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...and find a set of blue lights chasing you up the motorway, at least they could do it in style, Italian style:

Surely it is a given that we are all different? Size, shape, gender, colour, intelligence, personality, practical ability... So surely the human brain, and mind, are also infinitely variable. So why then do we have clothes, shoes, accessories, food, gadgets, literature, music, art, newspapers, all sorts of media, cars, houses, gardens, holidays, hobbies and pastimes of every conceivable colour, shape, size, sophistication, individuality to suit our needs and tastes and yet, when it comes to nurturing minds, especially young ones, in other words education, the state seems always to want a one size fits all, or nearly all solution we must all be dragooned through?

_{Scary kids from Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" video, copyright Columbia/CBS. Is this how we see education?}

Even the current advocates of increased "choice" in education are generally not calling for the sort of individually tailored schooling that might cater for a near infinite combination of aptitude and need in different subjects. No, squeezed onto the cattle trucks of the "skills agenda" at an increasingly early age, our children's precious formative minds are driven through National Curricula, SATs, Literacy Hour, regurgitated standardized lesson plans and a plethora of targets till they get an OFSTED stamp on their forehead to say they are ready to be part of Britains fast changing economy. Or at least, the fast changing economy that was being predicted by, yes, you guessed it, government, a decade ago when they started.

On Saturday I was having dinner with friends who either have children going through this system or looking to have soon. All of them, I think it would be fair to say, would be termed "left of centre" and would never have considered private education or home-schooling previously but are all actively considering it now or would if they had the money. They feel patronized by the system, and treated with varying degrees of contempt by the school and its staff.

But most of all they feel helpless when they can see that their child needs extra help or a different approach in one subject where they may thrive in a totally different subject with little struggle. Such different approaches may not be available in the one school. And the lesson plans used don't vary a great deal from school to school so there isn't a great deal of choice anyway. If they wanted to change schools - as one is trying to do now as a result of their experience - the bureaucracy is stifling.

Oh, this all sounds incredibly expensive doesn't it? How can we satisfy that nearly infinite combination of needs and aptitudes? Turn it around and ask, if we can satisfy a near infinite appetite for different trainers, baked beans and holidays, why can we not produce individualized education - surely one of the most important human needs, even for those of us who tend towards Herbert Spencer's view that the state should not be dictating or providing education at all.

I think we need to consider how to personalize education, from the earliest age; we're not going to achieve any step change in attainment just by adding a few extra teachers armed with standard lesson plans, just by putting a little extra money in the direction of the least well off - though that will no doubt help, assuming they can actually find the package to suit them.

Localism is certainly a part of the answer, as perhaps are things like "free schools" on the Dutch model and an idea expanded on at Regno del fines blog. Why not return the provision of schools much much closer to the families using them - at parish level or something similar sized. Parents could decide amongst themselves in a mutualist structure whether to get in a teacher who's going to teach the children proper grammar or to learn their times tables.

And we should not be so squeamish about the corporatization of education. By which I don't mean the mish-mash of schemes to get token private money into the current system. I mean that education, or at least the "skills agenda", is already a subsidy to business (or it ought to be if the education system produced people business can use). It is corporate welfare. So why not instead expect business itself to contribute directly to nurturing the skills needed in an area - perhaps paying for particular teachers is specialized subjects related to the local economy? It would be more transparent at least than corporate lobbyists persuading a few politicians far away to spend our money on providing them workers, and probably more reactive to changes in the economy.

A quantum leap in the amount of flexibility and personalization of education is what we need. And for government to butt out as much as possible. For surely, we have pretty well reached the situation Spencer predicted:

One of the great benefits of working at Oxford Brookes University is that, perhaps unlike more snooty institutions, we IT Guys do get to mingle with the egg-heads and boffins at lunchtimes and so on because we can only afford one staff dining room! And summer vacations are usually better for such opportunities as the academics seem to be less rushed between lectures and so on. So Friday was such an interesting occasion, and we were lunching with a particular friend from International Relations.

She can never understand, when I get talking about my political outlook, why I am not a Green (she is). And I glibly said well I'm a libertarian at heart. And I certainly believe that people should be able to make what they can and keep it, so long as it was fairly earned and not earned by coercion of others. And so off we went on a critique of various "schools" of libertarianism and anarchism. So was I an anarchist or a libertarian? Are "anarcho-capitalists" real anarchists or does their support for capitalism mean that they support inherently hierarchical and coercive social structures, especially in the sphere of economics? Are "anarcho-syndicalists" real libertarians or do their suggested post-revolutionary governance structures amount to localised tyrannies?

And what about "left libertarian" and "right libertarian" - can you be a libertarian and left leaning at all? Or is a libertarian really a right wing anarchist and an anarchist a left wing libertarian? If this is all beginning to sound like the various nomenclatures beloved of seventies marxist groups, that's what I thought too. I even found one person describing themselves as an "Anti-capitalist anti-communist individualist anarchist" which I am sure must adequately describes what he feels but is quite a mouthful you must admit!

So I got back to my desk and did a bit of digging around on the web in what was left of my lunch time. Am I closer to Murray Rothbard or to Kevin Carson? And how do either of them relate to nineteenth century anarchists/libertarians such as Benjamin Tucker? It seems I might have to decide whether I believe in the "labour theory of value" or in "marginal utility". But also, I believe, with Tucker, that the root cause of a lack of equity for the poor, and especially the working poor, is the four great monopolies maintained through state coercion: money and its creation, land, trade tariffs and patents.

And if you accept land as a factor of production I don't see how either of these other theories of value can be the whole story. I have, for a while now, described my position as "geo-libertarian". Geo-libertarians eschew, like other libertarians, state interference in economic and social aspects of life. But we add a rider, after Locke, Smith, Ricardo, Paine, Mill I & II and most obviously Henry George, that in order to set a level playing field the value of land must be distributed equitably amongst the whole community. So we believe that through Land Value Tax, or as Locke called it more accurately I believe, the Community Collection of Rent, all occupiers of economic land pay the value of that to the community which, in its purest form, simply distributes that as a dividend to all citizens but which also, if you do not want to go the whole hog an abolish the state, should set an absolute limit on the amount the state can raise and spend.

So anyway, I think I have nailed myself down. I will henceforth call myself an "anarcho-geo-libertarian-mutualist"! Are there any others out there? Maybe we can meet in an obscure public house somewhere one day and form a faction?

Technorati Tags: anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, Benjamin Tucker, Carson, geo-libertarianism, libertarianism, mutualism, radicalism, Rothbard

When you get a number of friends emailing to find out if you're okay because you haven't blogged for a couple of weeks it's maybe time to start paying the old thing some attention again. Although I do have a subscription to one of these blog stats packages and I keep an eye on it, I never seem to be getting as many hits as many younger blogs report in their early days. So I do often wonder if it's worth it all sometimes.

But yesterday I was on the platform for a debate/discussion on the subject of "Planning to win?" at the Lib Dems' South Central Regional Conference held here at Oxford Brookes University and the chair of the session had clearly got most of her information about me from this blog, so I guess it does get noticed once in a while.

But you know how it goes, it's not that I've not had any opinions over the past couple of weeks; far from it, I seem to have unfinished blog posts on a dozen different topics. But with being the only one in at work for much of last week and having had evening meetings on every night I wasn't on duty (and one on one that I was on duty for!) everything else gets behind a little. And soon my RSS feed reader is showing upwards of four thousand unread items and it all gets a bit much.

Some other projects must come ahead in my priorities over blogging; projects that promise in more practical ways to get across my core ideals:

• Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts where I've had two meetings in the past week explaining how to create community led affordable housing in two rural communities
• the "Liberal ALTERnative" book project aiming to get a book on radical liberal economics out before the autumn conference season
• the Oxfordshire Social Enterprise Forum's replacement website which we hope will better support and help grow the social enterprise sector in Oxfordshire
• and most of all, the run up to election campaigning for a seat on Oxford City Council again in May - where I think our agent would get upset if I blogged all my spare time while telling him I didn't have much of that precious commodity for campaigning!

Add to that obligations such as being the staff side elected governor here at Brookes, and we've had a few board and committee meetings in the past couple of weeks and you'll maybe see why I haven't got round to blogging much. I'm also still not really happy with the design, not happy that it actually has the effect I want of being simple but of steering readers to related posts and links and getting them to stick around a bit more to read the "back issues". But I'll live with the design while I cannot carve out any more time to work on it!

So, it might still be "blogging lite" for a while, but I will try and better choose my subjects so I don't end up writing nothing as a result of having too much to write about!