Book-burning in postwar Britain

Zere goes "Ze Art of Englisch"... !

"Textbooks are dying out in classrooms because teachers see them as 'regimented and old-fashioned', Elizabeth Truss said yesterday.

"The Education Minister said rampant ideology in schools that teaching should be 'unstructured and free-flow' meant just one in ten ten-year-olds are issued with them now."

- Andrew Levy, Daily Mail, today.

There are three reasons why teachers have abandoned textbooks and now labour till all hours of the night to lay the track on which their train will run the next day:

1. Revolutionaries. As I have said before, at the large comprehensive where I used to teach the head of English told me that the last act of the previous incumbent was to put all the English coursebooks into a skip in the playground and set fire to them, thus ensuring that the wicked old way of teaching from that sort of book would be gone for ever. This was in the mid-70s, and when I told this to others I found out that the same thing had happened in at least two other schools, at about the same time. I will bet my pension that, like the man who campaigned for the end of corporal punishment, the people who did this did not stay in the classroom, or possibly even in teaching.

2. Constant curricular change. How is it possible to write a textbook when the course content alters frequently? Every education secretary jerks the tiller in a different direction: grammar exercises, no grammar exercises, phonics, no phonics, Shakespeare, no Shakespeare.

3. Ofsted. Inspectors and advisers - some of whom may have been like those in (1) above, or taught or sponsored by them - not only don't want to see textbooks, they even frown on worksheets. We are expecting an inspection soon and we are told that our lessons will be classed as failing if they are text-based rather than activity-based.

Teacher is a fool. Education is a stupid job for clever people - you have to be clever to do it, you have to be stupid to take it on. Only periodic deep economic recessions and the institutional ageism in the British workplace keep the "profession" supplied, sucking in young idealists and middle-aged bankrupts and keeping them so busy that they fail to escape again.

And goodness know how much (colour, laser) photocopiers cost annually, compared with the wear-and-tear cost of replacing texts in the old days - the days when, as in modern-day China, South Korea etc children were set work to do and did it.

Still, we now get better, technicolour paper airplanes and higher-quality scrap in the recycling bins.

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Cameron's Chinese puzzle

(1) BBC News (2) Financial Times (3) Wikipedia

 

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Democracy: who should have the right to vote?

The self-governing Welsh colony on the Chubut River in Patagonia, established in the later 1860s, allowed all men and women over 18 to vote.

In Britain, no woman could vote until 1918, and even then it was restricted to women over 30. The minimum voting age for women was reduced to 21 ten years later. The voting age for both sexes was lowered to 18 in 1969, under the premiership of Harold Wilson, who hoped that the young would help him return to office in 1970; he was wrong.

Ironically, the United Kingdom's 1832 Reform Act, designed to correct the corruption of the electoral system, was the first to formally exclude women from voting by including the word "male" in the legislative text. Until then, the right to vote had been largely related to property.

In the United States, the State of New Jersey in 1776 permitted propertied widows to vote; this right was rescinded in 1807.

In 2010, a female Russsian journalist, Yulia Latinyna, argued in the Moscow Times that poor people should not be allowed to vote:

Poor people are capable of feats of bravery and revolution. They can storm the Bastille, overthrow the tsar or stage an Orange Revolution. But impoverished people are incapable of making sober decisions and voting responsibly in a popular election.

It may be that poor people don't want to, anyway. In 1950, the voter turnout for the UK General Election was 83.9%; in 2010 it was 65.1% (up from 59.4% in 2001). In the US, turnout for the Presidential election of 1876 was 81.8%; in 2012, 57.5%.

According to MORI, in the 2010 General Election, 66% of men cast their vote, but only 64% of women. Age, however, is a more significant determinant:

Data: Mori

The "democratic deficit" is getting dangerous. On Zero Hedge, "George Washington" said this week:

"... a May 2013 poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that 29% of registered voters think that armed revolution may be “necessary” in the next couple of years. In other words, the number of Americans who think that armed revolution may be “needed” dwarf the number of Americans who approve of the job that Congress is doing."

Before a call to arms, how about a call to exercise your right to the franchise?

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Fado

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Stockmarkets, inequality and investor behaviour

Yesterday, Michael Snyder gave us a doomster report on the stock market, which he sees as being in an "absolutely massive" bubble. The redoubtable Marc Faber agrees, as do many others.

Noting that 82% of individually held stocks are owned by just 5% of Americans, Snyder comments:

"When this stock market bubble does burst, those wealthy Americans are going to be in for a tremendous amount of pain."

This is the point at which I have to say, "hairy, spherical objects!" What pain?

If you are truly rich, you do not need to sell your stocks. Once you have ownership, and assuming that you have lots of cash and income from other sources, the notional sale value of your shares is an irrelevance. How much of his 700 acres of land in central London has the Duke of Westminster sold off whenever the property market was in a slump? Exactly.

There's still some fantasy that the Dow (or the S&P, whatever) is a measure of the well-being of the nation. Actually, it's a distraction. What matters is whether you have a sustainable economy, and what social arrangements you are prepared to tolerate. The answers appear to be "no" and "terrible".

Aside from rapidly building up gold reserves and planning to dispense with the US dollar as the world's settlement currency, China is now cashing out of the casino and buying land and businesses in America. The 5% will still be just fine, thank you, as the elites are in many of the worst countries in the world, but a growing number of Americans will find that they have become indentured slaves and their masters have sold them; billionaire Hugo Salinas Price thinks this is historically inevitable and the dream of democracy is due to end soon.

Unless you act.

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Dr Not-So-Strangelove

While the BBC screens a season on the Cold War, it's worth knowing that, for reasons of speed and just in case higher authority was uncontactable, all the ballistic nuclear missile silos in the USA had the same launch code for a period of 20 years: 00000000.

And never mind Dr Strangelove's General Jack D. Ripper, here is the real Commander-in-Chief of Strategic Air Command, General Thomas Power, talking in 1960 to a nuclear war strategist from the Rand Corporation: "Restraint! Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards! At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!"

And here's Power's boss, who was in charge of the whole Air Force: "At a Georgetown dinner party recently, the wife of a leading senator sat next to Gen. Curtis LeMay, chief of staff of the Air Force. He told her a nuclear war was inevitable. It would begin in December and be all over by the first of the year. In that interval, every major American city -- Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles -- would be reduced to rubble. Similarly, the principal cities of the Soviet Union would be destroyed. The lady, as she tells it, asked if there were any place where she could take her children and grandchildren to safety; the general would, of course, at the first alert be inside the top-secret underground hideout near Washington from which the retaliatory strike would be directed. He told her that certain unpopulated areas in the far west would be safest."

When I was in my teens at a Welsh boarding school, I studied the map to see where in Wales might be best to head for if the balloon went up - somewhere central, but avoiding the vicinity of military bases and any of the valleys leading away from target cities on the southern coast, I decided.

I should have been better prepared; I never had a bag and a bike ready. All over now? Are we now run by sane and sensible people?

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

"I me mine": gender and the possessive pronoun

Commenting on the latest twist in the Lawson-Saatchi feud, John Ward says:

"For me, Nigella had always represented a figure of fun: the personification of how too much money and bubble-based privilege can lead to idiotic comments such as “The best vinegar to add at this stage in the cooking is cider, but if you’ve run out, Champagne vinegar will do just as well”. But behind all that, I felt a background unease about the sheer size of her ego: how every dish was ‘my’ Christmas Turkey or ‘my’ summer salad."

Actually, this is something many women do, if you take the trouble to listen to them. This is (I venture to suggest) because they are more relationship-focused; they are also (I think) more likely to invest inanimate objects with personalities.

If you watch Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's cookery programmes (at least the early series) you may note - it stuck me quite forcefully at the time - that he does this "I/my" thing consistently. At first I found it irritating, but then I came to admire him, for I realised that he was mimicking the feminine use of language to appeal more strongly to his audience.

My wife says that in the quoted context, it's also about food as giving something of yourself.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.