Show notes
1. Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel-peace-prize winner, landed in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, to lead an interim government. He met the army chief and is expected to be sworn in on Thursday. Sheikh Hasina, the former prime minister, resigned and fled on Monday following days of violent unrest. In a guest essay for *The Economist *published before his appointment Mr Yunus laid out the next steps for Bangladesh.
穆罕默德·尤努斯（Muhammad Yunus），諾貝爾和平獎得主，抵達孟加拉首都達卡，準備領導過渡政府。他會見了軍隊總司令，預計將於週四宣誓就職。前總理謝赫·哈西娜（Sheikh Hasina）在持續多日的暴力動亂後，於週一辭職並逃離。在他被任命之前，尤努斯先生在《經濟學人》發表的來賓文章中，闡述了孟加拉的下一步行動計劃。
2. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris agreed to a televised debate on September 10th. Earlier, Mr Trump said that Ms Harris was “not smart” and claimed that the **presidency *had been “taken away” from Joe Biden. Mr Trump* inflated** the size of his rally crowds when asked about Ms Harris’s, claiming to have attracted more people to his speech on January 6th 2021 than Martin Luther King in 1963.
唐納德·川普（Donald Trump）和卡馬拉·賀錦麗（Kamala Harris）同意於9月10日進行電視辯論。早些時候，特朗普先生曾表示賀錦麗女士「不聰明」，並聲稱總統職位已被「從喬·拜登手中奪走」。當被問及賀錦麗女士的支持者人數時，特朗普誇大了他集會的人數，聲稱在2021年1月6日的演講中，他吸引的人數比1963年馬丁·路德·金的演講更多。
3. American stock indices and treasury yields rose after a report showed that jobless claims—a proxy for layoffs—in the past week were lower than expected. The S&P 500 increased by 2.3%, its biggest single-day gain since 2022; the tech-heavy NASDAQ also rose by 2.9%. Stock markets slumped last week partly because a bad American jobs reportfuelled fears of an economic slowdown.
美國股市指數和國債收益率在一份報告顯示上週失業救濟申請數量（裁員的替代指標）低於預期後上升。標準普爾500指數上漲了2.3%，創下自2022年以來單日最大漲幅；科技股為主的納斯達克指數也上漲了2.9%。股市上週下跌，部分原因是糟糕的美國就業報告引發了對經濟放緩的擔憂。
4. A court ordered FTX, a bankrupt crypto firm, to pay $12.7billion to its customers, according to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, an American regulator. The repayment would fully compensate creditors based on the value of their accounts when FTX filed for bankruptcy in November 2022. In March Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s boss, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for fraud.
根據美國監管機構商品期貨交易委員會（CFTC）的消息，法院命令破產的加密貨幣公司FTX向其客戶支付127億美元。這筆償還將根據FTX在2022年11月申請破產時的賬戶價值，全額補償債權人。今年三月，FTX的負責人山姆·班克曼-弗里德（Sam Bankman-Fried）因欺詐罪被判處25年監禁。
5. European gas prices rose to their highest level in 2024, as an** offensive** by Ukrainian forces in Kursk, a Russian region bordering Ukraine, entered its third day. Russia declared a state of emergency after the Kremlin said around 1,000 Ukrainian troops and several tanks had crossed the border. Earlier Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, accused Ukraine of launching a “major provocation”.
隨著烏克蘭軍隊在俄羅斯與烏克蘭接壤的庫爾斯克地區展開進攻進入第三天，歐洲天然氣價格上漲至2024年的最高水平。克里姆林宮表示，大約1,000名烏克蘭士兵和數輛坦克越過邊界後，俄羅斯宣布進入緊急狀態。此前，俄羅斯總統弗拉基米爾·普京（Vladimir Putin）指責烏克蘭發起了「重大挑釁」。
6. In his third emergency meeting of the week Keir Starmer, Britain’s prime minister, reportedly told ministers and police chiefs to “remain on high alert” to the threat of further race riots across England and Northern Ireland. Online disinformation, circulated among far-right circles after the murder of three children in Southport last week, has fuelled the unrest. Almost 500 rioters have been arrested so far.
據報導，英國首相基爾·斯塔默（Keir Starmer）在本週的第三次緊急會議中告訴部長和警察局長們，要「對英格蘭和北愛爾蘭可能爆發的進一步種族騷亂保持高度警惕」。上週在南港發生三名兒童被殺害事件後，極右翼圈子中傳播的網絡虛假信息加劇了動亂。目前已有將近500名暴徒被逮捕。
7. Carles Puigdemont, a Catalan separatist leader, returned to Spain after seven years in exile, despite an arrest warrant issued by the authorities. After giving an impassioned speech, he mysteriously disappeared. Catalan police launched an** operation** to find Mr Puigdemont and arrested one of their officers for allegedly helping him escape. In 2017, when he was president of Catalonia, Mr Puigdemont held an unconstitutional referendum on independence.
加泰隆尼亞分離主義領袖卡萊斯·普伊格德蒙特（Carles Puigdemont）在流亡七年後返回西班牙，儘管當局對他發出了逮捕令。他發表了一篇激昂的演講後，神秘消失。加泰隆尼亞警方展開行動搜尋普伊格德蒙特先生，並逮捕了一名據稱幫助他逃跑的警官。2017年，普伊格德蒙特先生擔任加泰隆尼亞總統期間舉行了一場違憲的獨立公投。
小撇步: 特別報導~ 教育該是自由開放還是傳統嚴謹?
Back to basics
England’s school reforms are earning fans abroad.
Countries that have made more fashionable changes have seen their scores fall hard
On paper, Mercia School in the north of England is a forbidding and unfashionable place. Teachers focus unrelentingly on “the acquisition of knowledge”, if its intimidating website is any guide. Lessons are “didactic”, delivered to pupils sitting in orderly rows. Youngsters form lines in the playground before processing silently into class. Failure to bring a pen can earn a demerit. Chatting in the corridors is banned.
Yet on a cloudy morning in May the secondary school in Sheffield is a far cheerier place than its pen portrait suggests. In its airy dinner hall 12-year-olds in PE kit prepare to tackle an orienteering course set across school grounds. During a noisy breaktime, two youngsters explain how they won the badges that hang in thick bunches from their lapels (for good attendance, speaking up in class and the like). The school is oversubscribed, absence rates are low and expulsions rare, says Dean Webster, its headteacher. Last year it ranked third in England for how much progress children make between the ages of 11 and 16. For boosting disadvantaged youngsters, it came top.
Founded in 2018 on the site of a school closed for its poor grades, Mercia is emblematic of a shift on education that politicians in England have pursued for a decade and a half. Conservative ministers who entered government in 2010 were convinced that faddish ideologies had diverted schools from teaching in ways that evidence suggests work best. Many people believe that the reforms they wrought amount to a big step backwards. Yet lately England’s schools have been climbing up international league tables. Meanwhile countries that have pressed on with more fashionable approaches have been watching their own scores fall.
Reforms in England have targeted both what is taught to children and the way lessons are delivered. Start with curriculums. Policymakers who grabbed the whip hand in 2010 maintained that, in a rush to endow children with useful “skills”, teachers were neglecting to instil them with enough nitty-gritty facts. Schools had come to think of “problem-solving” and “critical thinking” as talents children could pick up without gaining expertise in particular subjects, says Nick Gibb, who was schools minister, on and off, from 2010 to 2023. “But you can’t teach those things in isolation. You acquire them by having knowledge.”
To people who think schools are too Gradgrindian, the idea that they might be failing to transmit sufficient content sounds absurd. Yet in practice it is common for experts to downplay the importance of learning crunchy stuff. Since people can find facts on the internet, book-learning is less valuable, goes one theory. Some insist that the world is transforming so swiftly that much of what schools teach will quickly grow stale. More important, they say, to imbue children with a love of learning so that in future they can retrain themselves whenever a robot takes their job.
Just the facts, ma’am
In selling their fixes, England’s reformers invoke the work of E.D. Hirsch, an American academic. His research in the 1970s found that comprehension skills rely a lot on general knowledge. People who know little of Vikings or volcanoes struggle to make sense of writing that mentions them—even if they can read every word on the page. If that seems obvious, much literacy instruction has commonly ignored it.
Reforms in England also have sought to alter the ways teachers teach. The fashionable thinking is that children will learn better, and more joyfully, if teachers see themselves as “a guide on the side, not a sage on a stage”. That often means setting pupils on more self-guided projects that lead them towards key lessons, rather than explaining them explicitly upfront. All this borrows somewhat from ideas popularised by the early Romantics, who argued in the 18th century that formal schooling stamped out curiosity. People who are spoon-fed lessons as children, goes the thinking, will struggle to learn by themselves in adulthood.
The problem is that studies commonly find these hip pedagogies to be less reliable than the more straightforward kind. In the late 2000s John Hattie, a professor in New Zealand, crunched findings from thousands of educational studies to evaluate different kinds of interventions. This exercise found that conventional, teacher-led styles of instruction were much more effective than their critics tend to make out. PISA test results, likewise, suggest that rich-world children in classes that are “teacher-directed” score better than those in which lessons are “enquiry-based”. This is especially pertinent because the PISA tests are supposed to do a better job than most other assessments of measuring how far pupils can apply their learning in situations they might come across in real life.
England’s reformers yanked several levers to bring more rigour to the classroom. They made the national curriculum thicker and more specific. In maths, courses for young children now look more like the ones high-achieving Singapore sets. In reading, the curriculum rewrite cast aside “child-centred” approaches to literacy that sought to escape the drudgery of mastering phonics (broadly, how letters of the alphabet combine to make sounds). The more tedious methods, which depend greatly on such frowned-upon techniques as rote memorisation, get better results.
Many of these reforms have been deeply unpopular, but they are starting to bear fruit
Since 2011 the Education Endowment Foundation, a government-funded NGO, has sought to supply more data-based findings about what teachings work best. The government also shook up the national school inspectorate, which it had come to see as an enforcer of poorly evidenced orthodoxies it wanted to disrupt. And it has funded an arm’s-length agency, called Oak National Academy, which is meant to supply teachers with optional, high-quality lesson plans for every class the national curriculum might require them to teach.
Many of these reforms have been deeply unpopular, and some of them only partially a success. Teachers guffaw at the idea that they have been liberated from woolly thinking; plenty feel that ramped-up tests and inspections limit their freedom. “Nobody is against knowledge,” says Guy Claxton, a visiting professor of education at King’s College London. The risk of thinking that kids will learn more efficiently if you “just tell them” stuff, he says, is that they end up not understanding what they are told. Even big fans think that positive changes in England have been undercut by failures to invest in the teaching workforce and in repairing crumbling school buildings.
Yet the data give good reason to think that England’s reforms are starting to bear fruit. Before 2020 about 80% of children were passing a “phonics check” they take when they are six-year-olds, up from only 58% in 2012. England has been doing better than many comparable nations in international tests—including during the pandemic-afflicted years, when its grades appear to have fallen back by a little less than was the case in much of Europe. In the PISA tests for maths, England’s 15-year-olds have risen from 29th in the world in 2009 to 11th in 2022.
Gonnae no’ dae that
Most compelling are the sharply contrasting trajectories of education systems that have taken the opposite approach. The best comparator is Scotland (each of the four parts of the United Kingdom controls its own school system). Scotland’s children share much in common with their peers south of the border. The difference, argues Lindsay Paterson at the University of Edinburgh, is that Scotland’s political class has long viewed conventional approaches as “old-fashioned, out-of-date, alienating and unmotivating”.
This approach reached an apogee in 2010, with the launch of a Scottish curriculum that waxed modishly about skills but offered only vague steers about what content children should be taught (and which cemented practices that had come into vogue years earlier). Scotland’s scores in international tests, already then in decline, have continued slumping hard since. By the time the pandemic receded, Scottish 15-year-olds were scoring at levels that, a generation earlier, might have been expected of pupils a full two years younger (see chart). That is the case even though spending per pupil is 18% higher than the average across Britain.
The diverging fortunes of British children hold useful lessons for policymakers elsewhere. No other government in Europe has reformed its curriculum “as radically” as Scotland’s has, says Professor Paterson. But it is not the only place to offer a cautionary tale. In the early 2000s Finland had one of the most admired school systems on the planet. Over the years since, its scores in a range of international tests dropped sharply. In 2015 a report by Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, a Swedish economist, speculated that Finland’s rise to the top ranks of global league tables owed much to the traditional brand of schooling it was doling out in the 1970s and 1980s. Its decline, he argued, relates in part to a “progressive turn” that began gaining momentum in the mid-1990s. (Another theory is that after Finnish families achieved comfortable living standards, they lost some zeal for academic achievement.)
Many think similar shifts lie behind declines in bits of Canada, France and New Zealand. For some years Australian curriculums have offered teachers only limited detail on what content should be taught, and in what order, says Ben Jensen of Learning First, a consultancy; to him that helps explain why PISA test scores in that country have fallen. And despite mounting evidence of Scotland’s decline, politicians in Wales have just waived through a waffly curriculum as woolly as that deployed by its northern counterpart. It does not help that voters care little about schooling; in a poll conducted in May only 7% of Britons rated education as a top-three issue for this month’s election.
Roiling culture wars in America have made these debates trickier
In America a decentralised school system allows the world’s best- and worst-evidenced educational practices to rub along cheek by jowl. The challenge for reformers there is not just that policy choices are devolved to states and to local officials in 14,000 school districts. It is also that teachers closely guard their own freedom to run their classrooms however they see fit. Too few American educators have access to quality lesson plans, argues David Steiner of Johns Hopkins University; many concoct their own curriculums from resources found online. Research suggests they often make schoolwork less challenging than pupils need.
American exceptionalism
America has entertained a noisy debate about reading, which parents have come to realise is often taught in ways which sound appealing but which are not backed by solid studies. This awakening bears a resemblance to the movement that is changing schooling in England (itself inspired in part by methods used at America’s “No Excuses” charter schools). But many American schools retain a “visceral prejudice against teachers standing up in front of a classroom and explaining stuff”, says Natalie Wexler, an author. She thinks educators have not yet recognised how much pupils rely on general knowledge to gain comprehension skills.
The roiling culture wars in America have made the debates about what to do in the classrooms even trickier. Critics from the left accuse schools of fetishising the theories and deeds of dead white men. Those on the right seek to ban or sanitise teachings that they think paint the country in a bad light (as, for example, with the history of slavery). None of this gives educators much incentive to deliver an ambitious curriculum. Safer to steer away from knowledge-packed lessons, in favour of efforts to develop ambiguous “skills”.
Politicians who prioritise children’s progress would rise above these distractions. The best interests of their countries require it. Populations are ageing; workforces are shrinking. Young adults will have to become much more productive if they are to shoulder the rising costs of caring for the old. It is hard to see how that can happen unless youngsters receive more effective schooling. They must get the teachers, the technology, the curriculum and the pedagogies that they need to make the very best start. ■
美國的特殊性
美國一直在進行一場關於閱讀教學的激烈辯論。許多家長已經意識到，閱讀經常以一些聽起來很吸引人的方式來教導，但這些方法並沒有得到可靠研究的支持。這種覺醒與正在改變英國學校的運動有些相似（這個運動部分受到美國「無藉口」特許學校方法的啟發）。然而，美國許多學校仍然保留著「對教師站在教室前講授知識的本能偏見」，作家娜塔莉·韋克斯勒（Natalie Wexler）說。她認為教育者尚未充分認識到學生在獲得理解能力方面有多麼依賴一般知識。
美國激烈的文化戰爭使得關於課堂應該教什麼的辯論變得更加棘手。左翼的批評者指責學校迷戀已故白人男性的理論和行為。右翼則試圖禁止或修正他們認為將國家描繪得過於負面的教學內容（如奴隸制歷史）。這些都沒有給教育者提供足夠的動力來推行更具雄心的課程。為了安全
起見，他們傾向於避開知識豐富的課程，轉而努力發展模糊的「技能」。
優先考慮孩子進步的政治家們應該超越這些干擾。國家最好的利益需要這樣做。人口老齡化，勞動力在縮減。如果年輕人要承擔起日益增加的養老成本，他們將不得不變得更加高效。除非年輕人接受到更有效的教育，否則很難實現這一目標。他們必須獲得所需的教師、技術、課程和教學法，才能為未來打下最好的基礎。
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