How not to communicate with parents, part 2

A while back, I had a bit of a go at my kid's school and its use of social media.  To be fair, it does do something to do with social media at least approximately right. The school's Home School Agreement is worded fairly reasonably:

"Respect the school through the individual and joint use of social media including the posting of pictures following a school event."

"Respect" is a bit ambiguous and weaselly, but you could interpret this to mean "Use social media responsibly, don't post pictures of other people's kids, or blurt out confidential information better discussed with staff in private, or say anything defamatory - in short, we expect you to behave like a reasonable adult", in which case, fair enough.

At least it's better than the Home School Agreements some other schools try to enforce. For example:

"Parents will ... Not make reference to the school on social networking sites."

There are things a school would quite rightly want to control - I've already mentioned a few examples. But a social networking ban on mentioning the school that your child goes to, ever, under any circumstances? Is it just me, or isn't that a bit unreasonable?

Parent: "Little Topsy is loving Year Four at Sunnybrook Community School* and doing really well!"

School: "You're in breach of your Home School Agreement. Don't let this happen again!"

Parent: "So proud of young Timmy for winning the Sunnybrook Community School inter-house athletics cup!"

School: "We warned you..."

* A name I just made up - any resemblance to any actual school of that name, if one exists, is entirely coincidental.

"We have heard rumblings"

It's not my place to tell other people how to do their jobs, but what the hell. Here's a template for schools, showing how not to communicate with parents:

"Re: staffing for next year. All staff are fully qualified and experienced teachers who we check carefully. We have heard rumblings from parents who may have concerns. Please come and speak to Mrs [redacted] so you can be reassured. No negative comments on here please. We always endeavour to listen and work with you. Thank you [redacted]."

"Why don't we just put any information that parents might need to hear in one place, on the school website?"

"Because we're down with the kids; we're all about social media, sharing and interactivity! Let's create a Facebook group and use that to keep in touch with parents! They'll love it! They can tell us how great we are, share cute photos and everything!"

"But what about parents who don't do Facebook?"

"La, la, la, not listening!"

"And if you invite people to interact, doesn't that create a systemic risk of people sharing things you'd prefer they spoke privately to staff about? Isn't the result just curated, fake interactivity, that pretends to welcome sharing and feedback, but patronises parents like naughty five year olds if they say anything that isn't positive?"

"BORING!!!"

For the record, I haven't used Facebook in about a decade and don't know the specifics of what the parents in question had been "rumbling" about. I just think the whole set-up is asking for trouble, as well as being annoying to non-Facebook users like me.

People shouldn't need a Facebook account in order to do important things like keeping in touch with their children's schools.

The Church of Warhammer (now with added dinosaurs! )

I knew that the creationist mythos included dinosaurs on board Noah's Ark. What I didn't know was how the creationists thought that the mighty beasts which got saved from the Big Wet were subsequently wiped out - until I came across this:

...they [creationists] know the dinosaurs disappeared in The Flood, except for the few that were on the big wooden boat, who went extinct when medieval knights hunted them down.

Really? Knights and dinosaurs? Yep, creationist Kent Hovind has confirmed that humans were busy hunting dinosaurs ("dragons") into the Middle Ages and beyond.

This notion would really have appealed to the six year old me. I had plastic dinosaurs. I had plastic toy knights. If I'd known of Kent Hovind's scenario, knights and dinos would definitely have fought one another for possession of the dinner table and sand pit.

It may be nonsense, but if your sole aim is to get the little ones into church, tabletop battles involving knights versus dinosaurs might not be such a stupid idea.

Give me the child until the age of seven years and I will give you the man.

Foxy gentleman hosts dinner party

In Beatrix Potter's classic childrens' story, the naive Jemima Puddle-duck was befriended by an elegantly-dressed gentleman with sandy whiskers, who kindly agreed to provide her with a safe place to hatch her eggs. Jemima laid nine eggs in her benefactor's house and "The foxy gentleman admired them immensely." Then, the fox invited the duck to dinner - what could possibly go wrong?

"I intend to give you a treat." [said the foxy gentleman] "Let us have a dinner-party all to ourselves!

"May I ask you to bring up some herbs from the farm-garden to make a savoury omlette? Sage and thyme, and mint and two onions, and some parsley. I will provide lard for the stuff - lard for the omlette," said the hospitable gentleman with the sandy whiskers.

Jemima Puddle-duck was a simpleton: not even the mention of sage and onions made her suspicious.

She went round the farm-garden, nibbling off snippets of all the different sorts of herb that are used for stuffing roast duck.

Next week, another well-dressed, hospitable gentleman will be playing the host. "Prime Minister David Cameron has said he wants to put tackling corruption at the "top of the international agenda" ahead of a London summit on the issue."

Presumably he's counting on the rest of us having the duck-sized brains needed to trust a man whose family fortune has been squirrelled away in an offshore tax haven, whose party is largely funded by City firms which operate by hiding their own wealth in tax havens and advising their well-heeled clients how to do the same and whose country lies at the epicentre of a multi-trillion dollar globe-spanning tax avoidance scam. As a helpful article entitled "The world's 15 biggest tax havens" puts it :

Aaaaand the real #1?
Clue: It’s not Switzerland.

If the UK and its satellite secrecy jurisdictions were counted together, it would be number one on this list by an absolute mile. So while you might hear politicians in London crying foul about how other countries are acting as tax havens, the lion’s share of them sit under the British Crown. 

Or, to use another poultry-based analogy, Mr Fox is hosting a summit on how to make hen houses more secure. For every Jemima Puddle-duck must have a well turned-out, plausible-looking benefactor.

Academy schools - unfit for purpose

In 2000, David Blunkett rolled out a new idea - Academy Schools. These were supposed to improve the lifetime chances of children in poorly-performing schools by replacing such schools with better Academy schools, so that all those pupils would receive a better education. Here's how the new initiative was reported at the time:

The academies will usually replace failing or under-achieving schools and their sponsors will be expected to have plans to improve the education of all the pupils displaced by the change....

...There will be no single blueprint for the academies, but the aim will be "to improve pupil performance and break the cycle of low expectations".

By 2016, the project has experienced more mission creep than the US military in the Vietnam War, with the current government committing itself to converting all schools - good, bad and indifferent - into academies for reasons which are supposedly pressing, but which nobody has yet clearly, or convincingly, explained.

Although the full scope and purpose of the Academies' expanded mission is unclear, we can safely assume that it still includes the thing academies were created to do - turn around failing schools.

Now something that calls itself "The Centre for High Performance"  (a  collaboration  between senior faculties at the Universities of Oxford and Kingston) has come up with some very helpful guidance on how to successfully accomplish the core mission of Academies, with a report entitled "How to turn around a failing school." The report suggests eight action points. Some of these consist of pointing out the bleeding obvious (apparently, failing schools could try to "Improve teaching capability" - no shit, Sherlock).

But the seriously interesting piece of advice is point four, which reads:

4. Student quality - exclude poor quality students, improve admissions and acquire a local primary school

To recap - an initiative which was introduced to help students stuck in failing schools, by replacing poor schools with better ones, now apparently exists to help poor schools improve their performance by excluding the sort of students the system was created to help in the first place. A system which was set up to promote inclusion is now supposed to operate by excluding pupils.

I said that this guidance is really helpful and I mean it. It is an extremely helpful piece of evidence for anybody arguing that the Academy schools project has not only failed in its own terms, but is doing the precise opposite of what it was set up to do and has turned into a bureaucratic nightmare straight out of Kafka, a vast, unaccountable machine, relentlessly grinding on in pursuit of its own obscure purposes, systematically chewing up and spitting out the unfortunate people it was ostensibly set up to serve.

As the person running the machine, it's Nicky Morgan's responsibility to hit the big red "stop" button when it starts malfunctioning this badly. Instead, she's yanking on the lever that makes it go faster. Negligence on this scale ought to be a resigning matter.

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Obedient little soldiers

An interesting perspective on the history of education from Matt Ridley:

The economic historian Stephen Davies dates the modern form of the school to 1806, the year when Napoleon defeated Prussia. Stung by its humiliation, the Prussian state took the advice of its leading intellectual, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and devised a programme of compulsory and rigorous education, the purpose of which was to produce obedient soldiers who would not run away in battle. It was these Prussian schools that introduced many of the features we now take for granted. There was teaching by year group rather than ability, which made sense if the aim was to produce military recruits rather than rounded citizens. There was formal pedagogy, in which children sat at rows of desks in front of standing teachers, rather than, say, walking around together in the ancient Greek fashion. There was the set school day, punctuated by the ringing of bells. There was a predetermined syllabus, rather than open ended learning. There was the habit of doing several subjects a day, rather than sticking to one subject.

I can see how you might want to retain some of this stuff - especially in the early years, there's a lot to be said for a predetermined syllabus. You'd think, though, by 2016, everybody would at least be on board with the idea that schools should be in the business of turning out rounded citizens, not obedient cannon fodder, although I'm by no means convinced that we've got rid of the people who see education as a species of drill, rather than the way we pass thinking skills on to the next generation.

Conspiracy theory of the day

According to a recent headline "Education reforms have brought 'chaos' to classrooms, says NUT leader." From the point of view of Christine Blower, most other education professionals, parents and, most importantly, children, Nicky Morgan, Michael Gove and every other destructively meddling reforming education secretary, going back at least to David Blunkett* (who first rolled out the notion that academy schools would somehow solve the "problem" of "bog-standard" comprehensives), have all been doing a terrible job.

But you could also say they've been making an excellent job of furthering elite interests by keeping the plebs demoralised, ignorant and tractable -  "...the political establishment decided that the best way to keep the British** public passive and servile would be to systematically deny them the thinking skills they need to see through the right-wing political propaganda they're being drip-fed..."

Conspiracy theory? Well, Hanlon's razor warns against attributing to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. But on the other hand, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you...

"Conspiracy theory" can also be used as a snarl word to dismiss a valid worry that a group is up to something. A good example would be the discovery of COINTELPRO. People such as the Black Panthers and Abbie Hoffman suspected that the FBI had a covert program dedicated to tracking, discrediting and destroying them; however, they were largely written off as paranoid radicals finding a way to blame the man for their failures. (All sane people knew J. Edgar Hoover would never do anything such as these freaks were claiming!) Then, lo and behold, in 1971 the "FBI Burglars" released documents mentioning COINTELPRO. This in turn led journalists to investigate and expose the program and prove that the radicals were right.

Anyway, it's just a theory - use your own critical thinking skills to decide whether cock-up or conspiracy best explains our ongoing educational catastrophe. Right, Brian?

Brian: You've got to think for yourselves. You're all individuals.
[Crowd, together]: Yes, we're all individuals!
Brian: You're all different.
[Crowd, together]: Yes, we're all different!
Lone voice in crowd: I'm not...
[Crowd, together]: Shhh!

*The Tories have the most terrible record on educational "reform", but New Labour deserves a dishonourable mention for cobbling together such Frankenstein's monsters as academy schools and student-paid tuition fees in the first place.

** "English" if we're talking forced academisation. 

Ceci n'est pas un jouet

The free gift that the people at the Clarks shoe shop gave us when we bought The Offspring's latest pair of school shoes. Maybe, even with the addition of a violent orange pom-pom and promotional branding for the latest Disney movie, a novelty pen is NOT A TOY. Maybe it's just another ABOMINATION.

But it's the thought that counts, so thanks for the abomination, folks.

Zeppelin versus camels

Just look at this magnificent thing. A poster for one of the most insanely ludicrous movies never made, Hammer Films' unmade classic, Zeppelin V. Pterodactyls.* As a pre-pubescent kid, I thrilled to One Million Years B.C. and The Blue Max at an age when the heaving embonpoints of Raquel Welch and Ursula Andress were nothing but boring interruptions to the far more exciting business of stop-motion dino action and death-defying stunts in replica Fokker triplanes. My little head would have exploded at the sheer awesomeness of a planned film about dinosaurs** and daredevil flying aces ... AND Zeppelins, had I known of such a thing.*** It would have taken more than a few heaving embonpoints to rain on that parade.

This poster briefly popped into my head on holiday this summer, as I was enjoying a coffee and a waffle in a pavement cafe in Tønder, in the south of Denmark. Why? I'd seen a sign for a Zeppelin museum and was wondering, vaguely, what such a thing was doing in Denmark (albeit very close to the German border). We had other things to do that day and a long-ish drive back to where we were staying, so I never investigated at the time and forgot all about it. But just the other day, the thought popped back into my head and I googled it. It turns out that there was a very good reason for such a museum being there. Not only was Tønder once a home to Zeppelins, but  Tønder's Zeppelins were themselves the target of the world's first ever successful attack by aircraft flown from an aircraft carrier, carried out some 23 years before Pearl Harbour.

What were Zeppelins doing in Denmark? Well, that goes back to the interminable dynastic/territorial squabble between the Danish crown and the German Confederation, which Brits remember chiefly for launching Lord Palmerston's most quotable quip ("Only three people have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business—the Prince Consort, who is dead—a German professor, who has gone mad—and I, who have forgotten all about it"). Anyway, the Schleswig part of the business was settled - for more than half a century, anyway - by the Second Schleswig War of 1864, when Prussian and Austrian troops occupied the disputed territory. The subsequent Treaty of Vienna designated Schleswig as part of the German Confederation.

So Tønder, in North Schleswig became part of the German Confederation, then, from 1871, part of the new nation of Germany. And that's how it stayed until after the German defeat in World War One. Then, after centuries of people having their identity determined by the outcome of inhertance disputes between various monarchs and aristocrats, the people**** who lived there got a say. A plebiscite was held in 1920 and the locals of North Schleswig (or South Jutland, as the Danes call it), voted to return to Denmark (South Schleswig voted to remain German).

Anyhow, in 1918, the then German town of Tønder (Tondern in German) was doing its small bit for pan-European carnage by hosting a Zeppelin base with three airship hangers, run by the Imperial German Navy. By that stage in the war Zeppelins had been superseded as bombers by heavier-than-air R-planes, but were still being used for naval patrols. On the other side of the North Sea, the Brits had been doing their bit by adding a flight deck to the battlecruiser HMS Furious, so creating the world's first aircraft carrier. The Royal Navy chose the Tondern Zeppelin base as Furious's first target.

HMS Furious, complete with flight deck and U-boat-confusing dazzle camouflage

A first attempt to attack the Tondern Zeppelins, in June 1918, had to be called off due to bad weather. Furious and her escort set sail for the German North Sea coast again on July 17th. She was carrying a small contingent of Sopwith Camels, fitted with bomb racks.

Ship's Camels on board Furious

In the early morning of July 19th, seven Camels flew off Furious's flight deck, in two waves of three and four aircraft, bound for Tondern. Bombs from the first wave of three aircraft hit the largest airship hanger, setting Zeppelins L.54 and L.60 on fire. The second wave's bombs destroyed a captive balloon in another hanger.

Zeppelin L 54, outside its hanger in Tondern/Tønder

Although this was a hazardous operation which destroyed two Zeppelins, casualties on both sides were light, especially when compared with the numbers being routinely slaughtered in this conflict. Total casualties consisted of four Germans injured and one British pilot dead. None of the planes was able to return to Furious and land (the ship had an aft flight deck for landings, but these hadn't been perfected and pilots were expected to ditch in the sea and await rescue); one pilot experienced engine trouble and never made it to Tondern, but was recovered after ditching his plane near the fleet. Three pilots judged that they hadn't enough fuel to make it back and landed in neutral Denmark. The other three headed back for the fleet. Two of them ditched near the fleet and were recovered but one, Lieutenant Walter A "Toby" Yuelett, DFC, was never seen again and probably drowned after running out of fuel and being forced to ditch early.

It all sounds terribly primitive and quaint now, but it was deadly serious and high-tech at the time. A modern equivalent would be killer drones with Hellfire missiles (although your modern drone operator doesn't face the same physical dangers that killed Lieutenant Yuelett). In fact, the Tondern raid would have seemed even more cutting-edge - in 2015, the military has been using armed drones for nearly a decade and a half, but the Tondern raid came less than year after the first ever successful flight of an aircraft from the deck of a moving ship (the Furious). Rather than old-hat killer drones, the modern analogue would be something really novel, like the drone-based biryani delivery system currently being trialled in Milton Keynes (or its weaponised equivalent), which may, coincidentally, be the wierdest high-concept idea since Zeppelins V. Pterodactyls.

*First seen (by me, at least) here. Bless you, Internet.

**Yes, I know pterodactyls and dinosaurs are different things. OK, were different things. Shut up.

***Easy with the nostalgia, though - having just taken the Offspring to see Inside Out, I have to admit that the sort of family entertainment that got me going at his age was a good deal less nuanced, sophisticated and thought-provoking than some of the stuff that's being specifically made for kids today.

****I presume that people of both genders got a say, as - according to Wikipedia - Danish women got the vote in 1915 and their German sisters were enfranchised on the founding of the Weimar Republic in 1919.

War on three fronts

Apparently, The War On Drugs and the War On Terror worked out so spiffingly that the Tories are up for yet another war. 'Coasting schools will be taken over by the government as part of an “an all-out war on mediocrity”' enthuses the Torygraph.

Well, I suppose that controversially declaring yourself to be Against Bad Things is marginally less idiotic than Michael Gove's logic-defying project to make all children above average. 

At this rate, the stupid party might one day move towards something approaching sentience, although not fast enough to get there before going extinct.

Non-existence fails to dent Santa rally

Despite a Norfolk vicar's shocking attempt to murder the Confidence Fairy by revealing to the assembled boys and girls at a school carol concert that Father Christmas isn't real, Santa has continued to rally in Asian markets.

In other news, market analyst Margaret McPhee has traumatised an audience of young traders by revealing the continuing non-existence of profitability at seasonal gift-deliver, Amazon. She was quick to apologise for her 'off-the-cuff remarks,' after being heavily criticised for 'destroying the innocence, fun and magic of disruptive innovation.'

My first public relations campaign

Interesting factoid from the "what the papers say" slot on the radio news this morning. According to the Mail, the scouting movement no longer requires its leaders to know how to tie knots, although it has introduced a slew of new activity badges, including one for public relations. Despite appearing in the Mail, this fact turns out to be true, as a visit to the Scout Association's own web site confirms:

Find out about local media outlets (for example: radio, TV, newspapers and online opportunities). Make contact with your local media development manager to consider coverage of a positive news story or feature connected with local Scouting.

There's something depressingly zeitgeisty about the demotion of an actual skill in favour of teaching kids to manipulate other people's perceptions.  Not that I'd like to see the public relations badge scrapped - its very existence creates a teachable moment. Just turn it round and give the badge to kids who have learnt that public relations (puffery, in Oldspeak) exists and that, with good information hygiene, it's possible to separate it from useful information and discard it.

This would be a lot closer to the socially responsible ethos the Scout Association aspires to than just giving youngsters a badge for producing yet more promotional bullshit in a world that's already drowning in it.

The good news is that a few people are actively encouraging young people to think more critically about public relations. Even better, the seeds of doubt are already there in our popular culture. I always thought that The Matrix was ridiculously hyped, at least as a film for post-adolescent audiences, but as an age-appropriate parable about whose reality you're living in, I hope it's prompting a few healthy doubts in those youngsters no longer engaged in learning to tie knots.

The monetisation of everything, continued

Shortly afterwards, it was reported that the Academies Enterprise Trust, one of the largest chains, was planning to outsource all non-teaching posts in its 77 schools to a profit-making organisation. In the education investment community, this is known as ‘chore, not core’.

Matthew Bennett, at the LRB blog

'Chore, not core.' So there you have it - if you're doing a non-teaching job in a school, you're a waste of oxygen, at least until some profiteer can figure out a way of leeching a revenue stream from your worthless existence. That's what we're up against.

If you tolerate this your children will be next.

Semi-disposable self-assembly schools

One last piece of Gove-kicking, then I'll be done:

...we looked to social democratic Sweden for reform. Fifteen years ago the Swedes decided to challenge declining standards by breaking the bureaucratic stranglehold over educational provision and welcome private providers into the state system.

Former education secretary (boy, did I enjoy writing that 'former') Michael Gove, writing in the Indy in 2008

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that these reforms were a long way from delivering an Ikea-style Swedish success story:

After Sweden's students tumbled in the latest Pisa rankings, a new review suggests that due to a rigorous schedule of testing elsewhere, the students were too tired to care.

The Teacher and Learning International Survey (TALIS) asked teachers in OECD countries about their views on their jobs.
Sweden landed at the very bottom when it came to rating a career in teaching. Only France and Slovakia had worse results. Only one in twenty Swedish teachers thinks that their profession is appreciated in Sweden.
The average for OECD nations was 31 percent, and the highs were found in Malaysia and Sweden's neighbour Finland, where 59 percent of respondents said their job was highly valued.

The majority of Swedish high-school students can't work out simple sums, researchers have warned after grading a math skill test taken by 1,500 pupils in Sweden. They were stumped that teachers had not raised the alarm.

Some people have suggested that people who don't like Michael Gove's reforms are suffering from an irrational 'Goveophobia.' Personally, I don't think I'm being irrational in rejecting his obsession with competition and rankings, especially when Sweden, his model for a competition and ranking-obsessed system seems to be losing the international "competition" for educational excellence and to be tumbling down the international rankings that he values so highly.

Whereas neighbouring Finland, a country that's doing more or less the opposite of everything Michael Gove would like to see in education, has fared consistently better* (Finland has a publicly funded, comprehensive school system with no league tables, no artificial market and phony "choice", no constant testing and streaming, no grammar schools or academies, almost no private schools and the kids are taught by teachers who must have a master’s degree and who belong to strong trade unions). Perhaps the happy Finns could be even more "competitive" if they adopted the Chinese 9-hour-test-drill-and-kill-suicide model, so I suppose it's a small mercy that Gove got all starry-eyed about Sweden rather than China. Let's just hope that his successor, Nicky Morgan, hasn't been taking her educational inspiration from The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

*It may have dropped a few PISA points, from its position at the very top of the table in recent years, but Finland still seems to be doing way better than Sweden.

The evil that men do

So, farewell then, Michael Gove, education secretary and master of paradox. But it's way too early to hang up the bunting, with his undead legacy still blindly rampaging round the nation's schools:

...Gove's unhealthy idea that you don't need to be trained in how children learn in order to teach. It assumes that anyone with a vast pile of money must know best, about anything. Gove is was almost as pathetically starry-eyed about the ultra-rich as Tony Blair.

And what happens when the millionaires' schools fail? When there's no longer any local organisation to pick up the pieces, then the education secretary, Gove Morgan, must do it. Schools haven't been privatised; they've been nationalised, with Gove Morgan as the ultimate court of appeal and provider of most of the money for schools in every corner of the country...

The Graun

Yep, that's your academies 'driving success through autonomy.' Autonomous from oversight, autonomous from responsibility, yet still firmly clamped to the State's teats and sucking away like a bunch of starving piglets. A fittingly paradoxical legacy from a man dedicated to the idea of imposing autonomy from the centre.

Above average is the new normal

Please be seated. For today's lesson, let me quote again those old, familar words from chapter 19 of the Gospel According to St Michael, verses 24-26:

And again I say unto you, for a school to be Good, pupil performance must always exceed the national average and all schools must be Good.
When the the Education Select Committee heard this, they were exceedingly amazed, saying, how is this mathematically possible?
But Michael Gove beheld them, and said unto them, With logic this is impossible; but by getting better all the time all things are possible.

But it's not just the current education secretary who sees the very idea of averageness as a dangerous heresy that it must be suppressed, even if we have to undermine the very foundations of reality to root it out. According to Will Davies, lots of people have bought into the dodgy dossier that dragged us into The War On Average:

The challenge is partly an accounting one. The fact that many people view this as gross conformity may be one reason why such reinvention remains unlikely. However, it is no good hoping for socialism, in any traditional sense, without also working on an argument in defence of averageness, in defence of mediocrity and in defence of fairly old-fashioned forms of aggreagtion...

...We claim to dislike inequality, without noticing that when equality appears in the form of Nescafe instant coffee or an 'acceptable' comprehensive school, we turn up our noses at it. 

Accounting? Maybe, but it's also logic (see Michael Gove, above) and language. Take Davies' call to reclaim 'mediocrity', or the qualifier "bog-standard", as all too frequently applied to his 'acceptable' comps.

Put language and logic together and you begin to notice the sheer idiocy of the knee-jerk assumption that average = mediocre. So your life is pretty 'average?' That might mean anything from barely scraping by, if you live in Niger to doing very nicely, thank you, if you're lucky enough to be a bog-standard Norwegian.

Fretting about whether something is 'average' is irrelevant. The important question is, 'is it any good?'

Back in the 1970s, when most watches were still wound up with springs, Seiko marketed its new line of more accurate quartz watches with the slogan 'Some day all watches will be made this way.' Today, almost all of them are.  Those first Seiko watches boasted above average timekeeping, compared with your average hand-wound Timex of the day. Today, nearly all watches are made this way, so a Seiko watch is now functionally more or less average. And that's absolutely fine because, in this context, average is quite good enough for most users' purposes.*

A tiny minority of watches still aren't made this way -  high-end mechanical Swiss watches, which are basically status-enhancing jewellery with a subsidiary timekeeping function, so aren't particularly relevant, except as a metaphor for what I suspect Gove and Co. really mean by words like "excellence" and "rigour" - a hierarchy of ranking and exclusion, as opposed to making things functionally better for most people.

Sometimes, average can be OK and the best really is the enemy of the good.

Here endeth the lesson.



*Of course, no longer being able to charge a premium for being better than the competition must be an enormous bummer for Seiko, which neatly illustrates why the concept of "average" is such a an anathema from a purely capitalist point of view.

Professional male, into strict discipline, uniforms and leather, seeks...

 ...school with weak oversight to act out domination fantasies in a discreet setting.

According to sources quoted by a local paper, hundreds of pupils at an Academy school on the Isle of Wight have been punished by being taken away from their peers and curriculum or exam work and being put into 'isolation.' Pupils who contacted the paper said that those in isolation were made to sit in silence, facing the wall with their arms parallel to the desk, with Headteacher, Dr Rory Fox (formerly of Her Majesty's Prison Edmunds Hill) ‘shouting’ at them.

Sounds a bit harsh? What had the children at Ryde Academy actually done? They apparently weren't wearing regulation school uniform and this was an attempt to make them (or their parents) comply. The uniform policy seems to be administered by some arbitrary, yet exacting bureaucrat from a Kafka novel:

Confusingly, students who were not placed in isolation yesterday have today found themselves being penalised despite the uniform being acceptable on Tuesday' ... 'Speaking to parents outside Ryde Academy this morning, Island Echo has learnt that some Clarke’s school shoes – an expensive brand – are not acceptable, whilst a number of other leather shoes are not being accepted, despite the school’s policy saying shoes must be ‘leather’.

Although what is or isn't acceptable appears to be academic at this stage of the school year, since the school's own uniform suppliers don't have the the approved kit in stock and the big chains aren't offering much choice of generic school uniform items a few weeks before the Summer holidays.

The whole mess seems to stem from Dr Fox's desire to assert his own controlling, conformist vision of what education is  for 'Dealing with uniform issues helps us to improve general attitudes of co-operation and the skills of following instructions' and his specific obsession with policing female "modesty" a "problem" that seems to preoccupy authoritarians everywhere.

Furious parents are taking time off work to get their kids out of the isolation wing, while the trustees and executives of the taxpayer-funded Academies Enterprise Trust which "manages" Ryde Academy are presumably still laughing all the way to the bank.

Is this omnishambles what they mean by 'Academies – driving success through autonomy?'

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Occupy Legoland

Sometimes it feels as though things were better when I was kid. Mostly, this is just a nostalgic illusion, aided and abetted by the fact that, like most half-centenarians, I had more energy, fewer responsibilities, fewer shattered illusions and better health back then. But some things really were better when I was a kid, Lego being one of those things.

With old school Lego you got a limited suite of relatively inexpensive, generic bricks and, with enough bricks and enough imagination, you could create a blocky facsimile of any object you could possibly imagine. Today, the Lego company survives and thrives by marketing relatively expensive kits, each of which requires different, specific types of bricks, designed to be non-interchangeable, each kit being designed to makes only one model of one thing. This goes against the whole philosophy of interchangeability, universality and unfettered imagination that made Lego 1.0 such a brilliant toy.

I know that there are sound commercial reasons for the change. The brilliant simplicity of the original concept makes it easy for someone else to make similar bricks more cheaply, so the only way to go was probably to move up the value chain into marketing well-engineered, non-interchangeable kits that traded on quality and brand recognition (of Lego itself and of the franchises, like Star Wars and Harry Potter that spawn so many Lego tie-in kits). But Lego 2.0 is worse for parents (more expensive) and kids (it's not as universal, although kids can start to break the one-kit-makes-one-thing rule if they're lucky enough to have a reasonable supply of generic bricks, plus enough kits to experiment with inventive hybrids made of parts scavenged from various kits). The interests of consumers and producers are clearly not as seamlessly aligned as some fans of the Invisible Hand would have you believe.

But now I'm starting to feel better about Lego 2.0, via the people responsible for the spin-off Lego movie, on the grounds that somebody associated with Lego is now annoying the right people. Specifically, Fox News, who seem to be having a "Won't somebody please think of the children?!" moment, now they've noticed that the Lego movie villain is a power-crazed corporate tycoon. What does the Fox say? That the Lego movie is *obviously* corrupting tender little minds with a subversive, anti-business, socialist, freedom-hatin' message.

One of the Fox commentators even pops up to cite that American Christmas favourite It's A Wonderful Life as evidence that the Lego Movie is just the latest example of a long line of red propaganda coming out of Hollywood, with the corporate villain of the Lego movie being the modern iteration of It's A Wonderful Life's heartless tycoon, Mr Potter, for whom the opinionista seems to have rather a soft spot.

Needless to say, this is complete baloney. For a start, villains have to have some sort of power to be scary. Scarily powerful people might be crime lords, monarchs, wicked viziers, generals, evil wizards, galactic emperors, corrupt politicians, tyrants, terrorists and, yes, occasionally even businessmen.

As far as anyone knows, Shakespeare wasn't a revolutionary republican, even though he wrote plays featuring  usurpers (Henry IV, both parts, Macbeth, Hamlet), weak kings (Richard II), foolish and even mad ones (King Lear) and plain bad ones (Richard III). He was interested in power and in telling interesting stories about people and conflict. Stories about bad kings don't make him an anti-monarchist any more than a film featuring a bad boss, told by successful Hollywood film-makers, featuring products from a successful commercial enterprise, (Lego), is anti-business.

The Fox people seem to have noticed the weakness of their argument when they add the supplementary accusation of hypocrisy on the part of the film-makers and Lego for being in the money-making business, yet daring to portray a fictional plastic plutocrat in less than flattering terms. Which is kinda adorable, coming from the Fox network which is responsible for beaming the commie agitprop of It's a Wonderful Life into American homes every Christmas and introducing the world to that libellous misrepresentation of America's selflessly philanthropic boss class, Mr. Burns from The Simpsons.

It occurs to me that a political philosophy that's feeble enough to be threatened by a children's film about Lego people might have one or two problems.

On the other hand, creating conspiracy theories out of almost nothing is quite a creative, fun activity - a bit like Lego 1.0 for paranoids. So, I figured, why should the guys at Fox have all the fun? And on the basis of having watched one trailer for the Lego movie, I've discovered another shameless example of dirty Hollywood liberal propaganda being used to brainwash innocent kids. Specifically the scene where our moulded heroes are introduced to part of Lego World named "Cloud Cuckoo Land", by a character called Princess Unikitty:

Princess Unikitty: Here in Cloud Cuckoo Land there are no rules. There's no government, no babysitters, no bedtime, no frowny faces, no bushy moustaches and no negativity of any kind.
Wyldstyle: You just said the word 'no', like, a thousand times.
Princess Unikitty: And there's also no consistency. 

This is quite clearly a partisan political satire on  the simple-minded, ill-thought through libertarianism of the Tea Party, which has absolutely no business popping up in a wholesome family film. They ought to be ashamed, won't somebody please think of the children, etc...

Lego. Deconstructing the ideological hegemony of neoliberalism, one brick at a time (at least if you believe what they say on Fox News).

via

It's getting better all the time

In Lake Wobegon 'all the children are above average'. That's a really old joke, so old that there's even an effect (or syndrome) named after it. Can somebody please explain the joke to the Secretary of State for Education?

Chair: One is: if "good" requires pupil performance to exceed the national average, and if all schools must be good, how is this mathematically possible?
Michael Gove: By getting better all the time.
Chair: So it is possible, is it?
Michael Gove: It is possible to get better all the time.
Chair: Were you better at literacy than numeracy, Secretary of State?
Michael Gove: I cannot remember.

If this is what a private education does for you, I'd think twice before telling everybody that state schools in England should be more like private schools.



via Michael Rosen

Crystal balls

Or why the Large Hadron Collider is a colossal waste of time and money, Part 2. Because, using just a small piece of shiny rock, those boffins at CERN could have discovered everything worth knowing about our Multiverse and found out what happened before the Big Bang:

Crystal Cap Amethyst assists in exploring the multitude forms that life encompasses, not just the physical and material reality. It connects you to the immensity of life and attunes you to the most profound guidance. Crystal Cap Amethyst takes you into civilzations not as firmly corporeal as present one. You connect to Lemuria and live beyond the stars in other galaxies and universes, bringing back the wisdom and skills you garnered there. The stone conveys you to the start of our present universe and beyond to experience what went before.

With more New Age wibble than you can shake a dowsing rod at, The Crystal Bible 3, by Judy Hall, (an authority on 'spiritual development ... crystal healing, karmic astrology and past life therapy' no less) retails at £13.99 although, if you were to take its cosmological, archaeological and therapeutic claims seriously, its true price would be far above rubies (which are, apparently, most effective when embedded in a matrix of granite - 'The powerful lifeforece of Ruby or Garnet is magnified and focused by its granite matrix. It assists the transport of Qi around the body, energizing every cell. Excellent for repairing a broken heart, physically or psychologically').

My son has a copy of The Crystal Bible 3, a well-meaning present from somebody who knew that he was interested in rocks, minerals and gems, but failed to notice that TCB3 has less to do with mineralogy and geology then with such esoterica as 'karmic incrustations', 'high vibration energy', 'etheric blueprints' and out of body experiences.

Fortunately there are still plenty of books containing Actual Facts about rocks, minerals and gemstones (how they are formed, what they are made of, where they are found, the Mohs scale and so on). Rocks and Minerals, by Dan Green is especially good at summarising this stuff in a format likely to appeal to a seven-year-old. It's also way cheaper than TCB3, at a very reasonable £6.99: