Early Modern Notes

The Little Professor drew my attention to this article by Mark Edmundson, All Entertainment All The Time, and I think I was even more irritated by it than she was. A few main gripes (which partly overlap with hers):

1. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. Edmundson was distressed by student evaluations of a class on the works of Sigmund Freud along these lines: “Edmundson has done a fantastic job,” said one reviewer, “of presenting this difficult, important and controversial material in an enjoyable and approachable way.”

So he’d rather his students found it dull and inaccessible, presumably. He goes on to excoriate them for appreciating the ‘enjoyable and approachable’ aspect without once giving any credit for the other part of the comment: this student has understood that Freud is not only ‘difficult’ but also ‘important and controversial’. It doesn’t seem to occur to Edmundson that making difficult subjects ‘enjoyable’ and ‘approachable’ might be a path to better understanding. He also complains that his students failed to “see intellectual work as confrontation between two people, reader and author": doesn’t that one word, ‘controversial’, suggest that they have in fact understood that in some way? (I wonder how the students themselves would feel if they read his entirely negative reaction to their enthusiasm? Just a little hurt?)

2. “Why hadn’t anyone been changed by my course?” I’m basically repeating the LP here, but this really got my goat: how does he know they hadn’t been changed? (Also, if they hadn’t previously understood Freud’s significance and now did, it strikes me that that’s a worthwhile change in itself.)

3. The ‘critique’ of TV.

TV is a tranquilizing medium, a soporific, inducing in its devotees a light narcosis. It reduces anxiety, steadies and quiets the nerves. But also deadens. Like every narcotic, it will be consumed in certain doses, produce something like a hangover, the habitual watchers’ irritable languor that persists after the TV is off. It’s been said that the illusion of knowing and control that heroin engenders isn’t entirely unlike the TV consumer’s habitual smug-torpor, and that seems about right.

Oh, come on. I mix a fair bit with people who research in audience studies (ie, take the trouble to ask the audiences about their responses rather than making patronising and usually snobbish assumptions about them), so I’ve picked up a lot of their irritation at this kind of crass characterisation of the effects of TV (and film) watching. But personal experience should tell us that this kind of generalisation is utter rubbish. Sometimes I watch TV to be soothed and amused. Sometimes I watch it to learn and be stimulated, or provoked and challenged. Sometimes I slump; sometimes I shout at the screen. Haven’t I written here before about why I love good quality TV history?

4. More generally, how about some evidence for all the generalisations? As ever, there are good points to be found somewhere in the mix. But, as the LP says: “Is there some reason why academics bewailing the decline and fall of academia refuse to undertake anything that looks vaguely like the systematic gathering of evidence?” (And I have to continue her line here, because it’s just so irresistible.)

My own skeptical interpretation of such essays, to be honest, is that they are a wonderful way of inflating one’s vita without having to do anything but contemplate the elegantly decorated interior of one’s own hospitable brain. I suspect that this opinion may not make me well-loved in some quarters, but so be it.

Well, dear Little Professor, it makes me love you even more than I did before.

OK, there’s a lot of crap on our TV screens under the title of historical documentary. I particularly dislike the ones that tell us how everyone until now has got subject X all wrong and now this programme will in fifty minutes tell us the TRUTH. Blah blah blah. Or there’s all that heavily-trodden superficial ground of ‘The most evil men in history’ type rubbish (Channel 5, are you listening?). But I’m currently reading History and the media (ed. David Cannadine, Basingstoke, 2004), and I can only agree with Tristram Hunt in ‘How does television enhance history?’:

The question should no longer be, does TV enhance or diminish history?; it should be, how do we produce the highest quality history programming? (p. 99)

To which his answer is that we as academic historians must be involved working with programme makers and that we need to ‘assume as much editorial control as possible’. (Though I didn’t much like Tristram’s style on the box, if I’m honest. Shouty shouty, look at me, aren’t I a pretty blonde boy. Go away, brat. Er, I think I might be showing my age.)

TV history cannot do the same things as carefully, deeply researched and debated written history. Fine. It has other strengths. It can bring to a wide audience the fruits of that scholarship; it can engage the public with their past. It can tell stories about that past in different ways; it can often be more sophisticated in showing the problems of source material and interpretation than it’s given credit for.

One of my recent favourites was a recent Channel 4 programme – part of its Georgian Underworld series (2003) - on the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, which was unusual in being entirely a dramatic reconstruction, based on court records. (Well, we all love a courtroom drama, don’t we?) It was beautifully written and acted, deeply moving and utterly compelling. Or there was Channel 4’s Plague, Fire, War and Treason series (2001); moving away from my period, the BBC’s superb Pompeii: The Last Day (dramatic reconstructions - a great cast - as well as amazing CGI effects); I’ve written (gushingly) before about Meet the Ancestors and Terry Jones’s Medieval Lives; and now there’s Tony Robinson’s Worst Jobs in History (both the latter using humour to convey some serious messages; but there was a lot less piss and shit in Terry’s series…). Simon Schama’s History of Britain series had its faults, but it was nonetheless great viewing, and brought a wide sweep of British history to a vast audience.

There’s always something new and wonderful to watch, a vast array of techniques and a huge range, too, in terms of intellectual depth. And, as many of these links show, the TV programmes are increasingly complemented by high quality websites that provide background, develop their subjects and, at their best, also provide outstanding stand-alone learning resources (Channel 4’s Time Traveller’s Guides are wonderful, though mostly restricted to British history; the BBC’s History website is a wide-ranging treasure trove).

Considering the examples I’ve just given, it strikes me that ‘reconstructions’ of various kinds – by actors, by amateurs in ‘reality’ shows (which can be extremely variable, I agree, but I really liked The 1940s House), using computers – has really come of age in recent years. Reconstruction seems to have been considered deeply inferior as a technique by those who brought us the seminal documentaries of the 1960s to the 80s (The Great War, The World at War, etc).Working mostly in recent history, they created a formula that revolved around archive footage, interviews with participants and talking heads. Reconstructions were a last resort to be used only when ‘primary source’ film footage (which also had the virtue of being cheap) was unavailable, and industriously avoided even when it wasn’t. Jeremy Isaacs in the History and the media volume, comments on making a series about Irish history in the late 70s: ‘We set our face against reconstructions’ (p. 48) – problematic since half of the series covered the period before the invention of film.

Of course, bad reconstructions are really bad things, but good reconstructions bring home the ‘living’ past in a way that nothing else can. That’s why I so loved the Peterloo programme; or in a totally different vein, when Tony Robinson rolls up his sleeves and, trying not to gag – or in a few cases, freeze with fear – gets right in there to show us just what those awful jobs (many of them vital for society’s survival; or filthy tasks that made possible things of sublime beauty) really involved.

And all of that is why I love television history.

I often like John Sutherland’s columns in the Guardian education section. But the latest (from last Monday, although I only just noticed it) ends with a defence of the indefensible.

The most pernicious reform introduced into higher education over the last 40 years is “continuous assessment” (also called course unitation and modularisation). It is the pedagogic equivalent of CCTV, a monitoring and measuring of student performance from freshman to finalist.

Traditionally, you slacked for eight terms and worked like stink through the ninth, “revising” for the nightmare of finals week. Now you are examined from your first undergraduate essay onward. Hell starts on day one. Modularisation does for higher education what the conveyor belt did for automobile manufacture. No more hours of idleness.

Full disclosure: I loathe exams, and never did particularly well at them (both recalling all the stuff I’d revised and getting it down rapidly in a coherent form on paper were agony). I did significantly better at essays, which I could prepare and write - think about, plan, revise, write properly, as opposed to frantic scribbling - over several days. Which hardly means that I spent every waking second of every semester on writing essays, for chrissakes. (Also, to be picky, exams still made up more than half the assessment of most of our courses.)

I’m not saying that exams per se are not useful, however. What is indefensible is this championing of ‘finals’: assessing three years’ learning in a few weeks, with the possibility (as Sutherland says; I think it was probably extremely rare) of doing virtually nothing for over two and a half years beforehand. Does he really think that was something to be praised? (By the way, much of the article is about how great this system was in giving musical geniuses such as Coldplay time to hone their skills instead of being made to do what they were at university for… But, leaving aside whether you concur in his evaluation of the talents of Coldplay, there seems to be an implicit and pretty dubious argument that the university system should be tailored to the needs of a tiny minority of artistic geniuses.)

Besides, it’s absurd to compare continuous assessment to a conveyor belt (I’ve worked on those production lines in my time, and for longer than I care to remember; I doubt that Sutherland ever has). I never had too much difficulty making time off between essays, even though I probably spent a lot more time on them than the average student. It creates, instead, a more continous short-term cycle of work-idle-work. Individual students make their own choices about exactly how much and when, just as no doubt they did in the ‘finals’ system. And very often the results reflect the amount of work put in over the whole course - as they probably did for most students, whatever the mythology, in the finals system.

By logical extension, perhaps Sutherland also thinks that we shouldn’t ask undergrads to do things like read for weekly seminars either? And as for compulsory attendance at those seminars…

(Bad puns. Dontcha love ‘em?)

Yes, it’s that time of year in the British education system (except Scotland, where they got Highers results a week ago). The eighteen-year-olds’ A-level results are out (as usual, pictures of pretty girls hugging each other; presumably because the girls continue to do best, though apparently the boys are catching up. Unless it’s because teenage boys are generally less photogenic…), and there are more passes (96 per cent of students get at least one) and A-grades (22.4 per cent) than ever; records have been broken for the fifteenth year in a row. Students in Wales have done particularly well, it would seem.

And so the usual, predictable and over-the-top controversy breaks out. A-levels have been dumbed down. No they haven’t. They’re still the ‘Gold Standard’ (a particularly fatuous piece of rhetoric). No they’re not. Both sides of the quarrel talk copious quantities of bullshit without worrying too much about little things like, well, evidence (even, say, comparing exam papers over periods of time, although the Guardian once looked at sample O-level/GCSE papers from 1951, 1977 and 2001, in English language and literature, history and maths. Interesting exercise). And naturally, all of this is done without real reference to any other countries’ experiences or systems (despite the constant refrains that the A-level is falling behind/matching/surpassing international standards of excellence).

(I’m always rather amused by those who say: ‘go and ask the teachers, they’ll tell you how standards have fallen… or risen’. Because they rarely seem to follow their own advice; and when teachers do comment on this they seem to be as divided as everyone else.)

I don’t have the emotional attachment to the A level that seems to underlie much of this furore. I possess one A-level (a C in Economic and Social History), taken in night classes when I was thinking about returning to education. It was a trial run, no more; if I’d had more time to work at it I’d have no doubt got a better grade. Far more important to me is the diploma I got the following year at Coleg Harlech; it was that qualification that got me into university and I’d argue that I was better prepared by it than any of the 18 year olds with A-levels whom I met. OK, so I’m biased. But, frankly, this annual furore is completely out of proportion. It’s only another qualification. And for the majority of those taking it, it’s merely a stepping stone to the next stage in the system. It matters to them because their entry into university depends on their results, and because – as they and their teachers tell us every year – they have worked hard for it. Too much of the A-level lament does seem to disparage those efforts; no wonder teacher morale is low, you find yourself thinking. Which is not to say that there are no problems. We cannot go the other way and say that we mustn’t criticise the system because we risk hurting the feelings of teachers and students.

There are, I think, a number of reasons why the results have got better and better over the last fifteen years and why the label ‘dumbing-down’ will not do. It needs to be stressed, firstly, that during the 1980s (under a right-wing Tory government, don’t forget), the system for marking A-levels changed from ‘norm-referenced’ to ‘criterion-referenced’. In other words, students were now to be measured against identified standards of achievement rather than being ranked against each other with a set pass/fail rate (the latter had apparently been set at 30 per cent). It’s no accident, surely (even if correlation does not automatically equal causation…), that the record-breaking run starts shortly after the change to criterion-referenced assessment. There’s an obvious, basic, point: since previously not only the pass/fail rate but also the proportions of different grades had been predetermined, this issue could never arise. You couldn’t beat the system (only other students).

However, a system of criterion-referencing (which, theoretically, makes a 100 per cent pass rate possible) means that, year by year, teachers and students can learn how to most effectively focus their efforts to improve, improve, improve those grades. They haven’t got cleverer, but they’ve without doubt got more canny. They’ve also got more and more resources to help them do it: study guides, computers, the internet. It all makes a difference. In fact, it would be more surprising if grades didn’t keep rising, especially as there are other social factors at work.

I’m talking about the big push to higher education; increasingly, middle-class students fear the consequences of ‘failure’, of not getting into the right university, and their parents probably spend plenty of time reminding them. (Seriously, they’re under a lot more pressure to perform, almost from the day they enter school, than my thirty-something generation ever was. Jeez, I used to do most of my homework surreptitiously during the lesson before I was due to hand it in. Assessed coursework? We’d never heard of it. And as for all that testing… poor little buggers.) And there’s a lot at stake for schools too, in this world of league tables and parental ‘choice’. The more historically-minded and thoughtful try to make themselves heard over the clamour every year: we cannot meaningfully compare results today with those of thirty (or even twenty, perhaps even ten) years ago. The syllabi have changed; methods of assessment are different, in ways that are simply incommensurate; the educational and social context has been transformed.

None of this lets the A-level off the hook. Its defence is frequently conducted in terms that are every bit as crass, ill-informed and poorly reasoned as the knee-jerk traditionalists’ criticisms. It goes: critics are merely reactionary defenders of the old elitist order; they want to deny opportunity based on merit; they denigrate all the efforts of students and teachers. There is a loathsome but common political tactic being used: tar all critics and calls for reform, however moderate, with the same extreme and ‘elitist’ brush. We may not ask: hang on, what is the value of a qualification when over 20 per cent of students get As and less than five per cent get Fs? (Shouldn’t it be roughly as difficult to get the top mark as the bottom one?) Or suggest that there might be a need to toughen up marking to redress that imbalance. Because that immediately means that you are placed with those (probably mythical) people who would like to return to the time when only three per cent of teenagers took A-levels in the first place, and nearly a third were automatically failed. Of course it’s dishonest nonsense, but this is politics today.

So, actually, I’ll take the risk of being placed with the old fogies for a moment. I might not agree with the view of David Thomas (CE of the Careers Research Advisory Centre) that standards haven’t risen sufficiently to justify the rise in the pass mark; but I do agree with his point that the A grade now covers too wide a range of abilities. I’m wary of the Telegraph’s call for A grades to be rationed (by implication, for a return to norm-referenced assessment); but I do agree that A-levels are being discredited, and it certainly ought to be made harder to get an A. Most of all, there is a need for properly informed debate, for the standards to be more transparent, and almost certainly for some revision of marking criteria. (Of course, if we weren’t so emotionally attached to the damn things, we might be prepared to accept the proposals for them to be scrapped altogether: bring on the baccalaureate, I say, a view that means the fogies would never have me anyway.)

And this is in the students’ own interests: their achievements should be recognised, but this will not happen while we cannot properly evaluate what those achievements are. As educationalists point out, there are problems with criterion-referenced assessment - clearly exposed in the A-level controversy, of course: difficulties with setting out clearly what the standards are, what the criteria for those standards are, and sticking to them consistently in marking (although the problem of markers’ subjective judgments surely applies to any system of assessment).

A-level grades are becoming increasingly inadequate to universities trying to make decisions about admissions. Even David Miliband the schools lackey minister agrees about that, and there are proposals to provide universities with more detailed information to assist them in their decision-making - not simply overall grades, but a breakdown by individual modules in the course – changes that are actually likely to go ahead. And yet the most important reform that’s needed in this area – for universities to be able to base admission decisions on actual instead of predicted exam results – seems as far away as ever. But that’s another subject.

Update: There is one further reason for the rise in the pass rate, of which I was reminded today:* simply, those likely to fail are weeded out before they get as far as the exams. Schools simply can’t afford to let them mess up their league table ratings. And I didn’t know that the Northern Ireland A-grade rate is 30 per cent. (But does that have anything at all to do with the fact that there the grammar school system is still in place, I wonder? What proportion of Irish students are entered for A-levels at all?)

*By the way, this particular article is complaining about the dumbness of comment on the issue. But it makes at least one pretty stupid mistake of its own. See if you can spot what’s wrong with paragraphs 3-4…

This, in a way, leads on from the last post. Good blogging, after all, is good writing and pleasurable reading, whatever the status of the blogger. Via Arts and Letters Daily, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education explores ’style’ in writing.

It emerges when writers are comfortable and proficient with their tools. Style is expressed unconsciously, but shaped consciously, in revision. It is a whispering, not a shouting voice; whether readers discern it depends on their familiarity with the writer and their own skill as readers. The writer himself or herself is aware of it; identifying, developing, and shaping it is one of the main pleasures of the craft.

The delectable Tim Burke - whose writing is never less than wonderful, of course, and often inspired, even when you’re not quite agreeing with his argument - also made some highly pertinent comments about academic language recently. He’s right: if you simply parrot the formulae of academic writing, no one will believe that you really know what you’re talking about. That ‘whispering voice’ of your own, distinctive style is crucial to demonstrating that you are master of your subject, not the other way round.

I love writing. No one, I suspect, will believe me, but writing my PhD was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. (Though I’m fortunate, I think, in that history is a discipline that doesn’t impose many formal rules on the structure of a PhD thesis. I woke up one Sunday morning knowing exactly how I wanted it to be, scribbled it down on the back of an envelope with a very old bit of pencil - I’ve never managed to get into the sensible habit of keeping a notepad by the bed - and once I had that structure, somehow, everything came together.) And one of the reasons I love blogging is that I get to write, to keep practising this peculiar mystery (I use that in the early modern sense of a craft or art), in a way that’s rather different from scholarly articles and papers and all the rest of it - and yet it’s related. How do I find ways to say awkward, complicated things without using awkward, over-complicated language? Can I avoid pomposity when I want to be serious? What’s the best way to string these thoughts together to create a coherent ‘argument’? Hell, is that the time already?

Remarkable, by the way, that twentieth-century (delusional?) belief in the importance of keeping your own opinions out of writing (how can your writing not express your opinions, for heaven’s sake?). Which gives us quotes to ponder such as this, from the Chronicle article: “One can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality.” Written by… George Orwell.

There’s been a lot of discussion out there on pseudonymous and nymous blogs of late (I don’t need to give links, really, do I?). This blog was never going to be pseudonymous, since the whole idea was to be tied into my, er, professional resources website. I don’t emblazon my full name all over this site, but you only have to follow the ‘about me’ and EMR links to find out exactly who I am and what I’m doing. I don’t at present feel a need for a more personal blog that might need to be pseudonymous (for all the reasons that have been given in the discussions).

I blog the way I blog. Other people blog the way they blog. I’m just sad to see that there are a few who can only accept one valid way of doing things. I love the diversity of blogging; in a very short space of time I’ve become part of a hugely varied network of people, academics, non-academics, people in all sorts of fields, from all around the world. (OK, I tend to be primarily attracted to certain political and social perspectives over others.) I’ve learnt a lot. I’ve had fun. There’s some beautiful writing out there.

One link only, because I liked it so much: from Mel at In Favor of Thinking (and if you need links to the debates, she gives some):

blogs are one of the most lively forms of publishing currently going on. Blogs are all about reading writing. Not only have I learned about other people’s lives – I have been daily impressed with the style, verve, thoughtfulness, and pleasure to be found in reading the words of so many diverse minds. The more the merrier.

An alarming situation reported in The Observer yesterday, as noted by The Little Professor, and now also referred to by Jonathan Dresner at Cliopatria. As the LP says, it’s about money; and much of what the article discusses is exacerbated by the gap between what we’re allowed to charge home (and EU) students in tuition fees, and what we can get away with charging non-EU overseas students.

Having said that, I think it’s possible to overstate - or oversimplify - the issues discussed in the article. For example, the allegations that failing students’ marks are being bumped up in order to pass. But the only real evidence given concerns the tiny minority of borderline students. A departmental head has asked lecturers, in cases of marks of 38/9 per cent, with a pass of 40, to “look for the extra 1/2 marks if appropriate and not leave it to the exam board to make this decision". But he’s not asking them to pass clearly failing students; we’re talking about 1-2 percentage points here (and a fair bit of hedging: “where possible"; “if appropriate"). He’s startlingly frank about the money issues at stake. But was this the best the reporter could find in his search for scandal?

But there may be other more serious problems that we’re not noticing at all. One of our PhD students at Aber, who did his first degree in the US, firmly holds the view that UK universities are much softer on first-year undergrads than our US counterparts precisely because we’re so desperate for the extra funding once they’re into 2nd and 3rd year. His emphasis, however, is not on marking, but on the workload, or to be precise, lack of it; in other words, we expect much less than American universities do from our freshers - and indeed, very few fail. Are we expecting enough? [I wrote this before reading Jonathan’s post, so maybe things are changing in the US; after all, my informant’s experience is now going back a few years.]

Meanwhile, the Swansea departmental closures crisis (although I don’t know the ins and outs, even if, like everyone in the University of Wales, I’m hearing a fair amount of rumour) does seem to be about more than expanding the business school to get foreign masters students (the history department is one of those set to benefit too). Which is not to say that it isn’t (a) disgraceful and (b) about money. I’ve had the strong impression that it has a good deal to do with Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) ratings, which directly impact on funding. Swansea wouldn’t be the first university to start cuts and even closures of departments with less than stellar RAE scores (see: Durham).

And yes, I think that some of our universities are treating their overseas postgrad students as cash cows; but that can work two ways. For every accusation of easy passes, you can also find horror stories about foreign students being poorly treated, not given sufficient support - especially with language - and going home with nothing to show for their experience but a large hole in their bank accounts. I have no direct knowledge of either situation, incidentally. My own anecdote, for what it’s worth: at the University of York, where I did my MA, I was always impressed by the support, academic and social, provided for overseas postgrads, and I never heard any suggestion that they were not marked on exactly the same terms as the home students. If the pass rate was high, it might just be because the university set high admission standards for its postgrad students to begin with. (I might add that I didn’t know anyone who failed if they completed their course and the diss - but I did know some who dropped out at an earlier stage. Are those who claim that there are no fails in masters courses taking that into account, I wonder?) So which of these three scenarios is in fact the more representative?

In fact, this article all adds up to pretty dubious reporting: impressions and hearsay - with a mere handful of sources quoted - are used to draw some sweeping, sensational conclusions, when at best what the author has is a case for concern, indicating the need for further investigation. The nearest thing to any hard evidence is that departmental head’s email. Is there really a major “scandal"? I’m not suggesting the problem doesn’t exist, but I’m not yet convinced that it’s “endemic". And I’d really like to see a searching investigation into whether overseas students in the UK are getting good value for money - because I strongly suspect that that’s a much more serious - and common - problem than giving them easy rides.