.
So the day has finally arrived. It’s either hello to a new liberal America, the likes of which we’ve never seen before, since the Democrat president will be backed by a Democratic majority in both the Senate and the House, in an America where the ideology of conservatism has now been fully tested to destruction and is totally discredited. Or we’ll have the appalling prospect of a McCain/Palin leadership for the next four years, which doesn’t even bear thinking about.
I’ve been catching up with last Friday’s Guardian G2, whose cover article was, ‘What’s Bush done for our cultural life?’ ‘Twelve prominent Americans’ were asked to give their verdict.
Naomi Wolf wrote,
“It's not just that [Bush] didn't fund the arts or invite artists to the White House; it's not just that he doesn't read poetry, doesn't read books: there's something about the brute force of this administration, and the fetishisation of brute force by this administration, which literally stands in opposition to civilisation and the arts.
I've done a lot of work on Germany from the Weimar period to the late 30s. There was a similar hostility then to the cosmopolitan, the urbanite, the avant garde, to any originality in art.
[Why are people so reluctant to call the USA of the past (x) years a neo-fascist regime?]
I think artists in America are scared. Respected journalists are being arrested. Film documenting the Republican national congress has been destroyed. And artists are next on the list after journalists. So if, God forbid, there's a McCain/Palin presidency we'll see a crackdown of the police state, there's no doubt.
I'm really quite ashamed of the American people - and of course I include myself in this. We have seen what was happening, and we kept right on internet shopping. All these writers and artists, good people, have just looked around and quietly aligned themselves.
Novelists have been really silent. Usually writers are at the forefront of denouncing a regime: look at Václav Havel. Here, people have complained a lot, but in terms of organising a vanguard of resistance, of people getting out there and saying this is not the American way ... Where is the Arthur Miller of this generation? Who is out front, somewhere visible and tricky and scary?”
-------------------------------------------------------
Well, Neil Young and his mates, for a start. The Dixie Chicks? Also Naomi Klein. And Gore Vidal. It’s an interesting challenge for us Brits - to think of any prominent Americans who have put themselves out front, protesting and denouncing in a place that’s very scary, given the appalling ignorance and potential savagery of the American Right.
I had an interesting conversation with a close friend yesterday, a long-time Neil Young fan, about Neil Young getting the band back on the road to protest about what was happening in the country, to protest against the Iraq war. Having seen the first part of Friday evening’s BBC4 documentary of the 2006 'Freedom of Speech' tour, my friend was of the opinion that it was rather sad and embarrassing to see those old geezers still trying to crank out rock music, ‘protest’ music if you will, in large stadiums.
I had to disagree. On the grounds that in the first place the music and the performance were OK, but also because it’s entirely admirable for any musician or artist to speak out visibly and publicly against the Bush regime, or indeed any injustice. To hell with what they look like. At least my friend admits he’s an ageist and a sizeist.
You still have a few days to see all 60 minutes of the documentary about Neil, 'Don’t Be Denied', (or download it) at:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00f815m
Or you might need to go first to:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/musictv/neilyoung/
where you can also see some clips featuring Steve Stills, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, etc, talking about Neil and his music. Stills says some interesting things about how scarily polemical, provocative and combative Neil is. Emmylou talks about him putting something back into the world, and being a good father.
-----------------------------------------------------
Other contributors to the Guardian feature on the 'Bush legacy' said,
Daniel Libeskind
How can you even begin to speak of a cultural legacy? It's been wholly negative. Culture's a dirty word to these people, like "liberal" or "literate". We've experienced a complete bankruptcy of the culture of ideas over the past eight years. The intellect has been denigrated. Deep cuts have been made in education and in investment in cultural institutions.
It's hard to believe Bush, a man who's proud not to read books and who makes fun of words longer than one syllable, has been the inheritor of the mantle of the Founding Fathers, or of Woodrow Wilson, FDR or even Bill Clinton. These people believed in the value of American culture being seen as an inspiring and civilising force around the world. Jefferson was a fine architect. All Bush has offered the world is military force. This is still a great country, but Bush and Cheney have ensured that only the negative side of US culture has spread around the world.
David Simon
Enron, Afghanistan, Iraq, New Orleans, Wall Street. An untenable drug war. A non-existent energy policy. An obliviousness to climate change. An unwillingness to recognise our problems, much less begin the hard work of solving them. Incompetence - rank incompetence - has become the American standard. We are no longer a competent, responsible nation-state. America. The can't-do superpower. Quite a legacy. Mr Bush is a remarkable man.
Alex Gibney
I think the Bush administration did its best to create a vast wasteland. At the same time, because of the perfidy and corruption and utter lawlessness it created a very interesting backlash of politically oriented materials that were inspiring. Unintentionally, the administration provoked a lot of political art that I think was very valuable.
Edward Albee
What cultural legacy? There is no cultural legacy. We have an administration of criminality, complicity and incompetence but no cultural legacy whatever from those eight years. It doesn't seem to have produced the kind of rage that I would have expected it to. It shows me that we have a far more passive and ignorant society than I thought we had.
I'm something of an optimist. I hope that we're capable of getting back on the right track and continuing our peaceful social revolution.
Elizabeth LeCompte
He has fostered the rise of political satire as an art form again. It hasn't been very strong for the last 30 years or so and I think television programmes such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and South Park are all political works of art. Without the Bush administration I don't think satire would have been as strong. It revived irony.
With satire there's an incredibly powerful challenging of the powers that are, which I think is very healthy. There's also a trivialising effect at the same time. But it is a change, because young people are going to be involved in politics in a way that they haven't been before.
When Obama had trouble, before he beat Hillary, they began to make fun of him as a pompous teacher, so let's see. I think it'll be interesting. I just know that for me, under the Bush administration, things like The Daily Show and South Park will be remembered as real satire, not just parody and caricature."
This is an interesting point - the difference between satire, parody and caricature. The Daily Show has produced some brilliant satire, absolutely slaughtering McCain and Palin. Jon Stewart in particular is a genius.
Wouldn’t it be good if the general populace could read all the above comments before they go out to vote today. McCain says, “I’m not George Bush!” - but how different is his mindset and his ideology in reality? Palin, in many ways, is even worse than Bush.
Read the transcript of her being pranked by a Sarkozy impersonator:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/04/sarahpalin-usa
--------------------------------------------------------
Education News
The RSA Academy, Tipton, was featured on BBC TV news today. It’s an interesting place.
“Radical, controversial - should this school become a blueprint for others?”
“We actually want students to be motivated in their learning. Traditional homework has been scrapped,” says the headteacher, Michael Gernan.
The changes are fundamental. The focus is now on life skills or competences, managing information and relating to people.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7707662.stm
The RSA’s “Opening Minds Framework” is excellent:
“The Opening Minds curriculum features five categories of competences: learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information. Focusing on competences means that Opening Minds teaching is emphasising the ability to understand and to do, rather than just the transmission of knowledge.”
Read the rest of it here:
http://www.thersa.org/projects/education/opening-minds/opening-minds-framework
It is radical, and it should be a blueprint for other schools.
.
Showing posts with label McCain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label McCain. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Layer 83 Looting The Public Wealth.
.
There’s a brilliant cartoon by the wonderful Martin Rowson in yesterday’s Guardian , a perfect Halloween summary of the state of our society. It sums up more graphically and powerfully the insanity that’s all around us than any amount of well-argued column inches.
In the background, silhouetted against the light and smoke of flaming torches, are the unmistakable figures of Russell Brand, who’s dangling from a gallows, and J Ross who’s still fighting off a mob that’s armed with pitchforks and rakes.
In the foreground are two hideously fat, grinning, pinstripe-suited fat cats with a case bulging with bank notes, unconcerned about the mob which is clearly not interested in them. One of them says, looking towards us, the readers, “Hey! HE fucked your economy!! Ha Ha Ha!”
And his companion responds, “An’ I ain’t going to APOLOGISE or RESIGN or NUFFINK!”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/cartoon/2008/oct/31/cartoon-credit-crunch-crisis
---------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, alongside the cartoon, there’s a column by Reihan Salam, an editor at Atlantic magazine, who begins, “Despite running one of the worst presidential campaigns I’ve ever seen, John McCain would, I’m convinced, make an excellent president”.
So in other words, he’s convinced that a man who can’t even run a half-decent political campaign is capable of running the most powerful, complex and significant country on earth. Brilliant.
His rationale, naturally, goes like this: “Only Nixon could go to China, and only McCain can reconcile conservatives to some of the hard steps that the US will have to take”.
Reconcile? Interesting word. They have to be reconciled do they? And those hard steps can’t be taken if they’re not? Hmmmm. We shall see.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/31/john-mccain-us-elections-barack-obama
------------------------------------------------------------
The wonderful Naomi Klein, who’s been sadly missing from the Guardian of late, though it’s possible to read her columns at http://www.thenation.com/ , is back with a brilliant piece called, “The Bush gang’s parting gift - a final, frantic looting of public wealth.”
“There has been no nationalisation, partial or otherwise. American taxpayers have gained no meaningful control over the banks, which is why the banks are free to spend the new money as they wish. At Morgan Stanley, it looks as if much of the windfall will cover this year's bonuses. Citigroup has been hinting it will use its $25bn buying other banks, while John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told analysts: "At least for the next quarter, it's just going to be a cushion." The US government, meanwhile, is reduced to pleading with the banks that they at least spend a portion of the taxpayer windfall for loans - officially, the reason for the entire programme.
What, then, is the real purpose of the bail-out? My fear is this rush of dealmaking is something much more ambitious than a one-off gift to big business: that the Bush version of "partial nationalisation" is rigged to turn the US treasury into a bottomless cash machine for the banks for years to come. Remember, the main concern among the big market players, particularly banks, is not the lack of credit but their battered share prices. Investors have lost confidence in the honesty of the big financial players, and with good reason.
This is where the treasury's equity pays off big time. By purchasing stakes in these financial institutions, the treasury is sending a signal to the market that they are a safe bet. Why safe? Not because their level of risk has been accurately assessed at last. Not because they have renounced the kind of exotic instruments and outrageous leverage rates that created the crisis. But because the market will now be banking on the fact that the US government won't let these particular companies fail. If they get themselves into trouble, investors will now assume that the government will keep finding more cash to bail them out, since allowing them to go down would mean losing the initial equity investments, many of them in the billions.
This tethering of the public interest to private companies is the real purpose of the bail-out plan: Paulson is handing all the companies admitted to the programme - a number potentially in the thousands - an implicit treasury department guarantee. To skittish investors looking for safe places to park their money, these equity deals will be even more comforting than a triple-A from Moody's rating agency.
Insurance like that is priceless. But for the banks, the best part is that the government is paying them to accept its seal of approval. For taxpayers, on the other hand, this entire plan is extremely risky, and may well cost significantly more than Paulson's original idea of buying up $700bn in toxic debts. Now taxpayers aren't just on the hook for the debts but, arguably, for the fate of every corporation that sells them equity.
Not only were profits privatised while risks were socialised, but the implicit government backing created powerful incentives for reckless business practices.
With the new equity purchase programme Paulson has taken the discredited Fannie and Freddie model and applied it to a huge swath of the private banking industry. Again, there is no reason to shy away from risky bets, especially since the treasury has made no such demands of the banks (apparently it doesn't want to "micromanage".)
This may be Bush's most creative innovation: no-risk capitalism.
Meanwhile, every day it becomes clearer that the bail-out was sold to the public on false pretences. Clearly, it was never really about getting loans flowing. It was always about doing what it is doing: turning the state into a giant insurance agency for Wall Street, a safety net for the people who need it least, subsidised by the people who will most need state protections in the economic storms ahead.
This duplicity is a political opportunity. Whoever wins on November 4 will have enormous moral authority. It should be used to call for a freeze on the dispersal of bail-out funds, not after the inauguration but right away. All deals should be renegotiated, this time with the public getting the guarantees.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/31/useconomy-banking
-------------------------------------------------------
It’s all happening just as George Orwell forecast it would in 1949, in “1984”.
Wikipedia says,
The book has major significance for its vision of an all-knowing government which uses pervasive and constant surveillance of the populace, insidious and blatant propaganda, and brutal control over its citizens.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in Oceania, one of three intercontinental totalitarian super-states. The story occurs in London, the "chief city of Airstrip One", itself a province of Oceania that "had once been called England or Britain"
Winston Smith has in his possession a book called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
When the aforementioned Reihan Salam talks about reconciling “conservatives” to the steps the country needs to take he is, of course, referring to the oligarchs whose collective views and decisions determine what goes on in the country, with “conservatives” like McCain (or Mandleson, or Osborne, or Cameron, or Brown) acting as their mouthpiece.
Arguably there are four, and not three, “intercontinental totalitarian super-states” - the US and its satellites (including the UK and Japan), the EU, Russia and its remaining satellites, and China. Things are a little blurred, however, by the existence of NATO, which acts as a unifier for the US and the EU.
What’s clear, however, is that in the USA, at least, there’s now no separation whatsoever between the government and business (the oligarchs), and the government is now clearly and blatantly revealed in its role as first and foremost supporting US finance and US business (think Halliburton and Blackwater as well as the banks and Wall Street), which in turn determine the policies of the government.
This is in contrast to a social democratic system of government which sets out to make we, the people, the governors of the country’s business and financial sectors - laying down strict regulations to ensure that their activities benefit the nation as a whole, rather than enrich those who already possess most of its wealth and are greedy to possess even more.
Control of the planet, as such, is now less of an issue than control of its remaining oil and gas reserves, as they now begin to go into serious decline, at a time when consumers in China and India are beginning to compete very seriously for these resources with consumers in the so-called First World.
Control of the planet’s finances also seems to be a key issue, and China holds several trump cards. The US, as the world’s biggest debtor, would appear to be in considerable difficulties. They borrowed low in order to lend high, but will the creditors want to continue to make credit available?
We’re now entering a very interesting period of history in which the power of the US is being seriously challenged and there are several possible scenarios ahead of us.
1) The US becomes even more of a neo-fascist militaristic superstate, which is less likely to happen if Obama wins. In this scenario the US presses ahead with military expansion and a quest for world domination, with disastrous consequences for world peace, justice and enlightened cooperation between nations.
2) The “intercontinental totalitarian super-states” compete ever more vigorously, but peacefully, for power, influence and resources, with dire consequences for the masses, the proles.
3) The superstates realise that the only possible way of achieving a stable, sustainable, peaceful and viable planet is for governments to work together with an agreed set of principles based on human values. Perhaps set up an umbrella organization called something like the United Nations. George Orwell’s preferred option.
Place your bets.
.
There’s a brilliant cartoon by the wonderful Martin Rowson in yesterday’s Guardian , a perfect Halloween summary of the state of our society. It sums up more graphically and powerfully the insanity that’s all around us than any amount of well-argued column inches.
In the background, silhouetted against the light and smoke of flaming torches, are the unmistakable figures of Russell Brand, who’s dangling from a gallows, and J Ross who’s still fighting off a mob that’s armed with pitchforks and rakes.
In the foreground are two hideously fat, grinning, pinstripe-suited fat cats with a case bulging with bank notes, unconcerned about the mob which is clearly not interested in them. One of them says, looking towards us, the readers, “Hey! HE fucked your economy!! Ha Ha Ha!”
And his companion responds, “An’ I ain’t going to APOLOGISE or RESIGN or NUFFINK!”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/cartoon/2008/oct/31/cartoon-credit-crunch-crisis
---------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, alongside the cartoon, there’s a column by Reihan Salam, an editor at Atlantic magazine, who begins, “Despite running one of the worst presidential campaigns I’ve ever seen, John McCain would, I’m convinced, make an excellent president”.
So in other words, he’s convinced that a man who can’t even run a half-decent political campaign is capable of running the most powerful, complex and significant country on earth. Brilliant.
His rationale, naturally, goes like this: “Only Nixon could go to China, and only McCain can reconcile conservatives to some of the hard steps that the US will have to take”.
Reconcile? Interesting word. They have to be reconciled do they? And those hard steps can’t be taken if they’re not? Hmmmm. We shall see.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/31/john-mccain-us-elections-barack-obama
------------------------------------------------------------
The wonderful Naomi Klein, who’s been sadly missing from the Guardian of late, though it’s possible to read her columns at http://www.thenation.com/ , is back with a brilliant piece called, “The Bush gang’s parting gift - a final, frantic looting of public wealth.”
“There has been no nationalisation, partial or otherwise. American taxpayers have gained no meaningful control over the banks, which is why the banks are free to spend the new money as they wish. At Morgan Stanley, it looks as if much of the windfall will cover this year's bonuses. Citigroup has been hinting it will use its $25bn buying other banks, while John Thain, the chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told analysts: "At least for the next quarter, it's just going to be a cushion." The US government, meanwhile, is reduced to pleading with the banks that they at least spend a portion of the taxpayer windfall for loans - officially, the reason for the entire programme.
What, then, is the real purpose of the bail-out? My fear is this rush of dealmaking is something much more ambitious than a one-off gift to big business: that the Bush version of "partial nationalisation" is rigged to turn the US treasury into a bottomless cash machine for the banks for years to come. Remember, the main concern among the big market players, particularly banks, is not the lack of credit but their battered share prices. Investors have lost confidence in the honesty of the big financial players, and with good reason.
This is where the treasury's equity pays off big time. By purchasing stakes in these financial institutions, the treasury is sending a signal to the market that they are a safe bet. Why safe? Not because their level of risk has been accurately assessed at last. Not because they have renounced the kind of exotic instruments and outrageous leverage rates that created the crisis. But because the market will now be banking on the fact that the US government won't let these particular companies fail. If they get themselves into trouble, investors will now assume that the government will keep finding more cash to bail them out, since allowing them to go down would mean losing the initial equity investments, many of them in the billions.
This tethering of the public interest to private companies is the real purpose of the bail-out plan: Paulson is handing all the companies admitted to the programme - a number potentially in the thousands - an implicit treasury department guarantee. To skittish investors looking for safe places to park their money, these equity deals will be even more comforting than a triple-A from Moody's rating agency.
Insurance like that is priceless. But for the banks, the best part is that the government is paying them to accept its seal of approval. For taxpayers, on the other hand, this entire plan is extremely risky, and may well cost significantly more than Paulson's original idea of buying up $700bn in toxic debts. Now taxpayers aren't just on the hook for the debts but, arguably, for the fate of every corporation that sells them equity.
Not only were profits privatised while risks were socialised, but the implicit government backing created powerful incentives for reckless business practices.
With the new equity purchase programme Paulson has taken the discredited Fannie and Freddie model and applied it to a huge swath of the private banking industry. Again, there is no reason to shy away from risky bets, especially since the treasury has made no such demands of the banks (apparently it doesn't want to "micromanage".)
This may be Bush's most creative innovation: no-risk capitalism.
Meanwhile, every day it becomes clearer that the bail-out was sold to the public on false pretences. Clearly, it was never really about getting loans flowing. It was always about doing what it is doing: turning the state into a giant insurance agency for Wall Street, a safety net for the people who need it least, subsidised by the people who will most need state protections in the economic storms ahead.
This duplicity is a political opportunity. Whoever wins on November 4 will have enormous moral authority. It should be used to call for a freeze on the dispersal of bail-out funds, not after the inauguration but right away. All deals should be renegotiated, this time with the public getting the guarantees.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/31/useconomy-banking
-------------------------------------------------------
It’s all happening just as George Orwell forecast it would in 1949, in “1984”.
Wikipedia says,
The book has major significance for its vision of an all-knowing government which uses pervasive and constant surveillance of the populace, insidious and blatant propaganda, and brutal control over its citizens.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in Oceania, one of three intercontinental totalitarian super-states. The story occurs in London, the "chief city of Airstrip One", itself a province of Oceania that "had once been called England or Britain"
Winston Smith has in his possession a book called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
When the aforementioned Reihan Salam talks about reconciling “conservatives” to the steps the country needs to take he is, of course, referring to the oligarchs whose collective views and decisions determine what goes on in the country, with “conservatives” like McCain (or Mandleson, or Osborne, or Cameron, or Brown) acting as their mouthpiece.
Arguably there are four, and not three, “intercontinental totalitarian super-states” - the US and its satellites (including the UK and Japan), the EU, Russia and its remaining satellites, and China. Things are a little blurred, however, by the existence of NATO, which acts as a unifier for the US and the EU.
What’s clear, however, is that in the USA, at least, there’s now no separation whatsoever between the government and business (the oligarchs), and the government is now clearly and blatantly revealed in its role as first and foremost supporting US finance and US business (think Halliburton and Blackwater as well as the banks and Wall Street), which in turn determine the policies of the government.
This is in contrast to a social democratic system of government which sets out to make we, the people, the governors of the country’s business and financial sectors - laying down strict regulations to ensure that their activities benefit the nation as a whole, rather than enrich those who already possess most of its wealth and are greedy to possess even more.
Control of the planet, as such, is now less of an issue than control of its remaining oil and gas reserves, as they now begin to go into serious decline, at a time when consumers in China and India are beginning to compete very seriously for these resources with consumers in the so-called First World.
Control of the planet’s finances also seems to be a key issue, and China holds several trump cards. The US, as the world’s biggest debtor, would appear to be in considerable difficulties. They borrowed low in order to lend high, but will the creditors want to continue to make credit available?
We’re now entering a very interesting period of history in which the power of the US is being seriously challenged and there are several possible scenarios ahead of us.
1) The US becomes even more of a neo-fascist militaristic superstate, which is less likely to happen if Obama wins. In this scenario the US presses ahead with military expansion and a quest for world domination, with disastrous consequences for world peace, justice and enlightened cooperation between nations.
2) The “intercontinental totalitarian super-states” compete ever more vigorously, but peacefully, for power, influence and resources, with dire consequences for the masses, the proles.
3) The superstates realise that the only possible way of achieving a stable, sustainable, peaceful and viable planet is for governments to work together with an agreed set of principles based on human values. Perhaps set up an umbrella organization called something like the United Nations. George Orwell’s preferred option.
Place your bets.
.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Layer 81 Education, the USA & the UK, Solitude and Neil Young.
.`
The front page of this week’s Guardian Education concerned itself entirely with the question, “Which candidate would do more for US education?”
It then went on the describe the key issues and the problems they need to deal with, and I have to say I was shocked in reading it by just how bad things appear to be. Every bit as bad as they are here, and maybe even worse.
Nothing particularly bad about the teachers and the pupils, who are what they are, but the system itself appears to be completely stupid and counterproductive, just as ours is, in dealing with the real needs of pupils.
In 2001 “Bush took a strategy he had implemented in Texas of using standardized annual testing of pupils to gauge schools.” Same here, of course.
“Schools deemed to be failing are left to flail, while even good schools rail against the strictures of ‘teaching to the test’”. Same here. Except that our ‘good’ schools very rarely rail against teaching to the test since they deny even doing so, and many seem to quite enjoy playing the game.
“It is crucial for the new president to address high school dropout rates since up to half of pupils in the worst-performing states, particularly small southern states such as Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, leave at 15 or 16 with no qualifications.”
That’s to say, NO qualifications.
Makes you wonder what he hell all those kids ever did in school - what exactly did they spend their time doing? Because none of these writers and analysts ever discuss any other purpose for schools, apart from processing kids through courses geared to academic tests and exams. Could there possibly be any other purpose? And if so, what sort of success was achieved in pursuing it? We ought to know.
McCain has apparently pledged to introduce more competition and choice, and to make it easier to sack teachers and school leaders, as well as close schools that are deemed to be failing. Sounds to me like New Labour and the Tories.
McCain favours giving parents in state schools vouchers worth the value of their child’s education, which they can redeem at a private or charter school. Which is what many Tories advocate here, year after year. No difference at all, and so stupid it’s too depressing for words.
Estelle Morris, also writing in the education section, makes the point that since it’s now well established that the deregulated private banking and finance sector has been shown to be utterly incompetent, greedy, arrogant and corrupt, maybe we should hear less about the private sector and deregulated schools providing the answers to our problems in education.
Meanwhile George Monbiot, in his column in the Comment section, launches a brilliant and brave attack on the state of politics and of education in the USA - “How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington”.
You really need to read the entire article, but here’s a couple of tasters:
The degradation of intelligence and learning in American politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies
How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama was a Muslim and a terrorist?
It wasn't always like this. The founding fathers of the republic - Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and others - were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin?
On one level, this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves round the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15-year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD. But this merely extends the mystery: how did so many US citizens become so stupid, and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.
One theme is both familiar and clear: religion - in particular fundamentalist religion - makes you stupid. The US is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.
"In the south", Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."
The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest denomination in the US, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the south stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that one in four of the state's state school biology teachers believed humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time.
The spectre of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the election of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite - like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush - has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an over-educated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the rightwing elite has been successfully branded as elitism.
Obama has a lot to offer the US, but none of this will stop if he wins. Until the great failures of the US education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers, there will be political opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their ignorance.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/28/us-education-election-obama-bush-mccain
-------------------------------------------------------------
Lots of words and pictures in the news this week about the ‘Leopard Man of Skye’, a gent of 73 years who left London to live as a hermit in Scotland 20 years ago, after having his whole body tattooed in leopard-like spots at a cost in excess of £5,000. He’s decided to give up living in his isolated, ruined cottage and has moved into ‘sheltered accommodation’ in a village.
The notion of being a hermit is quite interesting, as is having one’s skin tattooed to look like a leopard, and being willing to pay someone 5K in order to do it. But the weirdest part of this story is someone choosing to go and live in Scotland. Where’s the last place on the planet any sane person would want to be if they planned to go around naked and live in an unheated cottage? Somewhere cold, wet, barren, windswept and grim like the Scottish Hebrides?
Libby Brookes has an interesting column in The Guardian today reflecting on how our society struggles for genuine intimacy, and also struggles to cope successfully with solitude. She writes,
These days, the notion of removing oneself from society, whether for religious, philosophic or individual reasons, is anathema.
Total solitude is considered the preserve of the mad, the extremely devout or the deeply unhappy. We live in a culture that values being witnessed above all other things. Whether that be Jade Goody's cervical cancer diagnosis on a live "reality" show, or Kerry Katona's slurring breakdown on This Morning, the current ethic tells us no event in our personal lives is valid unless we've texted 10 friends about it and proffered it to YouTube for general derision.
In our timetabled lives, a plethora of technology offers a distortion of genuine closeness. An email sent from one individual in a particular state of mind reaches another in quite a different one, and this we call keeping in touch. It's good for consumerism, and it's good for surveillance. Yet such desperate binding has little to do with the things we really crave: family, community, a society that concerns itself with more than cash and flash. And it also denies the transfiguring qualities of aloneness.
It is an irony that, despite the atomised, estranged nature of contemporary life, we have forgotten the value of retreat, while failing to differentiate the qualities of solitude from those of loneliness. Perhaps because it is something we all fear and consider evidence of failure, loneliness - though it can happen to those with crowded lives as well as quieter ones - is seldom discussed.
While Tom Leppard's method of retreat was extreme, he insists he was never lonely. Of course, love and trust are essential to the human experience, particularly at a time when those less intimate but similarly sustaining bonds of neighbourliness and community are being eroded. But we cannot define our existence only in relation to other people. As the renowned psychiatrist Anthony Storr argued, intimate personal relationships are but one source of wellbeing. The capacity to be alone is also fundamental to development.
Storr observed that, while there has been much research into children's relationships with their parents and with other children, there is little discussion of whether it is valuable for them to be alone. "Yet if it is considered desirable to foster the growth of the child's imaginative capacity," he wrote, "we should ensure that our children, when they are old enough to enjoy it, are given time and opportunity for solitude."
But solitude fosters not only creativity. It also relates to an individual's capacity to connect with, and make manifest, inner feelings and impulses. To experience a contented, relaxed sense of being alone offers an opportunity for self-realisation, and is as much a mark of maturity as the ability to sustain relationships with others.
What is noxious about our modern climate is that it militates against genuine solitude as well as genuine intimacy. If we take the time to look beyond the bizarre tattoos, the story of Tom Leppard has much to teach us about both.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/oct/28/scotland
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/30/healthandwellbeing-ruralaffairs
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/british-hermits-the-growing-lure-of-the-solitary-life-859656.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Privacy . . . . Isolation . . . . Collaboration.
Neil Young is a very strange guy in many ways, and has made frequent career moves between acoustic and electric, between working as a solo artist and collaborating with other great musicians.
Tomorrow night is Neil Young Night on BBC4. Thank goodness for the BBC, which is still under heavy shellfire today, even though Russell Brand has resigned - since Ross’s many enemies are still out to get him, and the Beeb’s many enemies are still out to get the Beeb.
This is exactly the sort of programming that BBC4, and public service broadcasting, should be providing - 3 hours of advert-free programmes on (one of) the world’s great artists. The website says,
Neil Young is a resolutely private artist who rarely looks back, and one of the world's great artists. He grants unprecedented access to the BBC for this film in which he traces his musical journey in his own words.
For five decades, Young's unbending dedication to the muse has created an awe-inspiring body of work – and put a few noses out of joint along the way.
I guess most people don’t even know that Young is a Canadian, such is his complete identification with the USA in the sixties, with the whole California hippie counterculture thing.
But Neil was always one of the edgy, political variety of artists, who clearly thought deeply about the kind of societies we live in, and how they need to progress to something that’s on a much higher spiritual and moral plane.
As I write I’m listening to his guitar solo on ‘Southern Man’ - raw, rocking, driving blues. Angry, provocative lyrics.
His ‘body of work’ is indeed ‘awe-inspiring’ both for its sheer quantity as well as its quality.
One of his best albums is ‘Sleeps With Angels’, which contains a fascinating bunch of songs that are as diverse in their subject matter as they are in musical styles.
The stand-out track is ‘Change Your Mind’, which is one his longest and one of his best ever tracks. It also has one of his most complex and challenging lyrics, as well as one of his greatest guitar instrumentals.
The lyrics are complex because they attempt to convey the complexity of intimacy and love - the light and the dark aspects, the yin as well as the yang. This is difficult and challenging territory, especially for those who don’t care to see both sides, who imagine that ‘love’ and intimacy are in all situations benign and desirable.
There’s a good Google Video version of this track, ‘The Complex Sessions', but it’s not a track to listen to on crappy computer speakers or even so-so headphones. It’s a track to listen to in semi-darkness, using a very good hi-fi with a big bass and the volume cranked well up, with eyes half closed, and preferably on your own, unless you’re with someone who can really, really dig it.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4755706050123207340
http://www.thrasherswheat.org/fot/lyrics_cym.htm
Never been into Neil Young? Change your mind?
.
The front page of this week’s Guardian Education concerned itself entirely with the question, “Which candidate would do more for US education?”
It then went on the describe the key issues and the problems they need to deal with, and I have to say I was shocked in reading it by just how bad things appear to be. Every bit as bad as they are here, and maybe even worse.
Nothing particularly bad about the teachers and the pupils, who are what they are, but the system itself appears to be completely stupid and counterproductive, just as ours is, in dealing with the real needs of pupils.
In 2001 “Bush took a strategy he had implemented in Texas of using standardized annual testing of pupils to gauge schools.” Same here, of course.
“Schools deemed to be failing are left to flail, while even good schools rail against the strictures of ‘teaching to the test’”. Same here. Except that our ‘good’ schools very rarely rail against teaching to the test since they deny even doing so, and many seem to quite enjoy playing the game.
“It is crucial for the new president to address high school dropout rates since up to half of pupils in the worst-performing states, particularly small southern states such as Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, leave at 15 or 16 with no qualifications.”
That’s to say, NO qualifications.
Makes you wonder what he hell all those kids ever did in school - what exactly did they spend their time doing? Because none of these writers and analysts ever discuss any other purpose for schools, apart from processing kids through courses geared to academic tests and exams. Could there possibly be any other purpose? And if so, what sort of success was achieved in pursuing it? We ought to know.
McCain has apparently pledged to introduce more competition and choice, and to make it easier to sack teachers and school leaders, as well as close schools that are deemed to be failing. Sounds to me like New Labour and the Tories.
McCain favours giving parents in state schools vouchers worth the value of their child’s education, which they can redeem at a private or charter school. Which is what many Tories advocate here, year after year. No difference at all, and so stupid it’s too depressing for words.
Estelle Morris, also writing in the education section, makes the point that since it’s now well established that the deregulated private banking and finance sector has been shown to be utterly incompetent, greedy, arrogant and corrupt, maybe we should hear less about the private sector and deregulated schools providing the answers to our problems in education.
Meanwhile George Monbiot, in his column in the Comment section, launches a brilliant and brave attack on the state of politics and of education in the USA - “How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington”.
You really need to read the entire article, but here’s a couple of tasters:
The degradation of intelligence and learning in American politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies
How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama was a Muslim and a terrorist?
It wasn't always like this. The founding fathers of the republic - Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and others - were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin?
On one level, this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves round the earth; only 26% accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15-year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD. But this merely extends the mystery: how did so many US citizens become so stupid, and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.
One theme is both familiar and clear: religion - in particular fundamentalist religion - makes you stupid. The US is the only rich country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.
"In the south", Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."
The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest denomination in the US, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to keep the south stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that one in four of the state's state school biology teachers believed humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time.
The spectre of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the election of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite - like the neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush - has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an over-educated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the rightwing elite has been successfully branded as elitism.
Obama has a lot to offer the US, but none of this will stop if he wins. Until the great failures of the US education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers, there will be political opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their ignorance.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/28/us-education-election-obama-bush-mccain
-------------------------------------------------------------
Lots of words and pictures in the news this week about the ‘Leopard Man of Skye’, a gent of 73 years who left London to live as a hermit in Scotland 20 years ago, after having his whole body tattooed in leopard-like spots at a cost in excess of £5,000. He’s decided to give up living in his isolated, ruined cottage and has moved into ‘sheltered accommodation’ in a village.
The notion of being a hermit is quite interesting, as is having one’s skin tattooed to look like a leopard, and being willing to pay someone 5K in order to do it. But the weirdest part of this story is someone choosing to go and live in Scotland. Where’s the last place on the planet any sane person would want to be if they planned to go around naked and live in an unheated cottage? Somewhere cold, wet, barren, windswept and grim like the Scottish Hebrides?
Libby Brookes has an interesting column in The Guardian today reflecting on how our society struggles for genuine intimacy, and also struggles to cope successfully with solitude. She writes,
These days, the notion of removing oneself from society, whether for religious, philosophic or individual reasons, is anathema.
Total solitude is considered the preserve of the mad, the extremely devout or the deeply unhappy. We live in a culture that values being witnessed above all other things. Whether that be Jade Goody's cervical cancer diagnosis on a live "reality" show, or Kerry Katona's slurring breakdown on This Morning, the current ethic tells us no event in our personal lives is valid unless we've texted 10 friends about it and proffered it to YouTube for general derision.
In our timetabled lives, a plethora of technology offers a distortion of genuine closeness. An email sent from one individual in a particular state of mind reaches another in quite a different one, and this we call keeping in touch. It's good for consumerism, and it's good for surveillance. Yet such desperate binding has little to do with the things we really crave: family, community, a society that concerns itself with more than cash and flash. And it also denies the transfiguring qualities of aloneness.
It is an irony that, despite the atomised, estranged nature of contemporary life, we have forgotten the value of retreat, while failing to differentiate the qualities of solitude from those of loneliness. Perhaps because it is something we all fear and consider evidence of failure, loneliness - though it can happen to those with crowded lives as well as quieter ones - is seldom discussed.
While Tom Leppard's method of retreat was extreme, he insists he was never lonely. Of course, love and trust are essential to the human experience, particularly at a time when those less intimate but similarly sustaining bonds of neighbourliness and community are being eroded. But we cannot define our existence only in relation to other people. As the renowned psychiatrist Anthony Storr argued, intimate personal relationships are but one source of wellbeing. The capacity to be alone is also fundamental to development.
Storr observed that, while there has been much research into children's relationships with their parents and with other children, there is little discussion of whether it is valuable for them to be alone. "Yet if it is considered desirable to foster the growth of the child's imaginative capacity," he wrote, "we should ensure that our children, when they are old enough to enjoy it, are given time and opportunity for solitude."
But solitude fosters not only creativity. It also relates to an individual's capacity to connect with, and make manifest, inner feelings and impulses. To experience a contented, relaxed sense of being alone offers an opportunity for self-realisation, and is as much a mark of maturity as the ability to sustain relationships with others.
What is noxious about our modern climate is that it militates against genuine solitude as well as genuine intimacy. If we take the time to look beyond the bizarre tattoos, the story of Tom Leppard has much to teach us about both.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/oct/28/scotland
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/30/healthandwellbeing-ruralaffairs
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/british-hermits-the-growing-lure-of-the-solitary-life-859656.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Privacy . . . . Isolation . . . . Collaboration.
Neil Young is a very strange guy in many ways, and has made frequent career moves between acoustic and electric, between working as a solo artist and collaborating with other great musicians.
Tomorrow night is Neil Young Night on BBC4. Thank goodness for the BBC, which is still under heavy shellfire today, even though Russell Brand has resigned - since Ross’s many enemies are still out to get him, and the Beeb’s many enemies are still out to get the Beeb.
This is exactly the sort of programming that BBC4, and public service broadcasting, should be providing - 3 hours of advert-free programmes on (one of) the world’s great artists. The website says,
Neil Young is a resolutely private artist who rarely looks back, and one of the world's great artists. He grants unprecedented access to the BBC for this film in which he traces his musical journey in his own words.
For five decades, Young's unbending dedication to the muse has created an awe-inspiring body of work – and put a few noses out of joint along the way.
I guess most people don’t even know that Young is a Canadian, such is his complete identification with the USA in the sixties, with the whole California hippie counterculture thing.
But Neil was always one of the edgy, political variety of artists, who clearly thought deeply about the kind of societies we live in, and how they need to progress to something that’s on a much higher spiritual and moral plane.
As I write I’m listening to his guitar solo on ‘Southern Man’ - raw, rocking, driving blues. Angry, provocative lyrics.
His ‘body of work’ is indeed ‘awe-inspiring’ both for its sheer quantity as well as its quality.
One of his best albums is ‘Sleeps With Angels’, which contains a fascinating bunch of songs that are as diverse in their subject matter as they are in musical styles.
The stand-out track is ‘Change Your Mind’, which is one his longest and one of his best ever tracks. It also has one of his most complex and challenging lyrics, as well as one of his greatest guitar instrumentals.
The lyrics are complex because they attempt to convey the complexity of intimacy and love - the light and the dark aspects, the yin as well as the yang. This is difficult and challenging territory, especially for those who don’t care to see both sides, who imagine that ‘love’ and intimacy are in all situations benign and desirable.
There’s a good Google Video version of this track, ‘The Complex Sessions', but it’s not a track to listen to on crappy computer speakers or even so-so headphones. It’s a track to listen to in semi-darkness, using a very good hi-fi with a big bass and the volume cranked well up, with eyes half closed, and preferably on your own, unless you’re with someone who can really, really dig it.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4755706050123207340
http://www.thrasherswheat.org/fot/lyrics_cym.htm
Never been into Neil Young? Change your mind?
.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Layer 77 Rapping Bankers, Scrapping SATs.
.
The events of the past month or so have been so wild and whacky there’s very little that any blogger can really say that isn’t superfluous and hasn‘t already been said. Wherever you look there’s craziness going on that’s almost beyond satire or even comment - the events speak for themselves.
There's Gordie Broon as superhero, deftly clearing up the mess he’s made, thanks to his admiration for the City and his determination not to regulate its greed and mad excesses.
There’s the USA and the UK nationalising the major providers and guarantors of mortgages, and the pillars of the banking system, in a manner advocated all those years ago by Michael Foot and various other socialists.
There’s John McCain trying to make himself electable by selecting as his vice presidential candidate someone who’s obscure even in her own country, and clearly a dimwit even by backwoods standards.
How do you satirise any of that? Fortunately Jon Stewart’s ‘The Daily Show’ (on More Four) and Private Eye are still having a very good go.
Stewart and his team are pretty much unmissable in this run-in to the election, especially in a time of financial and economic chaos and meltdown. Last week, commenting on what the Republicans can now do to improve their electability, he swerved around Obama’s crack about McCain choosing Palin for VP as like ‘putting lipstick on a pig’ and delicately settled for any future actions by McC & Co as being like ‘putting perfume on a turd’.
Stewart replayed the footage of the mad woman in one of McCain’s audiences fulminating about Obama being an Arab. Whereas the casual observer might have thought McCain gained some credit from the incident by telling the batty one that Obama was ‘a decent family man’, the Daily Show skewered him for letting the label ‘Arab’ stand as a something true and self-evidently a bad thing - i.e. no attempt to say a) he’s not ‘an Arab’, and b) even if he were, so what?
The woman was a barking racist, and all McCain did, whilst backing away from her, was condone her racism by merely pointing out that at least Obama had a family, as if that has anything to do with his character and his ability. Later in the programme one of Stewart’s team, in role as a Republican commentator, said to Stewart with pride in his voice, “The McCain campaign speaks for us - the Ignorant - the people who shouldn’t necessarily speak”.
Meanwhile, the current issue of Private Eye carries an ‘editorial’ by the former boss of the ‘Royal Bank of Gnome’ (i.e. RBS), which begins,
“The Royal Bank of Gnome has been taken over as of this morning by the Government. I welcome this development and I am happy to give a reassurance to members of my family that my money is perfectly safe. Despite my sadness at leaving a bank that I have done so much for over the years, I can walk away with the knowledge that I have done everything in my power to safeguard my salary, bonuses and pension scheme. Investors may take comfort in the knowledge that although they have lost all their money, I haven’t.”
The Eye also points out that Sir Fred Goodwin last year received a ‘performance bonus’ of £2,860,000 for his work in manoeuvring the Royal Bank of Scotland group into a position where it needed a £20billion bail-out.
The Eye carries ‘An Apology’ that’s ‘Exclusive to all Tory Newspapers’:
“In recent years we may have given the mistaken impression that the City was the driving force for growth in the economy, and that the “masters of the universe” and “superwomen” in the City who raked in mega-bonuses for deals which had transformed London into the banking capital of the world were people everyone should be proud of, as the wealth they’ve created has benefited each and every one of us in some way.
We now realise, in the wake of the ongoing credit crisis, that nothing could be further from the truth, and that the City is in fact nothing but a collection of sharp-suited robber barons, crooks, spivs and peroxide blond harpies, all shamelessly feeding at the trough as they scoop up mega-bonuses for dodgy deals which have taken us to the brink of Armageddon, and who are deserving of nothing but stoning or beheading for the misery they’ve wrought.
We apologise for any confusion caused, and any confusion in the future when we criticise the government’s plan to take a share in the banks, saying that stifling risk-taking in the City will only make us all poorer in the long . . . etc, etc, etc.”
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Our government, meanwhile, didn’t shirk the opportunity to slip in, undercover of the cacophony of a collapsing financial system, and their own collapsing credibility, a decision to quietly scrap KS3 SATs, whilst retaining tests at KS2. Well Hoo-ray. Two bloody cheers. A left turn, or a U-turn? Maybe not as momentous a U-turn as now promising to strictly regulate the money markets as well as put overseers on the banks’ boards of directors, but a major reversal of policy all the same.
Jenni Russell, as ever, in her Guardian column, neatly hit the nail on the head:
“These are good times to bury bad policies, and the government is making the most of it. Less than a day after the Home Office dropped 42-day detention came the totally unexpected announcement of the abolition of Sats for 14-year-olds. This was a U-turn of the most remarkable kind. The blind defence of the testing system despite a wall of evidence about its failure has been the defining and depressing characteristic of the schools policy for a decade. And on Tuesday, in a near-empty Commons, the facade finally cracked. A test that skews the education of hundreds of thousands of children every year was suddenly found by schools minister Ed Balls to be "not justified", and "less and less relevant" to children's learning. It is a welcome change of perspective from a minister who has insisted until now that Sats are essential.”
Jenni then went on to say,
“Every argument against Sats at 14 applies even more strongly to those at 11. They are simplistic and unreliable, they usually ruin year six, and they don't reflect what children understand. Almost every secondary school retests its 11-year-olds. At least a quarter can't do what the Sats claim they can. Yet since primaries' ranking, heads' survival and teachers' pay depend on the results, no junior school can afford to let a true picture of children's achievements emerge.
Every recent report on education has concluded that this system of perverse incentives is demoralising pupils and failing to develop their talents. We know why ministers have clung to it: the fake results have been a fig leaf for policy failures. Now we will find out whether Balls has real political courage.
He stepped out of the bunker this week, but if Balls is to retain any consistency he can't stop mid-stride. The biggest problem in education is the boredom and alienation of children. It's good to be acting to cut the disillusionment of 11-to 14-year-olds, but if he really cares about children rather than statistics, he needs to tackle the primary problem too.”
Oxzen’s comment in Comment Is Free, in case anyone missed it, was
As ever Jenni Russell has done a great job in skewering New Labour’s ludicrous and harmful education policies, and in highlighting the ridiculous and inconsistent arguments used by Ed Balls for not following his own logic and moving to an effective system of tracking pupil progress at KS2 as well as KS3.
Mr Balls must think educational professionals and parents alike are entirely stupid if he thinks he can get away with saying, effectively, that we must have external and objective tests at the end of Primary school because, well, we have them at the end of Secondary school.
This is a typical politician attempting to fudge the issue and behaving like someone who cares more about covering his own back from attacks from both the Tories and from within Labour than he does about the wellbeing and educational success of children. If Balls sincerely believes what he’s saying then he really is stupid, and if he doesn’t then he’s as cowardly and shifty as his media performances would indicate.
As Jenni Russell says, the testing regime has as harmful an effect on the learning and motivation of pupils at KS2 as it's had on the learning of pupils at KS3, and the tests don’t even give an accurate picture of what pupils know and what they can do. Only evidence-based expert teacher assessment and regular tracking against clear learning targets can do that.
The Year 6 SATs results are more often an indicator of the willingness of individual schools to abandon a broad, rich and balanced curriculum and cram their pupils for tests than they are an indicator of actual pupil progress and ability. As for schools producing pupils who love learning for its own sake, who are creative, confident, imaginative and emotionally intelligent - you must be joking. Schools that focus primarily on cramming and "standards" (i.e. their position in the league tables) normally don't even address these issues.
Recent New Labour murmurings of appreciation and praise for the success of the Finnish system of education don't seem to appreciate that the Finns don't formally test pupils until they are 16. They DO, however, rigorously track their progress throughout their school years, instead of relying on formal tests at the end of each Key Stage.
New Labour were wrong about formal tests for pupils at KS1 and had to recant. They were wrong about holding on to formal tests at KS3 and had to recant. Do we really have to hope the Tories win the next election in order for the right thing to happen at KS2?
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Layer 71 Goodbye to the Games; Politicians with Issues.
.
The Olympic Games closing ceremony was phenomenal and fabulous, entertaining and enthralling, apart from the 8 minutes that were allocated to London to advertise the 2012 games. This section was truly awful - even more shockingly horrible than anticipated. The Chinese put on a show that was awesome, spectacular, original, majestic, inspirational and uplifting. The Brits, however, brought on a red bus, some tackily dressed dancers doing silly and senseless gyrations, some garish umbrellas, and Beckham doing the only things he can do - grin inanely, and kick a ball. Or as Marina Hyde said in The Guardian, “Behold, world, our Beckham! Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair!”
The centrepiece, the pivotal performance in the London slot, was a rendition of “Whole Lotta Love” featuring Jimmy Page looking like a fat pigtailed grey-haired uncle, and Leona Lewis, admittedly a Hackney girl, warbling away at something that originally was, and still ought to be, belted out by Robert Plant. But not in this context. This was no place for ANY cock rock, let alone a period piece by Led Zep. The Chinese effort at contemporary rock music was colorful, original, up-tempo, uplifting and had a massive feel-good effect. The Brit effort was plodding, dull and hackneyed, and not a good advertisement for Hackney 2012 in any way. Shameful.
Even more horrible was the follow-on programme on BBC1, featuring various events around Britain - supposedly some kind of national launch party for the 2012 games. It was so bad it was impossible to switch off for fear of missing the very worst of what seems to pass for contemporary British ‘culture’.
In London, right outside Buck House, the organisers had built a concert stage that looked like a particularly nightmarish filling station. I think there used to be a petrol company called UK. This one was pumping out BP - British Poop music.
First up were the cast of the Queen musical, doing all the predictable and horrible stuff they do - “We Are The Champions”, “We Will Rock You”, etc. Time does nothing to diminish my hatred of Queen’s stupid, preening, overweening, senseless rubbish. What kind of people like this stuff? Fucking morons. Freddie Mercury, aka Farrokh Bulsara, - RIP. You were a true tosser and an egomaniac without peer, in a world full of egomaniacs and tossers.
How do they decide the running order of these things? In the time-honored manner of bringing on the complete rubbish first, and keeping the ‘best’ of it to ‘top the bill’? If so, it was a ridiculous mistake. To follow the magnificence of the Chinese dancing, playing, singing and performing with such complete dross was to fill one’s heart with despair and shame.
Next on were a bunch of lads called Scouting for Girls. Eh? What? Bring back The Animals, The Searchers, The Rolling Stones, even The Swinging Blue Jeans. What’s the point of having these wet little pillocks with their wet little names and their wet little haircuts performing so bloody wetly? Strangely though, S for G chose to end their slot with “London Calling” - a dark Clash classic.
London calling, see we ain't got no swing
Except for the ring of that truncheon thing
The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running but I have no fear
Cuz London is drowning and I live by the river.
http://www.chordie.com/chord.pere/getsome.org/guitar/olga/chordpro/c/The.Clash/LondonCalling.chopro
Did they really mean to bash out the message that London is NOT a good place to be? Or was it similar to Ronnie Reagan’s liking for Springsteen and “Born In The USA” - enthusiasm for a title, a tune, an artist and a performance, without paying the least attention to the meaning of the lyrics.
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go
Born in the U.S.A.
Mystifying.
Even worse than the crap music and the crap dancing were the silly kids they hire as “presenters” and MCs of this rubbish. Ludicrous inane wannabe celebs; fatuous, idiotic, foolish prats. Chattering, bilious fools. It was all so utterly cringe-making I truly worry about the media’s presentation of our national life and culture over the next four years and in 2012, should the world manage to stagger that far.
The Chinese left us all wanting more, and truly appreciating the refinement of their arts, their imagination, their traditions and their culture. God knows what’s going to happen if we let the fools who run our media and our affairs mess it all up with a ridiculous melange of sold-out dinosaurs and daft kids. Sensible rockers like Mick and Keith will stay well away from such rubbish, and so will any truly talented young folk, for fear of being tainted with the sheer crap that’s bound to predominate.
Maybe we should just hire the folk who produced the Chinese shows/ceremonies to come and do it for us - to create something new and brilliant. Or else risk the world seeing the true awfulness of what our mainstream celebrity, star-struck and wannabe culture actually is.
People like ‘Lord’ Coe and Co are already running scared of trying to match the Chinese effort. They’re already copping out by saying ‘our’ games will be more humble and modest, both in budget and ambition. You can already see them getting ready to parade just a few pop idols and national ‘icons’ dressed in pin-stripes and bowlers, riding in buses and black cabs, with a squad of pearly kings and queens for added flavour. If our 8 minutes in the closing ceremony of 2008 is anything to go by, God help us.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Obama mit Biden
I have a new theory about the US presidential election, which is now starting to shift into overdrive. Most positive and progressive people seem to assume that if there’s any justice on earth then the Democrats and Obama will win the race, and will begin forthwith to right the wrongs that have been perpetrated on America and on the planet since the Republicans stole the presidency from Al Gore and the Democrats back in the dawning of this millenium.
But my theory is that Fate hasn’t yet finished inflicting on America the amount of humiliation and economic catastrophe it feels the country deserves. This isn’t my judgement, I hope you understand. As Obama would say, that sort of decision takes place well above my pay grade. Personally I’m a pretty forgiving type, just as long as the guilty party is sufficiently grovellingly apologetic, and promises to never ever do those bad things again. Like waste 3 billion dollars a year on high-tech weaponry, on a fatuous and counter-productive ‘war on terror‘, and on killing thousands of innocent people, instead of using those incredible amounts of money to rid the planet of illiteracy, ignorance and starvation.
However, I’ve still not heard very much in the way of apology, and I’m beginning to suspect that Fate has taken the view that America still has an awful lot to learn about its racism and misogyny, about the effects of its arrogance and its bullying, and is therefore going to ensure that McCain becomes the next president, with appalling consequences. Only then will people stop and say to themselves - “You know, it really isn’t such a bad idea to elect someone on the basis of their actual policies and programmes, and not on the colour of their skin, their gender, their bellicosity, their affability or even their age. We must learn this lesson well, and resolve never to forget it.”
That’s assuming there’s any country (or world) left to elect another president after McC has finished confronting and facing down the Ruskies, the Iranians and the Islamists.
The hot topic in Britain this week is that 'Lady' Thatcher has dementia, CJD, BSE or whatever, and doesn’t know who’s who or what’s what. To which most people say - we told you so. We knew that already. It took Britain several elections to test Thatcherism to destruction, to discover that 'trickle down' political and economic theory is a pile of poo, and that if you don’t invest in good public services you get, well, bad public services. Which, after all, most people depend on. After 11 more years of neo-Thatcherism (ie New Labour) the poor are still getting poorer, the rich are getting disgustingly rich, and there’s still no sign of any inspiring progressive leaders in waiting who can turn the country around and lead us in a more progressive, more just and more enlightened direction. Cameron? Miliband? Boris? Oh dear.
City Academies to take over Primary Schools.
My handy Penguin dictionary defines Adonis as a strikingly handsome young man. Ah, the irony. Baron Andrew Adonis, age 45, ex-academic and ex-journalist, the scrawny, weasel-like New Labour schools minister, is about as qualified to run schools in England as I am to run a marathon. The bastard didn’t even attend a state secondary school. Wikipedia says his mother ran away and left him when he was a toddler. Good call. There goes a woman who recognizes some evil spawn of the devil when she sees it.
Front page news in the Guardian yesterday was Adonis’s plan to launch “matrix” Academies, which are basically City Academies with feeder Primary schools under their direct control.
Actually, the Guardian’s reporters are idiots. Polly Curtis and Allegra Stratton (who they?) wrote “One in five children start secondary school unable to read, write or do maths at the expected level”. Says who? These people have swallowed the line that 100% of eleven year olds should have reached Level 4 in their Sats by the end of Primary school. Which includes all children with special educational needs, English as a second language, behavioral and attitudinal problems, attendance issues, health issues, parents who suffer from depression, drug addiction, etc, etc.
What these reporters obviously don’t recognise, in common with most of the population, is that most ADULTS operate quite happily at Level 4 in their everyday reading, writing and maths, so if children are already at that level when they enter secondary school WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY GOING TO DO FOR THE NEXT 5 - 7 YEARS?
Who says Primary schools have a duty to do the work of Secondary schools for them? Who says Secondary teachers (as well as parents and poxy politicians) have a right to expect eleven year olds to be writing etc at an adult level by the time they enter Secondary school? So that they can 'access the curriculum'? And when exactly are they meant to learn how to access the curriculum for creativity, for emotional intelligence, for social intelligence, for spiritual intelligence?
There’s a hell of a lot wrong with our education system, including poor management of schools, both Primary and secondary. But can someone please explain how secondary specialists with no understanding of Primary pedagogy are going to benefit primary age children within a school of 2-3,000 pupils? Only an arrogant dimwit like Adonis could come up with this stuff.
What’s more he has the gall to cite Finland as the model of education he’s following. Says Lord Adonis, “Countries like Finland are often cited for their all-through schools which provide one seamless education for children through primary and secondary age".
Yes, you aDonut, and Finland also has NO summative testing of children prior to the age of 16, NO Sats, NO league tables, NO Ofsted regime, and NO micro-management of schools. Education professionals are shown proper respect and given the freedom to run their own professional and pedagogical affairs, including in-service staff development and curriculum development. And THAT’S the way they get to be top of the educational pops.
.
The Olympic Games closing ceremony was phenomenal and fabulous, entertaining and enthralling, apart from the 8 minutes that were allocated to London to advertise the 2012 games. This section was truly awful - even more shockingly horrible than anticipated. The Chinese put on a show that was awesome, spectacular, original, majestic, inspirational and uplifting. The Brits, however, brought on a red bus, some tackily dressed dancers doing silly and senseless gyrations, some garish umbrellas, and Beckham doing the only things he can do - grin inanely, and kick a ball. Or as Marina Hyde said in The Guardian, “Behold, world, our Beckham! Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair!”
The centrepiece, the pivotal performance in the London slot, was a rendition of “Whole Lotta Love” featuring Jimmy Page looking like a fat pigtailed grey-haired uncle, and Leona Lewis, admittedly a Hackney girl, warbling away at something that originally was, and still ought to be, belted out by Robert Plant. But not in this context. This was no place for ANY cock rock, let alone a period piece by Led Zep. The Chinese effort at contemporary rock music was colorful, original, up-tempo, uplifting and had a massive feel-good effect. The Brit effort was plodding, dull and hackneyed, and not a good advertisement for Hackney 2012 in any way. Shameful.
Even more horrible was the follow-on programme on BBC1, featuring various events around Britain - supposedly some kind of national launch party for the 2012 games. It was so bad it was impossible to switch off for fear of missing the very worst of what seems to pass for contemporary British ‘culture’.
In London, right outside Buck House, the organisers had built a concert stage that looked like a particularly nightmarish filling station. I think there used to be a petrol company called UK. This one was pumping out BP - British Poop music.
First up were the cast of the Queen musical, doing all the predictable and horrible stuff they do - “We Are The Champions”, “We Will Rock You”, etc. Time does nothing to diminish my hatred of Queen’s stupid, preening, overweening, senseless rubbish. What kind of people like this stuff? Fucking morons. Freddie Mercury, aka Farrokh Bulsara, - RIP. You were a true tosser and an egomaniac without peer, in a world full of egomaniacs and tossers.
How do they decide the running order of these things? In the time-honored manner of bringing on the complete rubbish first, and keeping the ‘best’ of it to ‘top the bill’? If so, it was a ridiculous mistake. To follow the magnificence of the Chinese dancing, playing, singing and performing with such complete dross was to fill one’s heart with despair and shame.
Next on were a bunch of lads called Scouting for Girls. Eh? What? Bring back The Animals, The Searchers, The Rolling Stones, even The Swinging Blue Jeans. What’s the point of having these wet little pillocks with their wet little names and their wet little haircuts performing so bloody wetly? Strangely though, S for G chose to end their slot with “London Calling” - a dark Clash classic.
London calling, see we ain't got no swing
Except for the ring of that truncheon thing
The ice age is coming, the sun's zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running but I have no fear
Cuz London is drowning and I live by the river.
http://www.chordie.com/chord.pere/getsome.org/guitar/olga/chordpro/c/The.Clash/LondonCalling.chopro
Did they really mean to bash out the message that London is NOT a good place to be? Or was it similar to Ronnie Reagan’s liking for Springsteen and “Born In The USA” - enthusiasm for a title, a tune, an artist and a performance, without paying the least attention to the meaning of the lyrics.
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary
Out by the gas fires of the refinery
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go
Born in the U.S.A.
Mystifying.
Even worse than the crap music and the crap dancing were the silly kids they hire as “presenters” and MCs of this rubbish. Ludicrous inane wannabe celebs; fatuous, idiotic, foolish prats. Chattering, bilious fools. It was all so utterly cringe-making I truly worry about the media’s presentation of our national life and culture over the next four years and in 2012, should the world manage to stagger that far.
The Chinese left us all wanting more, and truly appreciating the refinement of their arts, their imagination, their traditions and their culture. God knows what’s going to happen if we let the fools who run our media and our affairs mess it all up with a ridiculous melange of sold-out dinosaurs and daft kids. Sensible rockers like Mick and Keith will stay well away from such rubbish, and so will any truly talented young folk, for fear of being tainted with the sheer crap that’s bound to predominate.
Maybe we should just hire the folk who produced the Chinese shows/ceremonies to come and do it for us - to create something new and brilliant. Or else risk the world seeing the true awfulness of what our mainstream celebrity, star-struck and wannabe culture actually is.
People like ‘Lord’ Coe and Co are already running scared of trying to match the Chinese effort. They’re already copping out by saying ‘our’ games will be more humble and modest, both in budget and ambition. You can already see them getting ready to parade just a few pop idols and national ‘icons’ dressed in pin-stripes and bowlers, riding in buses and black cabs, with a squad of pearly kings and queens for added flavour. If our 8 minutes in the closing ceremony of 2008 is anything to go by, God help us.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Obama mit Biden
I have a new theory about the US presidential election, which is now starting to shift into overdrive. Most positive and progressive people seem to assume that if there’s any justice on earth then the Democrats and Obama will win the race, and will begin forthwith to right the wrongs that have been perpetrated on America and on the planet since the Republicans stole the presidency from Al Gore and the Democrats back in the dawning of this millenium.
But my theory is that Fate hasn’t yet finished inflicting on America the amount of humiliation and economic catastrophe it feels the country deserves. This isn’t my judgement, I hope you understand. As Obama would say, that sort of decision takes place well above my pay grade. Personally I’m a pretty forgiving type, just as long as the guilty party is sufficiently grovellingly apologetic, and promises to never ever do those bad things again. Like waste 3 billion dollars a year on high-tech weaponry, on a fatuous and counter-productive ‘war on terror‘, and on killing thousands of innocent people, instead of using those incredible amounts of money to rid the planet of illiteracy, ignorance and starvation.
However, I’ve still not heard very much in the way of apology, and I’m beginning to suspect that Fate has taken the view that America still has an awful lot to learn about its racism and misogyny, about the effects of its arrogance and its bullying, and is therefore going to ensure that McCain becomes the next president, with appalling consequences. Only then will people stop and say to themselves - “You know, it really isn’t such a bad idea to elect someone on the basis of their actual policies and programmes, and not on the colour of their skin, their gender, their bellicosity, their affability or even their age. We must learn this lesson well, and resolve never to forget it.”
That’s assuming there’s any country (or world) left to elect another president after McC has finished confronting and facing down the Ruskies, the Iranians and the Islamists.
The hot topic in Britain this week is that 'Lady' Thatcher has dementia, CJD, BSE or whatever, and doesn’t know who’s who or what’s what. To which most people say - we told you so. We knew that already. It took Britain several elections to test Thatcherism to destruction, to discover that 'trickle down' political and economic theory is a pile of poo, and that if you don’t invest in good public services you get, well, bad public services. Which, after all, most people depend on. After 11 more years of neo-Thatcherism (ie New Labour) the poor are still getting poorer, the rich are getting disgustingly rich, and there’s still no sign of any inspiring progressive leaders in waiting who can turn the country around and lead us in a more progressive, more just and more enlightened direction. Cameron? Miliband? Boris? Oh dear.
City Academies to take over Primary Schools.
My handy Penguin dictionary defines Adonis as a strikingly handsome young man. Ah, the irony. Baron Andrew Adonis, age 45, ex-academic and ex-journalist, the scrawny, weasel-like New Labour schools minister, is about as qualified to run schools in England as I am to run a marathon. The bastard didn’t even attend a state secondary school. Wikipedia says his mother ran away and left him when he was a toddler. Good call. There goes a woman who recognizes some evil spawn of the devil when she sees it.
Front page news in the Guardian yesterday was Adonis’s plan to launch “matrix” Academies, which are basically City Academies with feeder Primary schools under their direct control.
Actually, the Guardian’s reporters are idiots. Polly Curtis and Allegra Stratton (who they?) wrote “One in five children start secondary school unable to read, write or do maths at the expected level”. Says who? These people have swallowed the line that 100% of eleven year olds should have reached Level 4 in their Sats by the end of Primary school. Which includes all children with special educational needs, English as a second language, behavioral and attitudinal problems, attendance issues, health issues, parents who suffer from depression, drug addiction, etc, etc.
What these reporters obviously don’t recognise, in common with most of the population, is that most ADULTS operate quite happily at Level 4 in their everyday reading, writing and maths, so if children are already at that level when they enter secondary school WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY GOING TO DO FOR THE NEXT 5 - 7 YEARS?
Who says Primary schools have a duty to do the work of Secondary schools for them? Who says Secondary teachers (as well as parents and poxy politicians) have a right to expect eleven year olds to be writing etc at an adult level by the time they enter Secondary school? So that they can 'access the curriculum'? And when exactly are they meant to learn how to access the curriculum for creativity, for emotional intelligence, for social intelligence, for spiritual intelligence?
There’s a hell of a lot wrong with our education system, including poor management of schools, both Primary and secondary. But can someone please explain how secondary specialists with no understanding of Primary pedagogy are going to benefit primary age children within a school of 2-3,000 pupils? Only an arrogant dimwit like Adonis could come up with this stuff.
What’s more he has the gall to cite Finland as the model of education he’s following. Says Lord Adonis, “Countries like Finland are often cited for their all-through schools which provide one seamless education for children through primary and secondary age".
Yes, you aDonut, and Finland also has NO summative testing of children prior to the age of 16, NO Sats, NO league tables, NO Ofsted regime, and NO micro-management of schools. Education professionals are shown proper respect and given the freedom to run their own professional and pedagogical affairs, including in-service staff development and curriculum development. And THAT’S the way they get to be top of the educational pops.
.
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