Re: Here's someone on our side :o)

On Sat, 09 Sep 2006 22:36:44 +0100, D.M. Procida wrote:

pretty clearly indicated, and also a pretty standard usage. None of the
other

Of course I have a financial interest. I also have two feet and one
liver, but all these facts are equally and utterly irrelevant

You are confusing health with wealth ;-). Your feet and liver have little
to do with your personal wealth - your ability to command a premium
payment for your skills and knowledge does. Wealth is dependent on payment
for something, that is pretty much the same as making profit for the vast
majority of businesses and there are far more small businesses subsisting
like that than the large ones you seem to have a hang up about. If you go
down the road of fairness, why should you get paid more than someone who
perhaps through no fault of their own was born with less talent or without
the opportunities? Maybe you had more investment in your education than
someone else has had.

and I'm amazed that
you think you can make some kind of point by saying so.

I'm amazed you can be so narrow in your interpretation to ensure it fits
your own view of the world but then that's politics for you.

Your profit margin is your personal expenses taken from your take
home pay. You have a service level agreement with your employer in
the form of a contract which is not much different from the way I
have contracts with customers.

This is just nonsense. You can't take one model of contractual
relationship and apply it willy-nilly to every other.

I can and I have. Its perfectly reasonable, it just appears to disturb
your perspective on the world. That's cool, its a pluralist society.

Except it's nonsense.

To you perhaps, it seems perfectly rational to me. Again you don't appear
to be able to take an objective view of what is politics and what is
rational. That to me is more dangerous in an educator than business taking
an interest in education.

Neither in language, nor law, nor commonsense, nor
business practice, nor in any other way at all, can the relations
between employer and employer be understood according to a model of
relations between customer and supplier.

It doesn't fit the way you want to think of yourself, that's all. The
details of contract are not the issue, what matters is the morals
surrounding taking money for services, something common to both
situations. The politics arise from the mechanisms associated with that
process but in principle any of these mechanisms can be abused and have
been shown to be. When presenting such arguments to students it is
necessary to be very clear about the political perspective and to provide
a balanced and informed view of the various interest groups, including
your own and without bias. That is one reason why teaching is a difficult
job.

Because business are not any*one*. Businesses are businesses, not
people.

Sole trader is a single person business. There are rather a lot of
them.

Excellent. In that case the person has as much right to make demands of
education as any other person, and we can just leave the business out of
this completely.

Not if they are saying my legitimate interest is that I want to expand my
business from being a sole trader to employ people and I need people who
can eg spell accurately so I want more emphasis on that in the curriculum.
Where do you draw the line? What about the Federation of Small Businesses
acting on their behalf? Or a teaching union on behalf of its members for a
different political perspective?

Mostly, the teaching profession has the interests of its charges'
educations at heart. Business does not.

Businesses have the interests of employees, customers and shareholders
at heart. The teaching profession also has its own interests at heart
too.

When business has the interests of education at heart, it will have the
right to a stake in education.

But many have. They just have a different perspective on what constitutes
a balanced education from you. They (and incidentally most parents I have
ever talked to) believe that a legitimate part of education is preparing
young people for future life and that includes employment, setting up
businesses etc. Its not exclusively this but it is a factor just as the
employers' view is not exclusive in policy making but a factor. You could
have said you believe that business is too influential and that influence
should be reduced, but you didn't, you said business has no part at all.
Even the students themselves have an interest in being educated for
employment - do their views count? Your model appears to be teachers are
the only ones that matter, their judgement is sacrosanct rather like the
Pope being infallible. Apart from anything else, giving out that
impression does teachers a disservice because it will alienate the rest of
society against them. It will ensure that there are few people "on our
side".

Until then, it should be kept at a safe distance from education
policy-making and the people responsible for it.

I think it would be equally as dangerous to assume that the perspective
you have demonstrated here should be the only one that affected education
policy-making. Thankfully, its never likely to happen in a pluralist
political environment. In the end, if the Government has got it wrong,
vote for someone else next time and if you think the politics here
intolerable generally, you can either start a new political party of your
own or move to society that is more in tune with your views.

--
Ian Lynch
www.theINGOTs.org
www.opendocumentfellowship.org
www.schoolforge.org.uk
.

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