David Richardson

There's another aspect to this too. 'Putting the student in the centre' was a catchphrase here in Sweden a few years ago. Then people pointed out that this could just as well mean 'leaving the student in the lurch'. I.e. "we put you in the centre, gave you the facilities we thought you needed, so any responsibility for failure is yours, not ours".

Just to take up a couple of the points Lee raises about Proportional Representation … Sweden has a proportional representation system, which has only succeeded in producing a 'majority' government (defined as a government where *one* party has a majority of the seats in parliament) once. Swedish governments have to be coalitions, and there's always a lot of horse-trading immediately after an election. The split between the two blocs (called 'bourgeois' and 'non-bourgeois' in Swedish) is usually 51%-49%. There's a 4% limit to election, which means that a party has to get 4% of the national vote or a larger proportion (which I forget at the moment) of the vote in one specific constituency in order to be elected. After an election, there's a system for accounting for the votes for the parties which fall below the limit (not by reassigning those votes, but by re-calculating the size of the electorate without those votes). Although there's plenty of political argument in Sweden, there's also a fairly stable consensus about the basic ideas about how the country should be run. There seems, for example, to be a large majority in favour of 'high taxes + a welfare state', which is often cited as the reason for the inability of the 'bourgeois' bloc to take power, since there policies always seem to involve cutting taxes and cutting benefits. This unstated consensus may be a precondition for a PR system. What do you think?

I've often wondered why there are so many half-baked proposals going the rounds in the world of education. This is my theory: Firstly, education uses up a large portion of the national budget, so politicians can't ignore it. On the other hand, the amorphous nature of what we regard as success in an educational system makes it very difficult for politicians to take credit for anything. Secondly, everyone once went to school, and we all have a tendency to think that the educational world we saw from the 'pupil' side of the desk is the same as the world seen from the 'teacher' side. Thirdly, it's a lot easier to come up with a half-baked suggestion than to tackle the real problems of schools, pupils and teachers. Reminds me of the great education vouchers debate in the early 1980s in England, where politicians were seriously suggesting that popular schools would be able to build extra classrooms in order to house the pupils whose vouchers would be 'spent' with them, whilst unpopular schools would close classrooms down (and stop paying for them?) at the same rate.

One of the interesting things I found out about the writing of the US Constitution was the debate about whether the US should be a 'Spartan' democracy or an 'Athenian' democracy (this was one of the issues that Thomas Jefferson was passionate about). The former would be a democracy where only the 'qualified' would get to decide about things, whilst the latter was seen as bordering on mob rule. What the Founding Fathers were specifically anxious to avoid was the kind of development that has perhaps resulted in Sonia Gandhi's decision to withdraw … The mechanism they built in to the Constitution to try to prevent this was the Electoral College, another one of the checks and balances. A US 'presidential' vote is actually a vote for members of the Electoral College. Jefferson et al thought that this would be enough to prevent a sort of cult of personality. In theory the Electoral College could decide to elect someone other than the person with the majority of the popular vote. However, it didn't turn out that way in the USA, since people just don't see the Presidential election that way. It doesn't seem to have been possible for people to separate the office of Prime Minister from the person of Sonia Gandhi either. The implications for Iraq are also worrying - if this populist zeal is a permanent feature of any system where people can vote for their rulers, then the odds are that Iraq will become an Islamic fundamentalist state, in my opinion.

All is far from perfect in the state of Sweden, but the country does pretty well on John's latest 5 points. There's a system for subsidising the smaller or poorer of the local newspapers, for example. (People get their news from local papers. In the town I live in, the 60,000 inhabitants have three local dailies to choose between: one Social Democrat, one conservative and one Conservative.) This system has kept at least a semblance of variety, although the same tendency to form monopolies is present here too. Information at elections is also fairly tightly controlled. The employers' organisations usually try to get round it by forming 'non-political' action committees … which always end up supporting the bourgeois parties. There's another long-established principle (since 1766) which is incredibly important here: offentlighetsprincip. This is a law which states that every single document which any public body receives or sends must be given a file reference number and must be made available to any citizen without delay upon demand, unless a tightly-defined set of criteria are met to have it classified. It makes public corruption very difficult, since anyone can present themselves to the office of the Parliament or arrive at the town hall and demand to see the credit card receipts (for example) of any politician. It makes journalism very easy here! The lack of a similar type of openness is one of biggest problems Swedes have with the EU. The fact that the tax rolls are also subject to this principle means that you can inspect the tax returns of anyone - including politicians - on demand. You can see what they've tried to claim for, and how much their properties are worth. It's amazing how many bourgeois politicians end up not paying tax at all, and how many businessmen manage to make a 'loss' on their personal income! This has ruined many a political reputation here, and ensures that 'surviving' politicians are fairly clean.

Hm … back to reliability vs. validity. I'm fairly sure that GCSE Chemistry examiners would want their exams to be about the real world, Adrian, although I'm not a chemist! This reminds me of another piece of anecdotal 'evidence' I picked up somewhere. After independence, Nigeria decided to make English one of its official languages (to try to dampen regional rivalries), and made the teaching of English compulsory in all secondary schools. However, there weren't enough teachers who actually spoke English to go round, so the government produced a standardised syllabus, with accompanying textbooks which could be used by people whose own English was very poor. There was, of course, a comprehensive 'objective' examination system, where the spirit of the examination was the thing to bear in mind. After 15 or 20 years the results you'd expect had come to pass: the Nigerian school system produced lots of graduates who had qualifications in 'English' … but who spoke and wrote a language which was almost impossible for someone who *hadn't* been through the system themselves to understand. C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas l'enseignement!

Firstly, I think that it's important to be able to compare and contrast 'democracies' - otherwise the word loses its meaning (as in the German Democratic Republic - DDR). When I teach Swedish students about the political system of the United States, I often have to start by pointing out the *good* things about the USA (since most Swedes find it impossible to believe that there are any!). One of these good things is the system of checks and balances which was intended to ensure that no one branch of the government (such as the President's Executive) can dominate the entire political system. You could argue that the USA departed from this system when Reagan started packing the Supreme Court with the very conservatives who decided to halt the re-count process in Florida, ensuring Bush's victory in the 2000 election. Looked at from one perspective, this was a very 'Soviet' act - you have the appearance of democracy, in that people vote, but there's a mechanism hidden away which ensures that the Communist Party always gets in. When I get round to 'gerrymandering' (the constant design and re-design of the physical shapes of political constituencies in order to ensure both that your candidates' supporters are sufficiently concentrated so that your party always wins, and that your opponents' supporters are sufficiently dispersed so that they never win), Swedes get really confused. As I understand the situation at the moment, there are very few seats either in the Senate or in the House of Representatives where there is a genuine contest (i.e. in which the incumbent has any chance of being defeated). This looks like evidence that the USA is *not* a democracy - at least in the accepted sense of the word. Gerrymandering, both in the US variety and the UK variety (where the numbers of votes needed to elect a Labour MP and the numbers needed to elect a Conservative MP are still very different), is very difficult to pull off in a country like Sweden, which uses an extreme form of proportional representation. Interestingly enough, until very recently Sweden had fixed-term *3* year parliaments - it really kept the government of the day on its toes! They've just gone over to 4 year fixed terms. Nevertheless, the socialists still managed to rule Sweden unchallenged from 1932 until 1976 - being re-elected regularly every three years. Does this make Sweden *more* democratic than the USA?

I wonder if we could all agree on the following propositions: 1. Examinations, as such, are neither good nor bad, desirable nor undesirable - it all depends on what they're intended to achieve in an educational system. 2. Having public examinations (on the UK model) is not a necessary feature of a good educational system (the Swedish system doesn't have them, for example). 3. If you have a system of public examinations, the requirements of the exams will determine what is taught and how it is taught (i.e. the exams decide what is counted as learning - they are not mere reflections of what goes on in school independently of the exams). 4. The more exams you have in an educational system, the more difficult it is to produce and mark 'good' exams (i.e. exams which fairly test what they are supposed to be testing), since the size of the pool of exam-writing and -marking skills is finite (and most of the people who possess them are too busy teaching). 5. There are different kinds of knowledge, skills and abilities required for a 'successful' pupil. 6. Some of these are fairly easy to examine in 'mass' systems and others are almost impossible to examine without a lot of one-to-one or one-to-small group contact, which is usually too expensive and too dependent on large numbers of highly qualified and experienced examiners (who are in short supply). 7. The higher up you go in an educational system, the less important the 'easily-examined' types of knowledge are, and the more important the 'less easily-examined' types of knowledge are. 8. Being 'successful' at the higher levels requires years of practice with the right kind of exams, so if your educational system has spent its time in the early years of secondary school on the 'easily-examined' types of knowledge, the pupils will find the transition to the higher levels very difficult indeed. Any problems with any of these? If these propositions are correct, what are the implications for educational systems?

You probably know the anecdote about the student taking a Physics exam at Copenhagen University (I don't say it's true - I read it on the Internet!): The exam question was "how do you measure the height of a skyscraper using a barometer". The student wrote: take a long piece of string, tie it to the barometer, then stand on the roof and lower the barometer down. When it touches the ground, measure the length of the string and the length of the barometer and you've got the height of the building. He failed - and promptly appealed. At the viva, the examiners told him he was frivolous, but he asked for another chance. OK, they said, you can have 5 minutes to come up with a 'proper' answer. After 4 minutes of silence, the chief examiner asked him if he was going to answer. He said that the problem was he had too many answers, and he was deciding which one to choose. For example, you could go to the caretaker and say "you can have this fine barometer, if you tell me how high the building is"; or you could drop the barometer off the top and time how long it took before it hit the ground, then work out the distance; or you could be boring and measure the air pressure at the top and the air pressure at the bottom and work it out. The problem with the third alternative, he said, is that it's boring, and I thought we were being taught to think for ourselves here. The student was Nils Boehr, one of the only Danes to ever win a Nobel prize.

Good points. The problem with most 'mass' testing systems is that there's only certain kinds of knowledge that they're good at testing … and those might not be the kinds of knowledge we need. A few years ago I was listening to a presentation of why the medical school at the university of Linköping introduced problem-based learning to train doctors. Conventional medical training places a heavy emphasis on fairly easily-examined courses such as Anatomy. There are only so many bones in the human body and they've all got specific, discrete names. However, conventionally, there was no easy way to test "the doctor's ability to communicate with the patient", so this was given a very low priority, both by medical schools and medical students, since educational institutions tend to teach to the exam, if they've got an exam to teach to. Now, I'm not arguing that doctors *don't* need to know the names of bones and how they work together. But they definitely *do* need to be able to handle the 'last 30 seconds' - as the patient walks through the door at the end of the session, and blurts out what the *real* problems or symptoms are. On a purely pragmatic basis, the reason it's important for doctors to be able to do this is that otherwise they waste vast amounts of money on unnecessary treatment, and miss the real condition. The anecdotal evidence I get from UK academics is that the rot is spreading to the university system. Where once UK universities were famous for producing a small number of graduates who'd been thoroughly trained to think, universities are now having major problems with school leavers who've been thoroughly trained to 'get the right answer', but not to think.

Adrian Yes, it's a poor question … but the 'right' question is a very difficult one to examine, since the number of variables which have to be taken into account make it difficult to write fairly simple questions. (Andy's 'Fact' picture looks like Chapter 2 of Hard Times [the 'empty vessels' chapter], by the way. We had it read out to us on the first day of teacher training college - mostly to make us wary of being too certain!) I used to think that the complexity and difficulty of testing in a meaningful way was something particular to languages, since they're one of the most complex systems we're ever likely to come across. Then I started working with mathematicians and physicists at university level, and heard them express the same kinds of frustrations at the type of 'knowledge' new students were bringing with them from school. Physicists, for example, would claim that they had to 'unlearn' most of what the students had learned at school, since the school teachers had tended to construct over-simplified maps of the physical world for testing purposes … which were misleading and just plain wrong. The mathematicians had similar things to say about the students' fixation with answers, rather than with understanding the language that is mathematics. You can see from my inputs into this debate that I feel that language students come to me with a similar baggage of largely useless information and misconception about how language works. However, they've been tested good and proper before they come to me, and they've been adjudged to be competent.

That's right - it's a rule that doesn't work … but it's a 'rule' that's very easy to test. One the other hand, the reality is much more difficult to construct a reliable test for (using 'reliable' in this special sense). Time and again in my experience, testing systems have gone for tests with high reliability and low (or non-existent) validity. John Holt's 'How Children Fail' was compulsory pre-reading for my teacher training course, and there's a lot of good stuff in it still about the absurdity of many of the tests teachers set. The sad thing is that it was written about experiences in the late 1950s - and we still don't seem to have learned!

I also often see what I would describe as a failure to achieve a balance between reliability and validity in tests. I apologise for telling you things you already know, if that's what I'm doing, but 'reliability' is the feature that the same answer to a question from two different candidates will get the same mark from either the same or two different examiners. 'Validity' is the degree to which the test corresponds to the real world. Here's a typical 'objective' test question from English language tests in Sweden: Some or any? Which of these words fits in the gap in this sentence? Would you like ***** tea? The answer which would be marked (reliably) correct is 'any', since the course has taught the 'rule' that you use some with statements and any with questions or negatives. There's a question mark after 'tea', so the correct answer must be 'any'. In the real world, however, the correct answer is most likely to be 'some', since this utterance is used to invite people to drink tea with you, so you have to have some tea to offer them (because the real rule is some when you think there is some; any when you don't know or think there isn't). However, 'any' is also possible, isn't it, but it's used more among people who already have some connection with each other. This area comes up in English tests in Sweden, since it highlights an area where there's a difference from Swedish. I've read academic arguments that say that there's an *inverse* proportion between reliability and validity in language testing. In other words, the more 'objective' the test, the less connection it has to the real world. However, tests with a high degree of validity a) generally cost more to administer; rely heavily on the judgements of professional teachers; and c) deliver results which are usually extremely difficult to put into league tables to make simplistic comparisons. This doesn't make them 'unscientific' though. I'm very impressed with the International English Language Testing Service (IELTS), for example, through which one person can be tested in Beijing, and have her command of English accurately measured against the test of another person in Stockholm. This may be 'too expensive' to do in schools … but perhaps we need to ask ourselves what the real cost of the inadequate testing systems which most school use really is.

I have no problem with exams and tests as such - provided that they do the job they are supposed to do. Sometimes they're just incredibly badly designed, like the American Language Course tests. Sometimes the examiners have hit upon some feature of their subject which is testable … without thinking of what the learner needs to be able to show about her knowledge. Here's an example from my subject: What's the difference between these two sentences? a) She had a good time at the party. She had a green dress at the party. … well, this is a distinction between two types of transitive verb in English which is of great interest to the academic linguist. Someone learning English, on the other hand, is very unlikely ever to even notice the distinction, let alone make a mistake with it. My impression of a good many tests I've seen in all sorts of countries is that they test things "because they're there". It's that kind of test which I think there's far too much of.

Nice link, John. It's a very nice website - but, as you say, there are all sorts of things it omits (such as democracy, for example). This is my vote: no, the British Museum should not put up this site, if they fail to point out that it gives a very biased picture of Saudi Arabia. It should only be made available if there is equal access to a site critical of Saudi Arabia. I wouldn't be quite so strict about a site produced, say, by the German government, or even the British government. The point is that there is less reason (n.b. not *no* reason) to doubt whether the information on such sites would be unbiased, and there is plenty of alternative information available.

Swedish schools don't have school uniforms at all. I helped a local school run an 'English school day' a couple of weeks ago, and lots of the pupils tried to wear something like a school uniform. The girls' clothes were the most 'interesting' because many of them tried to find a suitable skirt or dress (for the first time - Swedish girls don't usually wear skirts, since they're extremely impractical). The result was like something out of a Britney Spears or TATU video! I told them about the Deputy Head at the mixed school I went to in London asking the girls to kneel on the floor, so that she could measure their hem length … and I'm afraid it only confirmed their view of Britain as weird! They (and their teachers) were also fascinated when I went round and commented on things like trainers, jewellery, sock colours and hair styles. Needless to say, neither the teachers nor the pupils could understand why British schools waste so much of their time and effort on such matters.

There's a good article in the current New Scientist about the torture policy: Abuse of Iraqis 'well thought through': http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994976

I sometimes play with the idea of returning to teach in the UK. There are two factors which always bring me back down to earth: the high cost of living, and the attitude to teaching and learning that Andy Walker describes. The last teaching post I had in the UK school sector was in Dartford in 1980, and even then I was constantly troubled by what I saw as the anti-educational attitude of the local authority and the government - and that was in the 'good old days' before the National Curriculum and SATs. It's a dilemma - someone has to teach the children … but how can you teach and encourage learning in a system which seems designed to work against you at every step?

I'm very reluctant to give any kind of advice - what do I really know about your situation? I've been in this sort of situation myself, though, and the only thing which seems to work is to bring the problem out into the open. What I think this would mean is that you'd have to convene a meeting of your board, where you only had one item on the agenda: the climate of debate and co-operation within the board. It'd be important *not* to frame the problem as: this woman's behaviour. And it'd be important to make statements like "When you say X, or when you question my authority by saying Y, I experience it like this …", rather than ones like "You criticise me unfairly" or "Why don't you stop whining and trying to undermine me". It'd also be important to get the other members of the board to state what they feel too, so that you all know where you stand. It strikes me that, as President, you're in quite a strong position. You're the one who was actually elected, when it comes down to it. Swedish industrial relations experts generally feel, though, that there is no solution in the long run to a total breakdown of relations and trust between people in a workplace, other than dissolution. In other words, someone has to go! (This is why most such disputes at Swedish workplaces end up with someone being paid large sums of money to quit - which is almost certainly not an option for you!). Julian Edge's "Co-operative Development" has proved exceptionally useful to me in sorting out conflicts between colleagues. The original book is now out of print, but Julian has published it on the web at: http://www.les.aston.ac.uk/lsu/staff/je/CD/ Hope this is useful …

I've got to tell you about the 'American Language Test' we used to use in Kuwait with the Kuwaiti Army. It was administered in the language lab by a military attaché from the US Embassy and was about as totally ludicrous as you can imagine. If the students passed, then they got put almost immediately on a plane to Austin, Texas, where they could go to bars and meet girls. The questions were largely multiple-choice, of the form: The captain had to postpone the meeting. Postpone: a) put off; call off; c) call in; d) call on. The students spent their preparation time going through unofficial lists, "Call off, same same cancel, put off, same same postpone". Some of the 'social skills' pages were totally surreal (and we were require to 'teach' every single page in each of the manuals). The most surreal was the 'dialog with a US serviceman' (and bear in mind that this course was written for servicemen from Arab countries and Latin America): Visiting soldier: Say look at that girl in the bar over there. She's mighty pretty. American: Yes, that's my sister, she's popular with the boys. Visiting soldier: I'd sure like to go out with her. American: Why don't you give it a try? Go and buy her a drink. Visiting soldier: But I don't have any money. American: That's OK, I'll lend you $10. Needless to say, we all skated through that page in double-quick time, and didn't take any questions! After someone had passed, it'd often happen that he'd come round a corner, and a teacher would say "Hi, how's it going?". The poor soul would then go off and find another teacher and ask, "Sir, what's 'how's it going?'?" We'd then say, "same same how are you", and the student would rush back and say, "Fine, thanks". The Americans said this test was a sure diagnoser of the Kuwaitis' ability to be trained in English by US instructors … Another of my colleagues had once had a job in the Army teaching Puerto Ricans to speak English. If they passed the tests, they got drafted. If they failed, they could go home again … Yes, by all means let's use mechanical tests devised largely by non-teachers - they're much more entertaining than the real thing!

Sweden's tax system is widely misunderstood! Here we pay an income tax to our local council, which varies according to where you live, and, if you earn over a certain limit (about what an experienced teacher would earn), then you have a very small amount of state income tax to pay. I pay around 32% to the local council and around 2% in state income tax. You submit a tax declaration every year, and you have to pay a property tax equal to around 0.75% of 75% (!) of the official taxable value of any house you own. These taxable values are updated every year from an index of actual purchase prices in that area, and vary according to whether the house has any especially desirable features (such as a sea view). Over and above that there is a wealth tax on assets which are valued at more than 2 million Swedish kronor, but that is fairly negligible. If you're wealthy enough to be eligible, you're usually wealthy enough to afford a tax lawyer who'll make sure that you're exempt! VAT is at a standard rate of 25% on most things. And that's about it … There are payroll taxes paid by the employer which add about 42% of take-home pay to the employers' costs. There's a gap in perception which I've never got my head round, though. The OECD says that the cost of doing business in Sweden is one of the lowest in the industrial world … but local politicians (on the right) say it's one of the highest.

Each country's system is different, but here's roughly what is supposed to happen in Sweden. Each workplace has an ombudsman from each of the unions represented on site (this means that the ancillary staff and the teachers have one each). By law, management has to involve the unions as soon as an issue which affects the working environment is raised, whether it's the loss of a car-parking space, a change in working practices, or a staff member being bullied or accused of bullying. The members of staff then have the right to have a union representative present at any discussion with anyone in a management position. Minutes have to be taken and circulated, after having been approved as a true record by people elected at the meeting. Both the original issue (which can be submitted anonymously) and the record are allocated a filing number and have to be made available to anyone - even a member of the general public, such as a journalist, on demand, unless certain very specific conditions are met to ensure that it's classified as private. As a last resort, if all else fails, anyone (management, union reps, staff, students) can call in the Swedish Health and Safety at Work Executive, who have the power to shut a workplace down immediately, if they judge that people can suffer physical or psychological damage by being there. They also go through everyone's behaviour (particularly the management's) with a fine-tooth comb, and can order a wide range of measures, such as in-depth counselling from teams of occupational psychologists (as can the management without the intervention of the Executive). So … how does it work in practice? The first point to make is that any management is in a position of power, and can go to quite extraordinary lengths to impose their will on employees. Employees in turn often feel threatened, and often fail to bring problems to anyone's notice. However, a friend of mine, who is the site ombudsman at a university in Sweden has just been involved in bringing in the Health and Safety at Work Executive, after having exhausted all the in-house procedures over a number of years. The charges relate to stress, bullying, unfair management practices, etc. The management say that this is what happens when you reorganise. The Executive had been itching to get at this workplace for a long time, since there had been worrying reports coming out for years, and as soon as the union reps contacted them, they gave as much unofficial help (with procedures, wording, etc) as they're allowed to do. The management are now furious, since every last detail of their procedure is now going to be laid bare (it's a criminal offence either to hide information, or to even enquire into the identity of anyone giving information). There's a very good chance now that sweeping changes will be made into workplace practice at that university, and it doesn't look good on your CV if you were the manager in charge when the Executive moved in. You're supposed to use the internal procedures to deal with problems before they get to that level.

I read four US on-line newspapers regularly. Three of them could be see as fairly 'liberal' (New York Times, Washington Post and the LA Times), but the fourth, The Chicago Tribune, is definitely conservative. Even the 'liberal' three have plenty of conservative commentators. There seems to be a lot being written about the abuse of prisoners in those newspapers, and the criticism of the Bush administration is quite scathing. Max Boot, for example, an extremely conservative commentator in the LA Times, has got a lot to say about the mess the US has got itself into, even though he's criticising the Bush administration for not being brutal enough: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commen...omment-opinions Richard Cohen in The Washington Post is also scathing about the failure of anyone in the Bush Administration to take any responsibility for what has happened: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/artic...7-2004May5.html Even the conservative Chicago Tribune has a lot of criticism for Bush's TV appearances: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion...newsopinion-hed It may be that these newspapers are unrepresentative, but I think there's evidence that at least some US media are reporting what has happened.

These aren't isolated incidents, perpetrated by individual soldiers acting alone, either. There seems to be plenty of evidence that the CIA were involved right from the start. I remember reading reports in the Swedish newspapers a few years ago from the centre for the treatment of victims of torture in Denmark (one of the very few in the world). The centre noted that methods of torturing people had started to become uniform all over the world (at least by regimes which had Western backing). Previously, a torturer in, say, Chile, would use a different method from a torturer in Algeria, but this had changed. Their speculation was that this reflected US military aid, in particular training in what used to be called the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, where generations of Latin American military officers have been trained in 'interrogation techniques'.

It's at times like this that I'm glad I use a Mac! However, maybe I shouldn't be too smug - it's probably a matter of time until some nutter decides to infect us too, just for being too cocky.