Layer 425 . . . Education, Facts, Knowledge, Feelings, Gove, Gradgrind, Idiocy, Pedagogy, Ritalin, Curriculum, Intelligences, Zen and Lifelong Learning.

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"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!"

Thomas Gradgrind-Gove - Hard Times

http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/hardtimes.html

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Prescriptions of Ritalin as a controlling drug for UK children are currently running at 600,000 per year. A pundit on the Today (R4) programme thought that there's no problem with this -  if the end result is that there's an "increase in educational performance". No need to discuss what we mean by "educational performance" of course - we all know and agree that it simply means improved test and exam results in pursuit of arbitrary targets and league table scores.

So there we have it - there's no need to concern ourselves with moral, ethical, social and psychological issues - just focus on the child's ability and willingness to "settle down", become more passive, submit to traditional schooling and cramming for tests, and just say alleluyah for hitting the test and exam targets.

The presenters on our flagship news programmes allow their pet pundits to get away with this stuff. No wonder we're such a fucking dumb nation.

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Confirmation, finally - as if it were needed - that Michael Gove is completely and utterly stupid. He's also an elitist and an evil bastard. He's demanding that the National Curriculum be reduced to a focus on "facts and knowledge".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9367000/9367626.stm

This man presumably has access to the huge body of work which tells us that Gradgrindism ("Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts") is not only futile, not only alienating, not only pointless, not only ridiculous - it's also counterproductive in the 21st Century in a huge number of ways. He's either not read about, or doesn't understand, the need for a New Learning Revolution.

The sole point of Gradgrindism is to sort out the academic goats from the non-academic sheep, and determine which of our children will go to university (if indeed that's what they want to do) and which of them will go to the elite universities. It has no other purpose.

It doesn't serve the needs of commerce and industry, which need individuals with imagination and creativity, and people with their social and emotional intelligences working effectively. 

It doesn't meet the needs of society in general, which also needs all of the above.

It doesn't meet the needs of individuals - to become rounded people who are capable of reaching their full potential, to become lifelong learners who enjoy learning for its own sake, to become active citizens, to become fully evolved human beings, etc.

It's profoundly depressing that an arrogant and ignorant little jerk like Gove is now calling all the shots in English education.

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2008/04/layer-20-fully-evolved-humans.html

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2008/05/layer-44-eyes-and-ears-of-community.html

http://oxzen.blogspot.com/2008/05/layer-48-eevnin-stannad-standards-evil.html

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Chapter II — Murdering The Innocents

THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir — peremptorily Thomas — Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind - no, sir!

In such terms Mr Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general. In such terms, no doubt, substituting the words ‘boys and girls,’ for ‘sir,’ Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers before him, who were to be filled so full of facts.

Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts, and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one discharge. He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be stormed away.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl. Who is that girl?’

‘Sissy Jupe, sir,’ explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and curtseying.

‘Sissy is not a name,’ said Mr Gradgrind. ‘Don’t call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia.’

http://www.online-literature.com/dickens/hardtimes/2/

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I had an interesting chat with my son. He's very certain that when it comes to decisions and actions we should always trust our instincts. He's very against doing what anyone else suggests or advises.

He thinks we should all be in touch with our instincts, and prioritise them above the demands and wishes of those around us - our families, our society and the prevailing culture.

Leonard Cohen, of course, said, "I don't trust my inner feelings . . . Inner feelings come and go."

To this, my son says - when your feelings change, you should change with them. And deal with the consequences. (I'm sure Len would agree with him about that - his essential point about not trusting inner feelings was to do with the impermanence of the things we associate with 'love'.)

I think I know what my son's getting at. Ultimately we all need to develop a Zen attitude of spontaneity, authenticity, acting-without-acting, living without fear or anxiety, seeing each life experience as a positive from which we can learn something and from which we can continue to develop ourselves. Ultimately we must look within ourselves for our direction and our decisions, and not allow ourselves to be directed by others or by the prevailing culture - as long as our decisions and our actions don't harm others unnecessarily and inappropriately.

Where I disagree with him is in his referring to what I'd call a Zen attitude and a Zen life as simply 'following our feelings' or 'trusting our instincts'. This blog has discussed at length, in previous Layers, the importance of developing a distinctive 'instinctual intelligence', and also the need to become, through meditation, fully aware of our true selves - our personal intelligence. It's also focused on the need to develop other intelligences, which I've referred to as 'spiritual intelligence' (intuition, etc) and 'social intelligence' (empathy, etc.) If all of those intelligences are working well and working collaboratively, together with our intellect, then we can also become 'emotionally intelligent' and become more able to control our destructive emotions.

It's not mere pedantry or a matter of semantics to clarify and separate out these various intelligences, and to see 'instinctual intelligence' as simply a component of our whole psyche, so that someone who acts 'spontaneously' solely on the basis of 'instinct' is seen to be acting without the benefit and input of all of his/her intelligences. In essence our hard-wired instinctual intelligence just prepares us for flight, fight, freeze and sex. (Although various skills, such as driving and playing a musical instrument, can also become more or less 'instinctual'.)

Words matter. Concepts matter. Intelligences matters. Developing (and using) all of our intelligences matters very much indeed. But don't expect Michael Gove and the coalition government to understand any of that.

What a pity that their pal Anthony Seldon can't help them to see the uselessness of an Education Secretary and an education system that value "largely worthless pieces of paper" and very little else.


Charles Dickens satirised the living daylights out of a school system that killed children's curiosity and reduced children to being passive memorisers of so-called facts and knowledge - and that was way back in the 19th Century, before computers and the Internet were even imagined. The ridiculous Gove still doesn't, and won't ever, get it. The man is an absolute joke.
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Layer 274 . . . Philosophy of Education, Warnock, Questa, Morris and Brighouse

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Talking of Philosophers . . .

This week we heard that schools are increasingly failing to provide opportunities for children to carry out proper scientific investigations - such is the apparent pressure to cram them with facts and do practices for tests and examinations. There's also a question of large classes, too few resources and poor teaching. So increasingly kids are expected to memorise scientific "knowledge", but have no experience or real understanding of how scientists are supposed to behave, from hypothesis through fair testing to drawing conclusions on the basis of real evidence. Sounds very New Labour. There's never been any proper evidence to support their approaches to education.

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Children are being deprived of the chance to conduct experiments in science lessons because teachers say there isn't time, or youngsters are too naughty, poll reveals

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/mar/26/no-time-practical-science-experiments

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Baroness Mary Warnock spoke about her concerns for science teaching, and for teaching in general, on the Today programme, after having written about them in Questa magazine:

http://www.philosophy-of-education.org/uploads/questa/questa_warnock.pdf

Download Issue 1 of the emagazine (published by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain) here:

http://www.philosophy-of-education.org/uploads/questa/questa_complete.pdf

Questa aims to create a meeting ground or forum in which philosophers and non-philosophers can reflect and engage in conversation. It is a space in which philosophers, practitioners, journalists, parents and policy-makers will hopefully sustain a high quality, carefully reasoned debate with the power to influence future policy in positive ways.

In this issue, we are focusing on the 2010 general election with contributions from writers including Mary Warnock, John White, Richard Pring, Richard Smith and Fiona Millar. The magazine can be downloaded as a whole, or the essays can be downloaded individually.

http://www.philosophy-of-education.org/

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Lady Warnock says:

Three reasons for hope in a new Age of Austerity

Mary Warnock wants no more platitudes about Education as Investment. Instead she welcomes the recession as a chance to shake off the chains of centralisation.

 It is wrong to think that efficiency economies will be enough. We need radical change to avoid waste, and not only of money, but of the talents of children who all too often find nothing to engage their interest once they have left their primary schools.

In one way we can count ourselves better off than they were in 1945: we have more mistakes to learn from; and centralisation has been one of the biggest mis­takes of all. We must, forthwith, abolish targets, league tables, and compulsory curricula. We must, if necessary by primary legislation, untangle education law from anti-discrimination law, so that local authorities, gover­nors and headteachers can regain control of the variety of schools that they want to be responsible for.

The whole exam system must be changed, if we are to see value for money. There should be one set of exams only, to replace GCSE, taken at the end of Year 9, whose purpose would be to ensure that good standards of reading, writing and comprehension had been achieved over a wide range of subjects, including mathemat­ics, science, history and a foreign language, ancient or modern. This could be examined within the school, by the appropriate subject teachers, and monitored by teachers from other schools (appropriately paid), and sporadically by Ofsted. Thereafter there would be no common exams.

Huge sums of money would be saved by the abandon­ment of externally-examined GCSE and A-levels, graded tests being substituted, over all the courses, to be taken when the student was thought, by himself or his teach­ers to be ready. These tests would be externally admin­istered, modelled on those already existing for music, ballet, drama and languages. Admission to higher educa­tion would be the business of individual institutions which would rely on graded test results and interview.

All these changes would streamline education, and save the money now wasted on the academic bias that still bedevils our educational system. It would motivate children by allowing them to do whatever they do best and enjoy most, and by treating them as grown-up, when they feel that they are so, largely taking charge of their own lives but within a formal structure. These changes, if they could come about, would be grounds for hope.

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In the anti-philosophy and pro-faith camp this week we have Estelle Morris and , sad to say, Tim Brighouse. These are both, no doubt, extremely pleasant people who have a genuine understanding of and sympathy with pupils and teachers, but are both politicians to their core, and as such they are mealy-mouthed and lacking in the courage to speak truth to power. They may well speak more plainly to their many politican friends behind closed doors, but their public utterings are rather pathetic. We, the people, are the ultimate source of power, and they ought to have the courage to speak to us in straighforward, plain language about crucial issues of education policy. Instead they write feeble little missives in Guardian Education, carefully avoiding any overt criticism of their New Labour chums.

Morris says this in her column this week:

It is his [Michael Gove's] "return to children sitting in rows and rote learning" that worries me most. It's not just that those teaching methods failed to engage so many young children in the past; it's the assumption that the huge body of evidence built up over recent years on what constitutes good teaching and learning is of no value.

It reveals the shallowness of his party's pledge to trust teachers. If teachers can't be trusted to arrange their own classroom and seat their pupils in the way they think best, they shouldn't hold out much hope for professional autonomy under a Tory government.

Does she really not see that New Labour have done everything they can to promote didactic teaching and passive learning, and to get Primary kids back in rows facing interactive whiteboards? New Labour have failed to trust professionals on ANY issues, and have micromanaged and controlled schools to death.

The huge body of understanding about what constitutes good teaching and learning that had accumulated before New Labour came to power (for example regarding the teaching of reading and writing) was totally disregarded in their rush to implement centrally-directed 'strategies'. Unbelievable!!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/mar/23/education-reform-conservative-plans

As for Tim Brighouse,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/mar/23/tim-brighouse-first-time-voters

this is about as mealy-mouthed and waffly as you can get. I just wonder why he's not had the balls to speak out against the New Labour 'reforms', instead of just running around pretending to be an education 'commissioner'.

Come to think about it, it was Brighouse who started the craze to impose 'challenging targets' when he was Birmingham's director of education.
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Layer 260 . . . Finding Our Voices

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As I was saying in the last blog, I don't want my children, or other people's children, to sound like automatons, androids, cyborgs, or brainwashed products of a quasi-military production system. I want them to develop their own individual voices which they use to articulate their own individual thoughts and feelings; and I want them to feel like individuals with minds, souls and spirits which they themselves understand and feel comfortable with.

I've recently returned to a book written by Lucy McCormick Calkins called "Lessons From A Child". The subtitle is "On the Teaching and Learning of Writing".

In her introduction she says,

Thankfully my first teaching experiences were in an urban high school where attendance averaged 60% and students weren't afraid to ask hard questions. "Why am I supposed to learn about Egypt?" they'd ask. "This is crazy stuff. Why are we doing this? So what?" When my year was over, I asked myself the same questions. "Why am I doing this? So what?"

In search of a vision, I began teaching first in Oxfordshire, England, and then in an alternative public school in Middlefield, Connecticut. Those readers who visited the British Primary Schools at their best will recognise ways in which their emphasis on collaborative learning, student initiative and craftsmanship have been re-discovered and extended within the context of the writing workshop. I agree with the great British educator, Charity James, who urges us to remember the roots of our innovations:

We are apt to think of our innovations as a new growth of the human spirit, which indeed they are, but this aspect in isolation can make the whole work seem too exciting, too perishable, for its own good. We must see ourselves also in this period as holding the line, as helping to maintain, through our new relationships with students and our new hopes for their learning, an older humanism which the march of matter, the parade of power, would otherwise destroy.

It was Donald Graves who showed me that beneath every research project there are human beings with stories to tell. "Every child has a story to tell," he often said, quoting Harold Rosen. "The question is, will they tell it to us?"

The answer was yes. Children, teachers, principals told us their stories because Graves showed us how to listen, how to see the significance in what others might think was ordinary.

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So it's voices; it's speaking, and it's listening. Do we grade our students on the power, the clarity, and the expressiveness of their individual voices? Of course not. Thankfully not.

[We care only about the length of their sentences, the number of 'connectives' they use, and whether they deliberately use plenty of 'wow words' - designed to demonstrate a working knowledge of multi-syllabic 'colourful' and 'sophisticated' English adjectives and adverbs.]

Do we grade them on their ability to listen to one another, and their ability to respond and to feed back, and to engage in open and genuine dialogue? Of course not.

We don't value these things - and is it any wonder therefore that we're so useless at them? And the pity is that no-one even cares, or even thinks it matters.

We value what we can measure, and we measure the things that don't even matter. Not any more. That's if they ever did.

Write an account of life in ancient Egypt. Say why their religious and political systems were important.

Fuck off.

Write an account of this week's soccer international between England and Egypt.

Ah yes. Now you're starting to interest me.

Say why John Terry was booed, why he's been deprived of the captaincy, and what this says about our current value systems and so-called morals.

Mmmmmm. Quite interesting.

Write an account of life in a contemporary British city. Describe the variety of lifestyles, the points of difference, and why they exist.

Describe why you're pissed off with the pressure of constantly being tested and graded and told that you're not 'on track' to reach the 'expected grades' in tests and exams. Say why you're so fucking bored and angry with this waste of your life, and why you hate school and our exam system so much. Say whether you're writing as a member of an 'advanced' set or 'stream', or from the point of view of someone who failed to become a 'high achiever'.

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Layer 206 . . . More Damned Targets

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Peter Preston, ex-editor of the Guardian, wrote another loathsome column in the paper on Monday, headed In Praise of Targets.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/18/targets-work-topdown-cameron?

The sheer ignorance expressed in this article is beyond belief, and beyond a joke. Every time 'Presto' writes one of these reactionary columns he gets a deluge of correspondence explaining why and how the targets culture messes up education, health, etc, - but does he pay any attention? Of course not. Why on earth would he pay attention to the views of those who advocate a wholly different approach which focuses on the needs of children, sick people, etc, rather than the needs of politicians & their pals to "show results"?

The reason he should pay some attention and show some respect to professional opinion (eg the Primary Review) is that the least we should expect of Guardian writers is the ability to consider & to present both sides of an argument, with a reasoned refutation of one side if they disagree with it. Preston clearly hasn't read the Cambridge Review with an unprejudiced eye, and clearly hasn't understood it. Just like the tabloid writers he's maintaining that the Review says children shouldn't start school till aged 6, whereas Alexander & co have said no such thing. Why on earth would "working mums" be unhappy with the report, as he suggests, when no-one's advocated closing down early years classes or reducing the length of the school day?

It's not a question of "putting teachers back in charge of what's taught". It's about putting professional educators back in positions of responsibility for policy and practice (rather than politicians and professional bureaucrats) and determining through reasoned argument & developing practice which approaches produce properly educated young people and which ones do not - as happens in the countries at the top of the international performance comparisons. In countries like Finland there is continuing debate & challenge within the profession, not top-down political dictat & arbitrary targets that measure only what is measurable, with no proper assessment of children's progress towards being positive, self-motivated & independent learners who enjoy learning, literature & literacy.

Government targets, in this respect, do not "work", as Preston continues to maintain. They have the opposite effect, if anything, although most teachers do their best to retain their pupils' enjoyment of and interest in learning, within what has become a soviet-style factory system of performance quotas & targets, used as a basis for "performance management".

Mr Preston really has to stop dismissing pupils who "only" achieve a high Level 3 (3A) at age 11 as "fundamentally illiterate". He clearly has no idea what a high Level 3 consists of, and no idea how much progress has been made by many children with learning difficulties and other disadvantages when they are able to score a Level 3 in English and maths in a formal timed test. Most adults are for the most part "only" operating at Level 4 in their daily reading and writing, and the supposedly failing and illiterate children (according to Peter Preston) who have reached Level 3 in English by the end of Primary school have almost achieved that level. If they don't then go on and reach Levels 4 and 5 at secondary school it can only be because insufficent support and inadequate focus on literacy is on offer there.

The "force of a centrally imposed quasi-market economy" has NOT "transformed the situation", and neither has centrally-dictated methodology & pedagogy, if what we mean by "transformed" is "turned more children into better learners, more capable thinkers, more imaginative and more motivated seekers of knowledge, etc". The only thing that's improved under the last two governments is teachers' competence in teaching to the tests. Enough.

The Guardian should send 'Presto' packing in the same direction as Melanie Phillips, and tell him that as of now his views should be repeated ad nauseam where they belong, thereby freeing up space in the Guardian for more enlightened opinion. It's outrageous that Preston should be given space in the Guardian to smear those of us who agree with the Primary Review's authors as people who are motivated by "dogma and professional self-interest". These are Stalinist smear tactics. If anyone's dogmatic in this argument it's Preston & his ilk. For goodness' sake, even the Conservatives have become enlightened to the point of pledging to scrap both government-set targets and the micro-management of pedagogy & the curriculum in schools.

As for Mr Preston's conclusion that we should "make knowledge your target, and value those who can tell you on the frontline of information" - here's final evidence that he has no understanding of the issues and still believes that improved test and exam scores, obtained by whatever means, including paid cramming, are the same thing as a high standard of education that develops all of a child's intelligences, aptitudes and abilities, including their creativity and imagination.

The schools that are failing their pupils are mainly those that are abusing them by treating them as mere instruments in the achievement of production targets, thereby depriving them of a real education. Preston clearly knows nothing about the sorts of achievement that can't be measured by timed pen & paper tests, and neither does he care.
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Layer 134 Education, Brown and Harman: Back to the Grindstone.

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“Since the recession began, applications to train for teaching have shot up.”
BBC News Radio 4.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7933690.stm

So this is now a clear case of potential teacher supply outstripping demand. And what does a stupid government do in this situation? Well, a truly stupid government, as represented by Jim Knight, creates an incentive for supply to go up even higher by saying it’s going to compress PGCE training courses from an already ludicrous 12 months to - wait for it - 6 months. That’s SIX months to learn about and become skilled in the arts and sciences of being a teacher.

What the government should be doing, of course, is fast-tracking redundant bankers with their fat kiss-offs into work experience as Teaching Assistants, to give them a substantial first-hand insight into why the majority of them SHOULD NOT, and CANNOT, become teachers.

That would serve two purposes. First, to disabuse them of what it’s actually like to be a teacher, and save them the time and expense of training to be a teacher. Secondly, to rid them of the idea that they have the intellectual, emotional and spiritual resources to be a teacher.

The very few who survived this sort of apprenticeship to a practicing classroom teacher for at least 6 months, before even embarking on training, would then

* be absolutely certain that they have the qualities of sensitivity, empathy, intuition, intellect, instinct, humility, emotional intelligence and resilience that you need to be a good teacher.
* be clear that they can function effectively in a professional setting as a member of a team of professionals, which of course you don’t necessarily need to do as a self-serving banker.
* be clear about the sort of self-discipline and self-sacrifice it takes to be a good teacher.

Having had such a workplace experience, any sensible applicant for teacher training would then demand that basic training should be effective and thorough, and conducted by highly skilled and experienced practitioners in both the college and their placement schools for a minimum of two years.

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There’s talk about the government introducing a Masters degree in Teaching & Learning. The incredible thing is that we apparently don’t already have them. How can that be?

Could it be anything to do with the idiotic world of academia where subject specialisation is all, and “Teaching & Learning” is a bit . . . . . generalist? A bit like Primary teachers - regarded as the poor relations, generalists, etc. When what they are in terms of their professionalism is actually a specialist in child development and pedagogy.

No-one can actually teach a young child who has limited language and literacy without understanding what makes a child tick and how to motivate them to want to learn. Or at least that’s what Primary teachers used to be able to do before NuLabour got its hands on education and turned teachers into operatives in results factories, “delivering national strategies” and teaching to tests.

In Finland, the world’s best educational system has not only an all-graduate profession, it has an all-post graduate profession, with every teacher being trained to Masters level in pedagogy within 5 years of starting teaching.

As a teachers’ Union spokesman said on the radio - it’s completely mad to let semi-trained people loose on teaching children when they haven’t even begun to properly understand the basics of child development and pedagogy, let alone know how to organise up to 30 children within a small space so that each and every one of them has his and her specific educational and personal needs met, all day every day.

Let alone be able to offer them a daily experience of school that fosters a love of learning for its own sake, and allows every child to develop high levels of intellectual, social, emotional and spiritual intelligence.

Even experienced teachers find it difficult to do that - principally because these days they’re no longer trained in such skills. They’re fast-tracked into “delivering” literacy and numeracy strategies and “the curriculum”. In other words, preparing the children for tests and exams.

But of course this is what people like Jim Knight imagine teachers should be doing. Any old banker can surely be trained to stand in front of a class and fill children with imperial gallons of facts. Within six months. Can’t they?

That’s right, Jim lad. Hammer them with grammar, “wow words”, “connectives”(?), number facts, bits of science, history and the rest, plus some training on test techniques, and Gordon’s your uncle.

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Here’s an excellent article, published on the Guardian website yesterday.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/mar/09/anthony-seldon-examinations

I can’t imagine Anthony Seldon wanting any semi-trained ex-bankers working in his school. Can’t imagine the fee-paying parents wanting them either. Maybe they’ll be fine for the inner-city schools. Eh, Jim?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2009/mar/09/anthony-seldon-primary-tests

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Returning to Oxzen’s recent comments on Brown and Harriet Harman, I notice Jackie Ashley wrote some very important comments in yesterday’s paper, under the strapline,

Harman and Darling are the PM's most constant allies. He should let them speak out, rather than slap them down.

This is another sad indictment on Brown, who’s still failing to realise it’s time to admit what the rest of us already know about NuLabour’s complicity with the City and ‘globalisation’ this past decade, and understand that he’s now operating in a totally new epoch that requires totally different approaches to politics and economics.

(Harriet Harman) seems to be fighting her cause in cabinet, taking a more anti-City line than some other ministers, and refusing to have her equalities legislation nudged aside by Mandelson . . . Under great personal attack, she's got her head down and is plugging on regardless. You don't have to regard her as some kind of political titan to think this is cause for mild praise rather than contempt.

Personally I think it’s cause for enormous praise - both what Harriet said about the bankers not being allowed to keep their booty, and the fact that she’s still fighting for her equalities legislation, especially if Mandelson is against it - which he would be, wouldn’t he?

Unless people feel politicians, like the rest of the world, have been shocked into rethinking their assumptions, how can they feel confidence in future decisions? This is not about weakness. You can't base a new politics on denial.

The Tories, with all their hedge-fund chums and banking backers, are still far too smug in their finger pointing, but even their language is now altering. Labour, take note.

If (Brown) was able to admit that he had been too credulous about the banks but had learned some painful lessons, he would actually now be in a stronger position, far better able to get a hearing.

If he was able to see Harman and Darling as loyal people with minds of their own, rather than as potential renegades who need to be slapped down, then he would also be in a better place, and his administration would seem more coherent. Why pick fights with friends?

The mood of the country has changed, anyway. People want something different in truly dangerous, recessionary times. They want politicians to be less tribal, franker and more open about what went wrong. It's a time for rallying round, not for finding new divisions.

It's not quite true that everyone failed to see the expanding golden bubble for what it was. A few did. But millions were mesmerised and the consequences are going to be horrible. At this hard moment, there is no place for false pride. We are in it together. The prime minister must be less proud. He has, frankly, less to be proud about.

There were a couple of good comments on CIF after this:

From guardianreeda (on Mandelson, and someone‘s suggestion that he could take over as PM if Brown resigned)

For a completely unelected, completely unelectable multiply disgraced multi-million pound trousering liar to end up running the country courtesy of Labour is indeed a fitting way to draw this desperately disappointing period in our history to a close.

From ardennespate (on someone’s comment that Brown’s successor should fire Mandelson immediately)

... from a large cannon, off the highest turret of the Tower of London, in the general direction of Elephant and Castle. Without a crash helmet.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/09/gordon-brown-harman-darling

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Meanwhile, Dr Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, is getting involved. Quite right too. This whole economic and financial crisis is, in the end, about spiritual intelligence, ethics and morality, equality and purpose.

Archbishop delivers attack on impact of globalisation.
Time for everyone to look at own lifestyles, he says.

Blaming the greed of individual bankers for the financial crisis was too easy and people should instead be asking profound questions about how poorly regulated economies obsessed with ever-growing consumer choice have skewed the judgments of entire countries, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.

Focusing on the greed of bankers had made people lose sight of the fact that "governments committed to deregulation and to the encouragement of speculation and high personal borrowing were elected repeatedly in Britain and the United States for a crucial couple of decades", he said. "Add to that the fact of warnings of some of the risks of poor (or no) regulation, and we are left with the question of what it was that skewed the judgment of a whole society as well as of financial professionals."

The archbishop . . . attacked "opportunistic" offshoring and outsourcing by large international companies. "The present situation favours economic agreements that give little or no leverage to workers and that have minimal reference to social, environmental or even local legal concerns.

"Learning how to use governmental antitrust legislation to break up the virtually monopolistic powers of large multinationals that have become cuckoos in the nest of a national economy would also be an essential part of a strategy designed to stop the slide from opportunistic outsourcing towards protectionism and monitoring or policing the chaotic flow of capital across boundaries," he said.

Plenty of good sense and things to chew on there. Excellent.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/09/deregulation-spending-banking

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/mar/09/rowan-williams-lecture-full-text
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