Cuba’s literacy program in Bolivia – Yes they can

Telesur and many other Latin American news outlets carried the news recently that Bolivia’s campaign to wipe out illiteracy has continued making huge strides. UNESCO now classes Bolivia an illiteracy free zone as it has a literacy rate of over 96%. The socialist government of Evo Morales has made wiping out illiteracy one of its major objectives and it has made major progress since 2001 when its illiteracy rate was 14%. Now its illiteracy rate stands at 3.6%. 800,000 people have been helped to literacy since 2007 with another 120,000 set to ‘graduate’ this year.

Part of the government’s success is credited to the use of a Cuban pioneered adult education methodology making extensive use of audio-visual techniques and called ‘Yes I can’. Like other socialist governments and socialist states, Cuba made the campaign to eradicate illiteracy and to raise educational standards an absolute priority. As Theodore MacDonald’s comprehensive study of Cuba’s education system has shown the revolutionary government immediately recognised that literacy is critical to waging the battle of ideas and devote huge economic and human resources into its literacy campaign. In 1961, just two years after the revolutionary government took power, UNESCO declared Cuba illiteracy free and it continues to recognise and promote the huge educational achievements of Cuban socialism in comparison with the rest of Latin America.

Now Cuba exports not just doctors to developing states but also adult education and the ‘Yes I can’ method. Quite a contrast to Britain and the US, where big education businesses export commodified access to educational materials and for-profit provision, and where universities trade their ‘brands’ for fees in the international student markets. Cuba’s educators have helped to raise educational standards and empower the people of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia. They are even to be found working with the indigenous communities of Australia. That’s truly revolutionary international education.

NIck Wright: Genetics and schools policy

In this article, Nick Wright looks at the work of Michael Gove's former special adviser Dominic Cummings and places it in the context of the history of genetic determinist theories of education. 

Ever since the intellectual case for school selection based on intelligence quotient testing was found to be grounded in faked statistics there has been an unceasing quest to find a new theoretical basis for a school system based on differentiating children.

The talmudic text deposited at the DfE by Michael Gove's departing policy advisor suggests that genetics may be the new great white hope for those who need the appearance of intellectual rigour to cloak their preference for selection. Only a political innocent would think that an argument that dismissed the value of much education, trashed teachers and claimed for heritability a privileged place in determining children's ability would go unchallenged.

Michael Gove's special advisor or Spad, Dominic Cummings – the author of a 250 page reflection on government, politics and education* – is reportedly returning to his career in the ministerially-favoured 'free schools' sector.

Already the practical case for such schools – freed from curriculum requirements, the necessity to employ qualified teachers, pay agreed pay rates or appoint head teachers with teaching experience – is unravelling more speedily than the faked science that underpinned the introduction of the 11 plus.

To recap – for any ministerial aide whose Oxford degree in Ancient and Modern History missed out the 20th century – Cyril Burt, knighted in 1946 for services to psychological testing – based his conclusion that the superior performance in his tests of upper class children in private preparatory schools was due to their greater inherited intelligence. He reached this conclusion in 1909 and by the time he died (in 1971) the idea that tests at the end of primary education were an accurate predictor of general intelligence, and by extension, future academic performance, vocational aptitude and positioning in the social structure, was under assault.

Burt based much of his research on the performance in intelligence tests of monozygotic twins.

Within a few years both the identity (even existence) of his supposed collaborators in field work and the statistical reliability of his key evidence was questioned. By the end of the decade his intellectual reputation was irredeemably tarnished and his friend and biographer Leslie Hearnshaw had concluded that Burt's data – critically important in the political case for selection and the post-war tri-partite division of secondary education – was fraudulent or could not be relied on.**

Remarkably, the evidence of this fraud has been challenged and a lively polemic has ensued in which the strongest suggestions that Burt's findings remain valid have come from people who still cleave to the proposition that the genetical heritability of intelligence as measured by IQ scores has decisive utility in education policy.

While this puts the question firmly into the contested terrain of ideology and politics Cummings claim that: “There is strong resistance across the political spectrum to accepting scientific evidence on genetics. Most of those that now dominate discussions on issues such as social mobility entirely ignore genetics and therefore their arguments are at best misleading and often worthless" is a transparent bid to claim the evidential high ground.

Relying on the work of US behavioural geneticist Robert Plomin he claims for genetic factors a decisive role in determining intelligence and educational attainment.

Plomin enters the back story at this point. In a speculative Spectator article this July he takes a swipe at Leon Kamin, the author of a 1970's book The Science and Politics of IQ which analysed Burt's statistics and found the correlation coefficients of monozygotic and dizygotic twins' IQ scores were the same to three decimal places, across articles – even when Burt more than doubled his sample.

Plomin seems uncomfortable with the mechanistic application of his research to contemporary political controversies. In an illuminating BBC Radio 4 exchange with the geneticist Steve Jones he was at pains to make the point that no necessary policy implications follow from his work and  emphatically stated: “I am not advising on policy.”

By way of contrast Dominic Cummings makes larger claims for this evidence.

"Work by one of the pioneers of behavioural genetics, Robert Plomin, has shown that most of the variation in performance of children in English schools is accounted for by within school factors (not between school factors), of which the largest factor is genes. Scores in the phonics test show ~70% heritability; scores in National Curriculum reading and maths tests at 7, 9, and 12 show ~60-70% heritability; and scores in English, Maths and Science GCSEs show ~60% heritability in a just completed twin study (the GCSE data will be published later in 2013).

Cummings is keen to discount environmental factors in shaping pupil performance and emphasise the primacy of genetic factors.

“In contrast, the overall effects of shared environment (including all family and school influences shared by the twins growing up in the same family and attending the same school) accounts for only about a third of the variance of GCSE scores. Educational achievement in school is more heritable than IQ in English school children: i.e the heritability of what is directly taught is higher than what is not directly taught. Perhaps differential performance in educational achievement is heritable because it is taught: that is, roughly similar schools teaching the same material reduces a major source of environmental variation, therefore the variation that remains is even more due to genetic variation.”

And he is is equally keen to discount family wealth, social position and class as factors:

“Similarly, this paper (Science, 23/4/2010) shows how good teachers improve reading standards for all but this means that the variance that remains is more due to genetic differences. This leads to a conclusion almost completely at odds with prevailing conventional wisdom in political and academic debates over education: differences in educational achievement are not mainly because of ‘richer parents buying greater opportunity’ and the successful pursuit of educational opportunity and ‘social mobility’ will increase heritability of educational achievement.”

To collapse the entire corpus of  'progressive' educational thought into the simple concept that educational achievement arises from privileged access is a transparently rhetorical flourish that abandons any claim to rational debate.

Behind it lies a an unsavoury strain of thinking with a compelling claim to historical continuity. It was, after all, Cyril Burt, who in his 1909 study argued that:

“Wherever a process is correlated with intelligence, these children of superior parents resemble their parents in themselves being superior. Proficiency at such tests does not depend on opportunity or training, but on some innate quality. The resemblance in degree of intelligence between the boys and their parents must, therefore, be due to inheritance. We thus have an experimental demonstration that intelligence is hereditary.” 1909, p 181.

Burt's 1909 comparative measure of parental intelligence had the virtue of simplicity. He simply assumed it from their profession and social position taking intellectual and upper class parents of his sample cohort to be more intelligent than the tradesmen.

Sixty years later, when quizzed about his measure of parental intelligence he reported that: “The intelligence of the parents was assessed primarily on the basis of their actual jobs, checked by personal interviews.”

Today of course, rich parents – even those seized by the insight that the intelligence of their offspring is mostly inherited – are still inclined to trust the education of their children not to the cash strapped and highly invigilated state sector but to a more relaxed environment where generously-endowed private schools with smaller class sizes and better paid teachers enjoy more intimate and  productive relations with the most prestigious universities. Lower down the pecking order ambitious parents will move might and main (and address) in order to get their children into a school perceived to be better.

An inevitable consequence of the current fashion for behavioural genetics is the hunt for the 'intelligence gene'.  Much hope is invested in the work of a young Chinese researcher Zhao Bowe at the biotech research centre BGI Shenzen where a large array of DNA sequencing machines is available.

The research programme – which involves an international group of collaborators – is aimed at discovering the genetic code for intelligence by distilling information from the genomes of thousands of prodigies. Large claims are made for the project; that it will identify the genetic basis of IQ and allow for large scale embryo screening including interventions to raise the IQ potential of unborn children.

Sceptics naturally predict failure for this utopian project. They point to the complexity involved in the relatively simpler scheme to isolate the genetic determinants of height in which nothing much emerged until the DNA sample exceeded ten thousand. After herculean efforts scientists have now tracked down something close to a thousand genetic variations that can be connected to variations in height with some claim to universal applicability across different population groups.

Zhao's is a bold initiative and one with no easily determined time scale. If the interest in this project objective arises from a desire for scientific and rational policies which might identify and educate a larger cohort of exceptionally gifted children, perhaps one drawn from a wider social spectrum than conventional school systems and testing regimes deliver, it might have wide appeal.

If, however, it was to be deployed to exclude some children from access to the best locally available education its appeal would be greatest to those who dismiss the potential of the great majority of children to develop beyond expectations. Cummings is frank in his advocacy of special educational privileges for children who are identified as especially gifted.

From the standpoint of school improvement professionals, concerned with the education of that great majority of children who do not enjoy the class room conditions of the elite, the priority is to devise strategies that realise the educational potential of the many.

If it would be perverse to ignore science that showed a powerful role for heritability  in IQ test results it would be equally perverse to discount the significance of the uncontroversial finding that Cummings references: 'that good teachers improve reading standards for all'.

Education has a wider role than simply identifying and developing exceptionally gifted pupils. Such children have to live in a real world where the fullest development of each child's potential is the condition for the fullest development of society as a whole.

Behavioural genetics has a serious public relations problem in education circles that is not going to be easily dispelled by partisan polemics of the type deployed by Michael Gove's attack dogs.

Neither will it be rehabilitated if it is deployed to perpetuate an education system that allows privileged elites, whether those elites are selected by parental wealth or genetic endowment, to prosper while the needs of society as a whole, and of the individual child, are neglected.

A deeper understanding of the role of heritability factors in the development of the child is an undoubted common good. But a fixed gaze on the genome must not be at the expense of a 20/20 vision of education for all.

*      http://static.guim.co.uk/ni/1381763590219/-Some-thoughts-on-education.pdf

**    Hearnshaw, L.S. (1979). Cyril Burt: Psychologist. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

For Democracy in Further and Higher Education

By Martin Levy.

This article was published as part of the CP's Unity Bulletin at the TUC in September 2013

 

Just a month ago Amazon boss Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post newspaper for $250 million.  Apart from the fact that all that money has come from the superexploitation of Amazon employees, does that matter to us?  It’s what he didn’t buy that is arguably more important.

The Washington Post company is still in existence, although its name will change.  But it has sold its flagship brand because it is making a lot more money from other subsidiaries, and principally from Kaplan Inc, its for-profit education company.  From relative modest origins, Kaplan has grown by aggressive marketing into a transnational corporation principally in higher education, and including some subsidiaries in Britain.  In the USA, it has faced charges of defrauding the government of hundreds of millions of dollars, by paying incentives to recruiters of students, and by lying to achieve accreditation.  Many Kaplan students have been left with no qualifications and with massive tuition fee debts that they will never pay off.

It is this market in further and higher education that the ConDem government in Britain wants to open up.  Already some of the larger FE colleges are becoming corporate groups, taking over smaller colleges and private training organisations – a prelude to full privatisation.  The government has also eased the entry of private, private equity and for-profit companies into higher education.  Just last month, BPP University College of Professional Studies, in London, became the second for-profit institution in Britain to be granted the title of university with degree-awarding powers.

If this sounds a bit analogous to the way that private companies are muscling into academy schools, then it’s not surprising.  The government is intent on privatising the whole public education system.  The process is tantamount to a massive transfer of funds to the private sector, from the public purse and from students in both FE and HE.  These private companies pay their workers less and offer worse terms and conditions than in public sector institutions, which in turn are putting pressure on their own staff as a result of the increased competition.

Education, throughout all sectors, is about the empowerment of individuals.  What is coming, if we don’t act to prevent it, is disempowerment – a narrow vocationalism with the ethos of the market, and with students as consumers who will pay throughout their lives.  We need to resist the changes, but we also need a Charter for Democratic Education, uniting the sectors, and recognising education both as a democratic equal right and as a basis for informed participation in society, as well as providing the skills needed for productive employment.  But it also needs to be democratically run and accountable to its communities, staff, students and the public who fund it.

Such an education system could only be realised within the context of an expanding, productive economy, and one not based on putting private profit first.  It therefore has to be fought for as part of the struggle for an Alternative Economic and Political Strategy (AEPS), something like the People’s Charter for Change.  By defending the current public provision, while projecting the need for a Charter for Democratic Education, we fight for the empowerment of individuals which will help to make the People’s Charter or the AEPS a reality.

Martin Levy teaches at Northumbria University,and is a branch officer and NEC member of UCU, but writes here in his capacity as a member of the Communist Party.  Further details about the proposed Charter for Democratic Education can be found in the Communist Party pamphlet, Education for the People.

Introducing 'Education for the People'

Education, we are told, is the most important thing shaping people’s futures and determining their life-chances. If you want to get a job, if you want a future at all, you have to get a good education, get into a good school, get a degree. In an era when unemployment and under-employment in low skilled jobs is becoming once again a major social reality, these messages of course wield a huge power. Policy-makers in the political mainstream argue about whether education is the key to economic success in the knowledge economy or whether it is vital in preserving the social order and preventing the kind of riots seen returning to Britain’s inner cities in 2011.

  

Yet for all the noise made about education, the reality of what is happening to our economy and our society and the reality of what is happening in our schools, colleges and universities tells a different, more complex story.

Just as the British economy is being further wrecked by austerity policies that reinforce its already deep structural weaknesses, so the education system appears increasingly incapable of delivering on either of its supposed purposes, let alone fulfilling any progressive vision. The Coalition government has returned to the policies of the Tory governments of the 1980s with a vengeance, further fragmenting the education system, fostering damaging competition, promoting the private sector and continuing the state centralisation of control over the content of education. Yet for all its aspirations to make education fulfil a dual role of rendering profits for its City friends and maintaining the social order, it cannot fully stifle the frustrations caused by its attempts to rein in democratic access to education. These aspirations and frustrations are finding expression, whether in the form of student protests or alienated urban riots.

Similarly, the idea that education can substitute for the role that redistribution and industrial policy used to perform for social democrats has been fully exploded. The financial crisis and the austerity assault, and the chronic weakness of the UK economy, coupled with the rise of high-skilled economic competitors in China and India has revealed Britain’s focus on skills at the expense of creating jobs and new industries to be an empty delusion. ‘Education, Education, Education’ was always an empty slogan, not just because it issued from the mouth of Tony Blair, but also because the fundamental idea behind it was rotten.

In this pamphlet, the Communist Party argues that it is time for the labour movement to go back to first principles about what education is, what role it plays in society and what it can be made to do to serve the working class and its allies.

We argue that the left and the labour movement needs to base its analysis on a sound understanding of the role that education plays in capitalist societies. This will enable a better  understanding of how it can be made to fulfil its potential in assisting the forces pushing toward an alternative path to socialist development.

This also means basing our immediate demands and our immediate objectives on a sound understanding of where we are now. We have to understand not just the immediate balance of class forces but also how the current conjuncture is rooted in the historical development of our education systems in the context of the development of British capitalism.

The task then is to articulate a progressive vision of what education is and should be for. This must be based on an understanding of what benefits the working class and its allies and the emancipatory role that education can play, but it must have its eye firmly on the current balance of class forces and the prevailing ‘common sense’. To repeat the old adage, we need to start from where people are, not where we would like them to be.

The Communist Party offers some proposals as to what should be at the core of a progressive education programme for the labour movement, as a contribution to an emerging debate on the broader left and in the labour movement. Our proposal is that a future progressive vision of education needs to be organically rooted to an Alternative Economic and Political Strategy. We are not in the business of dealing in utopias, but of developing an education programme that forms part of part of and reinforces the struggle for national economic and political renewal and which advances the political and economic interests of the working class in the process.

The pamphlet then goes on to make some suggestions about the form and content of an education system that could give expression to the kind of programme we set out. Too often, debate about education on the left starts from the wrong position. Too often debate is shaped by an understandably reactive response to government attacks: the need to defend this kind of school or that kind of funding pot. Instead, we are urging that the left and labour movement start from what we want education to do and begin to debate and discuss the kind of education system that could achieve this.

Finally, we argue that if the left and the labour movement are to begin to achieve any of this, then there must be a period of sustained movement building around a common programme based on the immediate needs of the hour, but which can also be seen to open up the way for further advances of a more socialist character. We offer some suggestions about the way in which a movement for education might be built.

Download the full document 'Education for the People' here