More indoctrination for British kids

New pupils enrolling in secondary schools this week will be required by law to stay in education until the age of 17, the government said on Wednesday. Raising the minimum leaving age from 16 to 17 is just one of several initiatives taking place in schools this term. Teenagers heading back to school after the summer holidays will also be among the first to study new diplomas in engineering, construction, IT, media and health. The syllabus for 11 to 14-year-olds will also see significant changes, as will well as changes to GCSE and A level exams, with the latter getting a new A* grade for the top achieving pupils.

The steps are part of the government's drive to keep youngsters in education or training till the age of 18 -- a move which will become enforceable in 2015. Ministers estimate around 200,000 youngsters between 16 and 18 are not in education or training.

"Education is all about opportunities -- a good education opens doors. It is the single best way for anyone, regardless of background, to do well and to gain the skills they need to succeed at whatever they want to do," said Schools Secretary Ed Balls. "I want to see a situation where every single young person has a range of interesting, exciting and challenging options ahead of them at every stage of their education, so that they never feel tempted to drop out or give up," he said. "This year will see some of the biggest steps towards this goal yet."

Meanwhile, a slew of computer glitches has caused more embarrassment for ministers after it emerged that around 150,000 17-year-old pupils will not receive their maintenance grants. The allowances, worth up to 30 pounds a week, were held up when the company responsible for processing applications, developed software problems.

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Sociology and political science have fouled their nests

Lots of opinion but little content

Key philanthropic and government programs offering grants for Ph.D. students appear to be excluding proposals for graduate students in sociology and political science, while favoring proposals from those in history, anthropology and a range of relatively small disciplines, such as art history and ethnomusicology, according to data released Friday.

The analysis was presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association and focused on programs to support field research or international research. The issue is particularly important because the analysis comes at a time that many political scientists are urging the discipline to push those who focus on American government and politics to take a broader view, and to study other parts of the world as well. According to those who discussed the issue at the APSA meeting, a variety of factors - including biases and habits within disciplines - are hurting the "explanatory social sciences," in ways that are damaging to those fields and their graduate students.

Ronald Herring, a professor of government at Cornell University who focuses on South Asia, said that he first became concerned about the issue when he was on a board looking at fellowships for the American Institute of Indian Studies, which is the largest funder of support for graduate work in India. The year he looked at the situation, the success rates for political scientists and sociologists seeking grants were both zero. Nearly three-quarters of proposals in art history were accepted, two-thirds for history, and nearly half for anthropology. While the situation has since improved, Herring said he wondered why "some social sciences were being weeded out of area studies."

Asked Herring: "Are we entering a C.P. Snow world of `two cultures'?" While Snow lamented the lack of understanding between those in the humanities and the sciences, the two cultures seen as divided in the research presented Friday are the social sciences that are perhaps closer to the hard sciences and those that closer to the humanities. (Definitions are a bit mushy here, as some fields, such as history, were described at the session as a humanities-leaning social science while many historians view themselves as in the humanities.)

Whatever the causes, data presented suggest that political scientists and sociologists are at a distinct disadvantage in seeking certain kinds of graduate support. The data were presented by Rina Agarwala, assistant professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, and Emmanuel Teitelbaum, assistant professor of political science at George Washington University. In terms of raw numbers, they left little doubt that some social science fields get more than others. For the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, for example, 31 percent of grants went to those doing work in history, 30 percent to anthropology, and 16 percent to regional studies, languages and literature. Political scientists gained only 5 percent of the awards - less than the 6 percent awarded to arts and ethnomusicology.

Relatively similar breakdowns were found in grants awarded by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council for similar programs supporting dissertation work abroad. Some of the data suggest that the trends are getting worse. For example, the Social Science Research Council's International Dissertation Research Fellowships, 10 years ago, were supporting 15 political scientists and 5 sociologists a year. Now each field gets two or three, a fraction of those going to anthropology and history.

The drops don't reflect a lack of applications, but lower success rates. Over the last 10 years of data for the SSRC program, anthropology's success rate had one year at 4 percent, but was otherwise between 5 and 8 percent. Since 2000, political science has been between 2 and 4 percent. Sociology, which used to be close to anthropology in success rates, has fallen to the 2 and 4 percent levels in recent years.

Notably, these shifts took place at a time that the composition of the selection committees for the fellowships was also changing, the Agarwala-Teitelbaum study found. In recent years, the committee has had one or two each from political science and sociology, while three or four each from history and anthropology. While history has been consistently high, political science used to be its equal, and anthropology's numbers have been growing on the panel as political science's have been shrinking.

At the National Science Foundation, the success rate for dissertation grant proposals for political science (20 percent) lags those for other fields, such as economics (37 percent), law and social sciences (53 percent) and cultural anthropology (27 percent, but with a larger grant total and many more grants given out than in other disciplines). But as Brian Humes, a program officer for the NSF who stressed he was sharing his opinions and not official agency policy, explained, separate panels are used to evaluate proposals, so the judges have plenty of knowledge of the various fields.

Humes said that certain problems tend to hold back political science proposals. He said that many of the proposals "don't provide a justification" for the funds. For instance, grad students will talk about their dissertation as a whole and not relate the grant's proposed trip to that work. Many other proposals, he said, don't suggest sufficient familiarity with the research challenges. In one case, an applicant had an interesting project for which he wanted to conduct research in French military archives, but the applicant admitted that he didn't know French. "When you add that you don't know French, you're cooked," said Humes.

Stathis Kalyvas, a professor of political science at Yale University, said that he sees the data pointing in part to ambivalence in political science about the value of field work. Many political scientists, he said, don't trust it at all and don't include it in their work. Others see "field work as an afterthought," and don't build it into their research agenda, but do field work to add "local color" to their work. This kind of approach isn't worth funding, he said.

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