Minus2909

7899

2012-02-17T04:55:00.001-08:00

Education and The Immune System

At least three of our body systems involve communication and information as a means of maintaining a healthy relationship with the world. These are the nervous system, the immune system and the endocrine system. The nervous and immune systems at least illustrate interesting parallels between state education and healthcare systems.

The nervous system allows someone to adapt, coordinate and record, store and relate information. Success and survival depend on being able to orient satisfactorily to a constantly changing environment; the brain and spinal cord receive information from the senses, sorts it and directs it to the different channels, resulting in responses favourable to the organism, and, given that we are social animals, ideally to our community too. Finally, we gain a fund of experience which influence future reactions to environmental changes.

Just as an aside, one of the salient features of this system is that it helps us cope with change, and so optimal learning means optimal flexibility, anticipation and versatility. I’m also aware of the coldness of the language i’m using here. In my relationships and practice, i’m not like this, but i’ve chosen to be analytical here in order to make things clear. Plenty of passion is expressed in connection with these issues, and that’s highly appropriate, but my aim here is to drain that passion and make the same argument without appealing to the emotions. There’s a strong rational case to be made for the approaches taken to education and health.

A child’s environment should optimise the functions of the nervous system because they are part of human nature in a biological sense. This is the kind of animal we are. Like other primates, human behaviour depends more on past experience than that of most other animals. Less of what we do is instinctive. Nonetheless we have certain instincts, one of which is the instinct to learn. One of the problems with empiricism is that a newborn baby seems to have to pull itself up by its own bootstraps intellectually, since it has no innate ideas in that model. A possible solution to that is that it has a learning instinct, and that seems to be borne out by an adult’s observation of a child. It’s hard to imagine that a species which depends so much on learning would not to some degree learn autonomously, without conscious intervention from others, though it might also be expected that as social animals, other individuals around us share that learning – we instinctively want to help our companions learn and they want to help us. Moreover, we have an aptitude for doing so, in-built, which may not always be nurtured but at least manifests itself at some point in our lives. Introspection strongly suggests that this exists in me and my empathy suggests the same is true of others. Having said that, we are likely to learn well in a rich and varied environment. Travel, for instance, broadens the mind.

In order for that environment to be rich and varied, different approaches might be taken, one of which could be to provide a fixed location which is varied and stimulating. This would not necessarily depend on conscious intervention or planning, but strongly suggests that the more versatile and imaginative those who influence that environment, and the more self-sufficient it is, the more complete and versatile the learning which takes place there will be.

Much has been written about reclaiming the home as where the heart is. and clearly more trust should be placed in parents and the home than the trend seems to be. I don’t want anything i say to contradict that. In the meantime, homes and schools can share certain features which may not aid learning. They can lack a strong connection with their environment. For instance, a school might have a nature table, which has positive aspects, but for that to happen, items are removed from their surroundings and placed in different circumstances where connections may be unclear or manufactured by others even if valid. Similarly, schools often have catering facilities and libraries. While catering is part of the school environment, it tends to stand apart from the life of the pupils and from the likes of home economics, biology, mathematics and the rest of the curriculum while conveying implicit messages about knowledge and food. Pupils are rarely expected to manage the purchase, pricing, stock control, nutritional balance or preparation of the food presented, but all of those activities are covered in classes at the school without exploiting the resource in their midst, wherewith they come into contact daily. There is little integration. Likewise, school libraries are valuable resources whcih are, however, located within school premises rather than the neighbourhood, and the wider neighbourhood usually lacks access to them. This encourages the impression that learning takes place in a specific location specialised for that purpose, with the corollary that other places are unsuitable. Moreover, the separation of school libraries from the community is a form of segregation which prevents much informal learning, such as how to cross roads, features of the local area, the changing seasons and the like. The kind of learning taking place outside these places is more accidental, immediate and relevant and the kind of learning which we primates are wont to acquire, just as we would in the rainforest or on the savannah.

As well as a nervous system, we have immune and endocrine systems. The immune system is frequently conceptually pruned down to an artificially specific immune response rather than its broader function being recognised in the barriers and flow of the body. The skin and mucous membranes, as well as firmer and less obvious barriers such as the ethmoid bone, which separates the brain from the nasal cavity, stop microorganisms from being where they would impair the function of the body, and the flow of blood, sweat, tears, urine, mucus and other fluids, all of which we tend to associate with tabus as part of the psychological, nervous-system based immune response, wash away the hazards and the potential hurt, moves them to places where they can be dealt with or dilutes them. Stagnation within us is a risk, examples being the development of infections in the urinary or gall bladder due to stasis or the likes of blood clots in the veins of stationary limbs, and the breaching of barriers is similarly a hazard, such as the insertion of a urinary catheter, abdominal surgery, grit in the eye or a splinter in a finger. It’s interesting to speculate whether this more general view of immunity can be applied to the nervous system: is there wider, systemic learning in the same way as there is wider, systemic immunity? Nevertheless, there is such a thing as the specific immune response, where the body resists and responds to specific antigens when it detects them. This response has much in common with learning as it involves long term acquired change as a result of earlier external environmental factors. The body “remembers” the antigens it encounters. Just as learning can be inappropriate, such as learned helplessness in depression or a tendency to place the wrong kind of value on conformity, so can the immune response, through hypersensitivity states and autoimmune conditions. Examples can include asthma, eczema, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. These maladaptive responses might be expected to take place where the presentation of information to the system is inappropriate.

Hence there are two similar situations, one involving the nervous system and the other the specific immune response. Both concern inappropriate encounters with information which fail to integrate well with how that information is presented in a less formal and more widespread situation.

Now, taking this out of the abstract, a parallel emerges between mainstream consensus on health and education when considered in this way, both rather contentious. With education, there seems to be a presumption that information is best assimilated when taken out of its environment, modified and presented to the child’s central nervous system in an artificial context. With health, the same situation occurs when antigens are thought to provoke an appropriate immune response when removed from their environment, modified and presented to the specific immune response. These processes have much in common. They are both institutional processes of abstraction of information which strike me as inappropriate because they are likely to lead to poor fits between the human being and her environment.

More specifically, excessive hygiene and immunisation, like schooling, can involve the inappropriate presentation of information to the organism. Excess hygiene is like sensory deprivation or boredom. The long-term response can be surprisingly maladaptive. It has unforeseen consequences such as self-defeating attitudes to learning and conditions where the body overreacts to otherwise harmless stimuli such as nuts.

Another system left out of this is the endocrine. Like immunity and learning, this keeps us healthy inside through the transfer of information, and it too can “learn”. The question arises of whether there are similarly inappropriate institutional factors which influence the endocrine system. One might be the over-prescription of steroids.

One final comment. Although there is much overlap, plenty of people who oppose vaccination send their children to school and plenty of children who don’t go to school have been vaccinated. Clearly parents have made decisions in both situations which they regard as appropriate and were taken in good faith. Even so, the parallels are interesting and suggest links between health and education which may be positive or negative. However, it’s important to acknowledge that the connection exists, and that it may apply elsewhere. I also wonder if the mutual hostility between the pro- and anti-vaccination camps, which is as big a problem as the issues themselves, is echoed in mutual hostility with respect to education.

788A

2012-02-06T03:25:00.001-08:00

A Delicate Matter

First of all, to avoid annoying a lot of people i’m going to add a whole load of caveats to this, possibly to the extent that most of this entry will end up consisting of them. Here we go.

I’m aware that people’s main concern is with their own families and that they understand their needs better than we do, “we” being those of us who are not them. There are lots of different “wes”. Moreover, we all have limited time and need to do various other things with our lives than sitting in front of anything as two-dimensional as a monitor or an inked sheet of paper. Origami and paper aircraft, or making paper oneself, are of course completely different concerns. In fact i have so much sympathy with this view that we dispensed with the television set as a distraction several years ago and it is also for this reason that i only reluctantly upload educational videos aimed at children on YouTube, although of course ones aimed at adults are another matter since we’re all past it and many of us have had our brains scrambled by schools, through no fault of the schools themselves of course. There are many appropriate ways of learning.

Now for the more annoying bit. Some of us are committed to autonomous education and many of us to the idea of encouraging independence in children. It would also be nice if there was an attempt to address bias in subject matter.

Now, a few years ago, i started a home ed wiki with the following quote, often erroneously attributed to Nelson Mandela, on the home page:

“We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

Incidentally, i fully acknowledge the theistic sledgehammer in the middle of the passage which, if i could be bothered, i would attempt to rephrase, but i think most people can look beyond this to a more agnostic or metaphysically realist reading.

I proceeded to produce a series of passages, sheets and the like on various subjects on which i was confident enough to feel i was able to make a positive contribution to education, such as various crafts, classical languages and the rest. After making quite a few contributions, i became aware that i was the only person doing this. This is a big problem for a wiki, since it’s supposed to be collaborative, and the bias present on that big Wiki is partly down to particular people not contributing to it. Consequently, i deleted all of the content, as it was seriously biassed towards my perspective.

And the thing is, yes, people pay lip-service to the above inspirational quote, and may live it elsewhere in their lives, but they don’t seem to do it much online.

This is what i mean: i often see people ask for links, or sharing links, to educational resources which other people have produced. There is a place for this, and in some people’s approach to children’s education it can be appropriate, but do we really believe we are so inadequate and ignorant that we have to keep doing this? We function in everyday life using the skills and knowledge we have learnt through our lives.

I would personally consider it a bad example to my children to rely largely on other people’s educational input because of the surely widely-held attitudes expressed above. We often personally try to be autonomous, but also have more widely shared beliefs, probably at least explicitly expressed by others’ actions with their children, that we want them to become autonomous themselves. If we provide resources ourselves, apart from it being intrinsically positive as a form of skill-sharing, there are a number of other positive results.

We demonstrate to our children that it can be better to do things self-sufficiently than to rely on others for information, which may or may not be accurate.
We address a bias in subject matter which may exist due to other people whose skills are in other areas contributing when we don’t – this is a major problem on Wikipedia, where for example faux scepticism tends to dominate in a number of areas.
We demonstrate to the world that we are a competent and positive learning community.

I understand that other messages are also important, such as asking for help when you need it and relying on others being OK, and also that many of us are under-confident in certain areas where there is no practical need for us to be, and i am as guilty as anyone in some of those, for instance poetry, knitting and driving are “beyond me”, with the emphasis on the quotes, but if we are to overcome this we all need to get out there and make our own resources. We are all experts in living and that’s what we’re trying to help our children to do. We need to be the threat of a good example to schools. Maybe if we are, those who are involved with schools will see our stuff and recognise its quality, and the truth that almost all families home educate will become manifest in a broader sense.

7883

2012-01-30T11:56:00.001-08:00

Bestiaries

As a herbalist, i have a fair amount to do with old herbals. They’re often useful but may need some kind of conceptual translation. Two related types of book used in mediaeval Europe were bestiaries and lapidaries, of which the latter is by far the most obscure, dealing with stones. There is a neat division between the three types: the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms. Items from each can sometimes be found in the same book. I perceive herbals as having a directly practical intent: they tell you how to identify, use, gather, prepare and grow plants. Lapidaries and bestiaries, however, strike me as fanciful in nature. They seem not to be intended for practical use. For instance, bestiaries give no advice on hunting, cooking or medical uses of the animals recorded in them. However, all three seem to be part of natural history and are based on description, rather than natural philosophy.

Bestiaries generally comprise a series of chapters, each describing an animal, seen as a beast, bird or fish. Bees are seen as birds and whales as fish, for example. Each chapter includes an illustration, a description of a striking, usually behavioural, characteristic, and sometimes a sermon-like passage explaining the spiritual significance of the animal. The pictures are often rather unlike the way we see the animal, and are often of apparently deliberately humorous tone.

The text engages a literary or religious faculty in me more than a scientific one, and i feel my impulse to think of it as intended to describe a situation literally is misplaced. I get the impression that this categorisation itself is an imposition of my mindset, which is driven to separate art and science in a way which only began after the books were compiled. I suspect that a partial explanation for this difference is that the producers and audience were more focussed on eternity than the then and there, seeing mundane life as a brief prelude and the history of the world itself as much briefer than we are wont to view it. Hence the emphasis is on what life lessons can be learnt rather than what could be observed by detached dispassionate observation of the animals concerned, which were often distant in one way or another from the reality of the people concerned with the book. The animals seem to be there as embellishments or to make the stories memorable, and there are also elements of entertainment and appeal to the emotions about the text and images. They are strikingly unlike herbals, except that herbals also try to fit their subject matter into an intricate system, which i find works as a mnemonic device and a form of system-oriented thinking in a superior manner to at least elementary botany, ecology and therapeutics. Herbals seldom venture into fable, though one exception is the mandrake:

Though we might separate the animals in bestiaries into mythical and real, things are rather less clear cut. While many species share the names of those we know today, many of them have very different characteristics. For instance, bears lick their cubs into shape, lion cubs are born dead and the father breathes life into them three days later – like many other stories, a religious allegory – and there are many apparent confusions, combinations and duplications. For instance, a number of different apes are described as giving birth to twins, one of which is abandoned and the other of which is fatally smothered by the mother, a tale reminiscent of the one told today about giant pandas, which are said to bear twins and abandon one, but of course a panda is bear-like, not an ape. Many species are seen as hybrids of others. Whales, for instance, are both fishes

(aquatic animals in this definition – mammal was seemingly not a familiar notion) and crosses between serpents and turtles. Others are duplications: the “monocerus” and the unicorn may be described separately.

Unicorn

Monocerus

The external history of the genre reflects a change in views of and approaches to the world. Unusually for him, the philosopher Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century BCE, gave a remarkably accurate account of many animals in his work, based substantially on first-hand observation and the testimony of people who were familiar with them, such as beekeepers, and includes factual details which have only recently been recognised as correct such as the detachable reproductive tentacle of the male octopus. By the first century of the Christian Era, Pliny the Elder’s Historia Naturalis was a secondary source, not based on his own observations but still quite accurate. During the following century, an unknown author, possibly Clement of Alexandria, wrote Physiologus, the prototype of future bestiaries. Tellingly, the title is derived from the fact that many of the entries include a phrase translatable into English as “The naturalist” or Physiologus, “says”, and was not available to the West in the original Greek. Hence first-hand authority was even more distant. It is the source of such stories as the one about the lion mentioned above and of the pelican drawing blood from its breast to resurrect its chicks.

Pelican

Physiologus is allegorical in nature, in a manner akin to Aesop’s Fables, and this is probably the key to the tone of the works which were to come after it. Deviation from literal accuracy increases with later bestiaries. However, to say that is to look at it from our own perspective. One thing it seems to signify is that we separate artistic and scientific concerns and the intellectuals of Europe in the Middle Ages did not.

Bringing this forward to today, just as was the case back then, we have separate academic subjects grouped into the humanities, social sciences, arts and sciences, meaning for example that history is not meant to be fictional, geometrical diagrams are not drawn in an abstract expressionist style and scientific papers are not written in verse. Though this can often help, this is not the only way to do things and when we look at how things are done now, we might benefit from ignoring these categories at least some of the time to stimulate thought, creativity and versatility. So when i say i would like there to be a new bestiary, i mean that there should be a creative work about animals we believe to be mythical which is emotionally engaging, uses the imagination to combine fantasy and science and raises as many questions as it answers.

787B

2012-01-26T03:35:00.001-08:00

Language Barriers

English has the feature of having two distinctive registers to its vocabulary, whose tones differ in terms of learnedness. This is also extended in the higher register to at least two further degrees, and of course this is a simplistic way of looking at it. Although there were certain features before that, most of this division is connected to the Norman invasion of 1066 and the gradual loss of territories on the Continent, leading to the nobility throwing their lot in with this land and their language gradually merging with our speech. This nobility is reflected today in the illusion of greater intelligence conferred by the use of what might be called “long words”, though some of them are not.

There are a few cases of words taken from Latin and French before the Norman conquest which are notable for lacking “poshness”. Examples are the Latin “mouse” and “pope” and the French “proud”, which was also transformed in a very English way into the abstract noun “pride”. Quite a lot of other words are now so ingrained in English that they too have lost their status, such as “very” and “use”. There are also a number of other words from Scandinavian languages which are often so close to their English counterparts that they have merged or carry a somewhat different though related sense: they lack a change in register. These include “drink” and “drench”, “skip" and “shift” and “them” and “’em”.

It’s perfectly common for a language to have more than one register or even for the more technical terms to be from a language closely related to Latin when the language itself isn’t, but there are also many languages which are less open than English in this respect, including German (and Icelandic even more so), Hebrew and Chinese. Whereas these may have registers, there is little difference in the origin of the words in each and so the meanings can be clearer to more people.

The idea of registers in this context communicates something other than a dictionary definition style of meaning. It also fulfils the roles of establishing an in-group and an out-group. Language can put at ease or it can be about asserting superiority for one or more people using a particular register. It can also be an anti-language, like the use of particular words in youth culture, either for good or ill.

Learning the jargon can be a passport to understanding and a form of shorthand. Although the words can be longer, they might not be as long as the words needed to explain the meaning otherwise. There is also a shortcut to learning much technical vocabulary: learn Greek and Latin and the meaning of many technical terms is uncovered. This is because, as well as the French/English division in English-speaking countries, Latin and to a lesser extent Greek have dominated intellectual communication in the past in European culture.

Using a higher verbal register can also help convince people that you know what you’re talking about, or even that there is content to what you’re saying when there isn’t. It can also be used to refer to things which exist but aren’t worth thinking about, or persuade others to think like you think, even when that isn’t in their best interests or in the interests of a larger group. Examples of such language would include a phrase such as “educational premises”, which assumes that learning is best facilitated in locations dedicated to the purpose.

Beyond this, not all learning is linguistic. Learning to test a baby for clicky hips, to knit, drive, paint or draw are all substantially non-linguistic. Significantly, though many practical skills benefit or can be communicated well using language, they often include a substantial practical, “hands-on” element. These are often the skills which ensure our survival. For instance, driving is a hazardous activity and there is a craft to avoiding the dangers inherent in it which appears to be second nature to many motorists. In a different sense, the ability to knit well seems not to be primarily linguistic to me, who cannot knit, but enables one to make clothes. Learning to provide the classic three basic needs of food, clothes and shelter, and many things which follow from them, are substantially non-linguistic skills. Moreover, many linguistic skills can be acquired simply by manipulating symbols without grasping their meaning.

Given all of this, and i know this is a bit of a “splodge” of a blog posting, suggests three areas of learning which might be important.

If you learn Latin and Greek, it helps you to fake being clever and is a passport to understanding technical vocabulary. It isn’t just about dead white men, partly because the long chain of dead white men who did use those languages were good at hoarding their learning rather than sharing it. Access to that information can be gained by learning classical languages, even if the language concerned is in a mother tongue.
Take care with language use so that we can both say things on our own terms and include others, thereby making sure we have more freedom and “craftiness”. Spot when others are taking away our words or language to serve narrow-minded or short-sighted needs, which may not be ours or even theirs.
Ease off on reading and writing so we don’t plonk children in front of a book in the same way they might be plonked in front of a screen. This has its place and shouldn’t be denigrated, but people need to learn to do things themselves rather than just reading and writing about them.

7875

2012-01-20T08:45:00.001-08:00

Why i think we’re all doomed and my response to it.

OK, frivolous title for a serious subject. I often assert that i believe we are one of the final generations of the species, and that Homo sapiens will soon become extinct, without explaining why. Hence this blog post.

In detail, my belief is as follows: Sometime in the very near future, by which i mean a couple of generations, our species will have become extinct, and that it is unlikely that enough will be done to prevent this. I’m aware that it’s long been popularly believed that the world is about to end and i’m open to the possibility that i’ve done this. Moreover, i realise that in a sense, the belief that human beings are about to disappear without trace is an unusual belief for a Christian. Nonetheless, it is what i believe.

I have several reasons for thinking this is so, and i’m going to present two of them in detail. I’m not going to mention climate change as one of them because i don’t want to engage with that argument. Nor will i be talking about the question of overpopulation. Even so, there is an interesting tangential argument about high population which is relevant. It’s known as the “Doomsday Argument”:

There are said to have been somewhere near 80 thousand million humans on this planet. The human population at most times since the Mount Toba eruption during the last ice age has been increasing, and though there are some drops due to the Four Horsemen the general trend is not only upwards but exponentially so: population is currently doubling about every three decades. I was born at a time when the world population was less than half its current size and if growth continues in this way, children born in 2042 will be born into a world whose population is about twice as big as now.

If the lifetime of this species (and any predecessors able to conceive of something like the idea of the end of the world) is finite and population increases over most of its history, and if we can consider ourselves to have been born at a random point in that history, the probability that we have been born near the end is higher than at other times simply because there are more people now than ever before. Therefore, it is more likely than ever before that we are about to become extinct, and with each passing generation the probability increases. Therefore, there is not only a relatively high risk that we are the last generation, but our children are even more likely to be it, and so on, as long as the population is rising.

Although i thought of this independently, this is quite a well-known argument for imminent human extinction. An important implication for a parent is that one’s children should be prepared for difficult circumstances to a greater degree than usual.

Another reason is the increasing complexity of the infrastructure. As technology changes, we become more dependent on a system which involves enough people to have sufficient skills to keep it going, and for there to be sufficient material resources to enable this. This has in fact been the case for a very long time, but it is also a trend which increases with the rate of technological change. This also involves increasing risk. A Specific example is our reliance on distant sources of energy such as power stations and oil and coal deposits, which depend on complex systems to continue functioning. Another instance is the dependence of telecommunications on a physical infrastructure such as mobile ‘phone networks, cable-based internet and, again, reliable sources of power. Today, ordinary utilities and the likes of essential drug supplies depend on all of that working well. The more complex this system becomes, the harder it is to guarantee its maintenance. That maintenance also depends on a high level of education, and there needs to be a high level of practical skill to keep it going. If it fails, which is again increasingly likely as time goes by, people will need to be creative, flexible and resourceful.

Other arguments for our extinction in the near future include reduction in biodiversity, the existence of the ability to produce weapons of mass destruction, reliance on scarce physical resources and conversion of those resources into a form which makes them difficult or impossible to recover, the evolution of new pathogens and the appearance of new diseases. Each one of these reasons may be wrong, but taken together there are so many of them that the probability of at least one of them happening is high. It also seems that, just as the Doomsday Argument is that probability of human extinction increases with population, a similar argument could be made that the more long-term risks emerge the longer the species survives, meaning that the risk of our extinction rises in any case.

It’s for these reasons that i believe it’s likely that we are about to die out. I also think that attempts to prevent this, where a risk is apparently identifiable, are not significant: not enough people are doing enough, and there are unknown risks about which we can clearly do nothing. Therefore, i think it’s almost certain we will soon die out.

The question is, how to respond to this, and this is where i make two different kinds of response. One is internal: i think this is effectively a bereavement and that thinking of it in those terms explains quite a lot of how people behave. Deep down, many people have a hunch that we haven’t got long to go. They therefore respond as if they’re grieving, which i’ve possibly over-enthusiastically seen as a five-stage process involving denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I would like to reach the stage of acceptance and stay there. Some suggested manifestations of each stage might be:

Denial: I would say climate change denial here but i don’t want to annoy anyone. Therefore, i’m going to give the example of a general unwillingness of people to face the prospect of changing their own approach to how they live in a manner which is beneficial to themselves. Sorry to be vague.

Anger: The Occupy movement, demonstrations and non-violent direct action.

Bargaining: The Transitions movement, which inspired me to write this entry in the first place.

Depression: I don’t really need to justify this i think.

Acceptance: This is a stage which is quite unstable, not one which makes one superior but, i hope, one which i’ve reached. Note that it is beyond depression. I am not claiming that this is a depressing prospect, simply an inevitable one.

Note also that this doesn’t mean i will forget about the whole project of attempting to alleviate whatever the oncoming disaster is. I try to act in such a way that if all people acted similarly they would be able to prevent our extinction.

My other response is to ensure that children are able to remain resourceful, inspired and engaged with the world in such a way that they can benefit from any situation the world throws at them. I am trying to provide opportunities that maximise self-sufficiency and a general rather than a specific level of competence. This belief is a major motivation for me making the children aware of their choice with respect to their upbringing. Also, as many children as possible need this flexibility, which is not currently being provided by schools.

Hence this is a big reason, behind it all, to see schools as inadvisable and hazardous to the long-term survival of the species.

7871

2012-01-17T13:33:00.001-08:00

The Fun They Had

Here’s another depiction of children’s education in SF. Once again, schools have ceased to exist:

http://users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/funtheyhad.html

This is a short-short by Isaac Asimov, written in 1951. Margie’s mechanical teacher, an educational computer which covers the entire school curriculum, has broken down and she has found a paper book. She and her friend Tommy are surprised that the text on the pages of the book doesn’t move.

Unlike the previous example, this version of a world which has superceded schooling has replaced it with school at home, which is unpopular with the children and Margie wishes she was still able to go to a physical building where teaching takes place. Nevertheless, various comments are made which suggest the inefficiencies of schooling as practiced in the 1950s, and possibly until the present day.

“How could a man be as smart as a teacher?” It’s implied that individual human beings can’t possibly have enough knowledge to teach subjects properly, which is similar to the internet today. The knowledge of a mechanical teacher is seen, at least by the children, to be superhuman. This suggests certain things about the nature of education and knowledge, such as the idea that a child’s mind is an empty vessel waiting to be filled with objective knowledge, and that this is the activity of children’s education.

It’s also considered remarkable that all children at the same age are taught the same thing. Margie says, “But my mother says a teacher has to be adjusted to fit the mind of each boy and girl it teaches and that each kid has to be taught differently."

Education for children is still referred to as “school” and children are generally isolated from each other while education takes place.

This particular picture of future education is more like the stereotype of education otherwise than at school involving social isolation, which however in this case takes place because children are seen as having individual needs which cannot be served simultaneously. However, children do socialise outside school hours. Education also seems to take place at home rather than more flexibly, for example in the neighbourhood, the wider community or other “educational” venues such as schools or museums. Nonetheless, it is still assumed that information technology would make schools obsolete as institutions. There is also an element of irony because children in 1951 were clearly about as reluctant to attend school as they are today. The lives of children, however, seem to have gone downhill as a result of the change, since they are able to socialise less.

Again, the assumption is that computer-aided learning replaces the kind of learning which is part of the explicit curriculum, and that other functions of school are subsidiary. One of these functions, socialising with other children, is fulfilled in different ways and not so well by the system which replaced schools. This has become a stereotype of “homeschooling”.

Hthe childcare function of school is fulfilled is not explicitly resolved in this story. Two answers to this are suggested by the time of publication and other Asimov stories, and i would also suggest a third, which may answer the question in this and other stories.

The first answer is the ascribed gender roles of the ‘50s, where it can be presumed that women stay at home and men go to work outside the home. This is not universal in Asimov’s stories by any means, though it does sometimes happen, for example in ‘Satisfaction Guaranteed’. In the Robot stories, however, Susan Calvin is clearly a career woman with no interest in children, though it is hinted that she has a nurturing instinct which moves her to care for robots instead. The robots are a second answer: Asimov’s robots are safe and care for children elsewhere, such as in ‘Robbie’. Therefore, we can probably conclude that the childcare function of schools has been superceded as well as their educational function, though in a different way.

The third reason childcare may not be an issue here or in other SF stories where schools have been technologically superceded is the nature of work in such a world. Either there is such a high level of automation that society is now based on leisure, in this situation perhaps similar to that of the Ancient Greek or Roman slave-owning class, or because working from home is now more feasible.

So again, i would ask the question: why the discrepancy between futuristic SF depictions of children’s education and those of the real present day? What functions are schools now performing given that the extent of advance in the educational use of IT is, as before, probably underestimated in these stories? Though an argument could be made for socialisation in this particular story, it doesn’t seem to be childcare in this case, given the wider context.

And again, why is school education still a majority activity?

786A

2012-01-14T05:23:00.001-08:00

Science Faction and Education

Back in the ‘70s, when i was an impressionable child, there was a vogue for what a school friend of mine called “Science Faction”, or, as he put it, “science fiction written as if it was true”. An example of this might be a mock-up of a newspaper front page covering current affairs in the Galactic Empire. There were various books written in this form, varying from the mushy soft (implausible) to the fairly hard (scientifically plausible), without a strong narrative element. The most well-known survivors of this genre from that time include the Terran Trade Federation series. Similar books are still sometimes published today, such as the Haynes Manual for the Millenium Falcon (though of course Star Wars is not SF).

One of my favourite books of this time is the ‘Handbook For Space Pioneers’ by L. Stephen Wolfe and Roy L Wysack, published in 1978. This is a description of the eight planets colonised by humans in the year 2376, going into considerable detail about their statistics, life forms and, most interestingly for the purposes of this blog entry, the societies on these planets, notably for the purposes of this blog, education. Other content of this book has been reviewed unwittingly elsewhere on the web, but is hard to find.

The book was written at a time when the post-war consensus had yet to break down, though being American it is more committed to the principles of free enterprise than the UK economy was at the time. Nevertheless, it implies clear assumptions about how the education of children would develop which is reflected in other science fiction, for instance to some extent Asimov’s ‘The Fun They Had’, which can be found here:

http://www.kunaschools.org/staff/KunaMiddleSchool/Fahrner_Terri/Documents/TheFunTheyHad0001.pdf

(I may refer to this in a future blog).

Anyway, the eight planets, discovered and colonised in order, are as follows:

Wyzdom: in the Alpha Centauri system and considered a lucky find, by the date the book is set it has been inhabited for about three centuries and is a mature society whose standards of living are like Earth’s in the 24th century. The model of education on Wyzdom is therefore not influenced by material necessity such as the lack of resources or poor communications and transport: remoteness or inaccessibility are, for example, not factors.

Education on Wyzdom is lifelong and referred to as “common”. There is no state education and children learn by a combination of non-profit cooperatives, private tuition and computer-aided learning. Autonomous education begins at below what we would think of as school age and continues throughout life.

Poseidous: A planet whose land surface consists entirely of small islands and consequently has a wide variety of political systems and independent states. Two contrasting islands are Troon, a hedonistic society basically inhabited by hippies who have few material needs due to the good climate and abundant resources, and who pass on their culture efficiently nevertheless without any formal education system at all. This is contrasted with Moamba, a totalitarian state where government policy is to minimise family life. Childbearing on Moamba is seen as a grim duty to the state, everyone wears overalls and children are raised in publically-funded childcare centres and then compulsory state boarding schools. A small minority of parents look after their own children. The general depiction of Moamban society is negative and the reader is clearly expected to disapprove of this system.

Brobdingnag: This is the newest of the older colonies, and there was a gap between the arrival of humans on this planet and the following due to First Contact taking place. Hence it is, like Wyzdom and unlike Poseidous, neither underdeveloped nor geographically fragmented. The continent which is most densely populated and on which the planetary capital is situated, i.e. the most developed one, where like Wyzdom there is basically an Earth-like level of technology, has a law requiring parents to purchase education for their children up to the age of nineteen. However, there and elsewhere, education is not state-funded and local schools are organised and funded by the community as opposed to local or planetary government.

Genesis: This planet lacks any complex life and is therefore considered to be a predictable and controllable environment which can be easily developed to human needs, even lacking infectious diseases. This gives the planet a level of predictability which means that a command economy is appropriate for the colony. Little is said about children’s education here, but since it is a state socialist, though democratic, society, it can probably be presumed that schooling is both state-funded and compulsory on Genesis, though this is not explicit.

Mammon: High in rare earths and on the lower edge of habitability, a corporation led the colonisation of this planet but it has now become a fully-fledged society. The autobiographical section describes the education of the writer as a child, which is materially under-resourced and led by ordinary people volunteering as teachers and maximising their use of physical materials such as drawing on the ground with sticks. There is also computer-aided education.

Yom: Children’s education is not mentioned on this planet but it may be too primitive and new for it to have become an issue. However, the autobiographical section describes the foundation of the planet’s first university.

Romulus: Since this planet, which is double and settled under special conditions because the other planet contains a technologically primitive but intelligent humanoid species, is governed under socialist principles, it may have compulsory schooling. Laissez-faire activity is inappropriate here due to the non-interference policy.

Athena: So far unsettled.

What interests me about all this is that, in spite of the fact that this book is in no way focussed on education, the assumption was that children’s education in the future would be substantially autonomous, not funded by the state and substantially aided by ICT, whether or not the society in which it existed was technologically advanced. The point is that this is an assumption: the idea that schools as they then stood would still exist in the future was completely rejected almost without conscious thought. Moreover, this assumption is typical of science fiction of the time: it was assumed that because of communications and information technology, state schooling would either vanish or become more autonomous.

Which leads us to ask the question: Why is the developed world not in fact like this today? Why have we gone in the opposite direction with education policy? These works generally underestimate the rate of progress in IT, and yet for some reason we still have schools. So what’s that about?

7863

2012-01-06T08:23:00.001-08:00

Thomas Hardy and the Star Trek Mirror Universe

Do i want to anger Star Trek fans? Do i want to anger Thomas Hardy fans? I don’t know. One thing i do know, though, is that i’m more familiar with Star Trek than Thomas Hardy.

However, i do have a general impression of Thomas Hardy’s writing, and one thing which strikes me as a flaw is that there are too many coincidences. I have the impression of a plot which is kept going by a series of improbable occurrences. There is sometimes a justification for this, i’ve heard – a character may be cursed, in which case she may well appear to be unlucky, and presumably then a string of incredible mishaps is defensible. Incidentally, should anyone wish to puncture my bubble of ignorance here they would be most welcome.

Most fiction is only well-plotted if it minimises the element of coincidence and improbability because the more of those there are, the less convincing the story is and the more likely the reader is to be distracted by the improbability. Moreover, unlikely events may be unconnected except by the fact that they occur in the same story, so they break up the flow of the story-telling in a way which makes it feel like consecutive seemingly random events messily stuck together rather than a story. On the other hand, a story with no remarkable events at all might be extremely boring and many unremarkable things should be excluded for that reason. Therefore, my general view is that every story should be allowed one unlikely event, perhaps near the start, from which other events should unfold as consequences.

A plethora of coincidences or improbabilities is not always a sign of a bad story, however, because it can be the main point of the story. This might apply to the Hardy novel in question, which might be ‘Tess of the d’Urbevilles’ incidentally. If a character is cursed, misfortunes have to befall her, and these are going to be unlikely. Those who see Biblical stories as myth might cite them as examples of stories whose point is the very improbability of the events in them, pointing to the unseen character known to us as God. Mythologies in general contain many such stories. Another example is a book, which i’d love to track down, where two friends invent a luck machine, but go on to discover that luck has positive and negative charge like electricity, meaning that for one person to be unusually lucky, another has to be unusually unlucky. I’m sure these are all good stories, but their quality is connected to their emphasis of the improbability.

Hardy’s novels may work in this way too but if this is not evident to a reader today, to me that seems to prevent them from being universal in their appeal. It may be that the subtext of, for example, being cursed, would have been evident to most people reading it when they were published. On the other hand, maybe working at understanding the circumstances of a story is a good thing, and the fact that they have provoked my curiosity in this respect means that they do work.

Now for the more comfortable ground of Star Trek.

There is an ongoing occasional theme in Star Trek, beginning in the Original Series, of a “Mirror Universe”, where there are counterparts of the protagonists in the universe depicted in the rest of the series, but they are in some way dark or evil. In the first episode which depicted this, It might be thought that this is a parallel universe, but this is where problems emerge.

Given that Star Trek is possible at all, the main Star Trek universe is a possible world, and the Star Trek Mirror Universe is separate possible world. They have different but remarkably parallel histories. There is in fact no particular reason why this should not be so if there are an infinite number of possible worlds whose timelines vary widely enough. Having said that, there is one thing the Mirror Universe isn’t, which is an alternate history with a small number of points of divergence (PODs).

It’s a science fiction cliche to depict worlds with single points of divergence to our own, either early on in the story or off-stage entirely, classic works of this kind including Philip K Dick’s ‘The Man In The High Castle’ and Len Deighton’s ‘SSGB’ where the Axis powers won the Second World War, or Murray Leinster’s early story ‘Sideways In Time’, where several alternate histories appear in the same world with various PODs.

Economy suggests that a good alternate history story would depict a universe with only one POD, although again the principle that if the story is about how many PODs would be needed for a state of affairs to exist, that would also be acceptable – one way of doing this is to use multiple PODs to illustrate how inevitable a particular actual event really is. There are other possibilities here, such as the world of Ill Bethisad, which shadows our history in a similar way to the Star Trek Mirror Universe, but not in a simple light/dark way so much as – well, just look at it and you’ll see what i mean:

Ill Bethisad

It’s more a literary convention than a scientific principle, though it does follow a principle of parsimony like Ockham’s Razor does. However, there are an infinite number of possible worlds, and where a plot device is used to move the point of view between a world closely resembling the actual one and another possible world, the two worlds need not be simple forks with a few PODs.

The Mirror Universe is in fact not a simple fork but an alternate timeline containing the same entities, similar institutions and the like but not as a result of a single POD in spite of what the internal story might show. Zefram Cochrane shot the Vulcans and stole their spacecraft in the Mirror Universe, but this is not an adequate explanation for all subsequent events depicted in that possible world. It does not explain how everyone in the main Star Trek universe seems to have a version in the Mirror Universe because that would imply that details of the timeline, though surrounded by differences, would be identical, such as the conceptions of James T. Kirk and Jonathan Archer by counterpart parents, with the same sperm and ova being involved.

This in itself does not stretch credulity too far because there are after all an infinite number of possible worlds. However, a couple of things are missing from the explanation and there seems to be no in-universe way of providing it. Firstly, if the Mirror Universe were simply to be allowed to go its own way without contact with the main Star Trek universe, the problem would be less severe, though it would still exist. Every moment that passes in the Mirror Universe is improbable, but every possible world has a probability of zero anyway, so that’s not a problem. However, once a story takes place in the Mirror Universe, every event which occurs which has a counterpart in the main universe makes it more improbable and harder to believe. In this respect, the Star Trek Mirror Universe is very similar to Thomas Hardy and has the same flaw.

There is a second flaw, however, absent from Thomas Hardy. Though the Mirror Universe can safely be allowed to plough its own furrow, even if that furrow is suspiciously like the main Star Trek one in some respects and arbitrarily unlike it in others, except in that it’s in some way “dark” or “evil” (and the physical universe doesn’t care about that, and is never portrayed as doing so in Star Trek, so why should it happen?), conduits from the main universe usually seem to end up in that universe without having any reason for doing so. Whereas there could be an explanation for it – morphic resonance maybe – there is never an attempt even to hint what it might be.

So, to summarise: Thomas Hardy’s novels and the Star Trek Mirror Universe suffer from the same problem: they pile up a heap of improbable events without providing a real connection between them, which makes them both ultimately unsatisfying and difficult to suspend disbelief in.

7828

2011-11-25T04:58:00.001-08:00

The Handwavy Physics of Interdimensional Exchange

I’m currently in the process of writing a series of stories, some of which i’ve decided to set in a fictional parallel universe i call the Caroline timeline. Details of it can be found here:

http://althistory.wikia.com/wiki/Caroline_Era

In the story “Buttonless”, an underachieving menial worker at a university in our version of reality finds himself transported into the Caroline timeline. This entry is to explain the imaginary science behind the story.

First, some real physics:

1) The light cone: An event cannot influence other events faster than the speed of light. Therefore, whatever happens on Alpha Centauri can only influence what happens here about four years later. Until then, it’s irrelevant. This also works in the other direction: what happens here cannot influence anything on Alpha Centauri for more than four years. This is because Alpha Centauri is about four light years away.

Thinking about this in three dimensions, it means that every event can be thought of as starting a spherical ripple of cause and effect which expands out from the point where it occurs at the speed of light. If time is thought of as a dimension like those of space, this means that every event is at the end of a cone stretching back into the past and at the beginning of another cone stretching forwards into the future, like an hourglass whose waist is the present place and time, except that these cones are four-dimensional: a “horizontal” section through such a cone would be spherical rather than circular. This is referred to as a light cone.

Any events linked by cause and effect to here and now must be within that cone, because the velocity of light is the ultimate speed limit and for a chain of cause and effect to pass from the outside to the inside of the cone, something would have to travel faster than light.

2) Time travel paradoxes: If travel backwards in time is possible, it appears to create a problem because of the “grandfather paradox”, whose classic version is that if one prevented one’s own conception, one wouldn’t exist to perform the act which prevented one’s existence in the first place, and so on without resolution.

Now some more speculative stuff:

Two possible solutions to the grandfather paradox:

1) Travel backwards in time must be accompanied by displacement outside the light cone. Whereas “back travel” is possible, it must also involve something similar to moving faster than light in space. That is, if one travels one year back in time, one must also be at least a light year away from one’s departure point. This would prevent paradoxes because it would be impossible to influence anything within the past light cone of the departure point. It also has a symmetry to it because ordinary travel in space also involves travel forwards in time, again within the light cone, but stretching into the future from one’s point of departure.

2) Travel backwards in time must involve moving into a different timeline, i.e. a parallel universe, in which the paradox caused happened anyway. There is however a problem with this because in such a parallel universe, the event may not have been caused by the time travel itself.

I suggest that these two solutions are compatible and linked, as follows:

When an event occurs which could go either way, it can be seen as causing a “fork” in a time stream. If someone tosses a coin to decide whether to take one course of action or another, the point of divergence (POD) between those two time streams appears to be the coin landing as heads or tails. In fact, the POD is earlier because a coin landing a particular way up is in a chain of cause and effect connected to how high it is tossed, air currents, the initial height of the coin above the surface it lands on and so forth. Therefore, the real POD is conceivably much earlier, perhaps even the beginning of time. However, that then involves another problem. It means that an entire universe has to be posited simply to account for a toss of a coin, which offends the sensibilities. It would also mean that we don’t know which of a very large number of different universes we inhabit because we will never observe which of almost all PODs is actually the case.

There is a solution to this. Rather than seeing the forking of timelines as a metaphor, they can be seen as literally arrayed along a dimension representing probability. Since at any moment there are a very large number of possible forks, their density then becomes effectively a continuum of points and time can be seen as a plane rather than a series of forking paths. Measuring the distance of a possible event then becomes a measurement of its probability and probability is then effectively an extra dimension. If we never find out about the truth, that simply means we are ourselves extended in this dimension rather than just confined to the actual universe of time and space. We have breadth across a series of possible worlds.

There is another problem with this view. It cannot account for more than three separate events of exactly equal probability. If two coins are tossed, the two heads possibility could be seen as to the left of the two tails possibility and the “direct” future could be seen as containing a possibility of a heads and a tails outcome. However, there are two heads and tails outcomes, so this cannot work if they are equally probable. One solution would be to suppose that no two events are of exactly equal probability, but this feels like a kludge. There is, however, another solution: two probability dimensions. That would allow for a circle to be drawn of equally probable events, in other words an infinite number, thereby solving the problem.

Although two probability dimensions seems to be the minimum feasible number, nothing specifically rules out more. To keep it simple though, i want to assume there are only two.

So, returning to the time travel paradox problem, if this is an accurate description of the state of affairs of the Multiverse, travel backwards in time which avoids paradoxes by shifting into a different timeline then simply becomes a diagonal shift similar to that involved in a straightforward spatial solution to the paradox problem where there is displacement outside the light curve with travel backwards in time.

Putting this all together, i get this:

A technique is found which can cause an object to change its space-time coordinates. Applying this technique causes an object to shift in space without time passing forwards. At first, this appears to be an instantaneous teleportation technique, but it soon emerges that the shift also takes place in time. The object is shifted backwards in time by a distance equivalent to how far it is shifted in space. So, moving an object a distance of one light year also causes it to travel back in time one year, because otherwise it would involve a problem with special relativity. This is not, however, the complete picture of what’s happening. An anomalous feature of these shifts is that the objects sometimes seem to alter when they arrive. This is in fact because they are not simply shifting in time and space but also into completely different timelines, and there is a corresponding event in the other timeline where a similar object shifts into this one. Since the other timeline has a different history, this object is often different. This has to happen because otherwise mass and energy would be lost from one timeline and gained in another, which violates the first law of thermodynamics - energy cannot be created or destroyed, and according to relativity, mass is energy, so mass cannot be created or destroyed either. Therefore, the technique appears to combine teleportation, time travel and the ability to enter an alternate universe, but is in fact an exchange of objects between two timelines. Also, in order for this to happen, the “teleportation” must take place simultaneously in both timelines.

Associated phenomena might therefore be that a laboratory mouse exchanged with another timeline would have a 50% chance of having the opposite sex of its counterpart, a stopwatch might be designed differently and so on.

I have also chosen to assume that although in the ordinary spatial dimensions along with time, only distance can be controlled rather than direction, in the probability dimensions the control of direction is also possible. Therefore, the Caroline and Gordon timelines can swap items freely.

The objects swapped can be trivial and inconsequential. For instance, an eighty kilogramme human being can be swapped with eighty kilogrammes of air molecules, so they would be replaced by a large volume of air which would lead to them being briefly surrounded by a vacuum in the timeline they entered and cause a sudden increase of pressure in the one they exited and the air entered. Alternatively, they could be exchanged with soil, leading to a less dramatic event of a human-shaped pile of soil replacing them where they exited but them being buried alive where they entered. It is therefore much easier simply to swap individuals.

How the exchange device works: There are two grids of electrically charged singularities in the booth, one at the top, one at the bottom. These are fired towards each other at close to the speed of light using a pulse of electromagnetic induction. As they pass through the matter in the booth, they displace it into the other timeline, location and time at a very high rate, effectively in the form of countless cylindrical slices. These are so close together that it does not damage the matter - the forces between the particles composing it are conserved and there is no time for it to lead to any kind of physical movement. At the same time, particles are exchanged between the two timelines to conserve mass and energy. Hence the objects are swapped.

I have assumed that the inventors of this device are initially unaware of what it actually does. The only hint they have is that they need to provide it with what seems to be too many parameters for it to work. However, they have assumed that some of the parameters are arbitrary when in fact they determine the timeline with which the contents of the booth is exchanged.

What are quaternions and octonions?
This bit is based on genuine mathematics.
Quaternions and octonions are hypercomplex numbers. A complex number is a two-dimensional value on the “number plane”. Just as there is a real “number line” stretching from minus infinity to plus infinity, on which real numbers lie, so there is a second imaginary number line forming a second axis like a graph. Imaginary numbers are seen as valid entities because they provide a solution to the equation x*x=-1. As it stands, no single real number can be multiplied by itself to give the answer -1: -1*-1=1 and 1*1=1. Therefore, it was posited that there is a second number line perpendicular to the first. A number on the plane formed by these two coordinates is known as a complex number, and they appear as solutions to the equations in relativity as the values of the mass of particles travelling faster than light.

Hypercomplex numbers are a generalisation of this idea to more coordinates. A quaternion is a “four-dimensional” number, and an octonion is an “eight-dimensional” number.

Here comes the vaguer, more hand-wavy bit: I have assumed that the physicists studying the displacement booth were describing its behaviour using quaternions because it seems to be a complete description of where the booth appears to relocate objects: a certain distance away from the starting point in the three dimensions of space and the fourth of time. However, they found that the equations needed to describe this seemed to be more complicated than they needed to be because what they were in fact describing was a displacement in eight dimensions rather than four. Tom’s insight is that the displacement is best described by octonions, eight-dimensional numbers, rather than quaternions because of this. His dreams are hints that this is what’s going on, but the Caroline-to-Gordon Tom realises this before the Gordon-to-Caroline Tom.

There are also eight PODs between the Caroline and Gordon timelines. These partly represent the eightfold coordinate position of the Caroline and Gordon timelines relative to each other, in other words the “direction” of the Caroline timeline. The Gordon timelines are in fact a “cluster” of eight timelines, each of which is itself a cluster, so they are a region in the multiverse rather than a single timeline like the Caroline one. The Caroline timeline is also “straighter” and the Gordon timelines more “divergent”, in the sense that the Caroline is an extrapolation of apparent trends taken forwards from the 1970s and has fewer improbable events in it than the Gordon timelines. For example, the Gordon timelines depend on two major figures narrowly escaping assassination attempts and two other major figures being improbably assassinated, and two divorces occurring at a time when they were rare. Therefore, it’s our timeline which is improbable and not the Caroline one, so we’re “off to one side” compared to it.

77A3

2011-09-29T11:55:00.000-07:00

Bet you thought those were just numbers.

-15647 (roughly): Oogonium formation from primary germ cells begins.
-3220: Results of meiosis produces a haploid cell which peristalsis moves - flagellum not yet functional.
-3205: LMP.
-3190: <Ahem>.
-3189: Ootid: Diploid again.
-3174: Awareness impinges beyond the internal environment.
-3167: Heart begins beating. Neural tube forming. Defect in future cauda equina ultimately leads to unusual autonomic and lower peripheral nervous system function.
-3133: SRY gene activates.
Minus2909: Born.

7793

2011-09-20T03:15:00.001-07:00

Companions, Lords and Ladies

These three words are linked by loaves. A companion is someone with (cum) whom one shares a loaf (panis), a lord is a “loaf-ward” – he looks after one’s loaf, and a lady is a “loaf-arranger” – she arranges for one to receive a loaf.

I’m thinking right now about three situations in which loaves and other food are shared, and i’d like to compare them: shared meals and refreshments in a neighbourhood, shared lunches at a home ed group and shared bread and wine in Communion. This is going to be mainly anthropological, but I can’t avoid some Christian elements and i’m not ashamed of them, so here we go.

I’m involved in two church initiatives involving food and the neighbourhood. One of them is a late night cafe where we provide hot drinks, soup, crisps and biscuits to anyone who wishes to drop in. These people are generally not Christian, so in a sense they are outsiders to us, but the act of offering these things to them is a good thing in itself and provides an opportunity for companionship, both between us and them and among themselves. The other is a fortnightly breakfast at church including members and non-members, and is of course substantially about food and companionship. It’s more mixed than the late night cafe, so to us within the church it’s the sharing of a meal with fellow Christians, and to those outside the church it’s the sharing of a meal within the community.

Then there’s Communion. This is a lot of things, but one of its meanings to me is that it’s a symbolic shared meal with other people in our church, other churches on the planet, Christians in the past back to the Last Supper, Christ, and further back still to the Passover meal celebrated for centuries before that. It’s also sharing a meal with all future Christians and with Christ in eternity, the eternal feast in Heaven where everyone will have what they need, freely given. Everyone will be fed.

All of these meals, regardless of religious perspective, have the effect of binding people together through eating food together. If you’re not Christian, you can lay aside what you doubtless see as my freaky God-bothering and just look at it as a social phenomenon: we define and bond our group through food and drink and we also invite others to share with us. This is even true of communion.

There is another shared meal in our experience as a family whose children don’t go to school, at the regular Tuesday meeting which as it happens also takes place in a church. There, people cook lunch together and share it. In my mind, the genuine obligation exists not to eat without providing food or at least contributing in another way. This shared meal, like the others, is also bonding. However, unlike the others, there is a barrier between me and the people who share, for two reasons. Since i’m duty-bound to contribute to the meal, providing food cost me money, and since for us money is in short supply, this made it harder to eat for the rest of the week. Also, the children in this family have been reluctant to eat the food provided. Therefore, we didn’t share the meal with the others, placing us in the outgroup. It meant we were not included in the sharing and interaction and had to sit there hungry while most other people shared a meal. Not only that, but the food i offered was regarded as a nuisance and rejected. Consequently, we have been pushed out of the group by the sharing of a meal.

To a degree, we are at least perceived as doing the same thing as Christians, though we are working against it. I contribute to the shared breakfast and the late night cafe, but for some reason i don’t experience that contribution as onerous, unlike my contribution to the shared lunch. I would also say that evangelism is “one beggar telling another where to find a crust of bread”, and that the parable of the banquet involved going out into the highways and byways and inviting people in to share.

This calls to mind another aspect of families whose children are not on a school roll. It’s very tempting for us to become a clique and see ourselves as somehow special. In reality, as i’ve said many times before, the vast majority of children in England are educated otherwise than at school for the majority of their childhood. It also benefits those who are opposed to what we do to consider us an isolated clique or elite. Therefore, the shared lunch which pushed us out may actually not only be entirely typical of a home ed group, but play into the hands of those who would seek to destroy what we do.

7787

2011-09-12T04:02:00.000-07:00

Why i believe in God

It’s not important to me whether you believe in God or not. It may be important to you whether you believe in God. That’s up to you to decide. However, i hope you might be interested in knowing why i do believe in God.

I should probably define what i mean by God. God to me is the supernatural consciousness whose existence does not depend on the existence of the Universe, and i also believe in a God who is emotionally involved with humans, which is much more specific than simply believing in God. So that’s the kind of God i’m arguing for.

To dispose of the usual arguments for God, namely the cosmological, ontological and teleological, i would say the following.

The cosmological argument is that all things are caused, therefore the Universe has a cause. This does not work for God for several reasons. Firstly, cause and effect operate within time. Since God is independent of time, cause and effect cannot apply. Secondly, if God is seen as subject to time, it seems sensible to apply the idea of a cause there also, or just to eliminate the whole idea and say that the Universe either has no beginning or caused itself. Thirdly, there do in fact seem to be uncaused events, for instance quantum effects. However, i do believe the existence of the Universe depends on God, which is somewhat similar to the notion of a cause, though not something about which i currently feel confident to argue.

The ontological argument is that an existing object is more perfect than the idea of one and since the idea of God involves perfection, God must also be real. This argument is so flawed to most people that it’s rejected out of hand whether or not they believe in God and it’s also a classic example of an argument which is wrong for interesting reasons as well as boring ones. I would offer an extra reason why it’s wrong: perfect objects are generally the ones which don’t exist and their real versions are flawed. For instance, there are no perfectly flat or perfectly spherical objects made of atoms.

The teleological argument is also known as the “design argument”, and goes like this: objects in the Universe and the Universe as a whole is intricate, complex, and works well, which implies a designer. I strongly disagree with this argument. There is the common reason for disagreement – that the existence of an observer means the Universe and that observer must have a certain structure, so we could be a rare example of a Universe which has produced observers among many which haven’t. I personally have other reasons for opposing this idea. One is that a design which suggests a designer is a poor design, or a poor work of art if you will. An artist might include their own fingerprints in a painting, or some of their hair might get stuck in the wet paint, but if that happens accidentally, it is more likely to be considered a poor work of art. Similarly, if a design draws attention to its designer, it’s a poor design – think of a flashy magazine page with garish colours and loads of different fonts in different sizes and positions, for example. It might have the designer’s style “stamped” on it but that would distract the reader from the textual content. So it doesn’t really work as an argument, because it would suggest that God is a poor designer rather than, as most theists would claim, a perfect one. It also detracts from free will. If God shows us that the Universe is designed incontrovertibly, we have little choice but to believe. Our rationality would force us to see the world in that way and we would not be able to make our own choices. A clearly designed universe would be coercive.

I would go further than that and say that not only is that so, but that on top of that, anything about the Universe as a whole or anything which can be apprehended appropriately using the techniques of natural science which suggests design is a mistake. A Universe which suggests God exists is unworthy of God. However, that only applies to the detached, dispassionate eye of the scientist, not to the involved and centred heart of the whole person, who may also be that same scientist.

So to me, those arguments all fail, though in instructive ways in some respects. Nevertheless, i do believe in God. I want to interject something here: i don’t generally feel drawn to argue that God exists any more than i feel drawn to argue that human beings of my acquaintance exist. It seems an odd thing to do in some ways: perhaps it’s intellectually stimulating but it’s not the kind of thing one should best be spending one’s time on considering there are meals to cook, pestilences to avert and clean water to be made available in the southern hemisphere of the planet. Nevertheless, here we are.

These are the arguments i generally use for the existence of God. I don’t claim that they’re particularly good or strong, but they’re mine. I don’t know if other people argue this way.

Firstly, in apparent contradiction of my rejection of the teleological argument, i believe that the existence of God is in a sense a testable hypothesis. It differs from a testable hypothesis in natural science because it has to be experienced in a personal realm, though not necessarily at first hand. This is how it can be tested.

People pray and those prayers are, hypothetically, either answered or not according to whether there is or is not a God of the kind who answers prayers. If there is such a God, it might be expected that relevant improbable events would occur at a frequency significantly greater than chance after prayer on that subject. I would maintain that this is so. Therefore, one way of ascertaining whether God exists or not would be to “shadow” someone who prays and see what happens, or of course to pray oneself, the problem there being that to do that sincerely, one might have to believe already.

I feel confident that this would in fact work because my experience is that it does. Having said that, interestingly, it’s not a particularly specific test for the existence of God, for a number of reasons.

There are other possibilities which would explain this impression. These include pareidolia, coincidence and psionics, though there may be others.

Looking at coincidence, a sufficiently improbable and relevant coincidence in someone’s life could be enough to convince them that God exists, and a string of less improbable coincidences, or for that matter more improbable ones (though those are more improbable!), could take place on a planet where there have been around 80 thousand million human lives. Therefore, even if we’re all purely rational, it would be a rational conclusion for a few people here at some point in history that God does exist even if there is no such person, simply because for a few people the evidence in their lives would be enough by chance alone.

Turning to pareidolia, we do of course see patterns where there are none, and think of randomness as being devoid of patterns when in fact it’s full of them. In particular, we see faces, for instance of Jesus in the clouds, on our toast in the mornings and elsewhere, because we’re genetically programmed to spot such patterns. That is of course another possibility, and an attractive one because it chimes with the idea that God’s existence is never evident through the rational analysis of what can be observed.

Then there’s the possibility of psionics. This goes as follows: a combination of telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis means that a religious community, individual or a more arbitrary group of people could bring about the same results as prayer seems to achieve. My immediate problem with this is not rational – it just seems outlandish. This kind of thing has been called the “argument from incredulous stare”, and isn’t very helpful because it’s not really an argument at all so much as an emotional reaction. There is a better reason for rejecting it though: the interestingly spelt principle of Ockham’s Razor – “entities should not be unnecessarily multiplied”. The idea that God is linked to these improbable events is a simpler explanation than communities or individuals with several coordinated psychic powers of which there seems to be little evidence.

So that’s the first argument: that the improbable relevant events following prayer are most easily explained by divine intervention.

My other argument is again not entirely adequate, but it goes like this. There are such things as hallucinations and mistaken impressions resulting from fallacious thinking or pathological processes, such as Charles Bonnet syndrome, phosphenes and dreams. However, all of these involve experiences in the sensory modalities which already exist, such as smell, proprioception, vision and so forth. These sensory modalities are sometimes reliable and detect phenomena in the physical world fairly accurately. There are no senses which do not do this. Even pain, though it is entirely internal, detects changes in the internal environment, which is of course part of the physical world. Now, people have a sense of the numinous – spiritual experience. This can be triggered off by temporal lobe epilepsy or by the use of powerful magnetic fields in brain-scanning machines (or whatever they are). The fact that this takes place is compatible with the existence of real stimuli which cause these experiences, and in fact it would be odd if we mostly had a sense which was purely hallucinatory and never accurate. I would argue that the stimulus for this sense is God.

Again, this argument is imperfect. This “sense” may not be a real one at all and we do have an imagination too. We can think that things exist which don’t, and we can come to conclusions about things along the lines of “I don’t trust him because his eyes are too close together”. Moreover, whereas the stimulus may be real, it may also be unwarranted to conclude that that stimulus is God. It may be esprit du corps, the Dao or Gaia. Nevertheless, i would claim that it probably does represent something real.

Taking those two arguments together, i would say that they both provide support for the existence of God, or at least something supernatural which is beyond us.

So there you go, that’s why i believe in God, or at least one story i’m telling you about my belief.

9377

2011-08-03T07:28:00.001-07:00

This is going to be a bit of a flight of fancy, and an inflammatory flight of fancy at that, so let me just say one thing first: the children God has lent us have always had the choice to attend school or not and this choice has been realistic and we have done our best to present it fairly. One reason for our approach to education is that we believe in freedom of choice. If flexischooling were a more realistic option, we might have taken it, but the choices between state education, private education and education without attending school are not fairly distributed.

Can i just say also that teachers and teaching assistants are not enemies but to some degree victims of the educational system? However, if you happen to be one of them and you carry on reading, you are probably going to be angry with me, so you might want to stop now. I will try to address my attitude towards school staff in another post.

Having said all that, please indulge me.

In England, it is the responsibility of the parent or guardian to ensure that their children are educated properly. The default position is that the parents are legally responsible for their children’s education. I’m a little uncomfortable with saying that the children are “theirs” because in fact children belong to themselves, though they are the parents’ in a similar sense to one’s parents belonging to one. They are not property. As i’m Christian, i tend to think of them as belonging to God and i have more sympathy for the idea that they belong to a family than that they belong to the state, so there are degrees of wrongness here for me.

Anyway, as i’ve said before elsewhere, in England most parents home educate the most of the time but most children also go to state schools. It would be disrespectful and patronising of me to criticise the decision to send their children to school even though i confess that i don’t understand it. At the same time, i recognise that the following are true: children learn all the time almost regardless of the setting, schools are primarily childcare facilities and money from anywhere generally comes with strings attached.

So, here comes the fantasy bit which will annoy a lot of people. If you don’t like it, consider it as a hypothetical illustration of the kind of bias which is currently in favour of schooling, but in the opposite direction. This is a utopian dream of what society would be like if it were opposed to schooling to a comparable extent to its current bias in favour.

As things stand, in law, parents are responsible for ensuring that their children receive as good an education as possible. For most parents, this requirement is unnecessary as it goes with the fact that they are parents that they do this as they see it. However, there is an argument for saying that that means that in some circumstances, it is actually a criminal offence to send your children to school. If you can provide them with a better education without them going to school, for instance if they are being bullied, they have special needs which are not recognised by the school or if there are problems with the school environment, and you are aware of this, that means you are not ensuring that they are educated, and because of that, though this would never happen, by allowing them to continue to go to that school, which may be the only school available to you, you could be breaking the law. There are many circumstances when you would have to do a very bad job indeed to do worse than the school at educating your child. That is with the law as it stands.

Now to move on to fantasy land. This is how i would like things to be.

State schools still exist. They are, however, not educational institutions because for a child at least and probably an adult, the whole world is educational. A school is potentially problematic because it segregates children from the community and deprives them of educational opportunities. Therefore, it is a far from ideal environment for education. Therefore, it is acknowledged in law, as it is in fact the case, that the function of a state school is to provide child care. Moreover, a state school is a last resort option for child care, where neither the family nor the friends and neighbours of that family can provide childcare. They are similar to children’s homes in that respect, with the consequent dangers and difficulties. Given this, certain changes would need to be made.

Since sending children to school means you are not parenting them for the time they are there, if you send your children there, you should lose a proportionate fraction of your child benefit. This is to deter parents from sending their children to school. It means that money is not handed to families with strings attached to fund education otherwise than at school, but recognises that teachers and other school staff are in loco parentis. They are being paid by the government to look after your children, so there is no need to pay parents for childcare when they are not in fact caring for the children but allowing them to attend school. If children are going to school, parents also have a greater opportunity to work and therefore may have a greater income than they would do if they were caring for their children.

Compulsory education begins at seven, as it did in Russia (not sure about now) and ends at fourteen. This is to lower further the requirement for schools. Older children can go to college, younger children are likely to be provided for in other ways.

Schools should not duplicate or restrict public access to facilities. Hence they should not have libraries if libraries are available in the neighbourhood, they should not provide computers or internet access, they should not have sports facilities and so forth, unless similar facilities are unavailable nearby. If it is in fact the case that they are not, the school facilities should be open to the public. This allows children to be in the neighbourhood rather than just be in school, and the neighbourhood has access to the school. This increases the active and passive educational value of childhood.

Registration of a child at school should be an active process undertaken by the parent or guardian. It should not be encouraged or publicised. Doubtless most parents would opt to send their children to school anyway, but it shouldn’t be made easy for them to do so.

The adults who work in schools should do so substantially on a voluntary basis. They should have a personal connection to some of the children in the school and they should be chosen by extent and variety of experience.

School hours should be shorter and school holidays longer.

There should be no age limits on access to tertiary education.

Where the workplace is not the home and it is at all practical, the majority of working days should be “take your child to work” days. This would provide children with experience of a working environment. This is clearly not always practical, but there should be the maximum possible level of flexibility here. If it is at all possible that a child be in a workplace with a parent, they should be there.

At the same time, adults should be encouraged to work for themselves, in the home or in genuine cooperatives, in order that they have as much flexibility as possible to raise their children for as much of the time as possible.

Needless to say, i think, there should be no Ofsted, no CRB checks, no National Curriculum, no SATs and no targets.

OK, have i said enough to annoy everyone yet?

9375

2011-08-01T08:10:00.001-07:00

A common image used to explain the idea of the Universe expanding is of a balloon inflating, with the skin of the balloon representing space. The balloon is covered in dots representing galaxies and as the balloon inflates, the galaxies recede from each other. To an ant standing on one of the dots, everything is receding and she appears to be at the centre of the Universe. Extending this image to the real Universe, rather than there being two dimensions across the curved skin of the balloon, there are three, but the constant recession of galaxies from each other would still be observed.

There are some other similar images used elsewhere in physics. One of these is the idea that most of the eleven dimensions making up the Universe according to string theory are “rolled up”, so space is in fact “thicker” in these extra dimensions than it seems, but still so thin that we fail to notice these other dimensions directly. A further image is of space as an elastic sheet with mass causing depressions like a weight on a sheet of rubber, used to explain gravity in general relativity and linked to the balloon image above.

Like any metaphor, these images have their limits and beyond them they can become misleading. In the case of the balloon, there is a misleading idea of a pre-existing hyperspace into which the Universe expands. Whereas this might be so, the general relativity and the Big Bang theory don’t require it to be looked at in this way. There need not be such a space and the Universe need not have an inside or an outside for this to work. The reason for this flaw is the nature of the concept of space. Space is not a container for objects but a set of relationships between them. Looking at space as if it’s some kind of vast ocean of infinitely subtle substance in which physical objects float is erroneous. Granted, it may be that space is entirely permeated by something tangible such as the Higgs Field or virtual particles, but the existence of space does not depend on this being so.

Space can be considered as an abstraction of two relationships somewhat like temperature. Although there is a temperature scale on which items such as the boiling point of water or the transition temperature of helium to a superfluid can be placed, there is no physical object called “temperature”, though there could be physical scales or devices for measuring temperature. Not would it generally make sense to refer to something as being outside the temperature scale, but simply as something to which the concept of temperature does not apply, such as the number seven or the experience of fascination. Similarly, the balloon in the image lacks an interior and an exterior, and in a sense even a surface.

The physical qualities of an object or event can be further sophisticated with respect to temperature. For instance, the boiling points of liquids tend to go up with pressure. Pressure could be introduced as another axis on a graph of physical properties, showing things like the boiling point of water at the top of Mount Everest or on the shores of the Dead Sea. Salinity could constitute a third dimension here. However, there is no real plane or volume where these events or points are located. Nobody would seriously suggest there was.

Space is similar. It appears to express two things: direction and distance. It is convenient to talk about locations as if they are physical, but points in space are more like “gunpoint” than “Gibraltar Point”. They are not literally located within the largest possible physical object named “Space”.

Consider the following three thought experiments:

1. Everything in the Universe shifts one metre in the same direction.

2. The Universe is completely empty.

3. A sphere of space one metre in radius is scooped out of the Universe somewhere.

All of these three experiments are meaningless on closer examination, but would mean something if space were a physical object. In the first place, there is no way to ascertain that such a shift had taken place, assuming inertia and momentum would not apply, because there would be no way to measure the shift. The same is true of the second thought. An empty Universe contains no rulers, sextants or protractors. If it contained a ruler and a sextant alone, space could be defined in terms of those two items but there are other conceivable worlds containing, for example, two identical featureless spheres, which have distance but no direction and therefore no space. Are there possible worlds with direction but no distance? I don’t know. The final example indicates that there is something wrong with thinking of space as a thing, although it also happens to be the closest of the three to having a meaning. If space is a thing, scooping out a sphere is for some reason immediately followed by it “growing back” instantly. Also, this sphere which is scooped out is somehow able to occupy the same space as another bit of space. Higher dimensions are not a solution to this – simply imagine a hypersphere. Having said that, there is a sort of sense to it because it could be taken as an outlandish way of describing moving everything in the Universe a metre closer centred about a particular point, assuming that the sphere is empty. If it isn’t, the objects within the sphere would have to relocate to their antipodes on the surface of a sphere of the same radius as the distance to the centre of the sphere. Also, this account assumes Euclidean space.

All of these are important because they show the shortcomings of a view of space as a physical object shown by the balloon metaphor. I’m not suggesting for a moment that they were intended seriously, or for that matter that the theories behind the images are true or false, but taking them that literally gets you nowhere and is misleading, except to illustrate that space is an abstraction of relationships and not a “thing”.

It so happens that an expanding Universe is a good way to illustrate the relational nature of space, even if the real Universe is not expanding. It also happens that the Creationist hyperbolic model of space works equally well, but i don’t really want to go there.

At first glance, on the scale on which humans are accustomed to thinking, the distance between two objects simply varies between zero and infinity, that is, it has no upper limit. The Big Bang theory claims something different: that at any point in time, there is a finite maximum distance between objects, that that distance has been increasing for some time now and that any two objects surround each other in all directions. The expansion of the Universe is simply the increase in the maximum possible distance between two objects. There could be variants. It might be that the maximum distance will begin to decrease, that its rate of increase will slow or that it was decreasing in the past. One thing, however, it definitely does not claim is that the Universe is literally expanding into a pre-existing hyperspace (although i suppose it might be).

What’s not clear about this, intriguingly, is whether distance and direction are all that space expresses. There might be other things involved. It isn’t clear whether two separate locations can be at the same distance and direction from a third without being in the same place. It might be, however, that such a situation would entail that space is not simply an abstraction of relationships, which would imply that it is in fact not possible.

So to imagining that notorious moment when the Earth was wrapped in bandages. Possibly a good idea if we think we are hurting the planet, but anyway, the idea is this: if you could somehow produce a strand of stationary massless bandages of any length you wanted and proceed to wrap them around Earth evenly, and assuming the Universe was otherwise empty, you would have surrounded yourself in bandages and be in the process of reducing the maximum distance at that time between the surface of the bandages. If the Universe turned out to be expanding more slowly than the rate at which the layers of bandages were being laid down, you would eventually find that you were inside a hollow, gradually shrinking ball of bandages rather than outside them. This can be made sense of thus: everything is in all directions from everything else – in other words it surrounds everything else – and there is a finite maximum distance.

Eventually, the only way outwards is inwards.

9373

2011-07-30T10:12:00.000-07:00

Comments on CRB checks.

CRB checks are the result of a long chain of events linked to a response to high profile cases of child sexual abuse and murder. Clearly it is important to protect children from such events and the CRB can be perceived to be doing this effectively. I would strongly dispute this claim and in what follows i will argue that this is ill-conceived.

Two phrases often used in connection with the CRB, along with many other controversial measures, are “If it saves one child” followed by something like “it is justified”, and “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.

The first of these is a non-sequitur. It hypothesises the alternatives of inaction causing horrible suffering and death to a single victim and action preventing that death and suffering. However, this ignores the bigger picture of the negative consequences of such action. The presumption is that such negative consequences cannot outweigh the suffering and death which, for the sake of argument, i will say are inevitable if the action is not taken. There is another possibility though: that the action taken will cause more evil than inaction, even weighed against that likelihood. In other words, let us assume that it is absolutely certain that at least one child will suffer horribly and die as a direct result of that action not being taken. It is not the case that any other situation is better than that. This is a grim fact, but it is true. For instance, the Rwandan genocide was worse than that. African famines are worse. Millions of children dying in pain of cancer is a worse outcome. That last possibility is particularly relevant. Extreme cases make bad law though.

The second claim, “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” makes two unwarranted assumptions. It assumes a perfectly functioning system. We know the CRB check system is not perfect because a number of people have gone through it with an unblemished record and gone on to harm children. It’s also a common argument against the death penalty. A pardon is of no benefit to an innocent person wrongly convicted and executed. In the event of a mistake being made in a CRB check, there may have been damage to a reputation and a person’s career simply because they have been unable to keep in practice at their profession or work for an employer who recognises their potential and is able to promote them. This is not simply a problem for that person, but for their passengers, customers, clients, pupils, students or patients. Suppose that individual would otherwise have become an effective oncologist who was able to treat childhood leukaemia. In the meantime, one child is saved from dying horribly. Another consequence of the check is that an innocent medical student never became a surgeon and thousands of children died horribly anyway. Compensation cannot address this problem and the potential surgeon’s wellbeing is not even an issue. Suppose a teacher failed a CRB check who would have been particularly inspiring to the pupil who went on to become that surgeon. The CRB system is known not to be perfect. It produces both false positives and false negatives. This makes it a hazard to the good of society in numerous unknown ways. Talents and skills would be lost to society or never develop in the first place.

The other assumption is that the values of the authority imposing the check are equal or superior to those of the person who believes they have something to hide. This doesn’t follow either. If someone hides their ethnic origin in a markedly racist society, they most certainly have something to fear from that being revealed. A whistleblower would also have something to fear. There are countless examples like this. In the Orkney child abuse scandal, Quakers were accused. They had something to fear but nothing to hide.

Turning to more detailed criticism of the CRB system, my major objections to their existence:

1. Mission creep: the initial remit of the CRB can expand in the absence of legislation enabling that, or its remit can be extended as a result of ill-considered legislation. Organisations have to justify their own existence and tend to manufacture work for themselves.

2. If the protection of children and vulnerable adults is a major priority, it is worth doing the checks via the experts in this area, the police. Whereas this could mean that other crime increases, the priority it has been given would imply that this is an acceptable price to pay. If not, why is it being done at all?

3. Volunteers are discouraged. A complex, time-consuming expensive bureaucratic system for doing these checks discourages volunteers. This is directly harmful to society, costs public money because of the expensive results and denies many of the opportunity to gain experience and become of greater value to society.

4. It allows organisations to construct a spurious case that they have taken steps to minimise risks to children and vulnerable adults when they have in fact done no such thing.

5. It encourages a culture of distrust and vexatious litigation between the generations.

6. It is duplicated. Each role requires another check. This is akin to requiring a new driving test and licence for every vehicle bought, rented or used in the line of work. The potential for harm from reckless or malicious driving is in no way less serious than the potential for harm from child sexual abuse and murder. Similarly, a single passport is required for entry to many countries rather than a separate passport for each country, and there is ample potential for harm there in the form of organised crime and terrorism. These are again no less harmful than child sexual abuse and murder. If a single driving licence and a single passport is required, there can be no justification for multiple checks.

7. It lulls people into a false sense of security, including parents, responsible adults and the clients of the organisations concerned.

8. It is a tax on charity and goodwill. The money a charity could otherwise use to pursue its purpose is diverted to the CRB and their agents. If the individual bears the cost instead, it constitutes a barrier to the poor in volunteering.

9. The soft evidence is merely hearsay and is open to abuse.

10. It violates the principle of presumed innocence.

11. It impairs authentic relationships.

I am opposed to the very existence of the CRB and their agents. However, if such a process is indeed necessary, i would suggest the following:

Define vulnerable adults very narrowly if at all. For instance, it could mean adults who are on remand, homeless, severely mentally or physically disabled, diagnosable as seriously mentally ill, critically ill or the victims of violent crime or natural disasters or accidents, that is, the traumatised. This is just an example. It should not mean the likes of people who happen to be in receipt of any kind of medical treatment at all.
Define contact as involving being in near-constant close physical proximity or near-constant communication with children or vulnerable adults as defined above where a close relative or trusted adult friend of the individual is absent, and where consent has not been actively withdrawn.
Frequently review the organisation independently in an accountable way for mission creep.
Make the police responsible for carrying out the checks. If this creates excessive extra work to the detriment of the other duties of the police, assess the relative value of the tasks and prioritise accordingly.
Recognise that as both teachers and certain other professionals are in loco parentis with children, they are expected to behave in certain ways as a parent would towards their child. This would include providing medical treatment as a parent would, for instance inhalers, adrenalin injections, medication and the like. As part of this, teachers and other professionals should be expected to have the same level of competence as a parent of a child with that kind of health problem if they are likely to come into contact with such a child. However, they are expected to arrange to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to meet these needs and failure to ensure that the child receives the appropriate treatment is likely to be seen as criminal negligence. Consent can be actively withdrawn by the parent or guardian or by a child above a certain age, but is otherwise assumed to be given tacitly, and the defence of the “reasonable man” is valid in this context for all parties involved.
In all things, presume innocence until guilt is demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt.
Do not require one check per role but attach the check to the individual in a manner analogous to a driving licence or a passport. The checks must be transferable. Model the nature of the checks on those required for driving licences or passports.
Specifically legislate that adherence to CRB checks is not a defence in law against an accusation of negligence or dereliction of duty of care against an organisation, i.e. in no way can it be accepted as evidence that the organisation has complied with any legal duty towards children or vulnerable adults. The priority must be the safety of children or vulnerable adults rather than the avoidance of legal liability.
Fund the checks publically, not through the private sector or individuals. The police are funded by the public to prevent crime and uphold the law. There is no difference here, therefore these checks, if they have to happen, must also be publically funded. They must also be carried out on a non-profit basis and the wages of any employee whose main responsibility involves these checks must be capped.
Specifically rule out certain actions and events from constituting unacceptable contact between professionals and children or responsible adults, such as non-sexual, non-aggressive physical contact, being in sight of children and assume consent for photography unless it has been actively and explicitly withdrawn by parents or children.

I realise this is all very sketchy at the moment, but this is roughly what i mean. Rather than this last bit, i would prefer the CRB simply to be abolished without being replaced by anything.

Totally pointless

2010-11-24T14:01:00.000-08:00

Well, what with the mergers between different "powers" on the internet, i now have a completely pointless blog which overlaps with other accounts on one of which i have a now completely inaccessible blog. So here's another post which nobody will read.

And all this is probably one of the many reasons why i am a complete failure. And an attention whore too!

2010-09-16T06:37:00.000-07:00

This is still here. It's totally blank. What is the point?