How Much Learning Is Verbal?

I made two videos today, but one of them was so annoying to edit that i haven't bothered to upload it (it was about anatomical terms such as "superior", "inferior" and the like).  Here's the other one:

This is about joint movements and the names for them.  So far there are only two of them, but it's in the same series as this one:

 (which is about lung volumes)

These are human biology/anatomy/physiology/medicine/whatever videos whose aim is purely educational and not particularly inspiring.  However, the joint one does raise an interesting (for me) issue:  how much learning is linguistic?  How much learning just involves finding out what people call things so you can talk about them?

In some ways, i feel this kind of learning is less legitimate than more practical acquisition of skills.  It's a bit like ornithological "twitching" (no offence to any twitchers in case i've got that wrong) or happening to know the Latin names for herbs without knowing anything about the ecology, biology, life cycle, constituents, cultural significance, real botany or uses of the plants concerned.  It seems empty and anal to me.  However, it's true that it acts as a stepping stone to learning, albeit mainly book learning, and it can draw an outline around something considered significant by some and as such may show something new about the Manifold - the blizzard of sensory impressions we call "the world".  There are other kinds of learning though - emotional intelligence, acting, empathy, woodwork, playing musical instruments, finding your way around...

I suppose i wonder the following:

• How much learning is linguistic?
• What would be left if you took away the verbal stuff?
• Is it overvalued in our society?
• How can we tell if it's real (or does it make it real)?

Not masculine but very male

I've not made "Oi Thou!" listed yet because i'm not particularly happy with the quality, which in a way is what it's about.  Anyway, here's today's:

This is another thing that really bothers me:  Why aren't more men involved in home ed?  When Liz and i planned our parenting, we decided to do it equally, and i can't believe it's just us, so i can only assume that it's to do with practical difficulties in managing to do it 50/50, because, for example, of the need to earn some money, or as a result of commitments which arose before having children.  However, to be honest i'm just puzzled by it and want to know why.

This also forms part of a pattern in my life where for some reason i often do the stereotypically girly thing without consciously choosing to, which is particularly weird because i see myself not as traditionally masculine but definitely as very male.  For instance, transsexualism is much more common in men, so my gender dysphoria fits in there, and i am rather too into high-tech gadgets.  However, on the other side of things, i did girls' A-levels (RE, Biology and English), became a herbalist (90% female) and have only rarely worked outside the home, have never had a full-time job and am very fixated on clothes, which again get perceived as feminine.

However, this shouldn't be about me, so i return to the original point:  where are all the fathers?  Why is it all women involved in home ed?  Is it a good or bad thing?  Why?  Should something be done about it and if so what?

Pseudocyesis aeterna

Pseudocyesis is phantom pregnancy.  It occurs in dogs a fair amount and also in humans.  In a way, this belongs somewhere else, but i'm sticking it here.

Today's video:

is not about what would presumably happen if a phantom pregnancy resulted in a phantom baby who then grew up and became a teenager, which is how far we've got with this situation.  So then, Sophie Ure Gray, born 13th November, 1999, whose Facebook page is here:

https://www.facebook.com/sophie.gray.7771?fref=ts

and who looks like these pictures:

is a happy, healthy child who of course does not attend school like the other two, but she is remarkable for a further feature not true of either of them:  she is uninstantiated - does not have a corresponding example in the physical world.  I have also suggested to my son that he is my favourite son because of my infinite number of imaginary sons, each of which is slightly less perfect than the one before, but all of which are less perfect than he is, because they too share Sophie's non-instantiation.

One serious point which arises from this set of circumstances is that, as i mentioned before, i already suspected i knew Daniel's name in about 1977, twenty years before his birth.  By this i mean that whereas one may be physicalist, dualist, idealist or have some other position about the mind-body problem, one thing that's clear is that a person's identity and role is not necessarily directly connected to their physical being or even their "unextended conscious" non-physical being, but is something else existing in an abstract realm.  This is something which causes me to reject realism rather strongly.

So:  tomorrow i do a subscriber drive and a giveaway.  My subscriber number is stubbornly nailed at just over three dozen and i need to push it up.  The other channel has almost ten dozen subscribers.  Something about the essence of the other channel's success needs to be distilled and transfused.  Tomorrow i will attempt to do something like that.

Why it's neither "homeschooling" nor "home education"

There are a couple of vids here, one of which will not have been released into the wild yet.  The first is a response to yesterday's upload by the lad's ma:

(Thanks again YouTube for that wonderful example of framing).  This is Ceri talking to me about her approach to home ed with her family.  It speaks for itself of course, so WATCH IT NOW!  I sprang the Welsh thing on her but she did well with it, and yes, please remember what Welsh home edders are going through right now and do something about it because it's seriously not on.

The other video comes out of rightful criticism of the titles and vocabulary in my home ed videos, and isn't there yet.  When it is, it'll be here (i hope):

Basically, there's nothing wrong with American English, as it says in the bit under the video, but the actual word "homeschooling" is bad.  Some people seem to be aware of this and have changed it to "unschooling" when they refer to autonomous education with children, which is a whole lot better.  Again, i go into this in the video so i won't here.

However, something i don't cover in it is the issue of American and Commonwealth English.  One problem with the second term, which i use to avoid "British English" because it includes Austral, South African and Indian English, among others, is that the Commonwealth includes Canada, and Canadian English is something of a quandary, being both its own thing and between two stools.  Leaving that aside though, and taking posh London English as one standard and high-class Chicago English as the other, which is fairly close to some kind of reality, there is no particular reason to choose one over the other.  Both have their strengths and weaknesses.  Even so, when a weakness in one dialect starts to leak into the other in either direction, it should probably be resisted, and the word "homeschool" is just such a weakness.  There's also another one which it's far too late to stop:  the "short scale".

Languages which use classical Mediterranean-derived terms to refer to large numbers have two ways of doing it:  the short scale and the long scale.  Many languages, for instance German, simply opt for one and never use the other.  English has historically used both, but the short scale won out in the past couple of decades.  I should explain.  Each step in the series of terms "billion", "trillion", "quadrillion" and so forth represents a multiplication of a thousand in the American scale and of a million in the British.  Hence for a Brit the word quadrillion used to mean 1000000000000000000000000, but to an American it seems always to have meant 1000000000000000.  The discrepancy gets steadily more gigantic as we work up the scale, and as a result American English runs out of words for integers at a much earlier point than British English.  It's far too late to do much about it now, but i have always felt this was a backwards step.  Then again, i don't like the decimal system anyway and there's always Standard Form.

Which reminds me, i'm supposed to be setting astronomy homework, so i'll do that.

A blog entry that lives up to the blog's name for once

Today's plan is to interview a "home-edded" teen about home ed.  This may not go according to plan because it's often difficult for people to get here, and since the kind of education in which i'm involved is child-centred, children may choose not to come.  Nonetheless, i hope it happens.  Hence the following link:

...may not exist.

I have a back-up plan involving rendering 3-D images of Greek letters and using them to introduce the Greek alphabet.  That plan, however, seems to be doomed too because right now i am wrestling with the rendering program unsuccessfully.  So, half in the spirit of Karen Carpenter, when the smallest of dreams won't come true, i have scaled down my plans to:  go to Iceland and buy some veggie sausages.

It's rapidly being borne in upon me that both factions in the religious war are, to quote Wolfgang Pauli, "not even wrong".  The level of the debate is strangely fixated on points argued about and disposed of in previous centuries rather than more recent concerns, and i'm trying to work out why.  It may be that they are simply unaware of the issues, or that they have themselves decided that the ensuing discussion was mere sophistry.  However, i need to address this i think.

Another thing i need to address is the fact that i haven't revised botanical terms for this afternoon's session yet.  Little does she know it, and in fact she has no way of finding out because i won't be publishing this until the video is uploaded, but a certain GS is expected to tell us all about the names of leaf shapes when she comes.  In the meantime, i'll post some pretty pictures with dubious intellectual property issues about them (they're actually not that pretty):

These illustrate the shape of leaves and are as follows:

1. Rounded

2. Reniform (like a kidney)

3. Cordiform (heart-shaped)

4. Elliptic

5. Ovate

6. Obovate

7. Lanceolate

8. Acicular

9. Linear

10. Sagittate ("arrowy")

11. Spathulate ("spoony")

12. Hastate ("speary")

13. Triangular.

14. Rhomboid.

Palmate and pinnate leaves.  Palmate leaves look like palms, i.e. hands, and pinnate like feathers (pinna - feather).  The extent to which they're divided is described in the same way in both cases:

1. Shallowly.

2. Deeply.

3. Parted.

4. Divided.

 Leaves can also be completely divided, in which case each mini-leaf is called a "leaflet".  The arrangements illustrated here are:
1. One pair of leaflets with the rest modified as tendrils - most plant organs are in fact modified forms of a few types, such as stems, leaves, roots and branches.
2. Trifoliate.
3. Digitate ("fingery").
4. Imparipinnate.
5. Paripinnate.
6. Bipinnate.
7. Pinnate with interjected leaflets.

Leaf positions:

1. Alternate.

2. Opposite (arranged in two ranks in this case).

3. Whorl.

Leaf attachments:

1. Petiolate with stipules.

2. Sessile.

3. Clasping (amplexicaul).

4. Sheathed.

Two issues emerge here.  One is, why should anyone care?  I feel a certain nerdy attachment to the names but does it add anything to one's real knowledge.  I would answer that by saying that if you can name something, you can pluck it out of the blurring, buzzing confusion and make sense of it.  One reason it might be important is that the almost universally highly toxic Ranunculaceae  - the buttercup family - have almost universally deeply divided leaves, so if you come across an unwell child or member of another animal species near some plants with finely divided leaves, you are more likely to know what's wrong.  Also, in that case toxic is determined as usual by dosage, so a smaller dosage means a marked and useful physiological effect.

The other issue is that this is a pretty good illustration of what i said in this video:

...in that if you know Latin and Greek you will already be aware that, for example, "sagittate" has something to do with arrows, and say if someone asks you, "are the leaves sagittate?" and you haven't already heard that word in a botanical context, you will probably guess what they mean.

This raises the interesting question of how much learning is linguistic.  Clearly you can't learn to drive or use a spokeshave using purely linguistic skills, but other things you can because a lot of stuff is simply naming of parts, and when you can name parts, you get to draw an outline around a particular pattern in the Universe which may or may not be helpful. I hope it is in this case.

Right, now i'm off down Iceland to get some sausages, so be good (see, i can occasionally make puns in French even if i hate the language!)

"I never read books, they're just Latin and Greek"

Sorry, another lyric-based title.

This video:

is of course about Latin and in Latin.  The reason for the wooden delivery, and particularly the horribly poorly acted second-to-last line, is mainly that it's being read.  I'm also sure the quality of the language is quite poor, being ungrammatical and poorly pronounced.  Having said that, this and its twin on the other channel have been deliberately made at low-quality to save upload time.  I was experimenting with a new format which reduced vertical resolution to 480 pixels and audio sampling to 44.1 kHz.  The lighting is also horrible in this one - it's from a non-"solar" compact fluorescent tube.  There have long been problems with videos made in the living room due to the low lighting conditions, which interestingly are not noticeable to the naked eye.  A TV documentary crew once removed the light bulb while filming without telling me, so it has a track record of association with videographic problematicism.

Yesterday's video on the Other Channel may have been disappointing to viewers there.  It was a round-up of news about the ebook, its print version (nowt so queer as folk), the hypnosis script slideshow plans and also the main channel.  I always feel i'm pushing things too hard and coming across as desperate when i promote something and that will naturally communicate itself in the tone of the video in a manner which seems beyond my control.  However, i did publicise the main channel and ask people to take a look at it and consider subscribing.

It's a matter of some concern that the first video the people coming over from the other channel were confronted with, unless they simply followed the links to individual vids likely to appeal to them, would've been that poorly lit subtitled offering in a foreign language.  Therefore, today's plan is to make a livelier video about "having a life", which is in fact imminent.

And the stars reach down and tell us there's always one escape

I am not a Spandau Ballet fan.  If you've read my previous entry, you may be aware of the fact that i imagine my own interpretations of cultural artifacts, and in keeping with that i can look at that line and see no connection with the Troubles or even that shouty singy bloke whose name i've forgotten.

You may also have noticed that i'm plonking a prodigious number of Celestia vids on YouTube, whereof the latest is this:

This is entitled 'Honeymoon on Enceladus' for reasons a select few will realise.  Certainly Enceladus does not constitute a particularly important part of this video and probably looks irrelevant to the uninitiated viewer.  Nonetheless it's there.

Again, i've made a bit of a mess of the middle of this video because i completely skipped Rhea.  This is Rhea:

I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to Rhea for missing her out.  I understand she is slightly triaxial, like this but less so:

Also, she might be heated by radioactivity, like many other large solid bodies in this solar system, in this case warmly enough to give her a liquid water ocean.  To be honest though, i find Tethys, Rhea and Dione all to be much of a muchness and pretty tedious.

The rest of what's going on in the Saturn system is quite interesting, but it's in the above video so i won't mention it here.

What i do want to mention is one of the emotional functions astronomy has for me, which might go some way towards explaining why i keep doing this kind of thing.  When i find personal problems or the human troubles of this planet get me down, i like to remind myself of our tininess and insignificance in this vast Cosmos, because it means that most or all of what the entire human species does, let alone myself as a wealthy human living in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries since that bloke got nailed to a tree (you know the quote) really doesn't matter and isn't worth getting het up about. Of course, in a sense i am totally wrong and it really does matter, but the impassionate and neutral vastness of space, even of our own little Solar System in fact, helps put it in perspective and is immensely calming.  Everything will be all right in just a few loops around that yellow dwarf, and we needn't worry.

Of course, the reason why this is called 'Honeymoon on Enceladus' is a little in-joke which tells you that in fact, that particular moon does have some emotional significance to me while simultaneously failing to communicate with the rest of humanity, partly due to my passive-aggressive perception that the rest of humanity refuses to communicate with me.

The hidden curriculum of breathing

The reason i'm topless in this video is merely to demonstrate respiratory movements.  I am under no illusions that people actually want to see my flabby naked flesh on YouTube.  It's bad enough for Liz and i don't want to inflict it on anyone else.

This is more a prelim video about breathing exercises in Yoga which also covers the  anatomy and physiology of respiratory muscles.  There are three sets of muscles involved in breathing.  The intercostal muscles raise and lower the ribs like the handle of a bucket.  The accessory respiratory muscles are also involved in other kinds of movement and are at the top of the chest and sort of there for emergencies to maximise lung capacity.  Finally, the diaphragm is the most efficient muscle for breathing and at rest is surprisingly high - just below the nipples.

Many people breathe inefficiently, using their intercostals and accessory muscles more than their diaphragm.  When they do this, they are expending a lot of effort on respiration without maximising their vital capacity (see the lung volumes video here):

This is important because, whereas a single breath taken inefficiently is not going to cost you much energy, a long series of respiratory actions of this kind is going to add up to a lot of wasted effort for a relatively small benefit.  As a result, if you breathe inefficiently, you are probably going to get needlessly tired.

Inefficient breathing is also addictive.  If you train yourself to breathe better, it will at first feel that you are almost suffocating and you will experience an urge to fill your lungs using the less efficient muscles and the cycle will continue, making you completely knackered.  However, if you persist with the habit described in the first video, you will lose that urge and go on to breathe better with less exhaustion.

Now, i am a little aware of the irony of including a video on teaching people to breathe when it's the classic example used by home edders to illustrate the silliness of schooling!  I would answer that by saying that the stresses and strains of everyday life lead people to breathe poorly, even though they can do it fine soon after birth.

Lung Volumes

Having taken on board some advice, i have produced another video, which has so far proven rather hard to edit:

This is actually a remake.  A year or so back, i had a policy of deleting any video which got under 144 views in a week.  I have now stopped doing this, possibly ill-advisedly.  Unfortunately there are still a number of mistakes in this video, notably in its delivery and also a couple of factual errors.  I need to get more lively.  Anyway, the advice i've taken on board includes the plainer backdrop and the absence of glasses.  The framing is not too good here either.  I suspect that some people will also find it too quiet.  I was a little concerned that there'd be a crossover with the other channel here but it didn't happen.

On the subject of the video, one of the remarkable things about lung volumes is that, like many other aspects of the human body, we spend most of our lives in a narrow range of capacities despite having the potential to go much further.  The tidal volume, which is how much we breathe when at rest, is only about a tenth of our vital capacity, which is the maximum volume we can inhale and exhale.  There are lots of other examples of this.  We spend most of our lives not achieving our potential in so many ways, and some of these are physical as well as mental.  The 10% figure here - tidal volume as 10% of our usable lung capacity - reminds me of the 10% myth that we use only 10% of our brains.  Of course it's not the case that we only use 10% of the neurones in our heads, and if we used 100% of them it would be equivalent to a seizure, but it wouldn't be at all surprising if in fact we only achieved 10% of our intellectual capacity, partly for existential reasons but also partly because of deficiencies in our education.

It's the best of jobs, it's the worst of jobs

I've said this before but not in this way:

Herbalism - the maintenance and improvement of health through the use of plants.  Some things are covered by this which shouldn't be, for instance you might improve health by using plants to clear the atmosphere of formaldehyde, benzene and ammonia, by creating a landscape garden or using a park as a city's "green lung", but this is specifically to do with herbalism as a narrowly medically defined approach to health.

Incidentally, this is the first video i've done using a tripod and i had endless trouble with it.  Whereas the tripod itself was very useful, the batteries ran out towards the end and on editing it, Avidemux and Windows Movie Maker both screwed it up several times.  Therefore, there are rather more um's and er's in this than i would ideally like, but i'm working to a tight schedule and ended up posting it as is.

My points are threefold really.  One is that research has shown that most of the general public do not know that herbalists exist or what we do, in spite of strenuous efforts to remedy this, so i thought it would be helpful to do a video which went through this in detail.  Another is the major discrepancy between the scepticism shown towards herbalism along with the research apparently showing that it doesn't work and my own measurable findings which occur after people consult me and i give them herbs.  That's an ethical red herring and in fact there's even an argument for herbalism being a good thing if it doesn't work.  Finally, there are two real ethical problems associated with herbalism which are rarely mentioned.  One is that seeing someone who hoards information about health doesn't ultimately help the client, and the other is that given the fact, widely known among herbalists, that it is nearly always impossible to make a living as a herbalist, the tacit pretence that it is cannot be justified.  Candidates of herbal medicine courses need to be told, before they start the course, that the chances of them being able to use their degrees professionally rather than as general degrees like English or History, are practically zero. a

Blue soda bread and home science

One of the brilliant things you can do at home, which is also really colourful, is make your own pH indicator from red cabbage water.  Here's a particular use for it which occurred to me the other day:

Making naturally blue soda bread.

The way this works is that so-called "red" cabbage (which i think of as purple) is very high in an anthocyanin.  The word "anthocyanin" is from the Greek words anthos -  flower, and kyanos - blue.  Anthocyanins are in fact not necessarily blue but all sorts of colours.  They are also useful in herbal medicine.  For instance, the skins of Sambucus nigra (elder) berries are high in anthocyanins which soothe the throat and are useful in coughs and sore throats.  They are almost entirely tasteless and occur in a wide range of flowering plants with the exception of the Caryophyllales, a large order containing such plants as beetroot and cacti, which instead contain betalains.  These two types of compound are never found in the same species.

Anthocyanins are derived from other compounds called anthocyanidins, whose molecular structure can be drawn like this:

The red numbers show where variations occur in the structure.

The substances occur in petals, leaves and some other parts of the plant, in vacuoles, which are "bubbles" of unorganised liquid surrounded by membrane inside the cells.  The acidity or alkalinity of the liquid determines the colour.  They are also responsible for the colour of some fruit, such as the redness of ripe apples.  They may also stop animals which are attracted to green plant parts, which they then eat, from consuming flower petals, and they also attract pollinating insects to flowers.  Their precise shade of purple is complementary to the green of leaves, so they don't block any light which the plant could use for photosynthesis.  This also means that the older photosynthetic organisms with which the plants had to complete billions of years ago would have been exactly that shade of purple too, so if we ever get to another planet where that quirk in the history of life didn't happen, we'd be quite likely to find that the plants were all the colour of anthocyanins, though only if the star the planet orbited was the same colour as the Sun.

Elderberries

Another aspect of anthocyanins is that they form the purple dye colour which is the easiest rich colour to use on cloth in natural dyeing.  Cotton, for example, dyed with elderberries is initially such a strong colour that it looks completely artificial.  Unfortunately, it also fades much faster in sunlight, probably for that reason.  They are sadly quite unstable.

As you can see from the video, anthocyanins are also excellent indicators.  They turn red in acid and blue-green in alkali.  In a strong caustic soda solution, about which i will soon make a video, they become orange.  The reaction between the sodium bicarbonate and lime juice, incidentally, produces a sodium citrate, of which there are three different types, and releases carbon dioxide, which occurs when any alkaline carbonate is combined with an acid.  Disodium citrate can be used to reduce the discomfort of cystitis and urethritis, and is one of the approximately twenty compounds which can easily be made at home from common organic acids and alkali and alkali earth metal compounds.  Compounds which are combinations of acids and bases are known as salts, so the sodium citrates are good examples of organic salts.

The other thing about all this is that the soda bread, which to be honest i perceive as pale turquoise rather than green or blue, is an example of a blue food.  Genuinely strong blue foods have long been an obsession of mine because there are so few of them, and the ones which are claimed to be blue or called blue usually aren't, such as blueberries, pasta coloured with squid ink or "blue corn".  However, there are a few foods which are genuinely blue, and this is one of them, though being soda bread it's probably partly antinutritional.  Another food which would be blue for the same reasons if it existed would be the Finnish salmiakki, which is high in sal ammoniac or ammonium chloride, mixed with liquorice:

  Besides that, there are rather few, but they would include cornflower or borage petals and raw bruised Boletus fungi:

Cornflower

Borage - Borago officinalis - i actually use this quite a lot, partly for its fatty acids.  There are pyrrolizidine alkaloids in it though, so i'm not incredibly keen, and it tends to go off very quickly which is also annoying.

Boletus - don't know which species, but they turn distinctively blue on cutting.  Not all are edible though, either

Anyway, i don't seem to share the general aversion to blue food and was only fearful of the blue soda bread because i was expecting it to taste like a combination of cabbage and bicarbonate of soda, but surprisingly it turned out to taste absolutely fine and was really nice.  I think i just got lucky with the quantity of soda though.

Unfortunately, this is the second time i've made something non-vegan for a YouTube video in a week, so i need to make amends in some way.

The Village That Raised Our Children

More splurging today i'm afraid, due to starting this post on the mini-tablet, which rather unhelpfully just saved this locally and i'm now copying.  At least that means this had a first draft for once.

Yesterday i briefly mentioned my slight unease at continuing to see myself as part of the home ed community now that the children are both at college, because now i no longer home educate in the commonly understood sense, although of course i still home educate because everyone does and it isn't even home education and so on, blah blah, you know the spiel.  One possible danger of course is that i could lose touch, to the extent that i was ever in touch in the first place, with approaches apt to appeal to children.  There are, however, a couple of reasons why that might not be so.

One of these is that i may only ever have been in limited touch with the needs of children anyway, and in fact due to my moderate but not total commitment to autonomous education, this could be said to be unnecessary in any case, though a varied life wherein one is able and willing to include children is probably important.  Against this might be set the fact that many children with this way of life spend so little time actually at home as opposed to hanging out or sleeping over at other children's homes or doing other stuff with them that their inclusion in the lives of other children and adults might make this less important.  We have a village which raises children in this community, both physically and virtually present, and we are not just families doing things in isolation unless it either suits us to do so, we are unlucky or we have been artificially isolated by a hostile social climate as engendered by, for example, local authorities scaring people into hiding or insufficient publicity regarding the reality of this approach to parenting.

One of the failures of school is that it severs the connection between adults and children and segregates them.  Part of that severance involves teachers being in loco parentis while being relatively unable to establish a natural rapport with the children, often through no fault of their own.  Now, i of course do offer science, maths and other workshops for children who are not mine, and this is potentially questionable.  It can lead to problems and is in danger of drifting towards schooling, something against which i strive.  However, it differs in various ways from teaching.  I am not waylaid by red tape and bureaucracy, by syllabi or curricula or by fear of bullying from the children.  However, i see this as being part of the village.  I must remain vigilant not to become "teachery", which is a risk in this situation.

One way in which i'm now trying to sidestep this issue is by attempting to participate in education in other ways.  To this end, i am embarking on a concerted effort to make a series of educational YouTube videos.  This project is still in its early stages and i am still learning how to put good videos together, and it is of course "no substitute for hands on" but they will improve and i also plan to link them, for people who are interested, to topic areas in the National Curriculum - it is a fact that some people do pay attention to that and i don't judge them for that although i had little interest in it myself.  For those who are interested, here are the links to the two i've made so far which have not been deleted, both about soap making:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEUmX7UpZ9w&list=UUa-j3lgC_ThPt9Ggov0yIyA&index=2&feature=plcp

and the second, which is more about the science (and how cheaply soap can be made!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1QAgdZ01lo&feature=BFa&list=UUa-j3lgC_ThPt9Ggov0yIyA

The other way in which i'm pursuing education, of course, is through writing books.  I have plans for a number of these.  So far, i've published one:  'You Could've Thought Of That', whose children's edition will soon be available from lulu.com (where the adult edition is already available here:  http://www.lulu.com/shop/mark-a-ure/you-couldve-thought-of-that-a-compendium-of-ideas-which-havent-been-thought-of-yet/paperback/product-20266026.html).  The second one is of course 'Here Be Dragons', a bestiary and atlas which aims both to entertain and inform.  Also, of course i plan to continue the science and maths sessions, and if possible start new ones on other subjects such as classical languages and philosophy if the interest is there, for as long as at least one child wants me to do so.

So what am i saying?  I suppose that you can all rest assured that i will try to make sure i stay in touch with the needs of children, and that i hope you still see me as part of your village

We all benefit from education

Maybe this should become a regular blog.  What do you think?  Bettina doesn't like blogs, but i don't know why.

Anyway...
Back in the mid-'80s, there was an education bill called GERBILL - the Great Education Reform Bill.  It introduced the National Curriculum, Key Stages, abolished academic tenure, started City Technology Colleges (and in fact my old secondary school became one) and various other things which at the time i thought were bad, and in fact i still maintain that they were quite negative and should be revoked.  At the time, I was involved in a campaign against it and was carting a petition around to be signed.  A major issue at the time was the possibility of the replacement of student grants with loans, which was phased in from 1990 though through different legislation.  Also at the time, i was of dramatically different opinions regarding what i would at the time have called home education - I felt that traditional nuclear families were automatically bad and had too much power, and would tend to screw children up for life.

While getting signatures for the petition, i was confronted by a Tory law student who said to me that he thought it was only fair that the beneficiaries of higher education should pay for it.  I replied that since the whole of society benefitted from higher education, i agreed completely and therefore felt reassured that he did in fact believe that it should be paid via grants rather than loans.  He had no answer for that.

Unsurprisingly, my opinions have changed to the extent that i am not now convinced that any kind of university education is appropriate in its current form, judging by the apparent tendency of higher education to reduce the quality of teaching and resources and the assumption that so-called "higher" education is the best possible education compared to others, among other things.  Nevertheless, I would still say that the whole of society benefits from higher education and in fact from education at a "lower" level and younger ages.

Let's go back to GERBILL for a moment.  Two of the measures it introduced were the National Curriculum and Key Stages.  A few years later, i would be writing lesson plans based on these (long story), and was disappointed by the low level of achievement they expected and the low level of involvement they seemed likely to engender.  These changes seem to mark the beginning of the sharp decline in the quality of school education which continues today, and were the first of many reasons which ultimately led to my conversion to the idea of home education, or rather, my resolve to make the children aware of their choice to attend school or not so that they could take that decision themselves.  One of the reasons for this was that the changes in education meant that, imperfect though it was, the net benefit to society from schooling was considerably reduced.

Therefore, it now makes sense more than ever to say that education otherwise than at school is of greater benefit to society than at least state schools, per child at least.  For instance, a society in which language does not exist might be pre-Palaeolithic in nature.  Learning would be minimally passed down from parents to children or through tribes and most would be lost.  Signed and spoken language more than anything else is what makes us human and is substantially the domain of "home" education - a child which fails to learn to use language before a certain age will apparently become incapable of doing so later, or at least find it much harder to acquire grammar.  The same applies to various other things children learn to do before reaching the age of compulsory education, and in fact, though to me it sounds unquantifiable, they are said to learn more than half of what they will ever learn by the age of two.  In that sense if no other, "home education" makes the biggest contribution of all to the common good.

However, we all know that when people use the term "home education", they usually mean the education of children of compulsory education age without any attendance at school for lessons.  This also contributes to the common good to a greater extent than schooling because children in those circumstances learn the kind of things as is exemplified by the "Three R's" and the explicit content of curricula more quickly and thoroughly than their peers at school, though not necessarily earlier or in the same order,because they are motivated when they learn, can do so at their own pace and level and the like.  They also miss out on much of the harmful learning which occurs in schools and which has increased in recent years, that learning is boring, irrelevant, difficult and so forth, and they also miss out on learning how total institutions work and various other things.  These are the kinds of things which are not in the common good.  They lead to students who plagiarise because they are not enthusiastic about their learning and fail to make a connection between it and their lives.  This is harmful to them and harmful to us all.  It can be largely avoided simply by not going to school, and results in adults more likely to have qualities such as self-motivation, independence, resourcefulness, creativity, imagination and vision to a greater degree.  Such people are better for the common good.

Why am i saying this now?  Well, first of all of course, the offspring are now both at college, which makes me feel that i am to some extent now an interloper in home ed, though that's a topic for another post.  However, just as back in Thatcher's day it was argued that the students were mere consumers of an education that benefitted only them rather than society, it is clear to me now that education which omits schooling is of greater benefit to us all than education which is considered to consist only of schooling, particularly when that schooling is of the kind which impairs truly inspiring and charismatic teachers and destroys the enthusiasm and interest of students because they bear the brunt of policy decisions made from on high.  This brings me to the other point:  just as Ed Balls had it in for us a couple of years ago, so today the Welsh Government is trying to do the same.  This from a nation on which the Welsh Knot was imposed.  There's a reason why Welsh English lacks a postvocalic R - it was imposed by Anglophone school authorities.  Welsh children, having acquired their native language through home education, then had it beaten out of them by the teachers.  The Welsh Government is now trying to do the same by insisting on the same irrational, fallaciously-based regime of monitoring education out of existence just as the British government destroyed the Welsh language two centuries previously.  I wonder what the Welsh for hypocrisy is.

Empty nest 1.0

Right, so he's gone.  Liz and Holly are also out.  Liz and i have both felt rather aimless today because it's bloody weird not having either of them around or needing to think of anything to do with them, although to be honest that happened quite a while ago - self-sufficient and overcome by ennui for quite some time have our children been.  So it's empty nest time, almost.  Presumably there will be a proper empty nest moment when they both really and truly do leave home, although people say that never quite happens.  Holly announced a couple of years ago that she had in fact "left home", but since she did it while loading the washing machine it wasn't entirely convincing unless we lived in a laundrette.

The thing now is to "start" as i mean to go on.  Unfortunately the whole weirdness of the situation is making it difficult to start anything.  My progress on the ebook has ground to a halt right now - i did displacement, fake work activities like making sure the text was all loaded into Evernote so i could edit it on the tablet if i needed to, but since as i said i am alone in the house, that was all a bit immaculate (=pointless).  So maybe Tuesday is the real day when i "start as I mean to go on" rather than today, but once you've had several days where you haven't started, it gets hard to convince yourself that that's what you're honestly doing.  For that reason in itself, it'd clearly be a good idea.

I have had one thought about all this which might be fruitful, and it's based on the idea of what some childless gays and lesbians seem to do.  There is more than one nurturing role available to us and as a result, such a person might choose to nurture the whole world, the youth of today or what have you.  Hence they might become a probation officer or teacher as a way of satisfying that role.  Now that is software in a sense.  Fertilisation provides the hardware - human bodies capable of learning.  Culture and nurture provide the software.  Liz and i are now in a sense a gay couple, apart from the minor detail that we're heterosexual.  Our role towards the children continues in a subdued way, but our role towards the world now comes to the fore.  Now we are supposed to provide the software more than the hardware.  There are a couple of organisms out there which are now considerably independent - the living bodies of Holly and Daniel.  However, they both existed as a piece of software from way before that in our minds because we were aware of various aspects of possible future children of ours before we even met.  For instance, some time in about 1977, i decided i liked the name Daniel and hence there was a possible future child of mine called Daniel Ure, date of birth unknown, possibly even non-existent.  That child would probably speak English as a first language, be male and so forth.  As time went by, that software was edited together with Liz's prototypes for children and eventually got compiled into the object codes we call Holly and Daniel.  The software is their souls, the hardware their bodies.  I hope that makes sense.

There is of course one other child in this family who has only ever existed as software:  Sophie Gray, date of birth 13th November 1999.  She has a soul but no body and she is still with us.  Here are some pictures of her:

This is a ghostly image of our phantom daughter on holiday in Sussex i think.  Her age here is something like nine.  Here's another one of her at home:

Unfortunately, due to the annoying fact that it's difficult to point a camera into a parallel universe, the shape of her face is a bit distorted, but she's there.  Incidentally, her eyes are the wrong colour in both of these.  Thus we still have a child at home, but she's disabled in an interesting way:  she is less existent than the other two children.

On a sort of combined software and hardware note, there are another set of phantom alter egos too:  the counterpart children who were never born but are everything, genetically, which one is not.  Everyone has one of these.  When the cells which eventually become the eggs and sperm which unite to create the hardware on which our souls run as programmes (or maybe operating systems if we are particularly dissociated or have lots of roles), each of them divides to produce two cells.  The other pair of cells, one an ovum, the other a sperm, has the other alleles, so for example any female will have a phantom male counterpart and vice versa, any homozygously blue-eyed child of heterozygous brown-eyed parents will have a brown-eyed phantom counterpart and so forth.  Hence, somewhere out there in the phase space of your genome, there is another person who is anyone but you:  Ivan and Daria, our non-children, our doubly non-existent phantom non-son Brutus, and the husband of the non-existent Ruth (who is anyone but me) who seems to be called George or Albert.  We all have these phantom counterparts who never existed, and of course many billions of other counterparts who never existed either, but in other ways.  Also, those counterparts Ruth and George have other children which we couldn't have because their very genomes are dormant or have been destroyed, depending on the sex.  These ghostly children can't even manage not to exist as well as the ones which don't.

However, we are not these bodies, whether or not they exist.  We are the software running on those bodies, perhaps with some differences.  We will never know what most of those differences were, and there would even be similarities where a homozygous recessive trait is inherited from both parents. Perhaps all of a nervous couple's phantom children are also nervous, for example.  Think of it this way.  You have a child.  They turn out to have an inherited genetic trait, such as, allegedly, being able to roll their tongue, but you don't find out until they're thirteen.  Now, suppose you had had the other, phantom child instead.  That child would not have been able to roll their tongue.  Similarly, you might find out your son is red-green colourblind.  Their alter ego would have been a daughter who was not colourblind, almost certainly (99.9% in fact).  However, simply because you discover your child can or cannot roll their tongue or is or is not colourblind does not alter the fact that they are the same person.  It means something to say they might not have been able to roll their tongue, or that they might not have been colourblind. It might even mean something to say they might have been of a different gender.  The point is that all that depends on the child's social identity.  They exist as a person in the world almost regardless of minor details in their genomes, although some differences have big consequences.  Therefore, I would say that our children are, metaphorically speaking, software, and that is the sense in which they have souls.  As such, they are also eternal because at the latest, taking my son as an example, he had a name by 1977 and he will exist in people's memories for as long as there are people to remember him after he has died.

To end frivolously, this makes Sophie as real as the other children in the sense that she exists as an imaginary character, but she is still our daughter.

Does that make sense?

786A

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?