Posts by giovanni tiso
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Thanks for the clip. Couldn't have found a better example of the what illiteracy can mean.
We should put it on posters: study, kids, if you don't want to end up like this Kiwiblog commenter.
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To repeat: 21st-century literacy is Peter Jackson literacy
Children, unit one this term is going to be about tax avoidance.
NZ is rated one of the easiest places in the world to do business. If those businesspeople and chamber of commerce types weren't so lazy and incompetent- and busy protecting their patches and bachs- we might just get our per capita income up to 9th (our lowest ranking of the three international educational standards.)
I like the way Rob thinks!
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But physics isn't an ideal type of a science. Biology is just as much a science as physics, and yet surprisingly light on things like equations. Things can be scientific without being physics-like.
I still think that biology is a lot more like physics than education, quite frankly. And I am terrorised that somebody might come up with the genus "plonker" some time in the near future. We need to resist rigid taxonomies along with crude measurements.
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Yet I don't think that Wittgenstein's point was that physics and education are as much a science as each other, somehow. This, notwithstanding what Heisenberg and others teach us.
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Yes, thank you indeed.
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Certainly the idea of getting 76% in morality is absurd. (The idea of getting 76% in literacy is pretty absurd as well for that matter.) But that doesn't mean you can't measure these things in some ways.
It's more a judgment-based evaluation than an assay, though, wouldn't you say? Which is why we don't say of the social sciences that are sciences in the same way that physics or medicine are. Yet when it suits a government's ideology you'll always find a technocrat or five ready to oblige and say that no, we can and should measure everything.
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The point is that Giovanni clearly thinks he can make decisions based on things like values. Now, there must be some way to get that information out of Giovanni's head and into the hands of other people who make decisions[2].
You can expect a school to promote certain values, including the inclusion of children with special needs, and then to a certain, fairly limited extent, evaluate (not there's something social scientists ought to be good at) whether it has succeeded in doing so. But you won't be able to measure it in the same way that you measure literacy or numeracy. It's just not possible. However, that's not to say that having that such a requirement is meaningless.
I think the requirement that organisations honour the Treaty is comparable. Remember when Winston used to routinely ask in the house what does it mean? He was playing with the fact that it is not always easy to tell, that it varies greatly between organisations, and yes, that in some cases it consists of a series of token gestures. Yet as a general principle is very valid and we ought to strive to apply it.
Going back to schools, national standards - precisely because they are so easy to measure - will inevitably become the headline number at the expense of all the other things that a school might be doing very well or not at all. And that's just stupid.
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More from Middleton Grange:
They appear to have been exempted from all standards of decency.
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Widgets can be defective in three different ways.
Another aspect of the scientific approach to the social is that it tends to focus on what is defective. Again, because it's easier to measure.
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An excerpt from a Chch Press story from 2006 (not by me):
There's another aspect of the standards that is consistent with Tory ideology and may not have been mentioned yet. I think it was Hattie who said at one point that it's not true that standardised testing results aren't accurate, in that they reflect very accurately the income of the families of the children who attend a school. Having said that, it's only natural that a society that punishes people for being poor may also want to assign the blame for poor educational outcomes to the schools in poorer community.