9z versus China

The Danish national broadcaster had a show about how Danish teenagers compared with Chinese teenagers after 9 years of school. It came out around about the time of the lockout. I have only watched one episode.

Comparing school systems is a great interest of mine and there is much to be said about the differences/similarities between the Danish and the Chinese system. I am not going to touch those issues here though.

What I found overpowering about the show itself was how Danish the people behind it were. I can imagine if a French team had made the show, or Brazilian, or Japanese:- Comparing Denmark and China still but coming without the cultural baggage of being Danish. That would be a show I would love to watch. The show did not have the self-awareness to address this weakness of a lack of self-awareness.

If I had been in control, I would have changed a lot of the presentation.

For example, the show starts with the first school day in both schools. The Danish school is shown, with singing and flag waving and dancing. Then the stark lines of Chinese children standing in the playground chanting “We are proud to be Chinese”.

If I had been in control of the editing, I would have put it together to show the similarities and not the differences. Flag goes up in Denmark, flag goes up in China, teacher chants slogans in China, teacher sings slogans in Denmark, children standing outside in Denmark, children standing outside in China, children look happy in Denmark, children look happy in China, children look bored in China, children look bored in Denmark.

Another thing I would have changed was the panel of “experts” called on to answer questions about both the Danish and the Chinese system. They had the head of the teachers’ union and some guy from a Danish university. Not one Chinese educational system expert was called on. (Neither in the sense of someone in Denmark who has made it their life’s work to study the Chinese system nor in the sense of a Chinese person involved in running the Chinese educational system.) The questions about the Chinese system were addressed to 12 year old Chinese girls and Danish men.

Not to mention, the Danish university “expert” did not even have a very good handle on what goes on in the Danish system. In one part, he claimed that children from all levels and backgrounds are together in their class, resulting in them having a better understanding of the breadth of Danish society.

Except. Denmark has private schools. And Denmark has special schools. So, apart from the children who go to private school and the children who are in special school, the Danish classroom is a cross section of Danish society.

He just repeated cultural myths about Denmark without being aware of how poorly he understood his own country. So, I took his pronouncements on the Chinese system with more than a pinch of salt.

How can a tv programme claim that the Danish system sets Danish teenagers up as being better critical thinkers than Chinese teenagers when it cannot demonstrate critical thinking in the actual show?

The teenagers were asked some “general knowledge” questions, to show how ignorant the Chinese children are. The questions were

“Who were The Beatles?”

“What is a teenager?”

“What happened on September 11th 2001?”

The children were not asked

“Who is Teresa Teng?”

“What do we mean by adolescence?”

“What was the Cultural Revolution?”

Also, the icons to show the children’s performance have little cartoon figures with flags as t-shirts. The Chinese ones are bright yellow faced and the Danish ones are pink faced. (This is despite the programme going to extraordinary hamfisted lengths to establish that the Danish class in question has a lot of brown people, to pre-explain why the results will be so bad… because of diversity of “social” groups)

What the actual fuck, though? Both have slitty eyes, so I guess that’s progress of a sort, though the Chinese eyes are the slittiest.

I facepalmed so hard, my hand got bruised

In conclusion, an interesting concept for a show, ruined by the lack of cultural understanding and critical thinking by the programme makers. Prejudices go unchallenged and are presented as self-evident truth, when a little digging would have found reality to be a lot more nuanced.

Cultural Imperialism

I have lived in Denmark for nearly five years now. This is quite a long time and is almost the longest I have lived anywhere. (Record to beat: six years in Cardiff). When people ask me where I am from, I say “London” which is bollocks because I lived there for three years. I am almost “from” Denmark, statistically speaking.

(Photo credit: countrykitty)

What is awkward about being a critical thinker abroad, is that I think critical thoughts but not many people think I should be allowed to express them. Back in the UK, I could criticise racism and boorishness to my heart’s content. Over here, even though this place is my home, I am seen as a terrible cultural imperialist if I say anything other than “how quaint!”

Here is a little story for you: I was walking down the street with a friend in Copenhagen and two very drunk older gentlemen stopped us so they could flirt. They spoke excellent English and we had a good chat. One of them asked if I liked Denmark and I looked sad and said no.

He said (and I didn’t make notes so this isn’t a direct quote, it’s a paraphrase)

“Good girl! It’s a terrible place. Terrible. Do you know what the three worst things about Denmark are?”

And he let rip. I will summarise: inferiority complex, superiority complex and Jantelov. Then he said:-

“Happiest country in the world my ARSE. They are all depressed. Everyone is mentally ill. Happiest country! And people refuse to take jobs they think are beneath them, so they end up on benefits and then they cannot get a job that is not beneath them because they have been unemployed and they stay on benefits for the rest of their lives. And the alcoholics, they stay sick because no one helps them,”

And I just listened in stunned silence. People are oh-so eager to tell me how the source of all small-mindedness in Denmark is “the old people”. This has never been the case.

If I say anything on these themes then I am shut down for being a cultural imperialist. I do not want Denmark to be like the UK. Very not. I just do not want to live in a country where it is seen as so routine and normal to call certain cultures ‘barbaric’ that it only makes the news if the cultures in question find out and hit the roof.

This is an awkward stage to be in: to feel at home in a culture but being expected to keep quiet about my opinions because I am not seen as really belonging to it.

Notes on Dialogue

Poor Helle. She got up to make a couple of speeches praising the solidarity of the labour movement, only to be booed off and hit with a water pistol and a tomato. Not her day.

Her response to the noise made by the crowd to drown out her speech was surprised, pedagogical hurt. A stock in trade for most teachers. ‘It’s your own time you’re wasting! You’re only cheating yourself!’

“Today is about dialogue.”

The thing about dialogue, though, is that if you are having a dialogue one-on-one and the other person appears not to be listening, eventually you stop listening. And if what they are saying offends you or hurts you or irritates you, you interrupt them. You shout at them. You stop them from talking.

For a crowd of a couple of hundred people in easy-going ligeglad Denmark to turn so mean so quickly, has major implications for Helle’s administration.

The teachers had planned a peaceful protest which took place: where they turned their backs on her. I don’t know who was booing and whistling. Maybe teachers too but not part of the main group.

I chose not to attend because even that: turning your back on someone speaking, seemed a little too edgy for me. A little too offensive.

You see, I have been there. So many times.

School classes turn mean if they do not feel respected or listened to. And they too will prevent you from being heard. In my first term of each UK school I have taught in, I have had to deal with students ignoring me and making it impossible for me to continue with the lesson. After a few weeks of demonstrating that I do care about them and I am a good teacher, things settle down and it is only the mentally ill students who cause trouble after that.

What you need to remember about the UK is this: the teaching unions were very strong and teaching practise was led by practitioners. Then the government decided they needed to denigrate teachers for political points between the 80s and the 90s and massive campaigns to reduce respect for teachers were launched. These are ongoing to date. No one respects teachers in the UK, which means their kids don’t. Which means classes can be really difficult to reach.

I learned in my teaching in London schools that ‘respect’ is earned and that the children would need to be taught to respect me. I gave them activities that were not boring or didn’t waste their time, I talked to them like adults, I was fair when I had to decide things about them. I took their views into account. I gave them responsibility in the classroom.

And eventually, the class realise it is a dialogue and they stop drowning you out. Because they trust you to listen.

I guess Danish politicians are finding out that they do not deserve respect just because they have the podium. Maybe it is not too late to win trust back.

News Translation: No one’s Listening Anymore

From Politiken: Thorning booed off on the first of May

By Søren Astrup

Anger about the Social Democrats’ leader was clear during State Minister Helle Thornin-Schmidt’s 1st May speech in Aarhus.

She was met with protest whistles and boos from the audience at the event in Tangkrogen.

It was only a couple of minute’s speech where she tried to get the audience to listen before she left the podium. At the same time, a large number of the audience turned their backs on her.

The protest against the State Minister is based on the government’s criticised reforms and intervention against the teachers.

“Everyone is entitled to think what they want about me but it’s a bit of a shame. It’s a strange paradox when the first of May is about dialogue and listening to each other,” was how Helle Thorning-Schmidt reacted.

“I don’t think we tells each other anything when we try to drown each other out. There were some Social Democratic Youth down there who would have liked to have heard the speech,” she said after the speech.

Also, in Fælled Park in Copenhagen, a leading Social Democrat had to fight to drown out protesters. That was the city’s mayor Frank Jensen who was met with jeering protesters who also used his speech to show their dissatisfaction with the government’s cuts and intervention. He stood across from a banner with the text “Helle is Blue” (Translator’s note: Helle is supposed to be left-wing and therefore “red”.)

While fingers were pointed towards the stage, the Social Democratic premier in the capital gave up trying to make himself heard.

“GO HOME!” was the cry to the mayor while the organisers tried to get the audience to get the large audience to adjust their angry outbursts.

This was not successful, even though the mayor was going to talk about the town’s schools, school meals and better help for the poor.

The answer from the crowd in Fælled Park was the fighting cry “GO HOME” which was shouted over and over through a megaphone.

Frank Jensen also had to duck an item that was chucked up on stage by a First of May participant, just as the speech was carried out in the smoke from fireworks or similar.

“May I wish you a good First of May in Fælled Park in Copenhagen,” was how he signed off his speech, which he carried out despite massive protest from the lawn in front of the stage.

The person after him at the podium in the capital was SF’s leader Anette Wilhelmsen. She also had to raise her voice to try to drown out the protesters.

“I stand by the compromises, even if not all of them have grassroots support,” she explained in competition with the megaphone shouts.

Finance Minister Bjarne Corydon (S) talked to a wall of backs when he spoke in Vojens, where teachers protested against the government’s intervention in the union conflict that started when they were locked out by the association of municipalities.

News Translation: The Worm Turns

From Ekstra Bladet: Helle Attacked

It’s all going on right now on the first of May.

A man was just arrested for shooting water at the States Minister Helle Thorning in Aarhus with a water pistol. And in Copenhagen, the mayor Frank Jensen just interrupted his speech because the protesters were so loud that he had to give up. Chair of the Unions in greater Copenhagen tried to moderate the masses but was not nearby to try to get people to listen to Frank Jensen.

And in Aarhus they were simply not there to listen to what States Minister Helle Thorning said from the podium in Tangkrogen in Aarhus.

She was drowned in boos and a massive whistling concert from a large group of the “audience” who had brought whistles to sabotage Helle Thorning’s speech.

She had chosen not to speak at Fælled Park in Copenhagen but she didn’t avoid massive criticism.

The crowd in front of her blew whistles they brought with them and held up placards with sad faces “:(” on them.

The State Minister was not surprised by her heated reception because the protest was announced beforehand.

“I don’t have much time for people who drown out others. It’s a bit weird on the first of May which is about talking and discussion,” she said just after her speech.

 

Danish Model Reprised

The Danish Model is a system where two parties: the employer and the employee can sit down and work out terms of employment. Compromise is expected. It seems to me that the biggest advantage of the Danish Model, is that the terms of someone’s employment is usually rather technical.

To someone outside of a particular job, the things that employees might stick on may seem overly pernickity.

Who really understands what anyone else does? Until you build code or fight crime or clean offices; you can only imagine (and romanticise the details).

As with all cases of confirmation bias, even as people patiently explain to you, for example: ‘no, that word means this’ and ‘that is not what people are fighting about’, people hear what they want to hear.

If someone has convinced themselves that all Danish teachers are lazy and useless, then no teacher (even a hard working, blameless British teacher), has any chance of changing their mind with their daring tales of hard work and success in the classroom.

If another person has decided that, as hard working as Danish teachers are, they are not working the same hours as everyone else then no clarification of what ‘normalisation’ is can ever hope to get through.

The government wanted to force these changes through. Had the Danish Model been allowed to run as usual, then the suggestions given by the government would have been weakened. Not by much, if you look at the course of the negotiations.

There were two things that the teachers’ unions stuck on.

1) Teachers over 60 should be allowed to have a reduced timetable on full-pay

2) Headteachers should not get the absolute final call on how to assign teacher’s activities. There should be an upper limit of lessons a week (25 hours) and a “pool” of preparation hours that the head can assign as they will.

The government, in their intervention, refused both. And so, now the terms of employment are that reduced timetables for teachers over 60 will be phased out and that headteachers can assign teachers to as many lessons a week as they want and (therefore), some lessons will have no paid preparation time at all.

Under the Danish Model, if the government has to break the deadlock, it cannot be one sided and both parties need to come away with something. I got a pay-bump of 300 kroner a month (Gee, I hope that’s after tax, I cannot WAIT to spend it), and the offer of extra training.

There was also an ‘assurance’ that teachers would not have to work evenings or weekends.

I doubt headteachers would want to treat their staff badly and would not want to overschedule their staff. But they will not be given enough money to be professionally considerate. And thusly, the buck stops with them (and not the government or the kommunes).

If I am given too many lessons a week to prepare for, then of course I will have to take work home. I just will be expected to work more hours than everyone else on my pay grade.

Most non-teachers have no idea what is about to happen to Danish schools. They are completely ignorant of how damaging these changes will be.

If this had run on the Danish Model, then teachers would have been able to modify the plans according to their professional needs and not solely due to budgetary requirements.

What gets me the most, isn’t the lack of sympathy strikes or the lack of peaceful direct action or the way that we have been taken for granted. It’s not people calling me lazy or a liar or freeloader. It’s not the loss of income. It wasn’t even misinformed people insisting that I could stop the lockouts singlehandedly by child minding teaching children in defiance of the rules.

What gets me the most is that the children of Denmark lost four weeks of schooling, so that the government could pretend that they were independent of these changes.

They wanted to bypass the Danish Model but not get in trouble for doing so.

They refused to release documents where the stated aim was “To prepare for the employment negotiations” because “they have nothing to do with the employment negotiations”. They insisted that they needed to do the intervention because “in the Danish Model sometimes lockouts happen and this has gone on too long”. They expected the people of Denmark to believe that they wrote 70+ pages of documentation about the new changes overnight. They claim that there is nothing odd about consulting the employers about how to make the intervention but not the teachers.

And, as usual, they got away with it because everyone is too apathetic to lift a finger to save what they say they believe in.

Four weeks with no schools, in a ‘democratic’ country.

For a game.

I am not sure who won but I know who lost.

News Translation: Dirty Tricks Special

From dr.dk the state owned broadcaster: Ombudsman suspects foul play in teacher negotiations

Parliament’s ombudsman, stated on Wednesday that the Finance Ministry has the law on its side when the ministry refused Denmark’s Teacher Union access to a number of documents from the Working Group that had to prepare the working conditions negotiations with teachers.

But at the same time, the ombudsman Jørgen Steen Sørensen wonders strongly about the secrecy afforded the Working Group. This has aroused suspicion of a conscious ploy to avoid scrutiny.

“I need to underline that I cannot know what the exact background for these circumstances are. But an overview gives the impression that these circumstances were planned and committed to, precisely with the intention to avoid that the documents could be subject to public access,” said Jørgen Steen Sørensen in his statement.

The Working Group was disbanded in February 2012 by the Finance Ministry to prepare for the negotiations.

But according to the ombudsman, work stopped at the end of 2012 without the Working Group giving a report. And this arouses suspicion.

According to the ombudsman, the Finance Ministry reported that the Working Group’s work was not relevant at this time and the Working Group’s documents have nothing to do with preparing for the negotiations.

The latter is crucial for whether the documents can be exempted from full disclosure according to the rules about internal working documents.

“The ombudsman may give the Finance Ministry’s information for consideration but he expresses that how it appears from the outside may appear surprising,” he said in a statement.”

It is surprising that the working group’s papers apparently were not used in preparation for the negotiations because the the group was created only in order to prepare for the talks.

From Politiken.dk: Secret documents about teachers’ working time were thrown out in the trash. (by  Anders Legarth Schmidt)

A secret report on teachers’ working time written by two ministries and the Kommunernes Landsforening (the nationwide association of borough councils), was “never used during the negotiations over new working conditions for teachers”, despite being the official and intended goal of the report.

That’s what the Finance Ministry wrote in answer to Parliament’s ombudsman as their main argument for not handing over the report to the teaching unions, which has led to a year long legal battle with the ministry to have access to the documents.

In addition to the Finance Ministry and KL, the Ministry for Children and Teacher were in the group. Civil servants worked shrouded in deep mystery.

It is largely the work of this group which has led to the complaint that the KL and the Finance Ministry have agreed in advance how the conflict will be ended and how the teachers’ terms and conditions will appear.

Denmark’s teachers’ union want to see the documents to find out how close a partnership the KL and Finance Ministry have been running.

The Finance Ministry has refused the request for access with the grounds that internal working documents are be exempted from public scrutiny, according to the Public Records Act Paragraph 7.

But, if these papers were sent from the Working Group to other authorities and administratons or have been used in other cases with the KL or the two ministries, then they lose their “internal” characteristic and should be generally presented.

Therefore, the ombudsman Jørgen Steen Sørensen asked about the characteristics of some 86 documents to determine if they can be considered internal. He stated earlier in the month in a letter to the Finance Ministry that if the documents have been used to prepare for the negotiations for a new working agreement, then they have been used in “other cases” and cannot be regarded as internal.

The Finance Ministry who acted as secretary for the working group wrote the following in response to the Ombudsman:

“But the Working Group’s documents have NOT been used in the treatment of other cases in the Finance Ministry or as previously stated neither in other cases in the Ministry for Children and Teaching nor in the KL. The Working Group’s documents were not used in preparation for the negotiations.”

Viewed from this explanation, the Working Group has not fulfilled its own goals. The Working Group’s job description, that gave the purpose of the group’s work was “…to prepare for working conditions negotiations in the public sector in 2013, and to support the shared goal of an increased teaching time share of working time in state primary and secondary schools.”

The Finance Ministry also wrote in its answer to the Ombudsman that the group was not finished with its report on teachers’ working time. The last meeting was held in August last year and there is an unfinished version of the report dated 19th November 2012, three weeks before the KL gave the demand to the Teachers’ Central Organisation to get rid of “rules that regulate the use of working time”.

The unfinished version was never made public but Denmark’s Teachers’ Union, using the Public Records Act, has obtained an excerpt of the document which describes the “factual circumstances”.

These are passages about rules for teaching in state schools, comments from old reports and other factual information that has been made public previously. But all estimates, interpretations and conclusions from the Working Group has not been given out.

However, in a footnote in the document, that the Working Group has used a press release from the KL called “Effective Use of Teachers’ Time” which came out in 2012.

In this report, it is claimed that teachers use 39.6 percent of their working time on teaching.

The KL has on separate occasions during the conflict referred to the exact number of calculated weekly lessons in the country as around 22 lessons, or 16 hours per teacher used for teaching. That teachers teacher for 16 hours a week has been a central message in KL’s public campaign about teachers’ working time. The number has been used in several full page adverts in newspapers.

Anders Bondo Christensen is the Teachers’ Central Organisation chief negotiator in the conflict about teachers’ working time. He finds it “very difficult” to understand the Finance Ministry’s explanation that the documents from the Working Group were not used at all to prepare for the negotiations about new working conditions for teachers.

“The group was set up to look at teachers’ working time ahead of negotiations about conditions. Why the heck weren’t they used in the report? There has been a lot of secrecy about the group’s work and it seems completely unrealistic to me that they wouldn’t have used the papers. It was why they were meeting. It was openly written in the mandate.”

Do you not believe the Finance Ministry has written the truth to the Ombudsman?

“When I say that it is unrealistic, it’s because I doubt that it is correct that they didn’t use the papers,” said Anders Bondo Christensen.

Denmark’s Teachers’ Union maintains its complaint to parliament’s Ombudsman, which has now asked the Finance Ministry about more detailed information. The Finance Ministry has stated to politiken.dk that the ministry will not comment on an ongoing complaint but politiken.dk learned that the negotiations about conditions were already started before the group finished the report. KL’s chief negotiator Michael Ziegler, has previously said to politiken.dk that he “assumed” that KL has used to the work from the committee but he did not personally take part in it, which was left to civil servants.

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