the 1980s. The book was published in 1995, by Dr Betty Hart and Dr. Todd Risley, with a forward from Lois Bloom at Columbia University in New York. FactCheck reached the now retired Lois Bloom, who confirmed the research was old, and that it showed income wasn’t the only that determining factor in children’s development. “The book says there are many other factors,” she said “including how many people in the house work and how many children there are in the house.”

So, it doesn’t seem all that ‘fair’ to us, to pass off research that is 20 years old, and based on a small sample in America, as relevant to a speech about inequality in modern Britain. ...

... The verdict
There is good evidence that wealth is one of several determining factors in educational attainment. But FactCheck found nothing to uphold the claim that poor children hear only 616 words an hour at home, in this country, in 2010.

Nick Clegg’s research on this seems extremely sketchy – quoting an old study, from a different county, and using a tiny sample, lands him a fiction rating. (more here in cache form, and more on that critique in turn being critiqued here in Nick Clegg and the Word Gap).

As usual, a few seconds googling would have got Pearson into the levels and bevils, but what's the point of finding out the devil in the detail when you want to embark on a round of rampant assertions.

Thus the factoid can be used for a splendid round of bizarre thought bubbles on the benefits of lashing toddlers to the educational grindstone, and giving them a good going over to sharpen their minds:

Young offers some rather endearing anecdotal evidence. "When my daughter Sasha was around six months old I read her Pride and Prejudice. Sounds pretentious and it is, but that's one of the advantages middle-class children enjoy over working-class children: their parents are willing to risk appearing pretentious if they believe their behaviour will secure their offspring a competitive advantage. And it worked.

"I have a video of Sasha scoring 100 out of 100 in a flash card test before her first birthday. By contrast, I read all three of her brothers Peepo! and none of them started talking until they were two."

Flash card testing before a first birthday? Pride and Prejudice at six months? Rather endearing?

Well I suppose playing Mozart to cows helped increase milk production (forget it Jake, that's just another factoid thought bubble - Mozart for Milk Production suggests Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Waters is just as effective. Yes Mozart or torture. So much for science).

I suppose torturing young children to ensure they 'get ahead' in life is a middle class prerogative. Got to be in a position to have that fifth plasma screen in the lavish bathroom by age twenty one ... or at least be in a position to deliver factoid blather for The Australian or The Spectator at any age you like.

And after reading Jane Austen? Well there's reading books which serve as an introduction to irony to your child, which is most peculiar, because in his scribbles, Pearson steadfastly refuses to introduce any sense of irony into his generally portentous pronouncements.

Instead we get anecdotes about his childhood, and a kind of childhood Jewish determinism, whereby ... There was scarcely a boy among them who had not settled on a choice of profession, with a modicum of parental nudging, by the time he was six.

Dear sweet absent lord! What next? What would Pearson say to parents in China? Enrol your child in the Communist party by age of five to ensure a settled life? Or how about give me a child until they're seven, and I'll have them believing in pie in the sky for life ...

Well thank the lord that John Safran escaped that notion of parental nudging, and saw Yeshivah College as fertile grounds for hip hop and the Raspberry Cordial. But then Safran has an actual sense of irony, frequently displayed, and nowhere better than when he did over Ray Martin ...

It seems that Pearson was left intimidated by his competitive Jewish counterparts:

Long before I was literate, most of my playmates could read a little English, speak Yiddish and perhaps another European language, and were beginning Hebrew lessons.

As well, willy-nilly, most learned a musical instrument. While some of them complained of a pressure-cooker existence - and left me feeling like a cheerful underachiever - they had a head start in life that most parents now can only dream about.

Yet what do you know, here is prattling away delivering factoids and superficial views of the UK education system, while no doubt many of the infant prodigies once around him are now stumbling from garbage bin to garbage bin in search of food, or as a tryout for a re-make of Shine. (Oh sorry, that's already been done, in The Soloist, using a cello. Back to your bins, infant prodigy bums).

Still there's good news:

My last four columns and this week's have all concentrated on what constitutes a great education and why so few of the rising generation have access to one. I fear it has been rather bleak reading for the most part, which is why I'm ending on a positive note.

Thank the absent lord, Pearson is leaving education behind. Yippee, done and dusted, finished, and many fine solutions found. (Warning: irony).

Time to read Diane Ravitch in peace. Clearly someone has thought of the children, and decided that a month of Pearson reforming education is enough, already ...

But then came the bad news:

Very early intervention to break the cycle of educational disadvantage holds out far more hope - especially for Aboriginal infants and the children of what used to be called the lumpenproletariat - than the public system ever has. It ought to be high on the productivity agendas of both the main parties.

Oh dear absent lord, won't someone think of the children.

Could Pearson have hoped to pen a more befuddled and benighted last paragraph on education than this? Conflating as it does Aboriginal infants and the lumpenproletariat, and productivity agendas and the failures of the public system ...

Well now we know what happened because Pearson's parents refused to read Pride and Prejudice to him at the tender age of six months.

Gobbledegook ...

How did Jane Austen put it?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a six month old baby in possession of a good parent, must be in want of a good book ...

(Below: still if you want to give your six month old a flying head start in life, you'll be pleased to know all things Pride and Prejudice, including the text, are here. Or you can pick the text up, along with other Jane Austen novels, at Project Gutenberg, here).