Sigbert Prais

Sigbert Jon Prais FBA (* 19th December 1928 in Frankfurt am Main ; † 22. February 2014 ) was a German- British economist and mathematician , who before the Nazis had fled and entered for the standards of mathematics to increase -Teaching UK .

Life

Family background, studies, teaching and research activities

Prais grew up as the eldest of four sons of an Orthodox Jewish family in Frankfurt am Main and emigrated with the family to Great Britain after the NSDAP seized power on January 30, 1933 . There his father set up a business in Birmingham to manufacture metal frames and ornaments for women's handbags. He was so disappointed that he did not get a school cone when he started school there like the children in his German homeland that later, to the amazement of their British classmates, he handed his own children a school cone with sweets when they started school.

After attending King Edward VI's School in Birmingham, he completed a degree in economics at the University of Birmingham . He then began postgraduate studies in applied economics at the University of Cambridge .

Upon completion of his studies, Prais became a lecturer in the Department of Applied Economics at Fitzwilliam College at the University of Cambridge. In 1953 he became a Fellow of the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago , founded in 1932 by the entrepreneur Alfred Cowles , where he worked together with CB Winsten on the formulation of the "Prais-Winsten Estimation", a complex mathematical method from econometrics . After returning to Great Britain in 1954, he resumed his work as a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, where he worked with Hendrik Houthakker on a study of household spending before the Second World War . With the work published in 1955 under the title Analysis of Family Budgets , he earned a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) and laid the foundation for a number of later research projects.

Furthermore, at this time he also began working as a senior research scientist at the National Institute for Economic and Social Research ( NIESR ) . Immediately thereafter, he and Peter Hart began research on the growth of British companies that led to the joint publication of The Analysis of Business Concentration: A Statistical Approach (1956).

In the 1960s, Prais worked for several years in the industry, where he was also the financial director of the metalworking company founded by his father in Birmingham, which made a successful listing on the London Stock Exchange in 1964 . After returning to the NIESR, he was primarily concerned with researching the reasons for the UK's relatively poor industrial performance and soon realized that one of the underlying causes was the poor standards in education and training. In the following years he made numerous international comparisons with educational standards .

Prais, who published The Evolution of Giant Firms in Britain in 1976 , became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985 .

Baker working group and criticism of the 1988 math curriculum

In 1988, Prais made headlines when he stepped down from a school math curriculum working group convened by Conservative Party's Secretary of Education, Kenneth Baker . The 14-person working group had been set up just a year earlier and was tasked with determining how math should be taught against the backdrop of a growing finding that British schoolchildren of average and below-average ability were falling behind those in the Federal Republic of Germany and Japan . When the working group presented its report in December 1987, it largely appeared that it was written to confirm traditional prejudices. Members concluded that there was more to mathematics than arithmetic and that a greater focus on arithmetic "would be to impoverish the development of the pupil". Furthermore, it came to the conclusion that an earlier access of the students to pocket calculators "could accelerate their understanding and feeling for numbers" ('accelerate their understanding of and feeling for numbers').

When Minister Baker distanced himself from the report, Prais wrote a dissenting report, which strongly criticized the findings of the other working group members. He advocated that basic arithmetic , one of the worst performing areas for UK students, should be paramount, adding that calculators are being used too often to avoid the need to remedy these weaknesses. After he resigned, he complained that the task force was "ambushed" by the educational institutions, most of which had no knowledge of the business world.

Armed with shameful comparisons, Prais was able to show how poorly British students fared on formal tests with students from other countries. For example, 69 percent of 16-year-old German students in the lower half of the proficiency scale were able to answer a division containing relatively simple fractions (18 3/5 divided 7 3/4), while only 40 of all British children and only 13 percent of children in on the lower half of the proficiency scale were able to solve the problem, as such arithmetic was considered unsuitable for less gifted children. He then sharply criticized:

“This is what our school system brings out. And the pundits of education will likely answer, 'We are very happy to be filling our children's brains with these questions.' "

'This is what our schooling system turns out. And our pundits of education would probably reply: "We're very glad we are not wasting our children's minds with these questions". '

As a result, the UK had far fewer high school leavers equipped with the skills necessary for a job.

Pioneer of the National Numeracy Project

In 1996, Prais and Helvia Bierhoff , who was also a researcher at NIESR, published the book From School to Productive Work , a completely devastating account of the standards of vocational training in Great Britain compared to Switzerland . This led to the fact that he was invited by the school board in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham to help raise standards in school education. School authorities were concerned about the poor reach of local children, many of whom were hoping to get jobs at the Ford plant in Dagenham but were underqualified compared to other school leavers from Europe .

As a consequence of this, a pilot project was established which attempted to incorporate the Swiss methods of arithmetic instruction in elementary schools into the elementary schools of the London Borough. The results were so impressive that they contributed to the launch of the National Numeracy Project under the Conservative government of Prime Minister John Major and subsequently to the Labor Party government's arithmetic task force of Prime Minister Tony Blair .

In general, the comparatively poor performance of British students remained unsolvable. As recently as February 2014, an OECD report found that the children of factory workers and cleaners in the People's Republic of China had better qualifications than the offspring of British lawyers and doctors.

Publications

• The analysis of family budgets, with an application to two British surveys conducted in 1937-39 and their detailed results , 1955
• The social-class structure of Anglo-Jewry 1961 , 1961
• A sample survey on Jewish education in London, 1972-73 , 1975
• The evolution of giant firms in Britain , 1976
• Big or small business , 1981
• Productivity and industrial structure , 1981
• Is informal school teaching bad , 1982
• Schooling or experience , 1982
• Schooling standards in Britain and Germany , 1983
• Some practical aspects of human capital investment , 1983
• The stock of machinery in Britain Germany and the United States , 1984
• Vocational training in France and Britain , 1985
• Educating for productivity , 1986
• Grouping and teaching efficiency in a normal school-class , 1986
• Pre-vocational schooling in Europe today , 1991
• Economic performance and education , 1993
• Productivity, education, and training , 1995
• School-readiness, whole-class teaching and pupils' mathematical attainments , 1997

Web links

• Proof of publication ( Open Library )
• Professor Sigbert Prais - obituary. Professor Sigbert Prais was a refugee from Nazi Germany who campaigned to raise standards of maths teaching in British schools . In: The Daily Telegraph, March 26, 2014