Micro-life for students

A house of multiple occupation, or HMO, is a house where several people live together as either tenants or lodgers.  Where the landlord also resides in the house, then the paying residents are termed lodgers; otherwise they are tenants.  The paying residents each have a room to themselves, and share communal rooms such as the kitchen, bathroom, and maybe a lounge.

Tenants have more legal rights than lodgers, who have almost no legal rights worth speaking of.

Two recent news items concern such dwellings.  The first is about a young student who was lodging in London, and caught her landlord entering her room without permission.  The comments are divided as to whether or not the landlord was acting legally.

The other is about the impact which HMOs tend to have upon the surrounding area and its other residents.  This quote from a man in Leeds is worth noting:

HMOs started to crop up in the Nineties when universities expanded as the Labour government pumped money in. No one gave any thought to where these students would live.

So too is this quote from a lawyer:

We just don’t have enough houses. HMOs are a response to the fact that lots and lots of people have nowhere to live.

I have lived as a lodger myself, and it would be easy for me to argue for strict laws protecting the welfare of lodgers, but then I reflect that it is not always easy to have a stranger living in your home.  Surely the best solution would be for the government to make it easier for people to have somewhere to live without having to lodge in someone else’s home.

The last Labour government made clear its ambition to have fifty percent of all school leavers go to university, but failed to provide an adequate explanation as to why this ambition was desirable.  One of its many consequences was to inflate the demand for housing near to universities- and yet this Labour government won three consecutive general elections.

Maybe it would make sense for people to stop voting for politicians who have illogical obsessions, and instead vote for politicians who have a sensible housing policy.

Related previous posts include:
Micro-life
Do we need universities? 

Religion and science education

A national newspaper recently reported an academic study into religion and science.  The study was a collaborative effort by psychologists at two universities, one in Britain and one in the USA, and it concluded that countries which tend to be strongly religious tend not to perform well in the teaching of mathematics and science at school.

I am aware that newspaper reports are often misleading, and so I recently took the time to speak with one of the academics involved in the study to find out more.

First, it appears that the authors of the report relied in part on a survey of attitudes to religion which they themselves did not compile.  This survey ranks eighty-two countries as to how strongly religious people in those countries tend to be.  Of the twelve deemed most religious, only two are predominantly Christian countries, with the other ten being Muslim countries.  Of the twelve deemed the least religious, almost all are predominantly Christian countries.

The authors discuss a displacement hypothesis, whereby school pupils spend time learning about religion instead of learning about science and mathematics.  Obviously this hypothesis applies equally to other subjects.  Time spent studying a foreign language is time not spent studying science or mathematics.

Also, time alone is no guarantee of quality.  Half an hour spent in a classroom with a good teacher is surely more valuable than an hour spent in a classroom with an inadequate teacher.

In other words, this academic study appears to be so vague in its findings as to be of very little value.  If the authors would like to carry out further research, then maybe they could give us some more significant insights, but I see little reason to respond enthusiastically to a study which apparently treats all religions the same.  They are not all the same.

Do we need universities?

A comment writer in a national newspaper has recently observed that information found on the internet may not always be correct.

Only last week this same comment writer wrote about his education at Cambridge University in the 1970s.  He recalls that some of the academics who taught him were right wing, while others were left wing.  He does not make it entirely clear what he means by those terms, but he does offer some clues.  For example, he associates left wing views with opposition to racial discrimination, and right wing views with opposition to inheritance tax.

He implies – or at least appears to imply – that some of the left wing academics sought unduly to influence the opinions of their students – in short, to brainwash them.  He does not imply – or appears not to imply - that any of the right wing academics indulged in any form of brainwashing.

He then argues that it is increasingly common nowadays for academics to be left wing.  He suggests that this may be a matter of self interest, as academics feed off public funds to a large extent, but surely that was no less true in the 1970s.

Also, even if it is true that British universities are increasingly becoming bastions of left wing brainwashing, then presumably their influence is limited – at least as far as political views are concerned.  I think it is fair to say that most of us change our opinions as we get older, and often do so in response to changes in our personal circumstances.  It is easy to adhere to one set of views when we are students at university, but it is equally very easy to adhere to different views once we have graduated and find ourselves in a different situation.

On the other hand, not all views are what we might term political.  I have read accounts of the persecution of Christian students in universities in the USA, and I often wonder if the same thing could happen in the United Kingdom.

I cannot be certain, but it appears that there may be a lot of brainwashing going on in science faculties of universities both in this country and elsewhere.  Without going into detail right now, I used to be active on a science forum on the internet, and based on that and other experiences I find it hard to avoid the conclusion that people with science degrees can be extremely narrow-minded and even bigoted.

Is there a law which requires universities to seek to educate rather than indoctrinate?  Are university academics required by law to grade their students’ work strictly on the basis of merit?  So far as I am aware, the answer is no.

Universities came into existence in the middle ages, when books were handwritten on vellum, and so were prohibitively expensive for almost everyone.  Public libraries did not exist, but universities had libraries where students could have access to books, and in a structured environment.  Teaching staff were on hand to advise students on which books to read first. The drawback to this was that the teaching staff were in a position to abuse their influence, which is not to say that they did.

We now live in a very different society.  For as long as I can remember, this country has had public libraries where people can access a wide variety of books, and where almost any book can be obtained on request.  Book shops allow us to buy books at prices which most working people can afford.

We also have the internet, which is perhaps the most truly egalitarian invention in the history of the world.  The internet allows almost anyone anywhere in the world to access almost any information, including information which brainwashing academics might prefer us not to have access to.  Of course what we read on the internet may not be true, but things we read in books or hear in lectures may also not be true.

In other words, the foundations of the university system are crumbling, and any sensible government should ask why they still exist.  I am not saying that there is not a reason, but perhaps we could at least be clear what that reason actually is.

An academic view of races

I cannot resist the temptation to return to the issue of race.  I am responding to an essay I recently found on the internet.  The quotes are in blue text, and I respond in black text.

The worst error in the history of science was undoubtedly classifying humans into the different races.

Rather than stray into a lengthy digression, I will merely observe that there are many errors in the history of science which could be classified as the worst.  Also, the fact that the author uses the term the different races suggests to me that he secretly accepts that races do in fact exist.

... race theory ... has wreaked untold misery and been used to justify barbaric acts of colonialism, slavery and even genocide. Even today it's still used to explain social inequality, and continues to inspire the rise of the far right across the globe.

Was race theory used to justify the millions of murders committed by the armed forces of the United Kingdom and the USA over the past hundred years or so?  I merely ask.

The human races were invented by anthropologists like Johann Friedrich Blumenbach back in the 18th century ...

This is utter garbage.  Anthropologists may have identified the concept of races, but races themselves were never invented.  They exist as a fact of science.

As an aside, I have recently found out that the word race derives from the medieval Italian word razza, and that it can be used to mean a breeding stock of animals.  The different races we see in the world today are basically different breeding stocks.  They have tended in the past to be determined largely be geography, but even in present day multiracial societies they can be determined by culture.  For example, fewer than ten percent of marriages in Britain today are inter-racial.

From the very beginning, the arbitrary and subjective nature of categories was widely acknowledged.

This is misleading.  It may well be true that there are some situations where racial definitions become blurred, but there are also many situations where the classification of animals into species and subspecies become blurred.  Does it follow that scientists who indulge in such classification are charlatans?

Most of the time races were justified on the grounds of cultural or language differences between groups of people rather than biological ones.

Even if this is true, it proves nothing.

Their existence was taken as a given right up until the 20th century when anthropologists were busy writing about races as a biological explanation for differences in psychology, including intelligence, and educational and socioeconomic outcomes between groups of people.

While the author does not want us to believe in races, he nevertheless acknowledges that there are different groups of people, and that they can differ in terms of intelligence and socioeconomic outcomes.  Maybe he’ll be telling us next that they can also differ in terms of propensity to criminal acts.

But buried within the survey results were some troubling findings like that anthropologists from privileged groups — in the US context 'white' males and females — were more likely to accept race as valid than non-privileged groups.

The author now accepts that white people exist as a group, and also as a privileged group.  Notice also that he does not explain what he means by privilege in this context.

These privileged scientists represent 75 per cent of the anthropologists surveyed. Their power and influence reaches right across the field. They are the main people determining what research is done, who gets funding ...

The author appears to hint at the possibility that access to funding in the academic world may not always be decided strictly on the basis of merit, but rather on the basis of adherence to an accepted point of view.  That does not surprise me in the slightest.

Related previous posts include:
Is there really just one race?
Are you a racist?