Michael Gove, our education secretary, doesn't appear to understand what an average is.
Michael Gove, our education secretary, doesn’t appear to understand what an average is.
This is how Gove responded when asked last year, during a question and answer session with the Education Committee, to explain his Kafkaesque logic as to what makes a good school good.
(Transcript here: http://
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12 Responses to “Michael Gove’s Kafkaesque logic”
Pierre Bernardi
George Hallam, it is not possible for everyone to be better than average. Not mathematically possible. It is possible, and even trivial, for a majority to be better than average. That is why there is a second measure, the median, which relates to distribution of the population. By definition, 50% of a population exceeds the median. That is what median means. It is not possible for 100% of a population to exceed the median. It is not possible for anything other than 50% of a population to exceed the median, by definition.
Here’s an example: If in a class of ten children, 9 score 11 at a test, and 1 scores 1, then the average score at the test is exactly 10, which 90% of the population exceeded.
On form -
[…] is that quick a learner, this is the man who thought it was possible for a majority of schools to be over average. (He obviously had enough of statistics at that […]