Decimalisation and rotten education

We're seeing articles commemorating fifty years of UK decimal currency (but nothing yet on the Great Revolution in education), so I thought I'd take you 'back to the future' with some comments I left on Peter Hitchens' blog in 2007
https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/02/your_questions_/comments/page/1/#comments

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I have read Steve Dalton's comments on education (https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2007/02/tories_ukip_and.html?cid=61044374#comment-6a00d8341c565553ef00d8351ad8bd69e2), as Peter has urged, and while I agree with him I think I can furnish some additional information. I was a little closer to the epicentre of the British Cultural Revolution, since I trained as an English teacher in 1975. So I can confirm that education has been betrayed quite as much from within as from without.

A generation of intelligent, idealistic but very misguided people came into teaching in the late 60s and 70s, and just like New Labour more recently, proceeded to throw out the baby with the bathwater. I have spoken to at least three teachers from different schools, who each told me that their respective Heads of English in the early 70s threw out all the coursebooks, to make sure that such dull teaching would not be possible in future. One firebrand in a major comprehensive in Birmingham actually put them all in a skip in the playground and burned them, as his Parthian shot before leaving for another school - I assume that he had got a promotion. Odd that they all did it around the same time - or maybe not so odd.

At a time of falling secondary school rolls, some of that generation - presumably including some of those zealots - were given early retirement on now-unobtainable terms, and/or subsequently reappeared as inspectors, advisers and consultants. Such people will have been able to influence policy and practices in their subjects, and even promotion, so that like-minded individuals (or pragmatic careerists) of the next generation would carry the same baton.

I believe that this "heritage" is a reason why, when it is clear that (in some cases) old teaching methods worked better, the return to them has only been partial - a full reinstatement would be a candid admission of failure. To give an example - chanting times tables does work, and without a knowledge of them you are seriously hampered in many number manipulations. But the modern return to this has a new and debilitating twist - the child is expected simply to remember a sequence (e.g. "7, 14, 21, 28...") rather than "one times seven is seven, two times seven is fourteen...". So ask a modern child what is 7 times 9, and you get a long and painful mumbling, and often the wrong answer, because the table was never learned in a way that connected the two numbers, so missteps and omitted steps are almost inevitable. A minor point, you may think, but it means that nine-year-olds are struggling with sums that my class did when I was 5 - and we had the (technically superior) duodecimal monetary system then, including farthings! This theme of the half-hearted prodigal son's return is further illustrated by the issues of synthetic phonics, reading schemes etc.

Currently, schools are so concerned to keep up with the ever-changing National Curriculum that they are constantly driving children on from one half-learned thing to another. In itself, innovation is not all bad - but there's never time to consolidate.

Not that fashion-following started with the baby boomers. I could give anecdotes of useless one-off shows for visiting VIPs in the late 50s, at my primary school near Chatham. Politicians and eager-to-please teachers have always made a mess of education, they've just done it with a vengeance in the last 30 years.

And then there is the general cultural and moral deterioration. TV (especially the soaps, of which many children will follow several) is a training in despair. There is much fashionable talk of healthy eating, but none of healthy viewing, listening, speaking and thinking. If you think cheery positive thinkers are a pain, you haven't looked closely at the suffering caused by abandoning children's imaginations to the worst that skilful nihilists can do.

I am not a Bible-basher, but I've witnessed with disbelief (you may say) the decline of hymns in assemblies, then prayers, then all religion. RE (once the ONLY subject that was compulsory in all schools!) was eventually replaced by PSME (personal, social and moral education), then PSHE (the H signifies the substitution of Health for Moral). The underlying assumption is that there is such common agreement on all practical issues that morality, theology and philosophy are only airy-fairy approaches to simple political decisions - usually, the spending of public money in the pursuit of social equality (ironically, itself an abstract and ill-defined notion). Chairman Mao praised Pol Pot because he got rid of all classes in one blow, and one feels the same insane anti-human dogmatism at work behind modern political thinking today.

If I had children I should do what a friend did, and home-educate them all to 16, just to keep them away from the madness. I continue to teach, but sanity is only possible because I no longer expect the system to work properly, or indeed to be working in the right direction. If you dislike the products of British education and upbringing, please remember that you cannot blame the children for the lunacy of their elders and betters.

Another reader comments:

Rolf Norfolk, above, claims a duodecimal monetary system is technically superior to the decimal system we use now. How so? Simple calculations (addition and multiplication) are much easier when our measurement systems have the same radix as our counting system.

I reply:

You've commented on a rather minor aside, but it's a fair question. As a monetary system the 240 pence /960 farthing pound was technically superior because it could be divided lots more ways. I grant you that this had greater significance when one pound was worth more than a day's pay, though as it happens the greatest damage to the value of the pound happened after decimalisation, not before. (Inflation doubled in the 20 years before 1971, but increased more than sixfold over the next 20 years). Obviously I'm not proposing a return - except perhaps to linking the currency to gold, so the politicians can't use inflation to steal from us.

As to the simplicity argument, after a long time in teaching I've found that the easier you make things for people, the stupider they become.

Arcadia, twelve years on... the donkey died

First published here in 2009 as 'Who Runs Britain?'

https://theylaughedatnoah.blogspot.com/2009/04/who-ruins-britain.html

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It's not just the bankers and the politicians. I'm reading Robert Peston's book "Who runs Britain?" and I'm wondering about the social benefits of private equity entrepreneurs. 

Take store group Arcadia, for example. In the year 2000, it was acquired by Stuart Rose, at which time it had a turnover of £2.5 billion, debts £250 million and a market capital value somewhere around £100 million. "The business was viewed as dead meat when he arrived." Two years later, the turnover was down to £2 billion, but all the debt was cleared and the group was making an annual profit of £106 million. 

Rose then sold out to Philip Green for a reported £850 million (Peston says £775 million), of which Green's personal investment was only £9.2 million. 

In 2005/2006, Arcadia's sales were down to £1.8 billion, but profits had risen to £300 million, according to Peston. Green then made it declare a £1.3 billion dividend, £1.2 billion of which went to his wife - who by then was, technically, domiciled in tax-free Monaco. This record-breaking payout was funded by bank loans to Arcadia totalling £1.35 billion, with the result that the group's net asset position went from plus £303 million (in August 2004) way into the red - minus £807 million. You'll see that the dividend accounted for the decline in Arcadia's net worth, and more besides. 

Stuart Rose is like a man who buys a sick donkey, nurses it back to health and sells it at a profit. Green appears to me like the new owner who nurtures it further, then suddenly puts back-breaking quantities of heavy stone in its panniers and wanders off on other business, whistling merrily while the poor, over-laden beast staggers behind him in the wilderness. If it should stumble... 

I can see what's in it for the bankers (less so, their shareholders). I can certainly see what's in it for Philip Green. But what's in it for us? We work, earn money, pay taxes and what is left we spend in stores that export our capital. 

If this is to be the pattern for British business, we are finished. I don't see Johnny Foreigner making plans to take on the obligations of our Welfare State when we no longer make anything he wants; if he's looking for maltreated, ill-bred, indolent slaves, he'll find all he needs closer to home. 

Are we making a nation fit for Marxists?

Adam Curtis and the Oozlum Bird, by Sackerson

 I've just frittered away seven hours or so watching Adam Curtis' latest six-part video essay 'Can't Get You Out Of My Head' (available on BBC iPlayer, also on Youtube for non-UK residents: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHFrhIAj0ME .)

It tries to cover a lot of ground - mass movements, resistance to elites, whether humans can be manipulated and so on. But I think it stretches too far, generalises terribly and ends up with no definite conclusion, disappearing up itself like the Oozlum Bird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oozlum_bird.

It gives us lots of interesting snippets, and looks as though it's making coherent sense because Curtis uses his familar tricks - strange dissociative music, lively footage of frightening events and so on. I think a corrective would be to publish the transcripts so we could spot the use of emotive language, insecurely founded assertions, questionable linkages.

Just for example, I pluck a couple of dubious statements and references from the fifth episode - I'm sure others could find more, throughout the series:

1. Curtis appears to suggest that the Brexiteers voted Out from some nostalgia for lost Empire. I have never heard anybody here, let alone a Brexiteer, state that they wanted to recolonise India and so on. On the other hand Curtis says nothing of the malign domestic socio-economic effects of our EU membership and globalisation generally, which in my view would go much further to explain ordinary people's frustration with the cosy cross-party pro-internationalism setup in Westminster.

2. Curtis quite rightly talks about the evils of the opium trade which Britain foisted on China; but in referring to the flood of silver this raised and returned to Britain, he fails to make mention of another trade that was a major factor: tea, payment for which the Chinese government insisted had to be in silver only, thus causing a monetary problem for Britain.

I'm not sure what the transcripts, presented as an Oxbridge undergraduate essay, would score from the dons. Sooner or later we must recognise that the 'flight from language' or the use of audio-visuals to override the critical faculty, has its limitations and pernicious tendencies.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Music for donkeys (Christopher Ameruoso), by JD

 Since we have now gone 'through the looking glass' to an upside down, back to front world, it is time for some light relief. We are in desperate need of some!

Music for Animals & Swamp Rock Music and this is provided by Christopher Ameruoso who plays a home made guitar fashioned from a cigar box. His guitar has three strings only (who needs more than three?) and from it he produces some wonderful slide blues with which he entertains his various animals in his animal rescue sanctuary. It looks as though they enjoy his music and join in occasionally! As well as being a fine musician he is or was a well known photographer of 'stars' with their pets. https://www.last.fm/music/Christopher+Ameruoso/+wiki

















There are more videos at this link, some of them less than one minute long and featuring music with lots of different animals, even a tame(?) brown bear!
https://www.youtube.com/c/ChristopherAmeruoso/videos

FRIDAY MUSIC: John Jacob Niles, by JD

 This week it is John Jacob Niles who was a major influence on all of the well known names in the 50s and 60s folk music 'scene' in the USA. You will either love his style or hate it, there is no in between!

John Jacob Niles (April 28, 1892—March 1, 1980) was an American composer, singer, and collector of traditional ballads. Called the "Dean of American Balladeers", Niles was an important influence on the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, with Joan Baez, Burl Ives, and Peter, Paul and Mary, among others, recording his songs.

In the 1920s, Niles began publishing music. He made four extended trips into the southern Appalachians as an assistant to photographer Doris Ulmann, again transcribing traditional songs from oral sources, including the ballads "Pretty Polly", "Barbara Allen", and "He's Goin' Away". On other occasions, he transcribed songs he heard sung by African Americans and by fellow soldiers in World War I.

Starting in 1938, he recorded a number of his compositions and transcribed songs, performing the material in an intense, dramatic manner. He employed a trademark very high falsetto to portray female characters, and often accompanied himself on an Appalachian dulcimer, lute, or other plucked stringed instrument.

Niles died in Lexington, Kentucky on March 1, 1980 at age 87. He is buried at the nearby St. Hubert's Episcopal Church. The John Jacob Niles Center for American Music at the University of Kentucky is named after him, and displays a number of traditional instruments he handcrafted.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/John_Jacob_Niles



The above clip is taken from Martin Scorsese's film No Direction Home about Bob Dylan. As far as I know it is the only film of Niles performing. In the 70s the BeeGees sang falsetto in their 'disco' period and earlier The Stylistics and Aaron Neville had made falsetto their signature style of singing. But Niles had the advantage of having been an opera singer with, one presumes, the correct training of the voice and so his unique sound is much purer than other untrained singers. The style may take some getting used to because it is so distinctive but it is also electrifying or as Niles himself described it as the "electrifying effect of the male C# alto.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Sant Andreu Jazz Band, by JD

As well as an artist in his own right, the superb Spanish multi-instrumentalist Joan Chamorro, is the founder and director of the incredible Sant Andreu Jazz Band, a Jazz youth band based in Barcelona. But this is no ordinary youth band. The band have toured the world, playing festivals and events to packed out houses, recorded many albums and given birth to some stars, such as Andrea Motis. Having dedicated himself to the band for the past 14 years, it is very clear that the magic behind the band is Joan. The work he does is exciting, inspirational, innovative and he is exactly what the world needs right now.

JC describes his 'mission' in life as follows -

"The Sant Andreu jazz band started at a municipal music school in 2006. In 2012 the project grew a lot and we had to leave the School. Since that year, we are now a totally independent project. We do not receive any kind of help and the musicians who are members of the project (more than 60 young people between the ages of 6 and 22 have already passed) do not pay anything for the classes, or for the recordings, trips or anything. We can continue with everything we do because we have concerts that allow us to continue doing what we do (new arrangements, inviting international musicians, recordings, videos, my small salary, etc etc.)

"My passion is music and life in general. I like to believe that things can be done differently, with enthusiasm and with a lot of love. Of course, with a lot of work and dedication. Seeing how young boys and girls fall in love with this music and dedicate their time to it, achieving the result they achieve, it fills me with happiness and gives me the energy to continue working tirelessly on it."

https://jazzineurope.mfmmedia.nl/2020/04/the-magical-joan-chamorro/

BURNS NIGHT MUSIC, by JD

 Burns Night tonight - but any suppers will be clandestine affairs! However we can enjoy a selection of his songs as compensation accompanied by a wee dram of course.

As you can see from the list here he wrote a lot of songs!
http://www.robertburns.org/completesongs.shtml

(Just a note about the song "My heart's in the highlands" The poem is included in English language curriculum in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus hence all the comments in Russian to that particular video.)