Joe Nutt's Blog
June 16, 2020
TES Review
Here is a review of 'Teaching English for the Real World' in TES.
"'Teaching English for the Real World' is very often extremely well written, funny, perceptive and justified in its claims."
https://www.tes.com/news/book-review/...
"'Teaching English for the Real World' is very often extremely well written, funny, perceptive and justified in its claims."
https://www.tes.com/news/book-review/...
May 17, 2020
In the Real World The Machines Have Already Rebelled. We Just Never Noticed.
The current pandemic has thrown a glaring light on something I’ve observed at work, but only dimly understood, for half of my career. Something I now know is profoundly damaging but still largely invisible. I spent twenty years teaching English and another twenty using it to earn a living, as an author and consultant for a large number of different businesses and organisations, all connected with education and most with technology.
Statistics and their graphical representation have come to dominate the political decision-making Covid19 forced onto scores of hapless political leaders worldwide. In an attempt to justify what were always entirely human decisions, scientists and politicians have relied on machines. The dramatic rebellion of the machines so familiar from movies like 'Terminator' or '2001 A Space Odyssey' wasn’t violent or overnight. It was slow and steady. It’s taken decades but it’s been every bit as relentless as Hal or an army of single-minded androids carrying firearms, and the way in which billions of human lives have been at best marginalised and at worst wrecked, or even lost, is a tribute to the clinical efficiency those machines have exhibited.
This is the rot at the heart of all technocratic behaviour. A naïve belief that numbers tell their own story. They don’t. They can’t. Ever.
Anyone who made the effort to consider the plethora of statistics on parade, the numbers of deaths due to Covid19; numbers of deaths in care homes; numbers of ventilators; face masks, viral tests, antibody tests, clinical gowns and especially how those numbers compare between nations, will understand that any stories the numbers tell derive not from the numbers themselves, but from the desires and goals of the scientists and politicians. If this truth hadn’t hit home, then the flood of questions that enveloped and then drowned the government adviser and epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, when he broke lockdown rules to visit his lover, will have done the job.
It’s as though around twenty years ago, when Silicon Valley fever first took hold, a company had created a machine that really could generate fluent English prose at the click of a mouse - and we believed all the stories it told.
When I moved from the classroom to work in the educational technology world I was quickly and frequently confronted with this dilemma although I had the loosest of grips on it. Businesses would design and sell solutions to educational problems that they themselves invented, every step of the way justifying the process on the basis of implacable numbers, and the opportunity to sell more technology.
The entire world of school improvement and educational reform is rooted in the technocratic belief that numbers tell their own story. A belief that naïve politicians eagerly bought into because it gave them a graph to point to, a tangible, colourful image of their personal and party success. In the UK schools were given grades by the schools inspectorate Ofsted, based on the numbers of exams their pupils passed, as though it was the school that was directly responsible for the numbers and not a machine that was merely toying with them before someone else told the story about the school that suited their personal or political agenda.
Children were placed into groups they didn’t really belong to in any meaningful sense on the basis of the story the numbers told. So, some had special educational needs and were immediately labelled SEN, others were tagged NEETs (not in education, employment or training) while others were just branded disadvantaged, or most recently, ‘pupil premium’. In every case, the only value to accrue was it provided the means for technology businesses to sell machines and for politicians to point to graphs to indicate their success; the real children, like unwonted film extras, never making an appearance in their own story.
I’ve no doubt the same profoundly damaging relationship between technology and politics has had equally reductive and crippling effects on every area of our cultural life you care to name, it’s just my personal experience has come from education.
Technocratic thinking reduces everything to numbers before any decision is made. If you manufacture computing technology it makes sense that you would use your own products to drive and support your business. The problem started when those same businesses stopped just encouraging others to adopt the same behaviour and started demanding everyone do it because the numbers always told the truth.
‘The machines can tell the truth’ turned into: ‘only the machines can tell the truth.’
The pandemic has given them a golden opportunity to ramp up this message. While politicians are stage front either relishing the attention or taking all the flack, global technology businesses are busy offstage redesigning the world in their own, dystopian image.
New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has set up a new panel led by the ex CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, to do exactly this for New York post pandemic. He has also invited the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation amongst others, to design “a smarter education system”. Tech giants are lining themselves up for what looks like a glut of commercial opportunities generated from the pandemic fallout. The irony is truly terrible. Those who empowered the rebellious machines now get to benefit most from the ensuing chaos.
Meanwhile almost every global thinktank and influential NGO you care to mention: UNESCO, The World Bank, the OECD, Unicef and the WHO have positioned themselves to take advantage of the disruption caused by the pandemic by forming visionary partnerships with some of the tech giants. UNESCO has set up a Global Education Coalition, what it calls a ‘multi-sector partnership to provide appropriate distance education for all learners.’ A coalition that embraces a number of major technology businesses including: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, KPMG, Weidong, Coursera, Zoom, Khan Academy, Moodle and code.org. These are some of the biggest players in the educational technology world.
In an article for an online magazine called Quartz, Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director of education commented: “All the red tape that keeps things away is gone and people are looking for solutions that in the past they did not want to see. … Real change takes place in deep crisis. You will not stop the momentum that will build.”
Schleicher epitomises the technocratic mindset. Not long ago a graph he had presented at a major event in London was shared online by arguably the UK’s most influential educational organisation, The Education Endowment Foundation. It purported to show the “Differences in educational resources between advantaged and disadvantaged schools” across 70 nations. The numbers would of course, tell the story. Only in this case the graph was unintelligible. I spent some time trying to interpret it, after all that’s part of my job, but having failed, I contacted an expert educational researcher in my network who found it baffling enough to ask a colleague of theirs, who was equally at a loss. A straw poll admittedly of three…experts.
So prevalent is the technocratic lie, so complete the machines’ victory, someone who whole nations listen to when it comes to education can point to a colourful nothing on a slide, and not an eyebrow nor objection gets raised.
While schools and teachers around the globe battle with the harsh realities of how to continue to educate the young while keeping them socially distant from each other, these remote organisations and businesses are busy selling the same technocratic lie they have always sold, only this time in the process they may well render schools and teachers obsolete. Quite what that means for our culture and society is a story I for one, am not prepared to sit around the campfire waiting to hear.
Statistics and their graphical representation have come to dominate the political decision-making Covid19 forced onto scores of hapless political leaders worldwide. In an attempt to justify what were always entirely human decisions, scientists and politicians have relied on machines. The dramatic rebellion of the machines so familiar from movies like 'Terminator' or '2001 A Space Odyssey' wasn’t violent or overnight. It was slow and steady. It’s taken decades but it’s been every bit as relentless as Hal or an army of single-minded androids carrying firearms, and the way in which billions of human lives have been at best marginalised and at worst wrecked, or even lost, is a tribute to the clinical efficiency those machines have exhibited.
This is the rot at the heart of all technocratic behaviour. A naïve belief that numbers tell their own story. They don’t. They can’t. Ever.
Anyone who made the effort to consider the plethora of statistics on parade, the numbers of deaths due to Covid19; numbers of deaths in care homes; numbers of ventilators; face masks, viral tests, antibody tests, clinical gowns and especially how those numbers compare between nations, will understand that any stories the numbers tell derive not from the numbers themselves, but from the desires and goals of the scientists and politicians. If this truth hadn’t hit home, then the flood of questions that enveloped and then drowned the government adviser and epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, when he broke lockdown rules to visit his lover, will have done the job.
It’s as though around twenty years ago, when Silicon Valley fever first took hold, a company had created a machine that really could generate fluent English prose at the click of a mouse - and we believed all the stories it told.
When I moved from the classroom to work in the educational technology world I was quickly and frequently confronted with this dilemma although I had the loosest of grips on it. Businesses would design and sell solutions to educational problems that they themselves invented, every step of the way justifying the process on the basis of implacable numbers, and the opportunity to sell more technology.
The entire world of school improvement and educational reform is rooted in the technocratic belief that numbers tell their own story. A belief that naïve politicians eagerly bought into because it gave them a graph to point to, a tangible, colourful image of their personal and party success. In the UK schools were given grades by the schools inspectorate Ofsted, based on the numbers of exams their pupils passed, as though it was the school that was directly responsible for the numbers and not a machine that was merely toying with them before someone else told the story about the school that suited their personal or political agenda.
Children were placed into groups they didn’t really belong to in any meaningful sense on the basis of the story the numbers told. So, some had special educational needs and were immediately labelled SEN, others were tagged NEETs (not in education, employment or training) while others were just branded disadvantaged, or most recently, ‘pupil premium’. In every case, the only value to accrue was it provided the means for technology businesses to sell machines and for politicians to point to graphs to indicate their success; the real children, like unwonted film extras, never making an appearance in their own story.
I’ve no doubt the same profoundly damaging relationship between technology and politics has had equally reductive and crippling effects on every area of our cultural life you care to name, it’s just my personal experience has come from education.
Technocratic thinking reduces everything to numbers before any decision is made. If you manufacture computing technology it makes sense that you would use your own products to drive and support your business. The problem started when those same businesses stopped just encouraging others to adopt the same behaviour and started demanding everyone do it because the numbers always told the truth.
‘The machines can tell the truth’ turned into: ‘only the machines can tell the truth.’
The pandemic has given them a golden opportunity to ramp up this message. While politicians are stage front either relishing the attention or taking all the flack, global technology businesses are busy offstage redesigning the world in their own, dystopian image.
New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, has set up a new panel led by the ex CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, to do exactly this for New York post pandemic. He has also invited the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation amongst others, to design “a smarter education system”. Tech giants are lining themselves up for what looks like a glut of commercial opportunities generated from the pandemic fallout. The irony is truly terrible. Those who empowered the rebellious machines now get to benefit most from the ensuing chaos.
Meanwhile almost every global thinktank and influential NGO you care to mention: UNESCO, The World Bank, the OECD, Unicef and the WHO have positioned themselves to take advantage of the disruption caused by the pandemic by forming visionary partnerships with some of the tech giants. UNESCO has set up a Global Education Coalition, what it calls a ‘multi-sector partnership to provide appropriate distance education for all learners.’ A coalition that embraces a number of major technology businesses including: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, KPMG, Weidong, Coursera, Zoom, Khan Academy, Moodle and code.org. These are some of the biggest players in the educational technology world.
In an article for an online magazine called Quartz, Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director of education commented: “All the red tape that keeps things away is gone and people are looking for solutions that in the past they did not want to see. … Real change takes place in deep crisis. You will not stop the momentum that will build.”
Schleicher epitomises the technocratic mindset. Not long ago a graph he had presented at a major event in London was shared online by arguably the UK’s most influential educational organisation, The Education Endowment Foundation. It purported to show the “Differences in educational resources between advantaged and disadvantaged schools” across 70 nations. The numbers would of course, tell the story. Only in this case the graph was unintelligible. I spent some time trying to interpret it, after all that’s part of my job, but having failed, I contacted an expert educational researcher in my network who found it baffling enough to ask a colleague of theirs, who was equally at a loss. A straw poll admittedly of three…experts.
So prevalent is the technocratic lie, so complete the machines’ victory, someone who whole nations listen to when it comes to education can point to a colourful nothing on a slide, and not an eyebrow nor objection gets raised.
While schools and teachers around the globe battle with the harsh realities of how to continue to educate the young while keeping them socially distant from each other, these remote organisations and businesses are busy selling the same technocratic lie they have always sold, only this time in the process they may well render schools and teachers obsolete. Quite what that means for our culture and society is a story I for one, am not prepared to sit around the campfire waiting to hear.
May 12, 2020
New Book Due Any Day
My new book, 'Teaching English for the Real World' is published this week. It argues that there is a serious misalignment between how English is taught and how it's now used in the real world, not least because of technology.
I hope readers will review it asap and here is just a taste.
"Far too many teachers…are seduced by this bizarre idea that they are nurturing little authors or poets. They forget that in an entire career teaching the subject, it’s highly unlikely that any one of the children they teach will ever publish a book or a poem, never mind script a play. Even if they could find a theatre to stage it."
I hope readers will review it asap and here is just a taste.
"Far too many teachers…are seduced by this bizarre idea that they are nurturing little authors or poets. They forget that in an entire career teaching the subject, it’s highly unlikely that any one of the children they teach will ever publish a book or a poem, never mind script a play. Even if they could find a theatre to stage it."
April 23, 2019
The Point of Poetry - Reviews
It is just a delight to find so many reviewers of 'The Point of Poetry' responding so positively to the book's aim.
"Joe Nutt’s book The Point of Poetry is not necessarily meant to be a textbook, but if it were, it is the textbook we all wish we had back when poetry was being taught–or so often assaulted or inflicted–back in high school or college."
"I absolutely loved this book! I feel that it’s given me back the confidence to start picking up more poetry collections again and to spend time reading poems out loud and taking time to really think about them."
"If every trainee teacher read and attended a book discussion on The Point of Poetry, the quality of pastoral care in UK schools would undoubtedly improve."
But my favourite has to be this tweet: "Just finished reading your book 'The Point of Poetry.' Beautifully written and extremely enlightening. It should be in every school and sixth form library. No Question."
"Joe Nutt’s book The Point of Poetry is not necessarily meant to be a textbook, but if it were, it is the textbook we all wish we had back when poetry was being taught–or so often assaulted or inflicted–back in high school or college."
"I absolutely loved this book! I feel that it’s given me back the confidence to start picking up more poetry collections again and to spend time reading poems out loud and taking time to really think about them."
"If every trainee teacher read and attended a book discussion on The Point of Poetry, the quality of pastoral care in UK schools would undoubtedly improve."
But my favourite has to be this tweet: "Just finished reading your book 'The Point of Poetry.' Beautifully written and extremely enlightening. It should be in every school and sixth form library. No Question."
November 23, 2018
The Point of Poetry
Had sight of the full pdf version of my new book today including full jacket design and end papers. It looks gorgeous and my publisher has done a super job of managing the rights so that almost every poem (that's short enough) is fully reproduced. This was shortly after attending the AGM of the ALCS at The Royal Society. Always entertaining to corral a few hundred writers in one room. I came away with a real challenge. I always knew I was writing 'The Point of Poetry' for real metrophobes...now I just have work out how to find them.
November 16, 2018
Arnold Bennett
I came across this passage reading Bennett's "The Old Wives' Tale" which I thought was really fascinating and then yesterday I saw a lengthy Twitter thread written by a woman, complaining about how male pedestrians behave. It was just far too serendipitous to ignore. Enjoy.
_____
She was obliged to walk slowly, because Gerald walked slowly. A beautiful woman, or any woman not positively hag-like or venerable, who walks slowly in the streets of Paris becomes at once the cause of inconvenient desires, as representing the main objective on earth, always transcending in importance politics and affairs. Just as a true patriotic Englishman cannot be too busy to run after a fox, so a Frenchman is always ready to forsake all in order to follow a woman whom he has never before set eyes on. Many men thought twice about her, with her Romantic Saxon mystery of temperament, and her Parisian clothes; but all refrained from affronting her, not in the least out of respect for the gloom in her face, but from an expert conviction that those rapt eyes were were fixed immovably on another male. She walked unscathed amid the frothing hounds as though protected by a spell. The Old Wive's Tale
_____
She was obliged to walk slowly, because Gerald walked slowly. A beautiful woman, or any woman not positively hag-like or venerable, who walks slowly in the streets of Paris becomes at once the cause of inconvenient desires, as representing the main objective on earth, always transcending in importance politics and affairs. Just as a true patriotic Englishman cannot be too busy to run after a fox, so a Frenchman is always ready to forsake all in order to follow a woman whom he has never before set eyes on. Many men thought twice about her, with her Romantic Saxon mystery of temperament, and her Parisian clothes; but all refrained from affronting her, not in the least out of respect for the gloom in her face, but from an expert conviction that those rapt eyes were were fixed immovably on another male. She walked unscathed amid the frothing hounds as though protected by a spell. The Old Wive's Tale
January 22, 2018
The Point of Poetry
I had some hilarious responses to my article in Spiked last week, about my new book, The Point of Poetry. http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/...
I had no idea my job title would interest anyone.
I had no idea my job title would interest anyone.
