.
Oh well, back to the politics, the financial meltdown, the appalling lack of spiritual intelligence in our public life.
There was a fascinating programme on BBC4 last night (twice - I caught the late show) about Zen and wabi sabi, but I’ll come to that in a moment.
The front page headline on the Guardian this morning is “Brown: I should have done more to prevent crisis.” And “PM says he accepts ‘full responsibility’ and declares laissez-faire era over.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/17/gordon-brown-recession-banking-regulation
"Gordon Brown attempts to launch a political fightback today by declaring that he takes "full responsibility" for his role in the banking failures that led to the global recession, and claims that the downturn marks the end of the era of laissez-faire government.
In an interview with the Guardian, the prime minister concedes that in retrospect he wishes he had mounted a popular campaign 10 years ago to demand more responsible regulation of the world's financial markets. He attempts to draw a line under calls for him to make an apology by admitting that the national system of regulation he helped establish in 1997 could not keep pace with the massive global financial flows.
In some of his most extensive comments on his role in the recession, Brown said: "I take full responsibility for all my actions, but I think we're dealing with a bigger problem that is global in nature, as well as national. Perhaps 10 years ago after the Asian crisis when other countries thought these problems would go away, we should have been tougher ... keeping and forcing these issues on to the agenda like we did on debt relief and other issues of international policy."
So what Brown actually said to the man from the Guardian was, “I take full responsibility for all my actions”. Of course he does. Why wouldn’t he? What he deliberately fails to say is that he takes full responsibility for all of his INactions which allowed and encouraged the bankers and the fat cats to ruthlessly exploit the gullibility and naivety of millions of ‘ordinary’ people - i.e. non-insiders (even people like Max Hastings, more of whom later) - and effectively rob them and steal from them their life savings in the capitalist casino, which, like every casino, operates for the benefit of those that run it.
He argues that "only progressive, centre-left governments can address the problems of the global change".
Brown also claims that "the 40-year-old prevalent orthodoxy known as the Washington consensus in favour of free markets has come to an end", but signals a refusal to return to Labour's comfort zone by saying there will be no return to "big government", or any let up in public service reform.
What a fucking nerve - suggesting that New Labour has been a progressive, left of centre government when we know damn well that it’s gone even further than Thatch and Major in its privatisations, deregulations, giving independence to the UK’s central bank, appointing useless bankers to key advisory and regulatory roles, etc. Bastard.
What a fucking nerve - telling us that the 40-year old ‘Washington consensus’ has (thankfully) come to an end when he and Blair did fuck all to try to end it when they came to power in ’97, as they should have done. As if he’s played any part in ending the era of voodoo economics and the reign of the Chicago School! He fucking supported it!
And now he’s opportunistically trying to follow Obama’s lead on everything - from suddenly adopting Keynesianism and ditching the Friedmanite Chicago School theorists, to advocating the end of the bonus culture, raising taxes on the rich and putting ceilings on executive pay. Bastard.
Jon Stewart on the Daily Show neatly skewered Brown last week by running clips of several of the bits of his speech to Congress that milked standing ovations, and then showed the much older clips of the bits of Obama’s speeches that Brown had copied word for word or plagiarised.
As Jon S put it, “What is this guy? A Barack Obama cover band?”
He said nothing original in that speech, and only stated the bleeding obvious when he called for concerted international action to deal with the world economic crisis. Big deal. We could all do that.
"Laissez-faire has had its day. People on the centre-left and the progressive agenda should be confident enough to say that the old idea that the markets were efficient and could work things out by themselves are gone", he says.
What’s this? You don’t say! Laissez-faire capitalism should have had its fucking day way back in the 1930’s - since it took a world war to kick-start economies out of the great depression that L-FC had caused, and post-war it took Keynesian enlightenment, the Marshall Plan and the creation of the United Nations and the IMF (before the Chicago Boys took up residence there) to pilot the world into a new era of peace and prosperity. These were institutions and international agreements that came into being because it was clearly understood back then that unbridled, unregulated capitalism could only bring misery, recession and ruin to entire populations.
And as for Brown saying that “people of the centre-left and the ‘progressive agenda’ should be confident enough blah blah” - WE fucking WERE confident enough to say that markets needed regulation and public accountability! Only Brown and Blair and their crew weren’t fucking listening!!
“The prime minister also argued that the world recession was changing the public's expectations of business values, and they no longer believe a successful economy has to be based on high levels of risk.
"Most people want business to have the same values as they practise in their everyday life. People would rather reward hard work rather than risk-taking.”
This is bollocks too. Maybe the world ‘recession’ (economic implosion) has changed Mr Brown’s ‘expectations of business values’, but WE, the ‘public’, i.e. the real people, have always espoused the values that he’s now, belatedly, proclaiming. It’s not the bloody public’s values that are now changing..
Brown also says, in the interview spread across pages 14 and 15, that “both government and markets have got to be underpinned by values”. That’s right, Gordo. Socialist values. Belief in fairness, social justice, the elimination of poverty, much greater inequality, the elimination of tax havens, tax avoidance and fat-cat bolt-holes, caps on executive pay, the elimination of the bonus culture, higher rates of tax for the rich, a much higher minimum wage, and so on. All the things that NuLabour has patently failed to even campaign about and argue for, let alone act on.
How this guy has the nerve to paint himself as a progressive and left of centre is beyond belief.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/mar/17/labour-gordon-brown-interview
---------------------------------------------------
A couple of days ago I was reading the chapters in Naomi Klein’s ‘The Shock doctrine” that deal with what happened to the so-called Asian Tiger Economies, which Brown refers to, during the late 1990’s. Read them and weep. Big business and big finance in the USA and elsewhere decided it wanted part of the action in places like Malaysia, Indonesia, the Phillipines and South Korea - places that had built thriving industries and public utilities that were at least part-owned by the state - and so set out to destabilise their currencies in order to force them to apply to the IMF for support. The IMF, of course, which by this time was firmly under the control of the Chicago Boys, told them that loans would only be available to them AFTER they’d agreed to sell off, to privatise, at knock-down prices, their state assets and their major industries. And guess who stepped in, bought them up, and asset-stripped them, as they had already done in Russia, Eastern Europe, South Africa, South America, and elsewhere? That’s right - fat cats, financial predators and oligarchs.
-------------------------------------------------
Two more recent columns in the quality press about the harmful effects of inequality, as researched and reported by Wilkinson & Pickett in ‘The Spirit Level’.
Will Hutton in The Observer:
‘Look no further than inequality for the source of all our ills.’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/15/equality-economy-will-hutton
John Crace in G2:
‘The Theory of Everything’.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/12/equality-british-society
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/11/mental-health-inequality
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/audio/2009/mar/05/the-spirit-level
----------------------------------------------
Simon Jenkins had another excellent column in The Guardian on Friday 13th, on the deeds and legacy of Thatch and her ilk.
“Where Thatcher - or rather her chancellor, Nigel Lawson - went wrong was in the reformed structure of City finance brought on by the Big Bang of 1986.”
No one was more traumatised by the miners' strike than two young Labour politicians, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. A year earlier, Blair had been elected for Sedgefield on a leftwing, anti-Europe, pro-union, pro-CND platform, to begin one of the most spectacular U-turns in political history.
By 1989 Blair was shadow employment secretary, and was demanding that his party quietly accept Thatcher's labour and privatisation laws. He and Brown visited Australia to study Labour leader Bob Hawke's ideal of Thatcherism with a human face. He declared, "We play the Tory game when we speak up for the underclass rather than for the broad majority." Meanwhile Brown demanded that the party "make an almost religious atonement for the sins of Labour's past", in the words of his biographer, Robert Peston.
Brown was so frantic to mimic Thatcherism as shadow chancellor that Peter Hain wrote in 1993: "There is little to distinguish Labour's macroeconomic policy from that of the Tories." John Prescott, Jack Straw and David Blunkett dismissed Brown in Tribune as a crypto-monetarist. He was against tax rises, for privatisation and an ardent defender of Kenneth Clarke's Treasury policies.
This is only relevant since whatever blame attaches to Thatcher for the financial chaos of the last six months attaches even more to Blair and Brown. In truth, Thatcherism was a consensus, built on the experience of the 1970s as the consensus of 1940s welfarism was built on that of war.
The difference is that Brown, in his semi-independence for the Bank of England, was super-Thatcherite. The Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 established the tripartite regulation that has so conspicuously failed. It went far beyond what Thatcher would have tolerated.
Meanwhile history is silent on the downside of the Thatcher era. The command structure she created to crush her foes became unrestrained, over-centralised and inefficient. Her evisceration of local democracy bred a cynicism among Britons towards political participation that remains unique in Europe. It also led to her downfall through the poll tax.
Thatcher was one of the great "nationalisers" of all time, taking control of the public housing stock, the rating system, a previously devolved hospital service, the universities, the courts, crown prosecution and, during the miners' strike, the police. It was Thatcher who turned Whitehall from an elite administrative corps into a demoralised, politicised officialdom which, under Blair and Brown, became besotted with targets, initiatives and useless IT systems.
Thatcher removed former nationalised industries from the state. But ask any doctor, farmer, lecturer, engineer or victim of the health and safety executive if, as a result of Thatcher, they feel less or more liberated from state interference. You will get a sick laugh.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/13/margaret-thatcher-recession-mythology
------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, back at Max Hastings, “Winning the next election should be the least of Cameron’s worries.”
In his previous Guardian column Max, a life-long Tory, had described how he’s lost a shitload of his own money through trusting financial advisers and others who told him to invest in stocks and shares that are now worthless. He’s belatedly woken up to the evils of capitalism. He’s extremely fearful that as a result of the collapse of economies around the world we’re now on the eve of social, political and financial catastrophe.
Well, Max, I hate to say this, but I, for one, could have told you so. Many people in fact wrote books about it. Am I the only one who read “The State We’re In” - Will Hutton’s best-selling 1996 classic? Surely not.
Anyone who had eyes to see could have told Max that American and European economic imperialism and exploitation would one day come to a very bad end. And now it has. People like Max may have lost the most money, but they’ll still be better insulated from the effects than those who lost nothing because they had fuck-all to lose in the first place. Nothing except their jobs, their homes, their self-respect, their life chances and indeed their lives, in lots of cases. The rates of suicide during and after the Asian downturn and buy-out were phenomenal. Millions are still unemployed and impoverished all over the world, and it’s going to get a lot worse.
“We are in a phoney war period, comparable with the winter of 1939. Everyone recognises the gravity of events, but no bombs are falling. Although markets have crashed and unemployment is rising steeply, most people are still going about their affairs more or less as they did a year ago. Few national leaderships are yet thinking or acting with a conviction commensurate with the scale of the crisis.
It is hard to suppose this comparative normality will persist. Hundreds of millions of lives are going to be brutally changed. It is unlikely that any decisions taken at next month's London G20 summit will avert acute social pain. It is implausible that populations will respond stoically. This will be especially so if they see those who created the disaster, notably the banking community, still enjoying absolute or even relative opulence secured by false pretences.
A few years ago, many of us were naive enough to suppose that the global struggle between left and right was effectively over; that capitalism and social democracy were irrevocably triumphant. Peter Flannery's 1996 TV classic, Our Friends in the North, seemed to represent an archaeological dig through old British miseries. The rage of the left that it portrayed, the corruption of capitalism and of the police as its enforcement arm, the violence of the 1984 miners' strike, the class war cliches, were light years removed from the prosperous Britain of the Blair years.
As a Tory, I watched Flannery's series with some complacency. I was confident - and still am - that our side was mostly right in the struggles of the 1980s.
The left's view of capitalism as a conspiracy against working people looked ridiculous. Tony Benn was wrong about almost everything. After Thatcher's fall, for almost a generation, capitalism delivered on an extraordinary scale, conferring prosperity on all but the poorest members of society.
Today, however, few people even in Wall Street or the City of London dispute that we are suffering a historic failure. It cannot be blamed on political troublemakers, workers, asylum-seekers, terrorists or climate change. It is explicitly the responsibility of those who have conducted the world's financial machinery, indulged and abetted by governments. Tim Geithner, the US treasury secretary, speaks frankly of "a systemic failure of regulation".
In the face of this, the innocents who will suffer seem entitled to vent their feelings, armed with a moral authority a hundred times greater than that which provoked the turbulence of the miners' strike or, for that matter, the poll tax riots. To say this is not to countenance violence, but merely to acknowledge the justice of public anger.
It will be strange if, in a new and poorer world, voices of the left do not find audiences such as they have not known for 30 years. As public spending is cut, the jobless find it impossible to regain work, businesses of all kinds struggle for survival, the political map of many nations, notably including Britain, could be redrawn. In the decade ahead, no one will speak without irony of "the enterprise society".
The war had forced upon Churchill's government socialistic domestic policies. These will be equally inescapable amid the 2010 economic crisis.
Privately at least, most politicians acknowledge the probability of civil unrest.
Thus far, what seems most remarkable about the cataclysm is that few prophets have acknowledged how radically it could change the political landscape.
Right on, Max, my man. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/16/david-cameron-conservatives-election
---------------------------------------------
Damn - I’ve run out of time and space to say anything about wabi sabi. Manyana.
.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Layer 136 All Along the Lea Banks
.
I’m a complete convert to the idea that cycling is the best way of going from place to place. Especially if you can do it away from roads and traffic. It’s silent, it’s much faster than walking - enabling you to travel much further, it doesn’t cost anything, it gets you fit, it gets the sun on your skin, and it gives a sense of absolute freedom.
Those were pretty much all the things I felt about cycling at the age of 10 or 11 when my parents bought me my first bike. Suddenly the whole world was mine to explore, any time I wanted, and all for free. My estate, the streets and estates beyond my immediate territory, and especially the open roads that led out of the city and into the countryside, the lanes, the woods and the hills on the horizon: all were mine to discover and to enjoy. Life became much more exciting.
The cycleway along the River Lea must now be the longest continuous cycle path alongside water in this country. The fact that it goes through the heart of the country’s biggest built-up area and its capital city makes it even more amazing. You can also branch off it and go east towards the Regent’s Canal as far as the Islington tunnel.
At the southern extremity of the Lea is the Limehouse Basin, and the connection with the Thames. Out of the basin there’s another canal heading north-west and a link with the Regent’s Canal at Victoria Park.
If you head north along the canalised River Lea you will eventually arrive in the countryside in Hertfordshire, if you have the stamina.
It must be the most interesting and stimulating off-road cycle route on tarmac and gravel in the entire country. Apart from the river itself there’s Hackney Marshes, Walthamstow Marshes, Leyton Marsh, Tottenham Marsh, nature reserves, ponds, lakes, playing fields, marinas, Springfield Park, Victoria Park, tennis courts, an ice rink, 18 hole pitch and putt, horse riding, the country’s biggest area of football pitches, reservoirs, locks, sailing, fishing, cafes, pubs, houseboats, rowing clubs, and riverside flats, houses, and businesses, both old and new.
There’s also wildlife, especially birdlife, galore. Cormorants, gulls, terns, herons, Canada geese, swans, coots, moorhens, kingfishers, kestrels, as well as the common varieties of city birds and others from far away just passing though - migrating down this green corridor across the metropolis. Yesterday there were magpies busy building nests.
And now we have the vast Olympic Park, currently taking shape and rising up behind fences, but soon to be available and accessible to everyone. Whatever anyone thinks about the Olympics, and personally I hate the jingoistic rivalry and petty nationalism, the medals tables and the sheer phenomenal cost of the things - there’s no getting away from the transformational effect of the building that’s currently taking place along the Lea.
This week and last there were TV documentaries showing some of the negative effects of the construction - the loss of allotments and business premises belonging to small local workshops and factories. There’s no question that a lot of local people are grieving for the loss of their quiet, run-down, post-industrial wilderness.
The question is whether the regeneration of the area - and there’s a huge area we’re talking about here, if you consider the whole of Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham - three of the poorest and most desperate boroughs in the country in pure economic terms - is worth it, on the basis of no pain, no gain.
Time will tell. Right now, I defy anyone with any imagination and full use of their senses to stand at the viewpoint overlooking the construction of the main stadium and the water sports complex and not to feel a sense of amazement and excitement at the sheer scale of the activity and the ambition of the project. In the distance stand the watchtowers of Canary Wharf and the Gherkin.
It’s now possible to see the full scale and the outline of the stadium itself, as it reaches its full height, whilst hundreds of hard-hatted project workers and enormous, strange-looking construction vehicles swarm around the entire site. There’s a constant stream of massive concrete-mixing trucks delivering concrete from the adjoining site where it’s produced.
Huge trains deliver raw materials to these works, and there are mountainous heaps of sand and gravel, and many vast silos of cement. Trucks queue beneath them to receive their next fill-ups. They shuttle back and forth, day and night.
The work is relentless, focused, and very impressive. A dozen cranes tower over the site, swinging long metal arms back and forth. Of course you might say it’s only a construction site. Well it’s a construction site, Jim, but not as we know it.
Interestingly, very few people pass by on foot or bicycle along the raised Greenway and its vantage points, and very few stop and stare. In a sense this is way off the beaten track, even though it’s right at the heart of the London conurbation, surrounded by millions of people, and the top of the stadium is now at a height that’s visible from miles away.
Very few people actually know the River Lea, let alone the Lea Valley Regional Park and its facilities, let alone make use of them. This situation will soon change, with snowball effect. The word is bound to spread, as soon as a few thousand more people get the know the area and what it offers, and then a tipping point will be reached, beyond which the awareness of the Lea Valley and its delights will be changed forever.
-----------------------------------------
The absence of people in general along the Lea, especially on weekdays, is even more marked if you think about children. They don’t exist. Or old people either, for that matter.
This is criminal if you think about the beneficial effect of walking down and around the Lea. If a river walk can make even a relatively jaded, self-confessed grumpy old man feel uplifted, inspired, de-stressed and regenerated, then consider what effect it will have on young people who know only city streets and estates, and the confines of busy, crowded homes and small classrooms.
It’s a whole new land of awe and wonder, considering the contact with water and nature, with wildlife and trees, with open skies and the elements, and all the various aspects of the built environment.
And then there’s the Olympic site, and the amazing structures that are beginning to appear there. There was a certain point on my river ride yesterday when you turn a corner just beyond the abandoned Big Breakfast house at Old Ford Locks, start moving across the bridge that spans one of the canal spurs, and suddenly see the massive skeletal structure of the new Olympic stadium towering above the trees and the river in the middle distance. It’s a stunning sight, guaranteed to provoke a ‘wow’ reaction.
My point is that children should be out there, taking it all in, benefitting from it all in every aspect of their development - intellectual, social, emotional, physical and spiritual. Children, especially city children, should be able to do the same things that enrich and inspire adults, to enjoy the same things that fire our imaginations and fill our senses.
There are so many opportunities for learning out there - so many starting points for conversations and discussions, for observation, for questioning, for drawing and photography, for inspiring follow-up investigations, reading and writing. How can teachers (and parents) ignore such opportunities?
It should be compulsory for every child in the area to be taken out and to become familiar with the geography and history of the area. Thanks to the excellent rail and DLR links from north, south, east and west into Stratford, Hackney Wick and Clapton, hundreds of schools could easily organise trips to investigate the Lea and the work on the Olympic site.
So why don’t these things happen? Mainly, of course, because there’s no political will for them to happen. Plus a shortage of headteachers with the vision, the will, the confidence and the determination to make them happen. Plus teachers who lack those qualities, and who might also suffer from fear, inertia, laziness and shortage of zest and energy. Over-large classes and children with behavioural difficulties don’t help, though those things can be catered for and the problems overcome.
Strangely enough, children who go to delightful, interesting, stimulating places tend not to misbehave. Oddly, they seem to become interested in learning when given opportunities for first-hand experience that gets them physically moving, legitimately and purposefully interacting, functioning as a team member, information-gathering, and using all their senses.
These opportunities to simultaneously develop social and emotional intelligence, and their intellectual capacities, should be grasped by all teachers, parents and carers. Parents should demand that their children be offered these experiences and these types of informal and formal learning by their schools.
Spiritual intelligence is nurtured when children are encouraged to use their senses to input directly into their knowledge of the world, and encouraged to use their intuition to see patterns, to question assumptions and draw conclusions. Spiritual intelligence manifests itself in joie de vivre, laughter, curiosity, delight, motivation, self-confidence, participation and self-control.
Physical intelligence - strength, coordination, mobility, fitness and health - is inevitably promoted when children are able to go on long rambles in the open air, with the sun on their faces and on their skin.
The government and the bureaucracy pay lip-service to environmental education - learning about, in and through the environment - but as every head-teacher will tell you, nobody actually gives a damn about these aspects of learning and achievement. No questions are ever asked about whether these opportunities are offered to children. All the attention is on getting bums on seats and eyes on the teacher and the interactive whiteboard, and on worksheets, for hours on end. Active? Ha!
-----------------------------------------------
It so happens that one of the best tracks ever recorded is The Lee Shore, by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Written by David Crosby in the key of E minor, it uses only three chords, Em, C and Am, to create a work of great atmosphere, beautiful melody and superb, gentle, insistent rhythm. The song is about the beauty, the atmosphere and the feeling of freedom and spiritual peace to be found when travelling around the Caribbean by yachts and boats of one sort or another.
Most London kids are never going to experience the Caribbean, except possibly some of those who have family living there. The nearest they are likely to have in the way of weekly or monthly experiences of water, of boats, of wide, open skies and landscapes, and of a profusion of beautiful animal and plant life, is therefore a place like the Lea banks and the marshes. It’s criminal that the overwhelming majority are being denied it.
So why don’t we offer, allow and encourage it? Health and safety concerns? Not enough time in the week? Not in the curriculum? Or just because we can’t fucking quantify and measure the outcomes? You can bet your life that if someone could ascertain that through environmental education and outdoor experiences kids could be guaranteed to achieve Level 4 by the age of 11 (or Level 5 if they’re in a posh area) the Lea Valley and places like it would be overrun with crocodiles of children, teachers, teaching assistants, pupil mentors and special needs assistants, all with their little bags with clip boards and packed lunches.
Oh well, back to reality.
--------------------------------------------
Learning from the environment, and from nature, is central to Zen and Taoism. Hence the emphasis in Zen that even in the town or the city it’s possible to create small gardens where the natural world can be contemplated in peace, stillness and silence.
------------------------------------------
To take a look at the Olympic site from webcams mounted on a school across the river, and other spots, go to
http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/webcams/2012_webcam1.shtml
http://apps.newham.gov.uk/Webcam/
http://ukwebcameras.co.uk/blog/2009/02/london-2012-olympics-stadium-live-construction-webcam/
http://www.webviews.co.uk/network/camera/england/london/olympic/games/village/construction/cam.html
http://www.gainsborough.hackney.sch.uk/olympics/olympic_park.asp
- double-click on the video screen(s) for some funky action.
Take a look at Nina Pope's excellent slide show of the construction on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nina_pope/sets/72157604450601466/show/
.
I’m a complete convert to the idea that cycling is the best way of going from place to place. Especially if you can do it away from roads and traffic. It’s silent, it’s much faster than walking - enabling you to travel much further, it doesn’t cost anything, it gets you fit, it gets the sun on your skin, and it gives a sense of absolute freedom.
Those were pretty much all the things I felt about cycling at the age of 10 or 11 when my parents bought me my first bike. Suddenly the whole world was mine to explore, any time I wanted, and all for free. My estate, the streets and estates beyond my immediate territory, and especially the open roads that led out of the city and into the countryside, the lanes, the woods and the hills on the horizon: all were mine to discover and to enjoy. Life became much more exciting.
The cycleway along the River Lea must now be the longest continuous cycle path alongside water in this country. The fact that it goes through the heart of the country’s biggest built-up area and its capital city makes it even more amazing. You can also branch off it and go east towards the Regent’s Canal as far as the Islington tunnel.
At the southern extremity of the Lea is the Limehouse Basin, and the connection with the Thames. Out of the basin there’s another canal heading north-west and a link with the Regent’s Canal at Victoria Park.
If you head north along the canalised River Lea you will eventually arrive in the countryside in Hertfordshire, if you have the stamina.
It must be the most interesting and stimulating off-road cycle route on tarmac and gravel in the entire country. Apart from the river itself there’s Hackney Marshes, Walthamstow Marshes, Leyton Marsh, Tottenham Marsh, nature reserves, ponds, lakes, playing fields, marinas, Springfield Park, Victoria Park, tennis courts, an ice rink, 18 hole pitch and putt, horse riding, the country’s biggest area of football pitches, reservoirs, locks, sailing, fishing, cafes, pubs, houseboats, rowing clubs, and riverside flats, houses, and businesses, both old and new.
There’s also wildlife, especially birdlife, galore. Cormorants, gulls, terns, herons, Canada geese, swans, coots, moorhens, kingfishers, kestrels, as well as the common varieties of city birds and others from far away just passing though - migrating down this green corridor across the metropolis. Yesterday there were magpies busy building nests.
And now we have the vast Olympic Park, currently taking shape and rising up behind fences, but soon to be available and accessible to everyone. Whatever anyone thinks about the Olympics, and personally I hate the jingoistic rivalry and petty nationalism, the medals tables and the sheer phenomenal cost of the things - there’s no getting away from the transformational effect of the building that’s currently taking place along the Lea.
This week and last there were TV documentaries showing some of the negative effects of the construction - the loss of allotments and business premises belonging to small local workshops and factories. There’s no question that a lot of local people are grieving for the loss of their quiet, run-down, post-industrial wilderness.
The question is whether the regeneration of the area - and there’s a huge area we’re talking about here, if you consider the whole of Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Newham - three of the poorest and most desperate boroughs in the country in pure economic terms - is worth it, on the basis of no pain, no gain.
Time will tell. Right now, I defy anyone with any imagination and full use of their senses to stand at the viewpoint overlooking the construction of the main stadium and the water sports complex and not to feel a sense of amazement and excitement at the sheer scale of the activity and the ambition of the project. In the distance stand the watchtowers of Canary Wharf and the Gherkin.
It’s now possible to see the full scale and the outline of the stadium itself, as it reaches its full height, whilst hundreds of hard-hatted project workers and enormous, strange-looking construction vehicles swarm around the entire site. There’s a constant stream of massive concrete-mixing trucks delivering concrete from the adjoining site where it’s produced.
Huge trains deliver raw materials to these works, and there are mountainous heaps of sand and gravel, and many vast silos of cement. Trucks queue beneath them to receive their next fill-ups. They shuttle back and forth, day and night.
The work is relentless, focused, and very impressive. A dozen cranes tower over the site, swinging long metal arms back and forth. Of course you might say it’s only a construction site. Well it’s a construction site, Jim, but not as we know it.
Interestingly, very few people pass by on foot or bicycle along the raised Greenway and its vantage points, and very few stop and stare. In a sense this is way off the beaten track, even though it’s right at the heart of the London conurbation, surrounded by millions of people, and the top of the stadium is now at a height that’s visible from miles away.
Very few people actually know the River Lea, let alone the Lea Valley Regional Park and its facilities, let alone make use of them. This situation will soon change, with snowball effect. The word is bound to spread, as soon as a few thousand more people get the know the area and what it offers, and then a tipping point will be reached, beyond which the awareness of the Lea Valley and its delights will be changed forever.
-----------------------------------------
The absence of people in general along the Lea, especially on weekdays, is even more marked if you think about children. They don’t exist. Or old people either, for that matter.
This is criminal if you think about the beneficial effect of walking down and around the Lea. If a river walk can make even a relatively jaded, self-confessed grumpy old man feel uplifted, inspired, de-stressed and regenerated, then consider what effect it will have on young people who know only city streets and estates, and the confines of busy, crowded homes and small classrooms.
It’s a whole new land of awe and wonder, considering the contact with water and nature, with wildlife and trees, with open skies and the elements, and all the various aspects of the built environment.
And then there’s the Olympic site, and the amazing structures that are beginning to appear there. There was a certain point on my river ride yesterday when you turn a corner just beyond the abandoned Big Breakfast house at Old Ford Locks, start moving across the bridge that spans one of the canal spurs, and suddenly see the massive skeletal structure of the new Olympic stadium towering above the trees and the river in the middle distance. It’s a stunning sight, guaranteed to provoke a ‘wow’ reaction.
My point is that children should be out there, taking it all in, benefitting from it all in every aspect of their development - intellectual, social, emotional, physical and spiritual. Children, especially city children, should be able to do the same things that enrich and inspire adults, to enjoy the same things that fire our imaginations and fill our senses.
There are so many opportunities for learning out there - so many starting points for conversations and discussions, for observation, for questioning, for drawing and photography, for inspiring follow-up investigations, reading and writing. How can teachers (and parents) ignore such opportunities?
It should be compulsory for every child in the area to be taken out and to become familiar with the geography and history of the area. Thanks to the excellent rail and DLR links from north, south, east and west into Stratford, Hackney Wick and Clapton, hundreds of schools could easily organise trips to investigate the Lea and the work on the Olympic site.
So why don’t these things happen? Mainly, of course, because there’s no political will for them to happen. Plus a shortage of headteachers with the vision, the will, the confidence and the determination to make them happen. Plus teachers who lack those qualities, and who might also suffer from fear, inertia, laziness and shortage of zest and energy. Over-large classes and children with behavioural difficulties don’t help, though those things can be catered for and the problems overcome.
Strangely enough, children who go to delightful, interesting, stimulating places tend not to misbehave. Oddly, they seem to become interested in learning when given opportunities for first-hand experience that gets them physically moving, legitimately and purposefully interacting, functioning as a team member, information-gathering, and using all their senses.
These opportunities to simultaneously develop social and emotional intelligence, and their intellectual capacities, should be grasped by all teachers, parents and carers. Parents should demand that their children be offered these experiences and these types of informal and formal learning by their schools.
Spiritual intelligence is nurtured when children are encouraged to use their senses to input directly into their knowledge of the world, and encouraged to use their intuition to see patterns, to question assumptions and draw conclusions. Spiritual intelligence manifests itself in joie de vivre, laughter, curiosity, delight, motivation, self-confidence, participation and self-control.
Physical intelligence - strength, coordination, mobility, fitness and health - is inevitably promoted when children are able to go on long rambles in the open air, with the sun on their faces and on their skin.
The government and the bureaucracy pay lip-service to environmental education - learning about, in and through the environment - but as every head-teacher will tell you, nobody actually gives a damn about these aspects of learning and achievement. No questions are ever asked about whether these opportunities are offered to children. All the attention is on getting bums on seats and eyes on the teacher and the interactive whiteboard, and on worksheets, for hours on end. Active? Ha!
-----------------------------------------------
It so happens that one of the best tracks ever recorded is The Lee Shore, by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Written by David Crosby in the key of E minor, it uses only three chords, Em, C and Am, to create a work of great atmosphere, beautiful melody and superb, gentle, insistent rhythm. The song is about the beauty, the atmosphere and the feeling of freedom and spiritual peace to be found when travelling around the Caribbean by yachts and boats of one sort or another.
Most London kids are never going to experience the Caribbean, except possibly some of those who have family living there. The nearest they are likely to have in the way of weekly or monthly experiences of water, of boats, of wide, open skies and landscapes, and of a profusion of beautiful animal and plant life, is therefore a place like the Lea banks and the marshes. It’s criminal that the overwhelming majority are being denied it.
So why don’t we offer, allow and encourage it? Health and safety concerns? Not enough time in the week? Not in the curriculum? Or just because we can’t fucking quantify and measure the outcomes? You can bet your life that if someone could ascertain that through environmental education and outdoor experiences kids could be guaranteed to achieve Level 4 by the age of 11 (or Level 5 if they’re in a posh area) the Lea Valley and places like it would be overrun with crocodiles of children, teachers, teaching assistants, pupil mentors and special needs assistants, all with their little bags with clip boards and packed lunches.
Oh well, back to reality.
--------------------------------------------
Learning from the environment, and from nature, is central to Zen and Taoism. Hence the emphasis in Zen that even in the town or the city it’s possible to create small gardens where the natural world can be contemplated in peace, stillness and silence.
------------------------------------------
To take a look at the Olympic site from webcams mounted on a school across the river, and other spots, go to
http://www.bbc.co.uk/london/content/webcams/2012_webcam1.shtml
http://apps.newham.gov.uk/Webcam/
http://ukwebcameras.co.uk/blog/2009/02/london-2012-olympics-stadium-live-construction-webcam/
http://www.webviews.co.uk/network/camera/england/london/olympic/games/village/construction/cam.html
http://www.gainsborough.hackney.sch.uk/olympics/olympic_park.asp
- double-click on the video screen(s) for some funky action.
Take a look at Nina Pope's excellent slide show of the construction on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nina_pope/sets/72157604450601466/show/
.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Layer 135 Political Culture, Radical Shifts, the Last Chance Saloon, and Children’s Services
.
Polly Toynbee had another excellent column in the Guardian this week, with every sentence worthy of the highlighter pen:
Labour has one last chance to catch the public mood
Anger at fat cats and tax dodgers needs a political narrative to sustain it. Brown must look to Obama and take the lead.
Are we in the midst of a radical shift in political culture? Measuring its significance or durability in the febrile moment is not easy. Is this anti-banker, anti-bonus spasm only a transitory fit that will be gone as soon as house prices start to rise again? Forces pull in both directions: governments try to re-assert their power over markets, while the masters of the universe try to carry on as if nothing much will change.
Now even a Conservative press rages at company functionaries still rewarding themselves undeserved fortunes.
See how the Telegraph and Mail follow the public mood with anti fat-cat invective these days: a year ago such talk was "class war" and "the politics of envy".
Yet how profound and long-lasting will all this be? How long before the masters of the universe assert themselves again, ride out the spasm, find new loopholes and intimidate future governments with warnings against any interference that risks the fragile recovery? After all, no sign of culture change reaches the boardrooms. GlaxoSmithKline just gave its CEO a 17.6% pay rise, bringing his salary to £1m with five times that sum in shares.
The cartel of top earners sitting on each other's boards has been blamed, along with the tiny coterie of auditors and remuneration consultants who pumped up pay and signed it off as the "market rate" they had created. Is there a sign the government dares to blow in fresh air?
It now looks as if closing tax havens will be the G20's key success. Obama campaigned on the Stop Tax Havens Act now in Congress. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel want Switzerland added to the blacklist, along with the 30 to 40 others. Brown has been latest on this issue, with an ignoble record of resisting EU attempts.
Transparency changes things. Labour has a year to lead the public mood; so far it has been dragged along behind it. With no political narrative, this chance to push back the forces of inequality will be lost. What bitter irony if loathing of Labour means the Tories take over despite the first authentic egalitarian public mood in years.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/10/brown-bankers-bonuses
-----------------------------------------------
There were well over 200 comments posted on Comment Is Free after this article. Oxzen wrote:
It’s hard to say, sometimes, whose comments are the most annoying to have to plough through in order to get to the good stuff on CIF - ignorant conservatives or rabid leftists. Polly Toynbee has been consistently a thoughtful, intelligent, left-of-centre commentator who deserves the respect and high regard of all social democrats and left-liberals, who after all make up the majority amongst the thinking classes, and indeed the masses who voted for the Labour landslide in 1997.
She's consistently criticised New Labour from a progressive position, and advocated transformational policies that are in line with what most of us want in terms of greater social justice and equality, in terms of tackling poverty, improving schools and early years provision, social services, the health service, and so on.
This latest column was a brilliant summary of how things stand politically in this country, and why Parliament, not just New Labour, must seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enact the reforms that we, the people, demand.
If Brown and New Labour can finally bring themselves to do something truly radical they could even find they have substantial support from swing voters, middle of the road conservatives and the pissed-off middle classes. And lets face it, it's only though radical action they stand any chance of winning back support from true socialists and progressives.
And if radical action doesn't improve their popularity? Too bad. After all, what's the Labour party for? It wasn’t created to provide a little trickle-down wealth, to maintain inequality or preserve dog-eat-dog unregulated capitalism.
------------------------------------------------------
Someone signed in as jgm2 wrote this wonderful comment:
Re: “However the nazis are just the most familiar example and by no means the only. It always worry me when politicians try to capture the public mood because government should be about leading, not cheer leading.”
Fred Goodwin is just Gordon 'Big Brother' Brown's equivalent of Emmanuel Goldstein. It's a cliche but it's unfortunately true. This government doesn't consider '1984' a warning. It considers it a fucking blueprint.
Rewriting history. Infallible leadership. Perpetual unwinnable wars with constantly shifting alliances. Privileged Party members and insiders all well looked after. Until they step out of line at which point they are immediately ostracised. Control of the 'media narrative'. Constant surveillance. Constant monitoring of our movements/correspondence/phone calls/e-mails. Individuals being singled out by the state for mass hate-fests.
Sod Jules Verne getting lucky predicting the yanks would pioneer space travel. Sod Leonardo Da Vinci and his drawings of 'helicopters'. George Orwell truly was a fucking genius. Every single fucking nightmare scenario he envisaged. Bang on the fucking money.
---------------------------------------------------
Children’s Services
I was listening to people talking on the radio this morning about the Sharon Shoesmith case, and the idea that local authority directors of children's services need to be offered training and support so that they can do their jobs properly. Bless. What a wonderful country we live in - we create these mega high powered jobs by insisting on merging education and social services - huge jobs that virtually no-one is able to do effectively, let alone be qualified though professional training or experience to do them - and after a couple of years we say, wouldn't it be a good idea if we give these poor incompetent underqualified sods some proper training and support? That should fix the problem. At least after that none of them will be able to claim that they didn't know what they were supposed to do and didn't really know how to do it, like they do now.
Incidentally, I’m not commenting here on the rights and wrongs of dismissing Shoesmith - I’ve already done that in previous blogs. Simon Jenkins wrote a good column about it this week:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/11/simon-jenkins-ed-balls-babyp-shoesmith
“Shoesmith's biggest mistake was not to be a bank boss.”
What I’m concerned about is the way this government has played about with bureaucratic structures with little or no consultation or preparation for the changes it drove through, and I’m livid about the way it which it maintains its command and control clunking fist policy with its targets and inspections culture that does nothing for children, and reveals little of value about the true effectiveness of local authorities.
Simon Jenkins rightly berates Mr Balls for the central part he’s played in developing and maintaining the targets culture, and for being a ludicrous lifelong professional politician with no knowledge of, or feeling for, the real world outside of Westminster.
"Balls runs one of Whitehall's worst departments: ask any teacher or social worker. When accidents happen - nobody in authority wanted Baby P to die - the charge of negligence cannot rest with local staff. In this top-heavy and hierarchical public sector, it should go to the top. Those who always claim the credit must take the blame."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/12/childprotection-social-care
----------------------------------------------------------------
I hear on the grapevine about the leadership in certain local authorities running around in frenzies, convening whole-day meetings of 50 or more senior children’s services managers, looking at ‘issues’, doing ‘workshops’ in which directors of education get down on the floor (literally) with flip chart pads and marker pens, trying to map out ‘how to move forward’ with the children’s ‘wellbeing agenda’, desperately trying to think what to do about their latest Whitehall-generated set of targets or the fact that they still have so many schools being hammered by Ofsted, blah, blah, blah . . .
I hear about ‘school improvement’ managers trying to reconcile their concern about children’s wellbeing with the fact that they’ve spent several years banging on about raising SATs scores and GCSE scores to the exclusion of all else. These poor dears must in some dim way realise that they’ve been the very agents of the destruction of real education, as far as children are concerned, since these are the people who have turned schools into soulless and joyless results factories, using and abusing children and teachers for their own wellbeing in terms of career progress.
Forcing children to do ‘Big Writing’ instead of anything meaningful, to use more ‘connectives’ in order to create longer and more middle-class-sounding sentences in their writing (extra marks in tests!!), to use more ‘Wow Words’ (flowery and usually inappropriate terminology - extra marks in tests!!), and forcing children to do less of the things they actually enjoy doing and more of the stuff they hate doing in order to jack up the schools’ test results - all of this amounts to the abuse of children, though no-one wants to admit it.
And of course they’ll all continue to deny what’s happened and insist that they did things they thought were right for children - as if getting a low Level 4 compared with a high Level 3 at the age of 11 really means a damn in terms of ‘access to the curriculum’ at secondary school. As if stressing children, boring them and denying them their human rights (for example to a broad, balanced and interesting curriculum) is better for them in the long run than helping children to see that learning can be enjoyable for its own sake, whatever your current level of literacy. Never mind a creative and active style of learning that’s bound to make children more enthusiastic about school than a dull life of drudgery in the education workhouse.
---------------------------------------------------
This is a good column in today’s paper, by Seamoose Milne, especially for political anoraks:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/12/miners-strike
The miners' strike of 1984-5, which officially kicked off 25 years ago today, was . . . a social and political tipping point that has had no real parallel anywhere else in the world. And now that the free-market fundamentalism unleashed by Margaret Thatcher in the strike's aftermath is being so comprehensively discredited by the crisis of deregulated capitalism she championed, it should be a good time to reassess the most determined bid to resist it in the first place.
The full costs of the war against the miners - including the strike, closures, redundancies and economic and welfare costs - are well over £30bn at current prices and far exceed those of the more rational energy policy the Tories rejected to crush the core of organised labour.
A generation later, these debates about the strike can seem arcane. But its outcome could not matter more for the country we have inherited. It's not just the wreckage of mining communities, but the entire political and economic direction has been shaped by the fallout from that convulsive dispute. The enfeeblement of unions, the explosion of inequality, social atomisation, the collapse of confidence in a political alternative and Britain's harsh brand of neoliberalism all flow from its aftermath. Success for the miners would, by contrast, have at least seriously weakened Thatcher, reined in the government's worst excesses and halted Labour's headlong rush for the third way.
The strike was a fight for jobs, but it was also a challenge to the market-driven restructuring of economic and social life already under way. It raised the alternative of a different Britain from the greed and individualism of the Thatcher years, rooted in solidarity and collective action. As the neoliberal order that Thatcher helped to build crumbles before us, that is a message that speaks to our times.
.
Polly Toynbee had another excellent column in the Guardian this week, with every sentence worthy of the highlighter pen:
Labour has one last chance to catch the public mood
Anger at fat cats and tax dodgers needs a political narrative to sustain it. Brown must look to Obama and take the lead.
Are we in the midst of a radical shift in political culture? Measuring its significance or durability in the febrile moment is not easy. Is this anti-banker, anti-bonus spasm only a transitory fit that will be gone as soon as house prices start to rise again? Forces pull in both directions: governments try to re-assert their power over markets, while the masters of the universe try to carry on as if nothing much will change.
Now even a Conservative press rages at company functionaries still rewarding themselves undeserved fortunes.
See how the Telegraph and Mail follow the public mood with anti fat-cat invective these days: a year ago such talk was "class war" and "the politics of envy".
Yet how profound and long-lasting will all this be? How long before the masters of the universe assert themselves again, ride out the spasm, find new loopholes and intimidate future governments with warnings against any interference that risks the fragile recovery? After all, no sign of culture change reaches the boardrooms. GlaxoSmithKline just gave its CEO a 17.6% pay rise, bringing his salary to £1m with five times that sum in shares.
The cartel of top earners sitting on each other's boards has been blamed, along with the tiny coterie of auditors and remuneration consultants who pumped up pay and signed it off as the "market rate" they had created. Is there a sign the government dares to blow in fresh air?
It now looks as if closing tax havens will be the G20's key success. Obama campaigned on the Stop Tax Havens Act now in Congress. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel want Switzerland added to the blacklist, along with the 30 to 40 others. Brown has been latest on this issue, with an ignoble record of resisting EU attempts.
Transparency changes things. Labour has a year to lead the public mood; so far it has been dragged along behind it. With no political narrative, this chance to push back the forces of inequality will be lost. What bitter irony if loathing of Labour means the Tories take over despite the first authentic egalitarian public mood in years.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/10/brown-bankers-bonuses
-----------------------------------------------
There were well over 200 comments posted on Comment Is Free after this article. Oxzen wrote:
It’s hard to say, sometimes, whose comments are the most annoying to have to plough through in order to get to the good stuff on CIF - ignorant conservatives or rabid leftists. Polly Toynbee has been consistently a thoughtful, intelligent, left-of-centre commentator who deserves the respect and high regard of all social democrats and left-liberals, who after all make up the majority amongst the thinking classes, and indeed the masses who voted for the Labour landslide in 1997.
She's consistently criticised New Labour from a progressive position, and advocated transformational policies that are in line with what most of us want in terms of greater social justice and equality, in terms of tackling poverty, improving schools and early years provision, social services, the health service, and so on.
This latest column was a brilliant summary of how things stand politically in this country, and why Parliament, not just New Labour, must seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enact the reforms that we, the people, demand.
If Brown and New Labour can finally bring themselves to do something truly radical they could even find they have substantial support from swing voters, middle of the road conservatives and the pissed-off middle classes. And lets face it, it's only though radical action they stand any chance of winning back support from true socialists and progressives.
And if radical action doesn't improve their popularity? Too bad. After all, what's the Labour party for? It wasn’t created to provide a little trickle-down wealth, to maintain inequality or preserve dog-eat-dog unregulated capitalism.
------------------------------------------------------
Someone signed in as jgm2 wrote this wonderful comment:
Re: “However the nazis are just the most familiar example and by no means the only. It always worry me when politicians try to capture the public mood because government should be about leading, not cheer leading.”
Fred Goodwin is just Gordon 'Big Brother' Brown's equivalent of Emmanuel Goldstein. It's a cliche but it's unfortunately true. This government doesn't consider '1984' a warning. It considers it a fucking blueprint.
Rewriting history. Infallible leadership. Perpetual unwinnable wars with constantly shifting alliances. Privileged Party members and insiders all well looked after. Until they step out of line at which point they are immediately ostracised. Control of the 'media narrative'. Constant surveillance. Constant monitoring of our movements/correspondence/phone calls/e-mails. Individuals being singled out by the state for mass hate-fests.
Sod Jules Verne getting lucky predicting the yanks would pioneer space travel. Sod Leonardo Da Vinci and his drawings of 'helicopters'. George Orwell truly was a fucking genius. Every single fucking nightmare scenario he envisaged. Bang on the fucking money.
---------------------------------------------------
Children’s Services
I was listening to people talking on the radio this morning about the Sharon Shoesmith case, and the idea that local authority directors of children's services need to be offered training and support so that they can do their jobs properly. Bless. What a wonderful country we live in - we create these mega high powered jobs by insisting on merging education and social services - huge jobs that virtually no-one is able to do effectively, let alone be qualified though professional training or experience to do them - and after a couple of years we say, wouldn't it be a good idea if we give these poor incompetent underqualified sods some proper training and support? That should fix the problem. At least after that none of them will be able to claim that they didn't know what they were supposed to do and didn't really know how to do it, like they do now.
Incidentally, I’m not commenting here on the rights and wrongs of dismissing Shoesmith - I’ve already done that in previous blogs. Simon Jenkins wrote a good column about it this week:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/11/simon-jenkins-ed-balls-babyp-shoesmith
“Shoesmith's biggest mistake was not to be a bank boss.”
What I’m concerned about is the way this government has played about with bureaucratic structures with little or no consultation or preparation for the changes it drove through, and I’m livid about the way it which it maintains its command and control clunking fist policy with its targets and inspections culture that does nothing for children, and reveals little of value about the true effectiveness of local authorities.
Simon Jenkins rightly berates Mr Balls for the central part he’s played in developing and maintaining the targets culture, and for being a ludicrous lifelong professional politician with no knowledge of, or feeling for, the real world outside of Westminster.
"Balls runs one of Whitehall's worst departments: ask any teacher or social worker. When accidents happen - nobody in authority wanted Baby P to die - the charge of negligence cannot rest with local staff. In this top-heavy and hierarchical public sector, it should go to the top. Those who always claim the credit must take the blame."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/mar/12/childprotection-social-care
----------------------------------------------------------------
I hear on the grapevine about the leadership in certain local authorities running around in frenzies, convening whole-day meetings of 50 or more senior children’s services managers, looking at ‘issues’, doing ‘workshops’ in which directors of education get down on the floor (literally) with flip chart pads and marker pens, trying to map out ‘how to move forward’ with the children’s ‘wellbeing agenda’, desperately trying to think what to do about their latest Whitehall-generated set of targets or the fact that they still have so many schools being hammered by Ofsted, blah, blah, blah . . .
I hear about ‘school improvement’ managers trying to reconcile their concern about children’s wellbeing with the fact that they’ve spent several years banging on about raising SATs scores and GCSE scores to the exclusion of all else. These poor dears must in some dim way realise that they’ve been the very agents of the destruction of real education, as far as children are concerned, since these are the people who have turned schools into soulless and joyless results factories, using and abusing children and teachers for their own wellbeing in terms of career progress.
Forcing children to do ‘Big Writing’ instead of anything meaningful, to use more ‘connectives’ in order to create longer and more middle-class-sounding sentences in their writing (extra marks in tests!!), to use more ‘Wow Words’ (flowery and usually inappropriate terminology - extra marks in tests!!), and forcing children to do less of the things they actually enjoy doing and more of the stuff they hate doing in order to jack up the schools’ test results - all of this amounts to the abuse of children, though no-one wants to admit it.
And of course they’ll all continue to deny what’s happened and insist that they did things they thought were right for children - as if getting a low Level 4 compared with a high Level 3 at the age of 11 really means a damn in terms of ‘access to the curriculum’ at secondary school. As if stressing children, boring them and denying them their human rights (for example to a broad, balanced and interesting curriculum) is better for them in the long run than helping children to see that learning can be enjoyable for its own sake, whatever your current level of literacy. Never mind a creative and active style of learning that’s bound to make children more enthusiastic about school than a dull life of drudgery in the education workhouse.
---------------------------------------------------
This is a good column in today’s paper, by Seamoose Milne, especially for political anoraks:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/12/miners-strike
The miners' strike of 1984-5, which officially kicked off 25 years ago today, was . . . a social and political tipping point that has had no real parallel anywhere else in the world. And now that the free-market fundamentalism unleashed by Margaret Thatcher in the strike's aftermath is being so comprehensively discredited by the crisis of deregulated capitalism she championed, it should be a good time to reassess the most determined bid to resist it in the first place.
The full costs of the war against the miners - including the strike, closures, redundancies and economic and welfare costs - are well over £30bn at current prices and far exceed those of the more rational energy policy the Tories rejected to crush the core of organised labour.
A generation later, these debates about the strike can seem arcane. But its outcome could not matter more for the country we have inherited. It's not just the wreckage of mining communities, but the entire political and economic direction has been shaped by the fallout from that convulsive dispute. The enfeeblement of unions, the explosion of inequality, social atomisation, the collapse of confidence in a political alternative and Britain's harsh brand of neoliberalism all flow from its aftermath. Success for the miners would, by contrast, have at least seriously weakened Thatcher, reined in the government's worst excesses and halted Labour's headlong rush for the third way.
The strike was a fight for jobs, but it was also a challenge to the market-driven restructuring of economic and social life already under way. It raised the alternative of a different Britain from the greed and individualism of the Thatcher years, rooted in solidarity and collective action. As the neoliberal order that Thatcher helped to build crumbles before us, that is a message that speaks to our times.
.
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