-
So let me get this straight… it’s a grave insult for a visually-impaired Prime Minister to make a spelling mistake in a letter of condolence, but a newspaper exploiting a mother’s grief in order to attack a man it wants to see out of office is ’supporting our boys’? Great, glad we cleared that up.
- Here’s a good question: why did Facebook allow a ‘pro-rape, anti-consent’ group to stay on the site for months?
- Meet the man who says the United States will start to collapse sometime in the next year. Naturally, the teabaggers are lovin’ it.
- Over at FP, Graeme Smith argues that more troops will not help in Afghanistan.
- By the way, if you haven’t been reading David Axe’s reports from his time with American troops, you should start doing so now.
- David Marquand is an eminent and well-respected academic, but he also moonlights for OurKingdom. This post on the ‘Blair for EU’ fuss is a delightfully blunt dose of reality.
- Annie Lowery reviews the implications of the Lisbon Treaty on foreign policy.
- And if four ex-scousers with guitars is your thing, PopMatters is dedicating a week of essays and articles about the music & legacy of The Beatles.
-
It’s now just slightly less terrifying to be sick in America. Can’t imagine that the one Republican who voted for it is going to get many Christmas cards.
-
The President seems to have thoroughly rejected my advice on Afghanistan.
-
Paul Canning brings news about three gay teenagers on death row in Iran.
- Daniel Levy assesses the week from hell in the Middle East peace process.
- Gideon Levy accuses Netanyahu of being afraid & sowing fear.
- Moshe Halbertal, who helped write the Israeli army’s code of ethics, gives the Goldstone report a thorough going over. Like Andrew Sullivan, I thought this paragraph was significant:
Radical groups such as Hamas start their struggle with little support from their population, which tends to be more moderate. They increase their base of support cynically, by murdering Israeli civilians and thereby goading Israel into an overreaction (this is not to deny, of course, that Israel can choose not to overreact) in a way that ends up causing suffering to the Palestinian civilians among whom the militants take shelter. The death and the suffering of the civilian Palestinian population, in the short run, is a part of the Hamas strategy, since it increases the sympathy of the population with the movement’s aims. An Israeli overreaction also leads to the shattering of Israel’s moral legitimacy in its own struggle. In a democratic society with a citizen’s army, any erosion of the ethical foundation of its soldiers and its citizens is of immense political and strategic consequence.
- And, as a bit of light relief, it turns out that the MTV music awards were actually just an elaborate occult ritual. Well, it at least explains the existence of Lady GaGa…
Despite all the quadrennial talk of ‘change’ and the blitzkrieg ferocity of political debate, there’s always far more that stays the same in American politics than really changes. Lobbyists are still writing cheques, politicians still act out of calculation as much as conviction, and there’s always someone, somewhere, who wants to seccede from the Union.
Similarly, Presidents inherit most of the sins or virtues of their predecessors without seeking or succeeding to change them. Sometimes they are constrained by the Constitution, Congress or political expediency, sometimes they are too timid to attempt change and sometimes the policies they inherited just happen to work.
The continuity which underlies the frenzied war games of Washington D.C. is – or should be – a fairly basic observation for anyone acquainted with American politics. However, such is the level of discourse at the New Statesman, this fact that some Presidents can inherit the misdeeds of their predecessors has been treated as some profound front page revelation.
Just last month they published a piece by Mehdi Hasan comparing President Obama to George W. Bush and noting the areas in which the Democrat had failed to roll back some of the most egregious misuses of executive power: Guantanamo is still open, rendition still occurs, state secrecy is still forcefully invoked and those suspected of authorising the use of torture have not been prosecuted.
Hasan is at it again on his blog, fisking a ’silly’ and ‘pointless’ rebuttal by Ken Gude of the Centre for American Progress and speculating about why some people didn’t like his original piece.
The Obamaniacs didn’t like my take. They don’t want to hear about assassinations in Pakistan, renditions in the Middle East, torture in Gitmo — that all stopped when Bush left for Dallas, right? Wrong. In several areas but, in particular, in national security policy, Obama has picked up Bush’s baton and run with it.
Possibly. Alternatively, maybe being the kind of writer who’ll describe supporters of this President as ‘Obamaniacs’ means you’ll just irritate a whole bunch of people without knowing it. By throwing around this crude little put-down, Hasan is implying that support for the President can only come from ignorance or irrationality; we are either blind to the black marks against his Presidency or, drunk on hope juice, we blithely slur that we’ll love him whatever he does. This is really just thinly-disguised political misanthrope; it’s crass when Melanie Phillips uses it , and it doesn’t come across as any more sophisticated when it’s used by someone on the left.
Of course President Obama has made some mistakes and bad decisions. He’s been too timorous in restoring transparency & human rights to the field of national security, has heavily-diluted some of the more progressive planks of his election platform, has been lamentably slow in pushing for gay rights and America’s foreign policy is guided more by naked self-interest than at any time since Bush 41. But he’s also being blamed for a bunch of things that aren’t entirely his fault, and critics should remember that the President cannot get much through Congress (including healthcare & a climate change bill) without 60 votes in the Senate. If you don’t recognise how difficult that is, then your expectations at the start really were too high.
Furthermore, it’s completely possible to accept the existence of all those mistakes and still feel that the President has made a reasonably good start to his first term.
In less than a year, he’s ordered an end to the use of torture, passed a $787 billion stimulus package, voided most of the petty ’signing statements’ of his predecessor, expanded health care to around 4 million children, begun moves towards reducing America’s nuclear arsenal, instructed the EPA to start regulating carbon emissions, worked to repair relations around the world, announced plans for high-speed rail networks, reversed the previous administration’s prosecutorial stance on medical marijuana, ended the travel ban on people with HIV, overturned the global gag rule, pledged $900 million in aid to Gaza and $300 million to flood-ravaged Haiti, signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act, supported a UN statement calling for the decriminalisation of homosexuality, encouraged tougher financial regulation, proposed a decent budget and appointed a progressive to the Supreme Court.
Ultimately, America is in a better place than this time a year ago, and there is still scope for major achievements in the future. If none of this is enough to rid him of the comparisons to ‘Dubya’, my guess is you’re giving Bush far more credit than he deserves.
Although President Obama has yet to announce whether he’ll commit more troops to Afghanistan, I think we can be certain of one thing: that what is being agonised-over in Washington’s defence & foreign policy establishments isn’t a choice between war and peace, but rather what type of war they’d rather wage.
For a long time, the clear favourite seemed to be a counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy. COIN advocates have argued that military operations must be accompanied by civilian outreach, aid & some measure of state-building. For a counter-insurgency to work, the institutions upon which the civilian population relies have to be restored and defended, thereby thwarting an insurgent’s ability to erode the state’s legitimacy & authority. If you believe that this strategy can work in Afghanistan, then it is self-evident that General McChrystal should have all the troops he needs.
However, you should only defend the legitimacy of a state when you’re working with a legitimate government. With Afghanistan’s calamitous, bloody and fraudulent election, the withdrawal of Hamid Karzai’s competitor and the subsequent declaration that this ineffective crook was the ‘victor’, it is wishful thinking to regard this government as being in any way legitimate.
This matters because one of the favoured options for going forward in Afghanistan relies on protecting and strengthening the major population centres; trying to restore the link between the state and the people and providing greater safety & prosperity. However, as one military intelligence official recently told the NYT, “if we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan, and we are perceived as backing thugs, then we are just undermining ourselves.”
So Karzai’s stolen re-election cuts at the very heart of what the Obama administration is trying to achieve in Afghanistan. Any action it takes from this point on will be seen to reinforce a rotten, corrupt, powerless and fraudulent government which has not brought anywhere near enough safety, security or prosperity to a war-ravaged people. Under these conditions, I can’t see how our presence there will be anything but counter-productive. Maybe the conversation they should be having in the White House is about devising an exit strategy.
I don’t suppose there are many dignified ways of being sacked by your employer, but ‘Death By Bar Chart’ must be one of the least savoury ways to go. In his lecture to the Centre for Crime & Justice Studies, Professor David Nutt included this rather inconvenient illustration of the level of harm caused by a range of dangerous substances:
As you can see, Nutt’s table had alcohol and tobacco ranked as more harmful than a whole host of intoxicants, including cannabis, LSD and ecstacy. From this little illustration, a sprawl of tabloid stories was spawned and the government’s chief adviser on drugs had unconsciously secured his own sacking.
Given his stormy relationship with the Home Office, the sacking itself had an eye-rolling inevitability to it, but when you read the careful, methodical and rather unremarkable content of Nutt’s lecture, you’re really left wondering what all the bloody fuss was about.
It really is tame stuff. At no point does he call for legalisation, or even decriminalisation; he reminds his audience of Britain’s international obligations, and the role he played in securing extra funding for prevention campaigns & rehabilitation centres. Sure, there’s criticism of this government’s wrong-headed decision to reject his advice on cannabis classification, but he did so in an inquisitive, systematic way; even going so far as to produce a chart showing how advice from science was competing with pressure from many other parts of the body politic:
It’s the lecture of a man who is realistic about the social stigma of illegal drugs, particularly in the mainstream media, and is just frustrated by our inability to compare the harms of consumption with the harms caused by other, completely legal activities. And whilst this might come across to some as an implicit argument for decriminalisation, I’ll let the good professor speak to that.
I think we have to accept young people like to experiment – with drugs and other potentially harmful activities – and what we should be doing in all of this is to protect them from harm at this stage of their lives. We therefore have to provide more accurate and credible information. If you think that scaring kids will stop them using, you’re probably wrong. They are often quite knowledgeable about drugs and the internet has made access to information extremely simple. We have to tell them the truth, so that they use us as their preferred source of information. A fully scientifically-based Misuse of Drugs Act where drug classification accurately reflects harms would be a powerful educational tool. Using the Act in a political way to give messages other than those relating to relative harms undermines the Act and does great damage to the educational message.
In other words, young people can spot the bullshit being fed to them by our Majesty’s expenses-gobbling ex-potheads, and if you really want to have a more effective, mature drugs policy, you need to reform the Misuse of Drugs Act so that it accurately reflects harm. That’s actually a little too moderate for my liking, but would still be a dramatic improvement on the current mess we have.
For me, this sacking reflects just how hysterical this country has become in the drugs debate. I could accept and support Professor Nutt’s removal if he was shown to be a bad scientist or was misleading the public. But a government which sacks a scientist because it simply don’t like the science is operating out of such irrationality and fear that it doesn’t even deserve science advisers in the first place. Sadly, I suspect that’s what has happened here.
When set against the context of the number of children you’ll teach throughout a school year, incidents of violent, abusive or threatening behaviour are actually quite rare. The occasions when a pupil dreams up allegations of abuse by a teacher are rarer still, and the occasions when those false allegations result in disciplinary action or a criminal conviction are even more infrequent.
That said, everyone’s heard at least one horror story about a teacher who’s been the victim to a malicious allegation. It does happen, and more can be done at school, local authority & central government level to ensure that good and safe teachers are protected from career-destroying fairy tales. Ending the atrocious policy of isolating accused teachers from contact with their colleagues would be a good place to start.
So it’s not like I’m ambivelent to or dismissive of a problem which does prey on a lot of teachers’ minds, and the general thrust of Jenni Russell’s piece on the topic is generally correct. Still, it is a Jenni Russell piece, and so every article must contain at least one moment of eye-watering idiocy:
Classrooms are becoming more difficult to manage because the policy of inclusion means that children with emotional, mental or physical difficulties are being put into mainstream schools without the extra support they need to cope.
Whether Russell is basing this on any actual evidence is unclear, but unlikely. For a start, when the DCSF asked researchers to look into the outcomes of inclusion (pdf), they found no evidence – none – of any relationship between inclusion policies and educational attainment. This means that whilst inclusion does not positively affect levels of achievement in a school, nor does it adversely affect it.
I’m also at a loss to understand what ‘extra support’ for support children with social, emotional & behavioural difficulties teachers are being deprived of. Every school in the country has someone responsible for organising provision for children with special educational needs, and they will often work with pupils, teachers, parents, social workers & psychologists to help each child achieve their best level of learning. Could there be more support? Sure, but we’d all have to open our wallets a bit more.
Admittedly, what we have now is an imperfect situation; it’s always going to be imperfect when you have finite resources but an infinite number of potential problems. But I think it’s worth remembering where we were before the policy of inclusion, which Russell blames for getting ‘violent’ teachers sacked. Before the journey towards integration and inclusion, most children with special educational needs were educated separately and as a result suffered castigation and humiliation. This meant that kids without English as a first language wouldn’t interact with their English speaking peers; that vulnerable kids would grow up lacking the confidence to fully participate in society; that children with mild disabilities would be mercilessly taunted as ’spackers’.
If Russell wants to reverse this policy, shes’s welcome to go & vote for whoever will promise to do just that (the boys in blue might be a good bet). But the least she could do is be a bit more honest about what inclusion is, what it does, and that ending it won’t make teachers, pupils or the wider society any better off.
Personally, I think Barry Sheerman missed a trick when he accused Ed Balls of being ‘a bit of a bully ‘. If I were him, I would’ve asked whether he was also a bit incompetent.
The past few days have a number of bad headlines for the 14-19 Diplomas, the heavily-promoted new qualification which looked fine on Mike Tomlinson’s drawing board but has been blighted in no small part by this government’s own hubris.
In a story as striking for its gumption as its mendacity, the DCSF’s own advertisement for Diplomas has been banned by the Advertising Standards Authority for falsely claiming that the Advanced Diploma, which is meant to be the equivalent of 3.5 A Levels, ‘can get you into any university’. In fact, whilst there are plenty of universities which will accept your Advanced Diploma, there’s still very little enthusiasm for them in the elite Russell Group.
Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but I happen to think that lying to young people – and about a decision as important & consequential as what subject they choose to study – is a pretty grubby act, irrespective of whether it was done by design or out of error. And we wonder why youngsters don’t like authority figures.
The second story is less shocking, but further underscores how badly the government has mismanaged the rollout of this qualification. According to the Association of Colleges, many learners are finding their Diplomas very hard, meaning that some colleges are reluctant to accept lower ability students, effectively cutting them off from what was meant to become the ‘qualification of choice’ . Parts of the qualification may need an urgent re-write.
This is bad news for two reasons. First, those students with below average scores are exactly the kind of people the Diploma was meant to help. By mixing academic work with vocational & skills-based learning, young people who had previously struggled with A-Levels might’ve found a better route to achievement & employment.
Secondly, it reinforces what has been the Diploma’s most crippling problem; its lack of credibility. New qualifications are always treated with suspicion & resistance, and that probably doubled when Balls got over-excited and dreamed publicly that they’d replace GCSE & A-Levels. He would’ve been better off keeping his mouth shut.
Not only that, but his department grossly over-estimated the number of students who would start taking the Diploma, fell 20,000 short of its target, saw it criticised for lacking academic rigour, rejected by the CBI, and then encouraged FE colleges to set them up whilst they were suffering a funding crisis. It’s been accused of being too expensive , damned for struggling to teach students the three R’s, has been incredibly awkward to timetable and accused of creating ‘SatNav students’ .
For those who see the Diploma as a potentially brilliant way of encouraging aspiration & social mobility, the way Labour has handled its introduction is dismaying. In a field so heavily scrutinised, and filled with such a diverse array of stakeholders, it was never going to be easy to bring the Diploma into mainstream education. But the gap between government rhetoric and newspaper headlines has become so cavernous that the very future of this qualification is being put at risk. A qualification will live or die on its reception from three groups: employers, universities and students. Right now, the Diploma is so tangled up in bleak headlines that none of these groups seem easy to impress.
There are, of course, exceptions to this bleak outlook, and local authorities would do well to study what they’re doing right in places like Bolton, which seems to have adapted to it incredibly well. But despite the valiant exceptions, the Diploma is still in trouble, and its future in the coming Tory government seems uncertain .
What’s become clear is that if the Diplomas turn into a failure, the blame will not fall on the people co-ordinating them, or those who’re teaching or studying them. No, the blame will fall squarely on the Department for Children, Schools and Families and its bungling Secretary of State. If that happens, being branded a bully will really be the least of Ed Balls’ problems.
Someone’s Hope Juice is running low:
In an interview with Italian daily La Repubblica, King Abdullah II said the region’s hopes for peace were huge at the start of the Obama administration, but now sees the goal getting farther away.
“I’ve heard people in Washington talking about Iran, again Iran, always Iran,” Abdullah was quoted as saying.
“But I insist on, and keep insisting on the Palestinian question: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most serious threat to the stability of the region and the Mediterranean,” he added.
There are some things King Abdullah gets right in this interview. He’s correct, for instance, that Israel-Palestine is still the greatest threat to regional instabilty, and that whilst Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons might cause a frightening arms race, those seeking confrontation with Ahmadinejad really do elevate him to a status he doesn’t deserve. More importantly, whilst things have improved on the West Bank, the situation in the Gaza Strip remains a humanitarian emergency in a way that the Iran problem isn’t.
Abdullah’s warning that there is a ‘window of opportunity’ in the region which is threatening to close also happens to be an argument Marc Lynch & Brian Katulis made in a report for the Centre for American Progress, which calls on the Obama administration to build on its initial positive steps in the region by helping strengthen Palestinian civic institutions, take immediate steps to help in Gaza and conduct better public outreach to explain its objectives to the Palestinian and Israeli public.
I’m surprised, however, by the King’s disappointment at diplomatic developments (or lack of them); surely he’s lived long enough & seen enough American Presidents fail this challenge not to set his hopes too high. Personally, I think Obama’s initial moves were encouraging: his appointments of Clinton & Mitchell showed seriousness of purpose, his Cairo speech was a part of a necessary rebranding, and his repeated calls for a settlement freeze showed understanding of how serious an impediment that was to progress.
I guess the question of America’s effectiveness ultimately boils down to this: has the administration dealt with Israeli instransigence over settlements in the right way? Alas, that’s a pretty difficult thing to answer. The Obama administration could have been more forceful over settlements, and could even – as George H. W. Bush did in ‘91 – have made a settlement freeze a condition of Israel’s aid package. But it’s Congress, not the White House, which controls the aid Israel receives, and as Bush 41 found out when he tried to toughen America’s stance, Congress does not react well. As Stephen Zunes reminds us, in ‘91, Bush was excoriated for the proposal by Congressmen insistent that aid should come with no conditions. Some of the most prominent people attacking him were Democrats.
So if the Obama administration doesn’t feel there’s anything it can do at its end to force Israel into a settlement freeze, perhaps it can do something at the other end. There is evidence to suggest that Israelis are turning away from these settlements and regarding them more as an expensive liability than a necessity, and that Netanyahu’s government has a far tougher line than its own, frustrated population. Maybe the Obama administration could exploit this by practicing the kind of public outreach proposed by Lynch & Katulis.
Maybe what the administration needed in addition to the Cairo speech was an address in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Perhaps by restating his own commitment to Israel’s security & explaining why he believes the settlements put that security at risk, the U.S. could find a way of dislodging some of the stubbornness which is rife in that country’s political class.
This is all theoretical, of course, and there may be very good reasons why it’s a very bad idea. But I do think that more could be achieved if the administration sought to reach out to the Israeli public in the same way as they’ve reached out to people in the ‘Arab world’.
I think Jay-Z said it best when he sighed:
“Every step you take they remind you you’re ghetto”
Y’know, after he’d offended a whole bunch of people by dismissing Barack Obama as a ‘glossy Uncle Tom’, I had hoped that John Pilger would’ve buried his race card deep in the ground. Alas, the old fool just can’t help himself, as whenever the President enjoys some measure of success, Pilger feels a duty to remind us all what his skin colour is:
Obama, the smooth operator from Chicago via Harvard, was enlisted to restore what he calls “leadership” throughout the world. The Nobel Prize committee’s decision is the kind of cloying reverse racism that has beatified the man for no reason other than he is a member of a minority and attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he kills.
With apparently no self-awareness, Pilger then goes on to mock the ‘Call of Obama’, which is “not unlike a dog whistle” to attract “the besotted and boneheaded”. Oh, there’s certainly a dog whistle here, but it’s not being blown by the President. No, it’s a whistle which is more often blown by the birthers, troofers, tea-baggers, hacks and half-wits who lay waste to our political discourse. It’s depressing, if unsurprising, to see Pilger join their number.
Of course I could wax lyrical about the man’s early journalistic exploits; his brave, penetrative, excoriatingly human portrayals of war and injustice. But the reason I won’t do that is because he seems bent on wrecking his own legacy. In the past year, Pilger has transformed into the Melanie Phillips of the left: overwrought, resentful, misanthropic, inaccurate, conspiratorial and, ultimately, totally irrelevant.
If you’ve been paying any sort of attention to the protracted, furious and utterly miserable fight over healthcare in the U.S. Congress, you probably won’t be holding out too much hope that this same body can agree to tough measures to combat climate change. Until yesterday, that is, when hope was restored by a quite unusual source:
First, we agree that climate change is real and threatens our economy and national security. That is why we are advocating aggressive reductions in our emissions of the carbon gases that cause climate change. We will minimize the impact on major emitters through a market-based system that will provide both flexibility and time for big polluters to come into compliance without hindering global competitiveness or driving more jobs overseas.
Whilst to most eyes the above paragraph is a fairly unremarkable, bog-standard political position, what makes it incredibly significant is that it was co-authored by Lindsey Graham, the Republican Senator for South Carolina. In an op-ed which appeared in yesterday’s New York Times, Graham & Democrat John Kerry spelled out their commitment to reaching a deal on climate change and pushing it through the Senate.
It’s the partnership between Kerry & Graham which gives me hope that an agreement can be reached. Graham is a hardcore Republican who doesn’t deviate too often from his party’s platform. But despite his trenchant conservatism, he is rational and seems increasingly eager to talk his own party out of its extremism – even to the point of publicly slapping-down Glenn Beck. Crucially, he also has power and influence on the rest of his party, and putting his name on any legislation could encourage the moderate Republicans in the Senate (all two of them) to follow suit.
It’s very early days, of course, and a speedy resolution to the health care impasse is vital for a deal to be reached before the mid-term elections. Still, it’s one to watch, I think.
You might well have seen this already, but last week’s Guardian ran a survey of the attitudes of teenage boys and found that, in spite of the caricature, our young lads happen to be ambitious & mostly happy in their school/family/social lives.
What did shock me, however, was seeing the extent to which this caricature dominates the media being proven with numbers:
In the survey, conducted by Echo, 78% of teenage boys said adults had a higher opinion of teenage girls than boys. An Echo survey earlier this year, commissioned by Women in Journalism, examined the language used to describe teenage boys in the media. The most common word was “yobs” (which appeared 591 times over a year), followed by thugs (254 times), sick (119), feral (96) and hoodie (60). More than 60% of the stories about teenage boys concerned crime, and 90% of these showed them in a bad light. Boys interviewed by the Guardian for a report in tomorrow’s Weekend magazine said they felt demonised by press and politicians.
Is there any wonder?
I’ll quit this issue soon, but there was one other part of Gove’s speech last week which I found pretty irritating:
The body responsible for writing the curriculum – the QDCA – spends more than one hundred million pounds every year – and after hiring an army of consultants, squadrons of advisers and regiments of bureaucrats they still wrote a syllabus for the Second World War without any place for Winston Churchill.
I guess it’s always possible that he’s right. Maybe there’s some secret document doing the rounds, written by scores of ‘unaccountable quangocrats’ which does indeed remove Winston Churchill from the history curriculum. But it would have to be a secret document, because when you hop over to the QCDA’s website, you’ll actually find quite a few references to Britain’s Greatest Ever Tory. He’s mentioned here, here and here, in these guidance notes for teachers and, rather inconveniently for Mr Gove, in this rather unwieldy PDF (p22):
A world study after 1900: A study of some of the significant individuals, events and developments from across the twentieth century, including the two World Wars, the Holocaust, the Cold War, and their impact on Britain, Europe and the wider world.
[...]
Examples for 13: a world study after 1900 Individuals: Winston Churchill; Adolf Hitler; Joseph Stalin; Benito Mussolini; Franklin Roosevelt; Mahatma Gandhi; Mao Zedong; Martin Luther King.
So what obscure document have I dredged up for this snidey little ‘gotcha!’ post? A little thing called the National Curriculum.
Now, I don’t really expect Michael Gove to have read the damn thing – I haven’t even done that myself yet, and I’m expecting to teach. But I do think it’d be a nice if he stopped telling other people who haven’t read it that hundreds of millions of pounds are being squandered to remove Churchill from classrooms.
This isn’t to say there’s uniform agreement on Sir Winston’s prominance in history classrooms, and I happen to think that people should be able to disagree in good faith without being accused of being either elitist or practicing ‘dumbing down’. Nor should it detract from the points in my earlier post that developing skills should take greater prominance over factual recall.
But I would hope that the least we could expect from a wannabe Secretary of State was having a decent fact checker on his staff. Perhaps we should set it as homework.
Given where I am and what I’ve decided to do with my life, it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’ve been casting an apprehensive eye over Michael Gove’s plans for education reform. Like many people, I’m not exactly reassured.
I suppose it’s worth bearing in mind that there’s a difference between the harmless conference season patter Gove practices now and the more mundane – but massively consequential – steps he’ll take as Secretary of State. On arriving at the DCSF, he’ll hopefully be informed that most schools do, in fact, have school uniforms, that classes are often set by ability and that for all the horrid neglect of Winston Churchill in history lessons, kids are at least not being taught that WWII was won single-handedly by a smilin’ Joe Stalin. What plays well in the papers and to a conference crowd often gets forgotten or watered-down when the realities of government actually set in, and that probably holds true with these proposals as well.
But what I’ve found interesting – and very frustrating – about the past week has been what it’s revealed about Gove’s narrow, straightjacketed view of what learning is for, and how it’s best achieved.
For instance, take this list of topics Gove wants kids to be taught in history lessons. All our Greatest Brit hits are on there: the Roman invasion, 1066, the Bill of Rights, the Napoleonic Wars, the Great Reform Act, both world wars (with particular emphasis on the awesomeness of a former Tory PM!) and something rather vaguely called “Modern history to the present”.
Now, there’s nothing at all wrong with having knowledge about these or any other areas of British (or even – gasp! – non-British) history, and it’d come in extremely handy if your son or daughter ever wanted to work in a museum or on Time Team. However, the emphasis here is on what is taught, when it should really be about what is learnt.
A few years ago, former Ofsted chief inspector Mike Tomlinson produced a report offering a vision for quite far-reaching reform of 14-19 education in which GCSEs and A-Levels would be replaced by a range of different diplomas. The suggestions were mostly ignored by the government but for two key areas: a range of diploma lines would be rolled-out (albeit very slowly), and the whole curriculum would pay much greater attention to developing skills.
It is this ’skills agenda’ which is currently writ large on the education landscape. Under greater competition from developing economies than ever before, Tomlinson was just one of many people to identify the need for children to develop a generic, transferable set of personal, learning & thinking skills which could equip them to thrive in a jobs market that none of us can predict. The accumulation of knowledge is still important, but developing a child’s innate ability to acquire knowledge for themselves is equally vital.
These aims aren’t ‘fashionable nonsense’ dreamt up by an ‘educational establishment’ hobbled on ‘political correctness’; they were devised with the express wish of sustaining – nay, revitalising – the economic competitiveness of UK PLC.
Does the Conservative Party share these aims? If this prescriptive, restrictive list of history topics is at all representative of how the Tories view teaching, I would assume they don’t. It’s a list that reeks of rote learning; of cramming hundreds of tiny little facts in a child’s head, with less time to help them learn how to think, argue, critique, or imagine. What this kind of thing is really about is satisfying our mystifying fetish to test, test, test children into automatons.
I could, of course, be reading too much into a little list which was passed onto a curious journalist, and the Tories might be fully committed to allowing the skills agenda to flourish. Nonetheless, it’s important to ask these questions because Gove’s attack on educators was so broad, so uncharitable and so hyperbolic that it acted as though the past 10 years have been nothing but a long line of ‘fashionable nonsense’, ‘political correctness’ and miserable failure.
Such thinking would be deluded. Labour’s not got a great track record on education, but it has got some key decisions (Every Child Matters, promoting inclusion, developing skills) correct, and it’s always difficult to overturn good policy. Besides, times and attitudes have changed, teaching practices have altered, ways of thinking about teaching & learning have transformed and I suspect that Gove’s apparent intention to revisit the flawed old practices of the past will be met with even greater resistance than he currently expects. He may find, as another history-bound Tory might’ve said, that the teachers are not for turning.
Meet Lady Godiva. Liked nakedness. Hated taxes. Loved by Coventry.
Hello,
Not sure if you’ll remember me, but once upon a time I ran a semi-regular blog about various Matters Of Great Importance (Which Only I Am Right About). Then the updating stopped as I moved to the West Midlands to learn about how to get people much younger than me to do some learning.
Anyway, I’m still in the West Midlands, but will try to stop Being Rubbish and get back into the swing of regular updates. As I’ve said earlier, the posts will probably get much briefer, and there’ll be a fair bit more link dumping, but at least you’ll be able to see different things if you’ve got so much time on your hands that you visit every day.
And contrary to everything I’ve just said, the next post is pretty long. I know, typical...
As demotions go, it could’ve been worse. Whilst Alan Duncan won’t be a member of the cabinet if a Prime Minister Cameron names him Minister for Prisons, the role is still massively important if the Tories are serious about mending their ‘broken society’. With a population of over 80,000, prisons groaning under the weight of over-crowding, and a pathetic rehabilitation rate which means we waste much of the $4bn spent annually, Duncan would oversee an aspect of the criminal justice system in which Labour has been a determined, belligerent, costly failure.
Of course, quite whether he’s up up to the task is a topic for debate; reading some of the assessments from fellow Tories gives the sense that he’s an ineffective, gaffe-prone hack who shouldn’t be trusted to run any department. Granted, as a minister, Mr Duncan would have some supervision (likely Dominic Grieve), but his rather rapid fall from Shadow Secretary of State for Business to a lowly shadow minister doesn’t inspire confidence, and when we have a prison estate which – by the Tories’ own admission – is in a state of crisis, you really want someone competent at the helm.
In the past few years, the Tories have come to resemble Jekyl & Hyde on issues of crime & punishment. It seems all Mr Hyde Chris Grayling has learnt from Labour’s successive Home Secretaries is how well the odd grubby, attention-grabbing gimmick (the ’21st century clip ’round the ear’; getting the state to steal teenagers’ mobile phones) plays in the papers, and I would hope that a presumptive Secretary of State would use his time more productively than coming up with clunky analogies to hip American TV shows.
But what’s gone under-reported is that the Tories’ plans for prison reform aren’t too bad at all; they’re sane, rational and seem focused on achieving long-term goals rather than short-term opportunism. Clearly influenced by the work done by Iain Duncan Smith’s Centre for Social Justice, many of the proposals laid out in this document [PDF], if implemented well, could take the prison service in a better direction than the one it’s currently heading in.
The Tories claim that reducing the rate of recidivism will be one of the top priorities, and will create financial incentives for prisons which reduce reoffending, make more money available for rehabilitation programmes and make prison governors accountable for the actions of prisoners once they’ve been released. They accept that whilst new prisons will be necessary to end overcrowding, the warehousing of prisoners in ‘titan’ jails isn’t the way to go. Instead, they propose to build smaller, local prisons and sell off some of the crumbling old dead wood. On top of this, more freedom will be given to prison governors, more opportunities will be offered for third sector agencies to work with inmates, and for charities to help with education & drug rehabilitation. The Tories claim that their proposals would rejuvinate prisons as places of “education, hard work, rehabilitation and restoration.”
Obviously, you can’t just take their word for it; even Tony Blair sounded strong on ‘the causes of crime’ when he was in opposition, and when Labour got into power the prison population soared. Much will depend on budgetary constraints caused by the deficit, whether they can resist the impulse to allow expansion of private sector prisons, and avoid the urge to respond to rising crime with more draconian sentencing. I also don’t think the goals for reducing the prison population are ambitious enough; under the Tories’ plans, the population would still rise to 94,000 by 2020, and whilst that may be an improvement on the projected 100,000 if things stay as they are, it still means locking up around 10,000 more people than we are right now. For me, more needs to be done to find tough alternatives to short (and mostly fruitless) custodial sentences.
That said, this is still much better than anything Labour’s offered recently. If they do what they promise – and if Mr Duncan can’t find new & innovative ways of screwing up – there’s always a chance that it might lead to better outcomes for some prisoners, and slightly safer communities for the rest of us.
Image: Strangeways Prison in Manchester, by Flickr user phil.d (Creative Commons)
