Good question. I think maybe it was because a good deal of academics from the Islamic world were educated in France already due to the colonies they did have. Algerians, Tunisians, Syrians, Moroccans, Lebanese... Not an expert so could totally be wrong here, but maybe France put in more effort to incorporate local elites into their own bureaucratic elite system? I imagine there were probably more Muslims in the grande ecoles in France in the 50-60s than in the English elite schools (or US ones for that matter).
Also, I know France practiced (and probably still practices) a good deal of academic "cultural outreach", promoting their culture and especially their language abroad.
Well, we've all been students, haven't we? And most of us probably have experience with ways of teaching us that worked, and ways that didn't. Of course we're all going to have an opinion.
I don't have any grand theory of education, but I have some stories of what worked for me and what didn't.
I learned English from a guy with a radical method: the "direct method" or "natural method". After the first lesson explaining what he was going to do, he spoke only English in class. The textbook also had only English (vocabulary was taught with pictures). This was about third grade elementary school. This worked great for me, I always had top marks in English. German, by comparison, was always taught to me in the traditional method with grammar lists etc. durchfürgegenohneum, ausbeimitnachseitvonzu, and I still remember that crap and I still absolutely suck at German.
So one "revolutionary", running his own radical program (he would never have been allowed to do that today), helped me. I think we should let people try things.
I'd agree with this conclusion from another angle as well. It seems slightly odd to me that people think there must be a single "right" way to teach. What works for one student, one group of people, doesn't necessarily work well for another.
And it also goes the other way as well. One form of pedagogy might work excellently for one teacher, yet he may do abysmally at another. What's "right" for him may be wrong for another teacher. By striving for something like homogeneity you disadvantage not only students, but also teachers.
This is all even more true in current times as educational outcomes continue to decline even as ever more money is pumped into education, and teacher churn rates are at record highs, with many completely leaving the profession.
Humans are not so different from one other that we need different ways. However there are a lot of ways that work and it is very hard to run a real study to figure out which is best. You cannot isolate all the variables (several of the different ways claim teacher quality is important - just one variable that is hard to isolate)
Why do you think? For an example of something in support of my argument, China (and a number of other East Asian countries) use a very hardcore memorization + training routine. And they are having literally the best educational outcomes in the world from it, but such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.
> such a thing would almost certainly fail catastrophically in a contemporary American classroom.
It definitely would fail but isn't it an order of magnitude more likely that's due to the parents, teachers' unions, and other factors rather than American students are neurologically different than Chinese students and therefore learn differently?
If they do have much better outcomes (I have no idea if this is the case or not), if you made that change in kindergarten today and moved it up through the end of high school with that class, I bet you'd see remarkable improvement in them compared to older cohorts.
Yeah, here [1] are the PISA outcomes. PISA is an international test that's generally the gold standard for comparison of educational outcomes on an international level. [1] Over the last testing year China was #2, the test prior #1. Singapore was #1 in the most recent period, and is around 75% ethnic Chinese.
Whether the differences are genetic or cultural is interesting but doesn't really matter. The reality is that they exist and are relatively immutable. For a very basic example, in China failing students fail. In American schools, failing students tend to be passed along. And such things are difficult to change, even if you could prove beyond any doubt that doing so would yield better outcomes for everybody.
Are they having the best results from that? I've seen the claim of other countries using that and having book smart kids who can't think. (Whatever that means)
There is a common want to make the grass greener. However it isn't always and most people don't know.
It's not necessarily easy to find people who will want to work with that, especially when you were the Trump administration.
I mean there used to be a fair amount of government loyalists remaining, working for outlets like Voice of America who, probably, sincerely thought they were doing a good thing. But they butted head with the Trump administration hard.
For all loyalists there is a grifter to true believer ratio, and for the current admin it's bad. Why pay a hard-to-find true believer to make actually convincing propaganda, when you're a grifter yourself and have the opportunity to take the budget for yourself and let an LLM half-ass it?
Not in policy, no he definitively isn't. It's actually possible to join and have a career in political party without believing a word of what they stand for. There are examples all over the world, but Starmer is among the most blatant ones.
My best theory is that he's chum with one of UK's many spy lords - that is, upper class twats with a sinecure in the secret services - and that he's trying to destroy Labour for them (and the good of the country of course). He only failed last election because the conservative party was even more self-destructive.
Well of course, if you're a concerned parent or concerned person of any kind in Norway, the first thing you do is start an organization. There are even some who start many, in the hope of cross-pollination.
What's more extreme to me is people like NRK's economy commentator Cecilie Langum Becker, who I read today went over to a lucrative job as communication chief in Aker. A corporate PR person by trade, for 8 years, she had front page space every day to push austeritarian, interest-scold propaganda that would make The Economist blush. So good of our public broadcaster to promote voices we rarely hear from in the media /s.
Actual grass roots organizations, even for unsympathetic causes like anti-pride, worry me less than the whole Orkla-Schibsted consensus.
I think you are underestimating these grass roots groups. Some of them are supported by foreign inyerests who want to undermine trust in the government.
So we are told, but generally I don't buy it. Certainly not just for moustache-twirling "destabilization" purposes. If foreign interests bother with fringe Norwegian issues, it's because they get something directly from it. It may of course be that e.g. Israel gives support of various kinds to groups like SIAN or MIFF, or Russia to groups which are critical of Norwegian military support for Ukraine. But even that doesn't give us right to dismiss these groups as insincere - it's quite a way from that to actual front groups and astroturfing.
Either way, I think the focus should be on the "respectable" corruption, not on unhinged noisy attention seeking outsiders.
This is a feature of every instrument. Even with piano you have to start pressing down a key slightly before you want to ring out or you will be behind time.
From what I remember nothing Graeber wrote suggests there wasn't a government. On the contrary, he wrote a lot of the temple being in charge of distribution.
Maybe there was a high priest in charge of weights and measures and punishing people who cheated with them, who knows - but we do know that for a very long time, that power if so wasn't leveraged into better living quarters, or better access to luxury goods that we know of. That's pretty remarkable.
So you can basically believe one of two things, or maybe some combination: that power was fairly evenly distributed, OR, those with power didn't appreciably privilege themselves. I find the latter harder to believe than the former.
And when it happens, I suspect we'll end up having to eat austerity to avoid inflation again. Under new leadership from the Responsible Party, whoever that is where we live.
I came across an omen list in a book I looked at for genealogy, and it was quite interesting to search and try to figure out which comet or volcanic eruption an entry referred to. Usually it wasn't hard. Makes me think lesser events like lightning strikes and misshapen calves they recorded are also reasonably accurate.
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