I do not know where they got my number from. Maybe Facebook which keeps showing me tuition related ads – it might be interesting to see where they got it from. Hopefully it will lead to a (misleading!) modification to whatever source they got it from (or at least their own database).

Having lived in Sri Lanka where tuition has long become normal for most children, I find the prospect of the same happening here to be horrifying. In Sri Lanka I felt sorry for all the children I saw going to tuition classes (not even proper one to one tuition, usually), often straight from school. Where is the time to enjoy their childhood? Not only that, spending all day studying is not conducive to good development, and is not even good purely academically – learning needs time to reflect, absorb and internalise. Constant studying promotes learning by rote.

This also encouraged (very badly paid) teachers to neglect teaching in school so they would create demand for their tuition classes. It encouraged studying to the exam rather than learning the subject, as parents paying for tuition want to see high grades. Children ask to know what will come up in the exam, and lose all joy in learning.

When I was a teenager I did have some tuition in my weakest subject, French. Less than once a week. My mother told me never to mention it in school, because they school did not like tuition because they regarded it as a bad reflection on their teaching. They (rightly) thought that good teaching in school should make tuition unnecessary.

I now see tuition becoming normalised in the UK. I know multiple people who have had or have tuition as children. I see ads all over Facebook, even highly expensive TV ads on the rare occasions I watch TV (I possess a No TV), there is even tuition available in a local supermarket (on their premises, but run by an education chain).

The phrase “education chain” should not be something I need to say. It is one of the clearest symptoms of mass produced, learn by rote education.

I think my school was right. Tuition should be unnecessary if schools do their job. The conclusion I draw from the rise of tuition is that schools are not doing their job. There is a widespread serious failure in the system. I do not have a simple solution – it needs complete reform – . At a purely personal level not sending children to school worked well for us, but this is not something most people will do, and certainly does not fix the failure in the system.

The problem is that schools are failing to achieve genuine high standards, causing severe mental health problems, and are generally struggling to cope. Many good teachers are leaving the profession because they are frustrated. Those that remain are fixed on the short term: getting high grades in this years exams.

Children are naturally born to learn. Schools often suck the joy out of learning. The need to stick to a curriculum, to make individuals with different talents and interests do exactly the same things at the same time is simply a bad idea.

The concept I have is easiest to describe in how it would apply to children of secondary school age – which,is the age group who have the most issues with school. It also works for younger children but needs more parental involvement (simply because of issues such as transport and safety – for which there are many solutions).

The solution is simple: schools cease to be “providers of everything”. A student at a school is typically there for the same hours every day, other activities such as sports are provided by schools: a single institution dominates a child’s life.

Instead schools provide classes and facilities. Other institutions provide extra resources: libraries, for example. Many resources can be provided online at a national or international level – these already exist but they could be so much more if they received government funding.

From all these parents and children choose what they want to use. They sign up for individual classes, and access the resources they want. Children good at a particular subject can move to a more advanced class, children who are struggling with a particular subject can move to an easier one. There will be more flexibility to fit in activities outside school.

It will also improve education. Teachers can teach the subject instead of focusing on league tables. Children can be sent o the classes taught in the way that best suits them. If they prefer to self study some things, then they can do so and be given access to the books, online resources, and whatever they need. They will also have a much wider range of subjects to choose from. Consider the choice of GCSEs a typical school can offer: it is nothing like the dozens that are possible (I have not done a thorough count, but it exceeds 60 subjects without even counting modern foreign languages).

Having more choices will also make learning less of a chore: it is a chore because it is compelled. I love reading, but if I have to read a book it because a chore – and this is a good example of something schools do that kills the joy. A library is a great educator.

It is also better in terms of social and personal development. Instead of spending all day in one place with the same people of exactly their own age, they will interact with far more people in multiple settings. They will be encouraged to take more responsibility for themselves instead which is a better preparation for adult life.

I know many people will be asking whether all this will work. I know it will because I have done it and it has been hugely successful. It is the commonest form of what is called “home education”. There are multiple studies around the world proving that home education works well, and that it works better than school for poorer and less well educated families.

The differences between what I propose above and what we do is that I had to pay for everything, and because it is something only a minority of people do the resources available locally are limited (which pushes us towards remote resources).  If it were adopted as national policy the budget that goes to schools, that is currently inadequate, would be enough to provide a very well resourced system on these lines (what parents pay to do this is invariably far less than the cost of school places).

If we analyse the principles of thought on which magic is based, they will probably be found to resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like, or that an effect resembles its cause; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other at a distance after the physical contact has been severed.

In fact he goes on to call the former of these principles “homoeopathic magic”.

This is the basis for many traditional systems of magic around the world. For example, two widespread ways of cursing someone are to use images or dolls of them (the first principle) or to use their hair or toenail clippings (the second principle).

Now consider how a homoeopathic medication is typically made:

1. A substance is chosen which produces similar symptoms to the sickness to be treated.
2. It is repeatedly diluted with water, each time taking just a small amount from the previous dilution, until it is unlikely that even one molecule of the substance remains in the water.
3. This water is then used in the manufacture of pills: but is evaporated in away in the process.

The first step in the process relies on a modification of the first principle of sympathetic magic: that like cures like, rather than affects like. Of course, it relies on similarity of symptoms, rather than similarity of appearance. It does not depend on the cause of the symptoms, but on similarity of visible, or otherwise easily perceptible, symptoms.

The remaining steps rely on a variation of the second principle. Rather than the water acting on the substance it has been in contact with, it retains some property it gains from the contact. Similarly, the pills retain that property from the contact with the water.

While homoeopathy is an interesting variation on the principles of sympathetic magic, I cannot see how it can be denied that it is a variation on those principles, rather than something entirely different.

Of course, most of this assumes that you are a healthy adult: many medical conditions need special diets, and children’s needs are different from adults.

Generally agreed

• Sugar is bad and should be consumed in much smaller quantities than is typical of modern eating habits.
• Fruits and vegetables are generally good (but see below for exceptions)
• Oily fish is good
• Transfats (heavily used in processed food) are bad, or at least possibly bad with no benefits

Generally agreed with caveats

• Whole grains are better than refined. Paleolithic and low carb diet advocates would say you should either eat little or now grain derived foods (after all human beings never evolved to eat grasses), or to eat only fermented grains. They also claim whole grains contain more  anti-nutrients (mild/small quantities of toxins) than refined.
• Less processed it usually better.
• Some fats are better than others . Things generally agreed to be better include olive oil. Most medical opinion favours monounsaturated or polyunsaturated over saturated. Paleo diet would favour oil in food that you can eat raw, or can extract without heavy machinery (e.g. olive oil, coconut oil and, most of all, meat).

Controversies

• Proportion of calories from fat vs carbs vs protein. Some low carb diet advocates promote high protein. Most medical opinion says high carb with less than 20% fat. Some low fat diet advocates say less than 10% fat. Paleo diet says high fat and low carb.
• Animal vs vegetable fat: conventional wisdom is that vegetable fat is better, paleo that animal fat is better as it is what our ancestors evolved to eat.
• High carb vegetables: obviously farinaceous ones such as potatoes, but also others such as many beans.
• Vegetables that cannot be eaten raw: discouraged on a paleo diet.
• Fatty dairy products: mostly low carb (unless sugar has been added), not paleo.
• Low fat dairy products: higher proportion of the calories in skimmed milk come from sugar: the fat would be preferable in a low carb diet.

Evidence and arguments

Medical research does not have a great track record on telling us what it is healthy to eat. Medical opinion has changed radically over the last few decades, sometimes more than once (eggs went from being regarded has healthy, to being considered a high cholesterol heart disease risk, and are now considered good again as dietary cholesterol is not generally regarded as a problem for healthy people).

Some logic also seems to be missing from many medical arguments. Consider that weight loss is encouraged by avoiding fat because fats have a high energy density (i.e. more calories per gram than other foods). That assumes that people eat a fixed weight of food, whereas different foods are not equally filling per unit weight. Why are Chinese meals (at least as served in the West) proverbial for leaving you feeling hungry an hour afterwards? That is because you need to eat a lot of a meal heavy in white rice to feel full for long: something that is also evident in modern South Asian eating habits  that are based in large servings of white rice. We actually end up eating fewer calories on high fat diets.

There is also a lack of evidence on very important questions. Take a look at this summary of the evidence on the link between fat and heart disease, by the Cochrane Collaboration, a highly respected medical research non-profit organisation, best known for producing such reviews. There replacing saturated fat with monounsaturated or polyunsaturated  may reduce the risk of heart disease, while there are no clear health benefits to reducing the total amount of fat we eat. This is critical given that reducing fat has been the most common medical advice on diet for the last few decades.

This is not surprising. The effects of diet are very hard to research. There are many bother factors (exercise, income, lifestyle), the effect of which are very hard to separate as they are highly correlated with diet and with each other. Long term studies are expensive. It is very difficult to accurately monitor what people eat.

The arguments can get very convoluted. For example, a low proportion of carbs compared to a typical diet can be achieved by eating lots of some types of fast food: but this a very different diet from what low carb diet advocates, or paleo diet advocates, recommend: it still has a much higher proportion of carbs, and a very different mix of fats.

A lot of the actual evidence in favour of a paleo diet is very well summarised by this post, which I will not duplicated here. There is more in favour of low carb diets in general in Gary Taubes’ book “Good Calories, Bad Calories”.

However, there is a more fundamental point in favour of the paleo diet in particular. Where the evidence is weak and lacking, the common sense starting point is what we evolved to eat. If I had to feed a lion,  I would have no idea what specific nutrients it needed, but I know that wild lions live on raw meat, so that would be the obviously be a suitable diet. Similarly, in the absence of proof, the common-sense diet for humans is what wild humans (hunter gatherers) eat: meat, raw vegetables, etc.

What works for me

I am short so my weight for the last few years, of around 80kg, was already enough to make me fat (although not really obese). A holiday last November meant lots of eating out, and sent my weight up to 84 kg. Since then, I have managed to lose a steady kilo or thereabouts every month, with neither a great effort, nor calories restriction, nor an increase in exercise, and am now down to 76kg and my waist (measured in terms of which trousers fit) has shrunk significantly.

I have adopted what is best described as a paleo influenced diet. I keep the amount of carbs I eat, especially grains, low. However I am not very strict about it, and eat a moderate amount of non-paleo vegetables such as pulses I also drink as much full fat milk and non-sweetened dairy products as I want. I cook with copious amounts of ghee, olive oil and coconut oil. I do not even attempt to stick to my diet when I go out.  I make no attempt to restrict the quantities I eat: I eat until I am full.

I disagree with the paleo objection to dairy, as it is evident that those of us with ancestors from parts of the world where milk has been drunk for a long time (Europe and South Asia) have evolved to cope with dairy: over 90% us have the gene that enables us to digest lactose as adults. I also do not see that milk is greatly different from other animal foods. I also do not believe that a strict diet is necessary. Humans are, naturally, opportunistic omnivores, like baboons. It is perfectly natural for us to have a a bit of everything, and we evolved to cope with this.

I am sure that it would be better to also follow the palaeolithic lifestyle in terms of exercise: regular light exercise such as walking, with short bursts of activity such as running. I get very little exercise, and my plans to change that are rather like St Augustine’s prayer for chastity “but not yet”.

Twitter focuses on what is interesting

The point of Twitter is to follow people who are interesting, regardless of whether you know or like them, and regardless of whether they have any interest in you (unless they actively block you from following them).

This contrasts with Facebook or Linked In which require some form of acceptance form the other person. Facebook does now have a Twitter like “follow” feature, but its is secondary and not widely used. Facebook also has fan pages for one way relationships, but most people do not have one.

I would be quicker to stop following someone boring than someone obnoxious: very much the opposite of what I would do on Facebook. Interesting people are not necessarily likeable, and likeable people are not necessarily interesting.

The end result is that a typical Twitter user follows large numbers of interesting people (interesting means that their tweets are interesting). This means that a quick glance is likely to find a high proportion of engaging content. In particular it has a high proportion of content that invites further discussion.

Twitter lets you scan a lot of content quickly

Because of Twitter’s 140 character limit on tweets, it is possible to scan a lot of tweets quickly, increasing the odds of quickly finding one that is interesting enough to respond to or that contains a really interesting link.

This increases the odds of a casual glance at Twitter turning into a discussion or leading to a site that is time consuming to read.

Twitter becomes hostile more easily

Twitter encourages users to follow interesting strangers. This is Twitters great strength. It also means that discussions can turn hostile without any social consequences. I cannot imagine anyone on Facebook saying something like “I hate people like you” (something I was told on Twitter a few weeks ago), because they are all either personal friends or family, or belong to some place or community which means they have some real life connection with me.

Because Twitter is more focused on topics than on people it is also more frequently used to discuss controversial topics, and there is no restraint about bringing up topics that may upset people: for example a blog post I recently read on abortion had a paragraph at the start warning that it contained graphic details that could be upsetting to those who have had abortions or miscarriages, that kind of restraint is unusual on Twitter — partly because the terse 140 character limit leaves little room for prefaces or tactful phrasing.

The result is both high engagement (few people quietly back off from arguments once started) and stress.

Twitter is often immediate

In interesting tweet very often gets fast responses, which can lead to an immediate extended discussion. While this is also true of some other forms of communication, social networks are unique in the combination of fast response, high reach (tweets are seen by every who follows the tweeter and anyone mentioned in a tweet) makes fast responses much more likely.

This makes Twitter far more likely to engage a user for a long time than a forum is.

Twitter covers all topics

Because people typically tweet on multiple topics, and follow people interested in different topics, it covers far more that topics that may engage a users. It is perfectly possible to look at Twitter to look for tweets about investment and find lots of interesting tweets on politics or religion (often that one wants to respond to). This happens to me quite frequently.

Twitter is often partly work related

Many people tweet about work related topics (giving one a great excuse to tweet during working hours), but few have the discipline to stick to just that. Once you are on all the distractions are right in front of you.

Try finding an excuse to spend working hours on Pinterest!

Twitter is public and demanding

Most people make their Twitter streams public, so people with similar interests can find and follow them. The problem is that producing a stream of terse comments that you are willing to put in writing in public is demanding. Mistakes are public, lack of fact checking is noticed. It takes effort, but as the effort is demanded in 140 character bursts, it is easy to fail to realise how much time and effort it takes in the course of a day.

The problems are the benefits

The problems are the benefits, not just a consequence, or even just an inevitable consequence. The point of Twitter is to find interesting people with interesting ideas and interesting discussions.

One of the great advantages of Twitter is that, because if you follow someone you see their tweets on all topics it exposes users to a diversity of opinions: especially when combined with its ability to find interesting strangers from anywhere in the world to follow (that sentence would have sounded creepy before Twitter…). This is especially valuable in an age when social media and a huge choice of broadcast and print media make it easy to retreat into a world where conflicting opinions disappear from view.

There is nothing wrong with Twitter. It does what it is meant to, but at a price.

I will leave aside my view that the government should not protect people from themselves, and, just for this post,  and, for the moment, accept the consensus that the role of the government includes forcing people to do what the government judges best.

Lets start with the missing information. What is meant by “More than 200,000 people could die early from alcohol-related diseases, accidents and violence over the next 20 years”? Does it mean that the death rate will be 200,000 more than if no one drank any alcohol? Does it mean that 200,000 people will die from diseases, accidents and violence in which alcohol is one of (many) avoidable risk factors?

Of course, as always, The Guardian, fails to but the numbers in context. 10,000 deaths a year is not a huge number in a country the size of the UK: barely over 1%. Depending on he exact meaning of the numbers, the actual number of deaths caused by (as opposed to “related to”) alcohol could be much lower and comparable with, for example, the 3,000 suicides a year. Given the distressing nature of suicide, and its impact on the friends and families of its victims, I think that is sufficient to argue it should be a higher priority.

Compare the impact of alcohol with that of bad diet (too much sugar, too much, and harmful types of, fat, etc.): . There are at least 30,000 deaths a year related to diabetes, and that is almost certainly an underestimate, and it is worsening rapidly, and it is only one of many diseases caused by unhealthy diets.  Worsening rapidly is something of an understatement: the number of people who have diabetes has doubled over the last thirty years.

Diet bring us to another issue. The health effects of different alcoholic drinks is very different:  the amount of carbohydrates in one pint of beer is comparable to an entire bottle of red wine.

That is one possible reason for the lack of correlation between alcohol consumption and life expectancy. Given that, what reason is there to think that reducing overall alcohol consumption will improve public health. In fact a WHO study found that the countries with the lowest level of alcohol related health problems are the wine drinking countries of south western Europe, many of which have very high levels of consumption.

In fact, it may even worsen public health. Moderate drinking improves life expectancy, so price increases that deterred moderate drinkers would lead to lower life expectancies. Heavy drinkers, especially very heavy drinkers, may be addicted, and will therefore be likely to spend more rather than reduce consumption. Abstaining entirely from alcohol carries a similar risk to heavy drinking, why are there no calls for government action to encourage teetotallers to start drinking?

The criticism of a government strategy that relies on voluntary cooperation from the industry, has two serious fallacies. They claim that “the primary requirement for these industries is to deliver shareholder value by maximising consumption”. This is wrong. Individual firms want to maximise profit, which is not the same as maximising consumption: the profit on one bottle of expensive wine is likely to be far more than on many bottles of plonk. It is even possible that a minimum sales price may may the industry more profitable by killing the lowest margin products.

The other fallacy is that because a businesses aim is to make a profit, it is entirely uninfluenced by anything else. Companies are run by individuals who are just as likely to act from ethical motives as anyone else, they are subject to public pressure, and the ability of governments to coerce companies to act “voluntarily” is enormous. Consider the success the government has had in getting internet service providers to subscribe to the Internet Watch Foundation’s controversial, secretive, undemocratic, ineffective and unaccountable censorship scheme.

I have become very cynical about the reasoning behind calls for action on alcohol. It seems to reflect a fixed, and puritanical, idea that alcohol is bad, rather than an assessment of evidence and likely benefits.

Its easy to reel off examples of irrationality about risk in everyday life. My favourite are people who took to commuting in London by motorbike because they were worried about the risk of terrorism on public transport. Minuscule risk against significant one. I am not sure what one can do legally as a regular part of everyday life that is more dangerous — I add those qualifications because of things like extreme sports (legal, but not usually a part of everyday life) and shooting heroin (A part of some people’s everyday life, but not legal) which are more dangerous.

Surely, when people are assessing what to invest in they will try to be more rational? I very much doubt they even try, and they certainly do not succeed. Buying into bubbles, buying complex investments they do not understand, refusing perfectly good investments because returns have not been good in the short term,……… and on and on and on.

Well at least those well paid, highly trained, professional investors who we trust our money to will be more rational. Like lemmings.

These are the people who come up with bright ideas like hedging with knock out options. This is like buying motor insurance that only covers the first £1,000 of damages: it covers the most likely eventualities, but is of no use when you really need it.

It can work quite well if you are looking after other people’s money (you can set things up so that you will probably out-perform, but a crash will wipe out the portfolio — no idea how often it really happens much), and is even better for packaging up into structured products with “guaranteed returns” that you then sell to people who have no idea how to value something so complex: of course the terms are not that complex so the unwashed have no idea that the valuation certainly is.

The point of all this is that financial theory makes the assumption that people are risk averse (which is probably near enough true) and that people assess risk rationally to protect their wealth. They do not. They assess risk irrationally and they entrust their wealth to people whose incentives to avoid risk are not consistent with their risk aversion.

That seems to make it likely that prices will diverge from what a rational investor would pay: the market is not perfectly efficient. I still think you should value securities with CAPM because you should value them at what a rational investor would pay.

The usual attempts to make maths relevant to children are pathetic pretences. Children do not need to use much arithmetic: but it is easy to make them enjoy things. Unlike with reading I have not found a simple answer: I try a lot of things to see what works. Some of the things we have done:

• Playing games that require logic: noughts and crosses, nim, etc. It works well, and even other types of games can be useful (playing monopoly is a good chance to practice addition, for example).
• Cutting out shapes and making solids such as cubes, tetrahedrons, cylinders, etc. Lucy loved this.
• Learning programming. Lots of kids like computers. I taught Lucy to draw shapes, so she learnt a bit of geometry at the same time, with a Logo (which is designed for children) variant. It worked for a while, then but she hit her limits. It is something I intend to return to, and I have some ideas.
• Binary numbers. She loved converting from binary to decimal and back when I taught it to her last year. She can still do it, even after a lapse of some months.
• Sequences. Lucy was delighted by the idea of sequences. See my previous post.
• Graphs: This also went really well. Lucy got her first taste of a lot of concepts this way:
  • Cartesian co-ordinates
  • Algebra: She can draw a graph given an equation of the y = a + bx type.
  • In conjunction with sequences, and diagrams, the ideas of convergent series. I am not sure this has stuck.

None of this was particularly difficult to teach and there is nothing to demanding for a child this age: I want it to be fun, not a chore, and it has been (for both of us).

1. It is fun. Children enjoy reading, teaching them to read adds to the number of enjoyable things they can do.
2. It forms a habit of reading, that can become a life-long pleasure.
3. It helps them develop in innumerable ways.

The last of these is the most contentious point, so that is what I will concentrate on. That does not mean I think it is the most important point: on the contrary, I think it is possibly the least important (insofar as one can pick between such important issues).

The commonest argument against teaching children to read is that they may not maintain that lead, over children to learn to read later, forever. I do not know what evidence there is for this claim, or whether it is even true. My family’s experience over at least two generations has been otherwise.

My immediate answer to that is that it does not matter. Think of all they have learnt, and all the enjoyment they have derived in the meantime.

The other is that, if it is true the lead disappears, the reason is that if they only read what they are set in schools, and they are not given continually interesting and challenging books, then of course they will lose that lead. Schools tend to standardise, and parents need to provide an environment that supports any children who are in advance of what their school teaches. The problem is that so many children spend spare time in from of the TV, and read only what they have to.

I have already discussed the sort of environment that nurtures reading in a previous post. All I have to add to that is that having a lot of books in the house, whether they are books the child will read in the near future or not, is a huge help.

I challenge those who claim the advantages of learning to read do not last, to provide evidence that it is true, and that it remains true given the right home environment.

The other claim is that children’s brains have not developed enough to learn to read until they are five or six. My reply to this is, to put it politely, that it is nonsense. It is trivially easy to teach a two year old (the exact age may vary from child to child) to recognize words: my mother did it, and I have repeated it. Once they can recognise enough words, they can read sentences, and then simple stories.

As soon as Lucy could talk reasonably well (I think a little short of her second birthday), we started using look and say flash cards. We made it fun: it was a game not a chore.

A lot of schools prefer to use phonics. Our experience was that phonics at school did not help much: partly because Lucy was well ahead of what they were being taught in school. The other reason parents should not use phonics lies in the reason schools use it: it is easier for children who are slower to read It also slows down faster children so the teachers have a more uniform class that is easier to teach. Very few children will be slow to read, if:

1. they are taught one to one,
2. it is fun, and,
3. they have an atmosphere that encourages reading.

The first is easy for parents, if impossible for most schools. Making it fun means making a game of it, and not trying to push them to do it when they do not want to. Children enjoy learning, so this should not be a problem either.

The last is the most difficult. The best thing to do is to buy and read books yourself. If children see their parents reading, they will want to read themselves. That is why Nisha (now 18 months old) has been fascinated by books since she was a few months old. She wants to know why her sister and parents spend so much time staring at these objects.

The other thing we did, which for most people would be a sacrifice they would not be prepared to make, is to invest in a No TV. It means that we read more, and do more constructive things in general — and by “we” I mean the whole family, adults and children.

The end result as been a success. The only time I thought it might not work out was when Lucy started reading snippets of books and lacked the concentration to read whole books. Now, she is a few months short of seven she is somewhat ahead of my reading at the same age. She is just finishing Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series. Like me, she loves the Narnia books. Like other children of her generation she loves Harry Potter.

Now, many people will question the benefits of teaching children to read so young. My next post will address that. [Edit: no done here.]