So the billionaire worshippers at Forbes Magazine * have got their eyes on the massive opportunities for profit promised by the privatisation of public education.

Naveen Jain’s article is so full of absurd assertions, greed- masquerading as idealism and fundamental misunderstandings that it is hard to know where to begin.

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Reading the start of Hard Times in the library last weekend, I had to stop myself accosting the nearest person with how strikingly relevant it is to the educational debate today.

In a miserable class room in a northern English industrial town a school inspector and a new teacher drill a class of youngsters with facts in the modern, 1850s, method.  Exaggerated as they are in Dickens’ inimitable style, Misters Gradgrind and M’Choakumchild are recognisable still as archetypes of the ‘filling a bucket’ style of educator.  Dickens describes the teacher “…looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after another… from thy boiling store that shalt fill each jar brim full [and] kill outright the robber Fancy lurking within…” and so on.

So, what’s so exciting about this?

First, it’s that, even in 1854, this style of education was quite obviously mocked and criticised by Dickens, and presumably other people too. There’s  this mythologising that goes on, from educational consultants and people on TED talks in particular, that the twentieth century industrial model of education was about pumping kids through schools and filling their heads in a regimented manner and rhythm, and that we have to change this because of the ‘new economy’ or ‘new forms of knowledge’ or whatever. What nonsense. The tension between education as a personal, holistic, creative endeavour versus the acquisition of knowledge, at least reaches back to the mid nineteenth century, and I suspect much earlier indeed.

And the relation of this to charter schools is simply that Mr Gradgrind sounds like a perfect candidate to run a KIPP school.  “A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations… With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket... ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature…” this sounds like a man ideally fitted for the ‘no excuses’ extreme-accountability regime of the (commonly known as) Kids in Prison Programme.

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Came across this cartoon on Susan Ohanian's website this afternoon and it seemed to fit.

• no politics in newsletters (obviously doesn't buy into the personal is political discussion);
• no emails/correspondence opposing bad policy; and
• secret meetings held with people who will agree with you.

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We wonder how many Treasury officials send their kids to state schools or use our public health services? We wonder how many have lived on benefits or had jobs that got their hands dirty, or in which they have had to face the consequences of the stupid policy proposals they seek to inflict on the population?

Treasury advice to the National government on funding for education includes the proposal to remove the automatic adjustments to base funding which occur through demographic and other projected changes and fund these changes within the allocation of new money each year or make a case for additional funding on a year by year basis.

School rolls are projected to rise to about 2024. These are demographic changes which increase operations funding and staffing levels in a predictable manner. Currently the funding for school staffing and operations is automatically adjusted to fund the increased cost this creates.

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