Michael Rosen

Harold Rosen

2012-02-23T23:46:00.003Z

Harold Rosen was the father of my brother Brian and me. He was a secondary school teacher and later a professor of English in Education at the Institute of Education.

Here's his wikipedia entry

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Rosen_(educationalist)

In a rather sedate way a small group of us (Marjorie Lorch, Simon Gibbons and myself) have been assembling a bibliography of his writings. I'm hoping that this can go up on the blog along with all sorts of other materials.

Here's the blogspot with not a lot on it yet.

http://haroldrosen.blogspot.com/

(I'll try to diminish my presence on the front page once we get going properly)

'Action Research' - teachers, librarians, children

2012-02-23T22:55:00.001Z

This term I'm supervising 5 students doing 'Action Research' - looking at themselves, their practice and a 'client group' of children or young people. They spend about 10 weeks developing and running the project, keeping a journal, compiling a portfolio and writing a 5000 word essay. It's one option in a two year MA at Birkbeck, University of London.

The five students are doing a wide range of things: developing cartoon strips in response to seeing 'The Red Balloon'; doing poems, nursery rhymes and songs in two very different 'drop-in' type settings; making and writing books in an after-school club; writing and compiling an online blog as a school lunchtime activity; making appliqué pictures inspired by fairy stories.

As well as planning and running the sessions with the children, they are also reading round the theory and practice of what they're doing, developing questionnaires for the children and keeping up with the journal and portfolio.

I think it's developing into one of the most exciting pieces of in-service teacher or librarian work I've ever been involved in.

Suspend the curriculum; get the parents in.

2012-02-23T20:56:00.000Z

A cheering account from a teacher yesterday: a school suspends the curriculum for the afternoon. The parents, carers, minders etc are invited in 'to see how and what we teach'. The teachers and headteacher have decided beforehand that the focus is poetry and related art and music. The first time it's 'quite well' attended but the second one succeeds in getting an adult carer for almost every child to come in. What's on offer is an exploration of a poem - in this case 'Overheard on a Saltmarsh'. The teachers read it. There's a 'tree' with all the lines of the poem cut up and distributed on it (a 'poet-tree'?). The child and carer come up and pick a line off the tree and then in their family group they are invited to express this line on paper, with paper, with paint, chalks, glue, folding or whatever (make masks? etc) prior to performing that line to each other at the end of the making and doing session.

The afternoon is massive success. Quite a few fathers come in even though it meant bunking off work. Everyone gets stuck in and have fun. Massive amount of talk, exploration, play and learning going on. Children delighted that their parents are in school making and doing and performing. The feedback is hugely enthusiastic. All kinds of learning modelled here that many of the parents haven't encountered before. They are very keen on doing something like that again. Soon and regularly!

I offer this as an example of great educational practice on all sorts of levels: emotional, social, cognitive, intellectual, linguistic. It also provides a fantastic opportunity to talk with parents about education, reading, writing and many other things. It breaks down barriers between people and done flexibly, it could provide the basis for some ways in which parents can bring their stories and culture into school through making books with the children about their lives and so on.

It comes from a teacher who attended the Poetry Write Now group at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education.

A worrying case of mistaken identity

2012-02-23T08:40:00.001Z

See below: this morning's email and below that my reply which I've sent. I'm now thinking that I should have said yes and seen how long I could have pretended to be an expert on the cytoskeleton before someone rumbled me.

"...hmmm well the nucleus is erm....yes, cytoplasm....quite...and...yes, very cytoplasmic....actually my favourites are the mitochondria....love'em to bits...very mitochondrial they are..."

Perhaps not.

Subject: Letter from the 2nd Annual World Congress of Molecular & Cell Biology (CMCB-2012)
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:22:24 +0800

2^nd Annual World Congress of Molecular & Cell Biology (CMCB-2012)

ime: May 18-20, 2012 Place: Beijing, China

Website: http://www.bitlifesciences.com/cmcb2012/

Dear Dr. Michael Rosen,

How are you? Wish you have a fruitful new year of 2012 in advance!

This is J**** D***, the Program Coordinator of the 2^ndAnnual World Congress of Molecular & Cell Biology (CMCB-2012), I am writing the letter to make sure if you have received my letter previously, it is about the conference: CMCB-2012 which will be held during May 18-20, 2012 in Beijing, China.

Maybe there some problems with my mailbox and I haven't received your kindly reply. And would you like to attend this conference as a Speaker of Section A3: Cytoskeleton.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello J*** D*

Really nice to hear from you but my subject is not molecular and cell biology. I'm a writer of children's books and I teach children's literature at Birkbeck, University of London. I did once study biology but I've forgotten it all. I'm very sorry.

very best

Michael

Settling with NewsInternational: a celeb speaks.

2012-02-23T01:34:00.001Z

"As you will know, there has been an ongoing case concerning myself, phone-tapping and the News of the World. You will also know that my position on this has always been that justice must be done. Phone-tapping or hacking is illegal and if it can be proved that my phone was hacked into, then we must, must, must,always, always,always see the law do its job. Right to the very end. It's only then that we find out all the facts.

I would also like to point out to you, the enormous pain and anguish this has caused me, my family, my lovers, my friends, my acquaintances, my fans and pretty well everyone on the planet. At no stage did I seek or want the kind of publicity which sought to expose me as someone who as a child had cheated with cigarette cards. I am not here either admitting or denying that I ever did such a thing. However, any kind of knowledge concerning a game I played with my friend Wilf in 1956 could only have been ascertained from a private phone call I had with my brother in 2006. And there, as far as I'm concerned, the matter is closed. Until I write my memoir. Which is called: 'Taking on News International'.

Finally, News International have agreed to pay me the sum of 67 million pounds in compensation for the pain, anguish and distress this has caused me. But I am not - as some have said - dropping the case because I've been given the money. I'm not in this for the money. I could give that 67 million to charity. I could. But I'm not. But that's got nothing to do with it. The point is: neither I nor News International want to spend months in court arguing over cigarette cards. And, as it happens, 67 million smackeroonies is seriously tasty wonga."

Apostrophes in Earl's Court and Barons Court.

2012-02-21T22:50:00.001Z

The wikipedia entry on Earl's Court Station is fun for students of the apostrophe.

Here it is:

"Since the early 1950s, the station name has been spelled with an apostrophe on the tube map although the name of the local area is generally spelled without. Prior to the 1950s tube and rail maps show the station name without the apostrophe and on the station buildings the name has variously appeared with and without the apostrophe. The name of the local area has always been shown with an apostrophe on Ordnance Survey maps, and also by A-Z, but other mapmakers do not use one.

There is an acknowledged reason why the apostrophe is used for Earl's Court station but not for the nearby Barons Court. William Palliser developed the Barons Court estate. A book in the Society of Genealogists, annotated in pencil by R. Burnet Morris who knew Sir William personally, provides a history of the area. Morris declared Barons Court was named "after Sir William's Irish Estates," Baronscourt. As a result, unlike its neighbouring station, Earl's Court is written with an apostrophe."

End of wikipedia paragraph

Notes from me:

1. Ordnance Survey use an apostrophe, 'other mapmakers' don't! (ie mapmakers have no rule on the matter, of if they do, they don't know the f. what it is.)

2.Prior to the 1950s - no apostrophe! (ie history is not on the side of those who imagine that people used to get apostrophes right but when civilisation started going down the pan in the 1960s, it was a matter of greengrocers starting to get them wrong. )

3. On the station buildings the name has variously appeared with and without the apostrophe! (ie we can't rely on official signs for rules on which way the apostrophe should be used.)

4. The Barons Court Estate should, according to this, have been the Baronscourt Estate. But it isn't! So, it's neither correct or incorrect to write Barons Court Station. It's just any old ordinary bit of varying editing.

5. The mix of inconsistency, anxiety and arbitrariness make for a lethal cocktail when it comes to usage. People thrash about looking for rules and precedence on the use of the apostrophe but in many circumstances - as here - they're not to be found.

6. On that basis, it's my view that I don't think the apostrophe will last more than about 30 years.

[edit]

An exciting new test: The DfE speaks:

2012-02-21T02:05:00.000Z

"I have been receiving some complaints concerning the excellent Phonics test which, thanks to me, all Year 1 children will be taking June.

The test works like this: first of all the children read some real words. They're not in sentences because that would be cheating. They're just words on a page. Phonics words. What I mean by that is words that are regular. By regular I don't mean small - like coffee cups. I mean that they are spelled like they are said. Unlike, er...'said' which looks as if it should be said 'sayed'. Which actually is the way some people say 'said'. Look, this is really quite easy and obvious.

Er...where was I? Yes, the test. So, there'll be words. Not sentences. Sentences complicate things because children start guessing words by where they are in the sentences. And by what the sentence means. And 'meaning' as we call it, really has very little to do with reading. Or words. Meaning gets in the way of reading. We need the children to read. Not mean. There's far too many children going about trying to make words mean things. As you'll see, we need words that don't mean anything. I'm coming to that in a moment.

Now where was I? Yes, the test. So, one part of the text will be phonics words. Not Red Words. Some of you won't know what Red Words are. Red Words, by the way, are not Read Words. That would be different. And not phonic. Red Words (not Read Words) are Tricky Words. These are in the Phonics books which every school must buy. (See me later for a list of recommended publishers. Only the ones we recommend are good. We know the people who write them and we recommend them so that the people we know get millions of pounds. This government is very pro-business.)

Now where was I? Yes,the test. Some words are Tricky. We call them 'Tricky'. Words like 'was' . 'Was' is tricky because it's said 'wozz' but written 'was'. So children just have to learn it. Look at it. Learn it. There's not enough of that sort of thing going on in schools. Far too many children don't look, and don't learn. They play and they talk. That's where the trouble starts. Later they become drug addicts and criminals.

Now where was I? Yes, the test. Tricky words are very tricky. And the best way to learn them is not phonically. I know phonics solves everything. But not tricky words. I'll leave tricky words for the time being because they are in fact very tricky. Or Red.

Now the test also has some other kinds of words. These aren't words. They're just words that look like words. Words like 'blurg'. or 'Skonk'. If you're a reader, you'll read those. If you're not a reader you won't. Now some people have said that some little children taking the test will think that if there's a word they can read but doesn't make sense, they'll try to make it make sense. Now that really doesn't make sense. Well at least not to me it doesn't.

So, a child who can read, might see 'blurg' and because it doesn't make sense, they'll try to turn it into a word that does....'blurt' or 'blurb' or something. Then they'll be wrong and score badly. You know what we say to this? Tough. (which incidentally is a 'tricky word' or a Red Word. It just depends which of the phonics schemes you buy thanks to us and our recommendations. Though it won't be us thanking you, it'll be the people who make the books. Jolly good for business. Jolly good for Britain. Well, not Britain actually, because this only applies to England. Which isn't Britain. Which is a shame I always think. It would be better if Wales and Scotland were England.).

But the good news is that we've been listening to what teachers have been telling us about this. So do you know what we're doing? We've hired an artist who imagines what a 'blurg' might look like and he draws a 'blurg'. There it is on the page next to the word 'blurg'. A bit like a Flannimal. Now isn't that fun?Now the child looks at 'blurg' and says to him or herself...'Ho ho ho, that must be a blurg'. Problem solved.

This is the sort of thing we do at the Department for Education. We hire people to do pictures of blurgs.

So, look, press on. The phonics test is very good. Any school that fails the phonics test will have to become an Academy. Which is a very tricky word indeed. "

Universities of the future: the minister speaks.

2012-02-10T18:31:00.001Z

The University of Brighton awarded me an honorary degree today and I was dead chuffed to receive it. It came via the education department who have a great record. It was a wonderful occasion, and I felt all glowy. Looking at the graduating students' faces as they came up on to the stage and again at their families afterwards was a very warming thing to do on a very cold day. So, thank you University of Brighton. Thank you very much.

While I was sitting on the stage hearing the degrees that the graduates had studied for, I found myself thinking about the hypocritical stance adopted by education ministers and the right wing press in relation to degrees. They have orchestrated a sneering chorus mocking 'mickey mouse' degrees, hoping to recruit that section of the professional caste who are proud of their more academic degrees. But it's a lying recruitment speech they give, because the other part of their outlook is functionalist. It puts a price on everything, so that if, let's say, someone is studying catering management at university, their functionalist side would think this is good, it's 'upskilling' so that Britain can compete in the world market. So they try to ride both horses at the same time - traditionalist and functionalist. And then they think they sound convincing!

So I started composing an imaginary speech - the one that no minister would dare give - at a degree ceremony like the one I was at today.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, the Minister!"

"Distinguished guests, Vice-Chancellor, ladies and gentlemen - all things considered, I'm very pleased to be here today at this second-rate university. I would have preferred to have been at an Oxbridge ceremony, but it seems as if they're freezing me out at the moment.

No matter. Well, not very much. No really. I'm not that bothered. Not at all.

Education is at the heart of everything. Oh yes. And so am I. Looking through this university's booklet for today, I'm delighted to see that some of the students are graduating from here with real degrees, like Geography and Law and English Literature. I'm interested in gold standards. That's what universities are for. Gold standard even though there are only two gold standard universities. So degrees like Geography make sense. They're gold standard subjects. But really - should universities be places where people footle their time away doing 'Cultural History, Memory and Identity'. What's that? Making photo albums or something?

And what's this? Hospitality Management? What's the point of that? If people want to run a cafe don't they just go into their father's business? That's how we do it in this country, don't we?

Now, I can see that the hall is full of parents and family of these unfortunate students. I suppose you were rather hoping that I would have encouraging words to say to you about your offspring's long years of work, your sacrifices to get them to where they are today.

Well, I'm not.

I'll leave that to the bleeding heart liberals who skulk about the corridors of universities like this. But it's not always going to be like this. We're going to weed them out. Believe me. What with our innovative and exciting policy on university fees, and and our necessary but clever cuts in budgets, we're going to get universities back to being the elite institutions they once were.

After all, in today's climate, we can't afford higher education for everyone who might benefit from it. Not any more. The truth is that the nation is becoming over-educated. What is the point of someone doing a degree when the job they end up with is stacking shelves in Sainsbury's?

Yes, yes, yes, a minister standing where I'm standing now ten, twenty or thirty years ago wouldn't be saying this. He would be saying, learn, educate yourselves, expanding world economy, unlimited human potential, blah blah blah.

I'm not. I'm saying, forget all that. What we need now is some serious downgrading of people's hopes and aspirations. Especially if those people are poor. Maybe there are some poor people in the room. Well done. You got in before it got really tough. Next year, we're hoping there will be fewer of your type here and the year after, even fewer.

So, thank you for inviting me. If anyone knows someone at an Oxbridge college, I'm wondering if I could get on to this thingummyjig where Tory ministers become bosses of Oxbridge colleges. No? Well, I wouldn't expect anyone here would. Huh?

And what's this? A masters in nephrology? What's nephrology for goodness sake? Oh, it's something to do with medicine, is it? Fair enough. If the graduate of that particular malarky has got any sense, he won't hang about in the NHS. Set up a Nephrology company, sonnyjim and sell it back to the NHS at twice the price.

That's the way to do it."

The new head of Ofsted shares his most recent ideas.

2012-02-09T22:50:00.000Z

" In my new post as Educational Commander-in-chief with brass buttons on, I am sounding a warning to anyone who thinks that 'good' is good enough. It's not. Good is not good. And the trouble today with teachers is that they think that work is just one big holiday. It isn't even a small holiday. That's told them.

And another thing. Schools. I'm bringing in a new policy: it's called 'we're not good enough'. At the beginning of every day I want teachers to get in a ring in the staff room and chant 'We're not good enough'. There are far too many teachers who think that they're good. They're not. That's my message and I should know. I turned a school around. It used to be bad. Now it's good. Not 'good' in the new sense. Which means 'not good'. But in the old sense when good meant good. Parents know what I'm talking about and they like it. Hello all parents. You like me, don't you?

I'm talking so please stand up when I'm talking. Teaching and learning. That's what we have to do. And there's not enough of it. People keep making excuses. They say, 'The dog ate my teacher so what's the point?' There - that's the excuse culture.

And another thing. Some headteachers are good. That's the very new good. Not like the other good which wasn't good. Well if these big-headed good headteachers think they're so hard, then they can go into some really bad schools - which is actually most schools - get in there and start making these bad schools, good in the new sense, meaning good. Not bad.

Some people say to me that if these good heads are spending all their time away from their good schools, trying to make bad schools good, won't the good schools they came from originally start to be less good?

Wrong. Stand up when you're listening to me.

And another thing: structure. Structure is important because the children we teach don't have structure. They don't even know how to do anything till they get to my school. We show them how to stand up. Then they know.

We're dealing with entrenched attitudes here. Not any more. Not now I'm here. Do you remember Chris Woodhead? Sissy. He's not hard like me. If there was a teacher in here now, I'd put him between my finger and thumb and snap him in two. Then you'd see something, I can tell you.

Right, Samantha will take you round my schoo - oh she's not at the school anymore. Complicated story but we felt that it would better suit her temperament if she wasn't here anymore. This has absolutely nothing to do with test and exam scores. "

My poems seen 3 million times. Blimey.

2012-02-09T21:07:00.000Z

I'm not sure that I can fully grasp this, but the little counter in the top right hand corner of this page:

http://www.youtube.com/user/artificedesign/videos?sort=p&view=u

tells me that the videos of me performing my poems that I put up on my website have been seen 3 million times. They reached that figure today.

In theory that could be anything from one person alone seeing them 3 million times in four years or it could be 3 million people watching them once. I guess it's something like both of those - but in between - perhaps a couple of hundred thousand people watching them several times over.

Seems amazing. Exorbitant even.

If you're in some way responsible - thanks for coming by. Yes. Thanks.

Freelance. Freelancer. Freelancing.

2012-02-08T18:26:00.001Z

Freelance life rotates around the axis of the 'commission' and/or 'contract'. This is in effect the legal statement of your position in relation to whatever it is you do. So you might grovel to get a commission, you might be approached and offered a commission. You might ask for a contract, someone might offer you a contract, you might seek to change your contract. Everything rotates around it.

Bizarre goings on around this centre-point include failing to deliver the commission (naughty), having the commission delayed by the commissioner (it's not happening after all, we couldn't get the funding), the empty commission (yes, you're commissioned but we can't pay you), and the unfulfilled offer (we love what you do, please do it. Four years later, you're still waiting to hear from them), the broken commissioning (yes, it's been great, you've been doing a great job, but we're restructuring and won't be doing it quite that way again) etc etc.

To make this a little more concrete - one or two scenes from commission-land that I amuse myself with. Two women ask to see me from 'the ballet'. (I can't remember which ballet. Not-remembering is a key feature of commission-land. Things blur). They say that they really like my work. They want to work with me. We talk. It goes well. They have ballet legs. This sounds intriguing. They go. I never see them ever again.

A commissioned project is going really well. It involves collaboration. Tremendous excitement builds up. Hundreds of people are involved, cross fertilisation between art-forms takes place. Materials are produced. People of a wide range of abilities produce great work. It is public. It supports work that others do. It enriches. It draws in people of a wide range of creative capacity all overlapping and interfusing. I'm excited by it. So are others. A new management comes in. I go to a meeting. At the meeting the new management appear to not know anything about it even though it seems to be 'on their patch'. I have a strange sense of being at the wrong end of a corridor. Pieces of paper are passing around on the table. I feel that I'm having to justify something that justified itself. The new management say that they are incorporating everything and re-building and re-structuring and re-working and re-configuring. I never hear from them ever again. The project is killed stone dead. No reason ever given.

Similar - much smaller scale but with a national reach. Three of us establish a production that seems to be much appreciated. We are constantly 'upskilling', adapting, improving. It's much scrutinized. Anything deemed to have not-worked is looked at very closely so that that mistake won't be made again. Ihave a sense of a body of expertise building. There is an audience building too because the expectation is there. Regularity and certainty are important too. New management comes in. One person. He says that it's not suitable. Not the right thing. He doesn't want it. Plonk. It's gone.One stroke. No comeback. A few months later - plonk - he's gone. Out of sight. Gone. A few years later I'm on the tube, looking up at the lights, staring at the reflections in the window, enjoying the way I appear to be travelling outside the train, suspended outside the window. Hello,says someone. Hello, I say. He says his name. Ah, it's the manager who closed it down. The same bloke. He seems to think that I'll be pleased to see him. What a strange idea. I say hello to him as if through cold tea. He is a pleased man. We part. I never see him again.

This is the city. In the city, more and more people rotate round the commission. We work in spurts. We wait. We try to set things up. Sometimes others set things up and call. Hi. Sometimes things just collapse. Sometimes you do a runner. You can't face it. Sometimes Mr NewBroom comes in and knows better and the village is flooded with his bullshit. You are afloat in curiousville. What's going on, you say. Dunno. Hi. Hi. How you doing? Great. Good. Coffee? Great. Have you ever? Yeah. Mmm. Good.

I had a dream today that I would play Falstaff. Or Toby Belch. Or Justice Shallow....'We have heard the chimes at midnight, Sir John....' It would be amateur. Utterly, utterly amateur. A way of not rotating. Be a weevil, weevilling away inside Toby Belch. A plague upon these pickled herring. Tilly-vally lady. People would hate me because whenever they tried to talk to me, I would say, tilly-vally lady.

Neville Lawrence and Esther Brunstein

2012-02-08T15:24:00.000Z

Here's my memory of meetings with Neville Lawrence and Esther Brunstein - which is an intro to an interview with Holocaust survivor Esther Brunstein in this week's Socialist Worker.

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=27455

In the 1990s Esther was a strong supporter of the Anti Nazi League—one of the organisations that later launched Unite Against Fascism.

She campaigned to close down the headquarters of the British National Party headquarters in southeast London. She frequently spoke in schools, colleges and for trade unions, and at demonstrations.

Through all this Esther met Neville Lawrence, whose son Stephen Lawrence had been murdered by a racist gang. Michael Rosen remembers seeing them speak together:

'It doesn’t matter how often we say to each other that the struggles for freedom, justice and equality bring remarkable people to the fore—or indeed produce them. It is always a moving and uplifting moment to be in a room alongside such people.

From very different times and circumstances, Esther Brunstein and Neville Lawrence spoke together at meetings for the Anti Nazi League in the 1990s. I was lucky and proud to be there on several occasions.

They were both people who had felt the terror of persecution and murder at the hands of those who think that killing innocent people is a solution. You could see it on Esther and Neville’s faces, in the tone of their voices, and in the way they looked at the people listening.

Here were two witnesses of the abyss who, even in their strength and courage to resist, expressed a sense of sadness and bewilderment that human beings could be so cruel.

With Esther, we had a living link to events that mostly come to us through books, TV and film. She was presenting us with scenes of mass murder that had once stretched out in front of her, and we knew she was looking at us with the same eyes that had seen such things.

With Neville, I had the feeling that he was someone who had to fight with himself to face every day. And in the minutes he spoke to us there were perhaps a few moments of relief from the loss and grief of what had happened to his son.

The fact that they were witnesses, the fact that they had chosen to come to speak to people discussing and planning how to defeat the threat of racism would have been more than enough.

But in different ways they each wanted to look beyond the immediate circumstances of their own pain.

Esther pointed us at how the lie that fascists hadn’t tried to eliminate the Jews of Europe was one of the ways in which today’s fascists could present themselves as respectable.

Neville took us beyond the racism of Stephen Lawrence’s attackers to the racism in this country’s justice system that had given the murderers time to quite literally clean up.

In speaking like that, together, at the same meeting, Esther Brunstein and Neville Lawrence showed us the only force that can stop racism and fascism—unity across peoples, across cultures, across all the barriers that racists put up between us. '

© Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original.

The Murdoch File: Police Mystery. Or not.

2012-02-08T00:23:00.001Z

Yes, we've finally homed in on one of the great mysteries of our time: why is it that the police didn't investigate the phone-hacking, why didn't they warn people that their phones were being hacked?

Here's MP Chris Bryant on the matter:

'Mr Bryant said it was "still a complete mystery to me why the police failed properly to investigate the News of the World in 2006, why they failed to examine the material they had garnered from Mr Mulcaire, why they continued to tell parliament that they had contacted all the victims when they hadn't, why they refused to show me the material that related to me and why they refused to reopen the investigation even when there was clear evidence that the original investigation had only scratched the surface of the criminality at News International."'

Now, it's possible that when Chris Bryant is saying that it's 'complete mystery' to him, he means that it wasn't a complete mystery to him. In fact, he knows exactly why it all happened. The other possibility is that he's a middle of the road Labour guy who quite genuinely can't figure out that the police service's job in this case was to service the Murdoch press.

The fact is that it's not a mystery at all. It's the system. The only thing that makes this affair look different is that they got caught. Are we really supposed to believe that this sort of thing hasn't been going on for decades?

There was a corridor between the top of the Murdoch empire, the top of government and the top of the police force. They all scratched each other's backs, secured each other's positions, passed oodles of cash to each other, installed 'trusties' in each other's pockets and persecuted anyone who raised a word against any of this.

Quite how Cameron stays clean in this isn't clear as he helped set up the biggest inside job of all - appointing Andy 'I didn't know anything, really I didn't' Coulson to help him slash millions off people's standard of living.

There's a lot about all this that makes me sick but I have a special vom-bag for when I think about how the Murdoch press has specialised in creating public enemies, people they identify as being morally unacceptable. But who are the people who do the finger-pointing? What kinds of lives do they lead that entitles them to do the finger-pointing? Quite clearly, droves of them were illegal snoopers and police bribers.

I hate the idea that we live in a culture that allows secretive, almost anonymous, people to act as our morality police. And now it turns out that the whole apparatus was criminal and corrupt as well.

It's great that we're living for a few months with the whole thing exposed but it won't be long before the covers are put back on and another police-government-press complex will be re-established and someone like Cameron can give a speech about the uniquely wonderful thing about the British is our sense of fairplay, our free press, our independent judiciary and the best police force in the world.

Imagine you could imagine

2012-02-07T16:22:00.000Z

The Imagine Festival takes place at London's South Bank over half-term and the week after. There are 53 events and I would guess that at least one of them would interest a child you know.

Hope you can get there, and if you fancy listening to the utterly implastopherous Philip Ardagh, Louise Rennison and Liz Pichon then come and take a dekko, butchers or gander at ours.

Here's the website:

http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/imagine-childrens-festival

Learning 'written-ese'

2012-02-07T14:58:00.001Z

One of the peculiarities of the spoken language is that it's very rarely studied. To study it, you have to listen to recordings of it, look at videos of it, look at transcripts of it. When you do that you start to see that it has its own 'grammar' or 'syntax'. That's to say it sticks together in its own ways.

(I say 'it does' this or 'it does' that. This is rubbish, really. 'It' is spoken. Whatever 'it' does, 'it' does because thinking human beings do 'it'. Excuse my language!)

One of the key ways spoken language sticks together is through what it leaves out. If you look at a transcript of two people talking together, you'll quickly see that we spend a lot of time, 'not finishing'. In fact we're doing as much 'finishing' as the context requires, but we say 'not finishing' because of expectations of what is a sentence, what is a paragraph.

In conversation we follow patterns of taking turns, interrupting, not interrupting.

We have a complex system of referring backwards and forwards to actions, events, things, people, feelings that both parties know or think they know.

(The previous is not meant to refer to the kind of spoken-writing that you hear on radio and TV, where people read informal written 'talks' off autocues and scripts.)

When we write, it's as if we're writing in another dialect. So, if you take a section of written text, you might well find that you can read all of it, understand every word (word by word) of it, but you know that it isn't something you'd ever say in conversation. You might say it in a 'talk' but not when chatting. So, it's part of 'English' (in my case) but not the same part as spoken English.

Quite at random, I've opened a letter tucked into my diary. Here's the last sentence:

'As discussed with Katy, please can you email me your foreword of approximately 1000 words by Monday 9 January'.

It's written in 'written-ese'. The phrases 'as discussed with' , 'please can you', 'of approximately' 'by Monday 9 January' are all 'written-ese' usages - as I suggested in a kind of dialect of English, just as we might say that 'me gwan' or 'he disnae' or examples of dialects of the family of English usages.

So, from the point of view of a child in a school, we are asking them to learn a dialect other than the one they speak - or indeed that we speak. The difference between us and them, though, is that we've had long immersion in 'written-ese'. We can even speak it!

I'm not going to go off on one about phonics here - so let's leave them to one side for a moment. What I will say is that no matter how well or not that a person can sound out a word, that person will still have to learn the 'wording' of written-ese. Otherwise, all you can do is read words, one after another without knowing what it all means, rather as I can with a bit of complex French.

What follows from this is that one of the most important things we can do with people learning 'written-ese' is to enable them to hear many, many times a day what 'written-ese' sounds like, as well as many, many times to see different kinds of written-ese all around them, especially written-ese that they've written, especially written-ese they've written which represented something that they actually said.

I realise this last contradicts, in part, what I'm saying. The child says something, and someone (themselves or someone else) scribes what they say. What this 'says' is that the magic of writing is that it can record and preserve the things we say - and think. After all, as a child, why - unless you've shown them - would a child know that you can write down the things you say? All the books and stories and texts around them are full of stuff that you, the child, don't say!

So if we're constructing a bridge (that's probably the wrong metaphor - I can see a lot wrong with it, even as I'm writing) - between the spoken and the written so that the children can learn 'written-ese' then we need to think of many 'hybrid' activities where the spoken and the written are amalgamated eg

writing things you say, speech bubbles, monologue and dialogue poems, writing playlets and sketches

reading outloud - hearing and doing it yourself - many, many times

performing written texts - poems and plays and scripts

creating school radio with scripts

choosing poems and pieces to learn off by heart

videoing performances

team-writing where one person speaks, the other writes - ideal when you're making magazines together.

Who owns literacy?

2012-02-07T13:16:00.000Z

Imagine you're a four year old and you arrive at school. It's clear you have come to a place which is doing something with language that you don't do: there are signs up all over the place, there are books in classrooms, writing all over the walls of classrooms and in the hall and older children seem to be able to do this writing thing - though mostly it looks different from the printed signs and books.

So you don't own any literacy but the school appears to not only own it, but to a certain extent to be in charge of it. Authority figures change the signs, they ask children to write more of it. There are special places - controlled by the authority figures - where their writing is put. Books come into the school, apparently also controlled by the authority figures.

All this is the state of normality.

However, one of the things we keep saying about literacy is that it's important for children to take control of it, to feel it's theirs, to feel that they can use it and do what they want with it, that they can access it in order to access important things.

The point here is that literacy is culturally and politically mediated. Or to be more precise: all literacy is culturally and politically mediated - to such an extent that literacy ends up being divided and sub-divided into differentially controlled and mediated literacies. So, to take two extreme examples: the literacy of the legal profession and the literacy of popular music. The first is owned and controlled by the legal profession and even though I am a highly literate person there are a many documents and processes that I don't understand and can't access in the usual ways I do this: opening a document, reading it, re-reading it, even using a dictionary doesn't always help. With popular music, there are many parts of it I do get but others I don't. Sometimes this is individual words, other times it's what's being referred to, other times it's the whole wording of a song that I don't hear. Again, the usual tools for accessing stuff I don't understand are no use to me. I have to go and ask someone who is immersed in that literacy to find out more.

So let's go back to school and see what's happening to the literacy - or literacies - in a school, but this time take up the position of a classroom teacher. In relation to the pupils, the teacher appears to be in charge of literacy, controlling it - owning it even - but out of sight, the reality is different. Most of what a teacher does in terms of literacy is what he or she has been asked to do, via documents and instructions and text books and the like. This then translates into lessons, homework, tasks, wall displays, letters home and so on.

So, to take an example, I go into a lot of classrooms where there is a 'word wall'. Teachers have been encouraged to 'enrich' the children's 'vocabulary' by putting up useful or good or 'wow' words on the wall that children can use in their writing. There are several problems with this: 1. We don't write with vocabulary. We write with longer sequences of text, embodied in the phrases, sentences, scenes, tropes, plotlines, genres of writing. All words have a context and the meaning of a word is only realised in the context of the words, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, plotlines and genre that surround it. Sticking words up on the wall, in fact pretty well guarantees that such words don't 'stick'! because they are context-less. 2. In truth there is no such thing as a 'wow' word. All words are wow words. They all do stuff. The only thing that makes a word more or less wow than another is the context of that word - the scene it's in, the sounds or meanings of the words around it.

In the context of this discussion about who owns literacy, then clearly the word wall is an example of saying to children, someone cleverer 'out there' owns literacy and here's a bit of it, you can use in your writing. It's a gift from the owners and controllers.

This can't be reversed entirely. But if you're interested in nibbling away at the edges of this power structure then you reverse roles. You invite the children to make their own word wall and you make clear that this can include a wide range of words, phrases, passages, quotes, eavesdroppings that the children have heard, seen, read. You do your best to get every child to contribute.

Then this child-centred word wall - full of sayings, lines from songs, overheard mistakes, jokes, titles, bits of TV shows, catchphrases or whatever - becomes a source for writing, or playing with in whatever way seems appropriate.

So, in this particular case, literacy is being culturally mediated in a different way. A small amount of the ownership and control has tipped in the direction of the pupil.

Now, if you go around a school looking at the literacy (ies) on display or in process (eg through the pupils' writing) and ask, who owns and controls this stuff? How is this stuff being culturally mediated? What signs are being given off by how this stuff is being displayed or distributed? - you come up with some interesting discoveries. For example, how much of the available literacy on show or in process has come about because of what pupils have chosen, has come about because one or more children have decided that this is what should be on display or in process? And what kind of signs does this power-relationship give off?

I would suggest that very, very little of it is owned, controlled or mediated by pupils. Sometimes it is. And it could be. There can, for example, be systems by which pupils choose books for the library, edit class, school magazines and website, edit 'word walls', choose books and displays for the classroom, poems to put up on the wall, poems to read out in school, books to recommend to other children to read, topics to write about, topics to debate. You can - as many schools do - encourage children to have writing journals that aren't marked and you can encourage the children all the time to make books and get these books into classes and libraries. In this sense, the teacher is an 'enabler' rather than a 'deliverer' of literacy. So, using someone like Paul Johnson's excellent books about 'how to make a book' you can give children ideas and technology in how to make a book. Same goes for enabling the children to have blog magazines or blog stories or blog anythings . It took me less than five minutes to set up this blog, but that's a literacy we would want children to learn how to use, enjoy and benefit from?

Just to repeat - none of the above is an attack or criticism of teachers. As I've tried to say, teachers work within the rules and conventions of literacy that are passed down through the power structure of schooling: Government, Dept for Education, inspectors, exams, local authorities, advisers, headteachers and into classrooms. Daily, I hear stories from classroom teachers about how their view on trying to enable children to take control of literacy is more often than not undermined or overruled by demands that this or that literacy activity or scheme (top-down in 99% of cases) is implemented immediately.

The irony is that most of the tasks in top-down literacy activities eg comprehension, grammar and punctuation exercises, spelling tests - can be enacted within the editing processes of producing text for other people to read. That's as it is with real production of texts in the real world. So, if you're producing a pupil-based word-wall, a blog, a book, a magazine or whatever, these texts have to be edited. You can rotate editing jobs in such a way as to involve children who find that task difficult but team them up with children who find it easier. Texts can circulate prior to 'production' around a group or a class until they're right. That way 'correctness' is also owned and controlled by the pupils. They're getting it right for a purpose - that a wider audience might want to read it and will find it easier to read in edited form.

Even punctuation, spelling and 'grammar' are culturally mediated and we want pupils to own that stuff too. That's how to do it.

Dear Mr Gove

2012-02-06T21:03:00.002Z

The Guardian asked me if I would to write a column for their Education page and I thought it would be interesting to write to Michael Gove. So here it is: a letter for him published in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/feb/06/michael-rosen-gove-curriculum-schools

Structure-writing: how to escape it.

2012-02-05T23:40:00.001Z

(These notes are expanded from some replies on a facebook thread)

1. The structures for writing that many young children in primary schools are offered are lies. They are told that stories have or should have a certain structure. The model they are given doesn't correspond to the stories they actually read.

2. Even if you did give them some supposed 'true' structure that did correspond to the stories they read, it would be such a piece of reduced 'formalism' as to be of no use to them as writers.

3. I suggest several other approaches: motif, parody, dilemma - not in any particular order.

Motif encourages children to 'spot' motifs from one story to another by calling on their own 'intertextual repertoire' responses 'Is there anything about this story that reminds you of anything else you've read or seen?' So you encourage children to draw on what they know about stories - which is already massive, if you include film and TV programmes. You encourage them to spot 'motifs' (scenes, moments, types of encounter) and to spot differences between them...with a view to using them adapting them for their own purposes eg child meets monster...or child runs away...or poor girl becomes rich...etc

Parody asks children to see if they can swap 'paradigms' to see what happens: . What would happen if Little RRH was waiting to catch a wolf who had to take some food to his granny? This is both ludic (playful) and subversive. Essentially, you ask children to 'write like' but swapping elements.

Dilemma-based writing suggests that most (not 100%) of stories that they come across have a key dilemma or problem which is 'solved' through the telling. In the usual skeleton or structure children are given, this problem doesn't turn up till after 'introduction', 'characters' and 'setting'. This is actually a lesson in bad writing! As my daughter says, (10) she really likes stories where you get the conclusion at the beginning and you read in order to find out how the characters got there! She is 'wrong' according to the systems they're given. The great thing about dilemma-writing is that you discover that writing is the work you do to solve the problem, You dig into the dilemma in order to dig out solutions. Your tools are the words you use.

Only when you've got people writing and talking about writing, do you need to get into talking about structures. In fact, it's much more exciting and much more complex than these prescriptive ones out of text-books and schemes.

The politics of prescriptive structures and writing:

The ideology behind this 'reduced structuralism' is that children are incapable beings; they are positioned as unknowing, waiting to be filled up with knowledge which is possessed ultimately by distant far-off gods called examiners, inspectors and ministers.

It leaves everything unequestioned - writing, stories, structures, the world, how we learn, the hierarchies between adults and children, between teachers and their bosses. It the theory of permanent non-revolution that dominates education. Nothing evolves or changes. Nothing is there to be questioned. You can't get round it or behind it. You just have to do it as systematised by my dear bro as 'Don't question it, just do it.'

In order to create passivity in the majority, these permanences are constantly being put in front of children on the basis that they're lower ability or that this will help them get through SATs or GCSEs or whatever. The 'help' is in fact a hindrance. It's a seminar in passivity.

Pick of the Week: future of radio

2012-02-05T09:17:00.001Z

I've been in radioland this week picking slices of wireless programmes for the 45 minute show that is Pick of the Week (Radio 4 tonight 6.15).

Over on Comment is Free, there's a discussion going on about how come radio has survived the digital age. It's old tech, and 'technicist' interpretations of history usually come up with theories about technologies replacing each other. One way that radio has survived is that radio companies employ people who either have interesting things to say and/or people who think up interesting ways to use the medium. The big problem with that is that it requires radio bosses to accept that this requires them to give money, space and time to programme-makers. Like everywhere else, these radio producers and researchers are working longer and longer hours while spending less and less time to making each individual programme. Meanwhile, there's casualisation-creep with more and more parts of the business being done by people without pensions - and a lot else besides. Lean and hungry, get up and go, desperate to please - is one interpretation of that. Another is: insecure, worried, always aware of their own replace-ability.

As for the medium, one way to think of it from the production end is that what you're making is either noisy or silent. Noisy programmes are phone-ins which have settled into jousting matches between star presenters and callers. Anyone seriously trying to understand what function these are serving would have to look at the general cultural and political bias of the star presenters. Perhaps that's in a book I haven't read.

Silent radio is the kind that I am mostly involved in, which makes programmes and simply sends them off, ship-in-bottles, helium balloons. Apart from a handful of listener-comments and newspaper radio reviews, no one really knows what happens to these. I say 'happens' - I mean in people's minds and in what might be called a 'social response'. A close look at these programmes would, I guess,come up with a model of broadcasting and listening that corresponds to corridors. That's to say, there is a cultural corridor in which producers and audience mingle. This is the theory of specialised audiences - in whatever terms these specialisms are defined. To take an example that doesn't exist - people interested in deep-sea diving make a programme for deep-sea divers. Or Greens make a programme for Greens. Or fans of Musical Theatre make programmes for Musical Theatre fans. The question that has sometimes interested the people who run Radio 4 is whether Musical Theatre fans will hang about listening to a programme about deep-sea diving.

Of course, the typification of people by their special interest might be a red herring. The listening demographies might be determined more or less by the amount of education people received.

One last observation about silent radio. I've often been curious about the fact that I've sat about in radio studios when someone or some people have said something that I thought was easily as important as anything you read in broadsheets or say on TV and yet such things seem to have slipped away into silence. I used to work on the World Service book review programme and each week we interviewed major international authors - Nobel prizewinners - the lot. Presumably there were people somewhere in the world who heard these but the programmes appeared to be silent. At the same time, a broadsheet newspaper with a catchment area, tiny in comparison to the World Service's, would carry an interview with the same writer and in my parish people were chatting about it, and in weeks to come references to it would crop up in other newspapers and in years to come these crop up in books. This is not a complaint. Just an observation.

Schools-libraries; libraries-schools. Make the marriage work.

2012-02-04T20:21:00.001Z

Here it is again:

As part of every child's welcome pack when they enter state education, they should be given a library ticket with a map showing where they can find the nearest libraries or mobile library stops, along with a simple explanation as to what the library ticket entitles the child to. How many books, for how long and if there are fines (or not) for non-return.

It's as simple as that.

All it needs is for Nick Gibb to talk to Ed Vaizey and arrange it. In the last government all it needed was for Ed Balls to talk to Margaret Hodge to arrange it. I even wrote it out on a piece of paper and gave it to Margaret Hodge when she asked me for a paper for her libraries review. I now think I was asked to do it so that it could be ignored.

What is the matter with these people? They are paid large sums of money to run these services on our behalf. They should be doing everything they can to encourage people to want to use them. Why can't that simple piece of bureaucracy be done? There are many people who are print-phobic, form-phobic who imagine that going into a library and borrowing books would involve all sorts of passing across of information, some of which might compromise them in some way. This would help erode such feelings and misgivings.

A child entering school has proof of address and a named parent or guardian. Give them each, every single one of them, a ticket, a map and what they can get for it. Tell them it doesn't cost anything. They've already paid for it. It's that simple.

Just do it.

Sec Mod site - great new post

2012-02-04T15:58:00.003Z

The Sec Mod site which is creating an archive of memories about Secondary Modern School education 1944-early 1970s is developing. There's a great new post up there from 'Archie'.

If you went to a Sec Mod yourself do contribute. If you know someone else who went to one, perhaps you could encourage them to contribute.

Here's the site link:

http://secmod.blogspot.com/

Inventing stories without meaning or feeling

2012-02-04T01:01:00.000Z

Here's a serious question: do you think you could come up with a way in which a group of people could come together and either talk about, or write some stories and then spend an hour, say, talking about those stories, without at any point talking about the meaning of the stories?

One way, you could talk about 'structure' - but you would have to do it in such a way as to be so abstract that you couldn't ever refer to notions of good and bad, powerful and less powerful, individual versus the rest, the forces of nature appearing to be either easily dominated or overwhelming...none of that.

And you couldn't really talk about the 'little guy' or the 'big guy', or 'boy meets girl'. And you couldn't even talk about motifs like Cinderella or the deposed king or the wicked step-mother, or the robot that gets out of control. That's all forbidden.

In short, you must only talk about such things as 'the setting' or 'characters' or the 'introduction' as if these are god-given, essential parts of every story. In fact, it's a formula! And if it's a formula you can sell it!

Yes, you can dilute narratives down until all you have is this 'structure-without-meaning', package it up as if this is some form of sacred knowledge and flog it as a solution to Writing in schools.

And it makes the marking of Writing dead easy too. Has the child done the structure? Good if she has, bad if she hasn't.

Needless to say, this has absolutely nothing to do with how writers write or how readers read. Analysis of hundreds of stories, writers' methods, motives and intentions, readers' experience of reading will not deliver you these diy packages.

Instead, you'll hear writers talking about, say, catching a hint of something from what they've read, seen or heard. And this appeared to them to be some kind of problem or dilemma or oddity that needed solving or relating or unravelling. Sometimes writers will say that at some stage in the process they remembered things they had read and, yes, a structure or several structures appear to them from those read books or films or TV programmes or plays as they write. Or motifs from these sources appear to them, a 'search for the true king' or the 'lost child' or whatever. In these circumstances, writers are playing with the 'paradigm' - that's to say the 'syntax' of a story-form might stay the same but it's the elements that can be taken out and swapped. Thus: if you say the rom-com has a syntax - boy meets girl, boy (or girl) doesn't like the other party, they are in each other's company and sparks fly, the result is that the one or two in the relationship suddenly discover that they have a liking for each other. What a writer can do is take that syntax and change elements - the reluctant lovers are both divorcees instead of young inexperienced lovers; or there's a political element: the couple aren't of the same cultural group....that's the paradigm changing and not the syntax - a fruitful way to write but one that also involves talking about meaning. But, note, these story forms have different syntaxes - not one syntax!

These are some of the ways writers work. That's not to say they don't study or learn about 'structure', but that they learn about it in the context of trying to write stories with meaning and power. They discover that this or that structure might enable or hinder what they're trying to say. But, it's about meaning.

So how come schools, strategies, course plans in relation to the writing of stories are full of reductive crap about structure? How come such strategies demote or eliminate questions of meaning and feeling?

I believe it's a crisis in educational culture. It's a lack of belief in the human and in particular the human that is the child. It's an attempt to de-humanize narrative, purely so that these humans can be measured. And yet the thing that makes us human - our ability to make meanings and pass them on to each other - is being demoted or marginalised or eliminated from this activity.

So what's being measured? What possible worth can be placed on such measurement if the human has been subtracted from what is being measured? After all, we're not talking about something which is of itself an abstract process - like Maths. We're talking about a process which humans invented in order to pass on meanings and feelings.

There are people out there who have become afraid of children's meanings and feelings and these 'structures' are just right for them. Out go the tears and laughter, in come the marking systems.

Beware.

So what happened when you met Nick Gibb?

2012-02-03T15:34:00.001Z

I know you've been on the edge of your seats longing to know what happened up at the Department for Education.

Schools Minister, Nick Gibb, is collecting ideas on how to encourage children to read. He says that he's got the 'decoding' in place (acknowledging that we wouldn't agree about that). He said he wanted to tackle the syndrome of 'can't read, won't read'. What ideas did I have about that?

[small intermission while Rosen muses on the phenomenon of canny sods who go about collecting vast consultancy fees every time they open their gobs within a hundred metres of a government minister and idiotic mugs like himself who turn up, gas on about reading, poetry, writing, teaching, schools, children, life, beauty, truth, the meaning of life and the universe and we don't even get to keep the security badge they give you on the way in.]

So, I repeated pretty well everything I've said on this blog about reading, writing, schools, teachers - I raved on about the model of teacher INSET pioneered by the Language in the National Curriculum project - why not a 'Reading Project' on the same model? I handed Nick Gibb my 20 point plan to turn a school into a book-loving school with the strong proviso that this shouldn't be a directive, that it was something schools could adapt to suit local conditions. I mentioned the 'reading revolution' website. I talked about how every school should be legally entitled to issue a library ticket to every child when they enter schooling in reception or Year 1 with a map showing the nearest libraries. We talked about how teacher training should include a module on children's literature - on all courses, not just some. I talked about 'browsing' and how this is a form of abstract thought, when children 'sort' their books into categories, how reading a Greek myth with my daughter aged 7, led her to between concrete and abstract thought as she investigated the meaning of the word 'pity'. I provided the reference to the research I've written about on this blog (see 'Books, books, books') which showed that having 500 books in your home (could be library books coming through), guarantees your child getting 3 years more schooling. (Mariah Evans, University of Nevada 2010) and so on.

[second intermission while Rosen remembers this conversation going with Ed Balls and Jim Knights, being treated with mild disdain because NuLabour were 'levering up standards' using SATs.]

It was a conversation. Nick Gibb listened and talked. I think I listened and talked. He said he was very interested in all this. He said that he would convene a meeting of all the Children's Laureates. I said that they were all passionate about reading and it could be fruitful.

I left.

Can't stop. Off to the Ministry to see Nick Gibb.

2012-02-02T15:37:00.000Z

In a few minutes I'll be meeting the Schools Minister, Nick Gibb. He asked to see me to talk about 'how to encourage children to read'.

In the words of Terry Venables, it's deja-vu all over again.

While I was Children's Laureate I was in and out of the Ministry faster than Sugar Ray Leonard's left jab. Who didn't I get to see! Oh it was fun. If it wasn't Ed Balls telling me that schools were reading books - he'd seen a school where they were reading in the playground, it was Jim Knight telling me that I had a point but he was moving on, it was Vernon Coaker telling me that they had just the same problem with PE - 'variability, Michael, variability', it was Jim Rose with his 'how do you make books come alive, Mike?', it was Phil Hammond from Ofsted telling me about how it was all very well people reading poems by you, Michael, but what about the other poets? it was Margaret Hodge saying, 'And what's happening with libraries, Michael, what's going on? and there was even one young woman who came up to me furtively as I came out of one of those meetings to ask me if I knew 'anything about multi-cultural education' because she had a report to write...

Maybe I could get a job up there - odd job man: 'Mend your light, Mr Gove?', 'Got a spot of bother with your taps, Mr Gibb.' 'Oh did that Mr Balls leave a mess on his desk? Don't worry, I'll give it a good old wipe down with swarfega...'

I make a generous offer to ex-head of Dept of Education

2012-02-02T11:24:00.002Z

I didn't make it up. Look (and see below this extract from today's Guardian, my generous offer to Sir David):

Let state schools be run for profit, says former Department for Education chief

Sir David Bell, the department's top civil servant until last year, believes move to profit-making is likely but is still 'a bit far off'

The former top civil servant in the Department for Education has said he sees "no principled objection" to profit-making companies taking over state schools and believes they will "probably" be allowed to do so eventually.

Sir David Bell, permanent secretary at the department until the end of last year and now vice-chancellor of Reading University, said in an interview with Education Guardian: "In those areas of systematic failure, where all other options have failed, can you object to somebody coming in and trying something very different and making some profit out of it?

"It could lead to better education for the kind of students who have been systematically failed for generations."

But, he added, profit-making was still "a bit far off" and it would be introduced "very gently, not in a big bang sort of way".

Michael Gove, the education secretary, said last year: "I don't have any particular objection to involving any organisation that is going to improve our education."

But he added: "We don't need to have profit-making organisations involved at the moment."

Though Nick Clegg has stated the Liberal Democrats' opposition to "running schools for profit", many in the Conservative party – particularly those associated with Tory thinktanks – support the move and are pressing for its inclusion in the party's next general election manifesto.

Bell's cautious backing for commercial firms running schools comes as a surprise because of his long background in state education and public service.

A former primary school teacher in Glasgow and Essex, he became chief education officer in Newcastle and chief executive of Bedfordshire council. He was head of Ofsted before moving to the Department for Education in 2006.

"Psst, Sir David, come over here. Come and sit in the car with me for a moment. I won't take up much of your time. I work for a company with many different interests: we import food from Poland, sink oil wells in Alaska, install surveillance systems in public toilets - pretty well anything actually.

We've seen your statements about the schools of the future and we like what we're hearing. Let me blunt with you, Sir David. Do you have a pension? Might I be so bold as to ask how much? Hmm, doesn't stretch all that far, does it? I'm going to make a guess: you would give your right hand to pay a visit to, say, the Grand Canyon, the Sidney Opera House, the Great Wall of China...or an exclusive Mediterranean holiday with a private beach. But it's all beyond your means, isn't it?

I think I've got the answer. We're very interested indeed in getting into the schools market. The snag is we're very good on surveillance systems, we've very good on waste disposal in low lying areas but education is pretty well a closed book for us. I'll be frank - closed books are the only kind of book I know. Last time I read a book was 'Noddy' in 1986. But hell, education - it's just something you have to get through before you start doing real things, don't you think? Well maybe you don't agree but don't let that stand between us.

Here's what I'm suggesting: you could come on to our board, we would pay you a generous stipend worth several thousand pounds a year. In return you would share some of your expertise with us. You would enable us to establish our education portfolio. We need to know exactly what are the weak spots, the areas of anxiety, if you like, so we can go in there with both boots on and grab the market. With you on the board we could be market leaders. What do you say?"

We don't want poor people finding out too much

2012-02-02T01:24:00.001Z

"What is becoming increasingly worrying for those of us in the business world is how naked our work has become. In the past, we could go through decades of business life without people mentioning a word like 'capitalism'. For years people's attention was forever drawn towards benefit scroungers, builders working on the black, skivers who took time off work, trade union trouble-makers, strikers - the list goes on. Meanwhile, questions of how rich company bosses should be, or indeed, how did they get to be rich - were almost invisible. In short, we lived through many happy years where people who were poor were obviously poor because they were stupid. They hadn't learned how to get rich. Meanwhile, we at the top of the business tree managed to convey the idea that we were clever, canny, shrewd and above all, rather attractive.

But now this has all changed. And I'm not sure it's for the better.

Every day the newspapers are full of stories about fat cats, tax avoidance, inequality, bonuses, high-earners and the rest. Even the word 'capitalism' is being mentioned over and over again.

Look, those of us at the top of business just want to get on with our job. We don't want people prying into the exact nature of our earnings and bonuses. We want it to appear that we just happen to be rich. Or that we are being justly rewarded for doing a damned hard job, or that we are great leaders who know how to do things like 'turn a business round'. We particularly don't want the whole world and his brother trying to figure out how share-holding works. So when Stephen Hester was due to get his bonus, you'll remember it wasn't cash. It was a pretty hefty number of shares. If the whole world hadn't bloody started poking their nose in, that could have been Hester's pension. He could have spent the rest of his days, collecting the dividends.

You see, if you get people trying to figure out how a stack of shares can deliver a hefty pension to someone, they'll start asking where do these dividend share-outs come from? In the end, you go all the way back to the people doing the work for a company, the people we call the shit-shovellers. They're the ones who actually do the work that our companies need and so give the dividends to people like Steve Hester.

But if people concentrate on that sort of thing, they'll be much less likely to accept the cuts that we in business are calling for. We desperately need people to be earning less - which of course means pay cuts and unemployment. We need for that to happen so that people like me at the top of business can go on dishing out the dividends to all of us who own hundreds of thousands of shares.

Now I rather like the way Osborne and Cameron have made it seem as if the great financial crisis happened because people like my employees were greedily hanging on to their jobs, or taking pay hikes. I think far too much attention is being paid to the idea that a good deal of the crisis came from trillions of poundsworth of loans couldn't be paid back. They turned out to be worthless.

But you can't have your ordinary Joe going about saying that. Or where would we be then? Strikes? Occupations? Or worse? Do we really want ordinary Joes stopping work and then sitting right where they are, saying, 'this office or factory or store is ours. We've paid for it many times over in the dividends we've earned for you guys at the top.'?

What a nightmare."

First stories of Sec Mod life in

2012-02-02T00:51:00.000Z

People are beginning to send in their stories of what life was like in Secondary Modern Schools between 1944 and the early 1970s.

Here's the site:

http://secmod.blogspot.com/

Memories of Sec Mod school

2012-01-31T23:11:00.000Z

Emma-Louise Williams and I have started a blogspot to build a living archive of memories of life and education in Secondary Modern Schools in Britain between 1944 and the early 70s.

It's a story that has never been told even though over two-thirds of the school population at any given time were going through the secondary modern schools.

We're inviting anyone who had experience of the schools to send in comments.

Here's the address:

http://secmod.blogspot.com/

The end of State Education, at last.

2012-01-31T16:55:00.000Z

"Good evening, thanks very much for asking me to give this year's Rupert Murdoch Lecture on education - and thanks first to him for being a beacon of truth in a sea of lies and misinformation. Today marks the day when we have finally got rid of state education. This great parasitic octopus that has sucked the lifeblood out of the nation and delivered to those of us in business millions of illiterates will, under this government, have its tentacles removed and its body buried.

Please welcome in its place: variety, diversity, specialism and choice. Put it this way, if you're a parent, you will quite literally have no idea who your local school is funded by or how. It could be national government, local government, a church or other religious organisation, a business, a charity, a trust, a foundation - or all 7 at the same time. Exciting or what?

Apart from some key features of the curriculum - like phonics - central government are butting out of education. They're leaving it to the real experts - teachers, interested business people like me, and any organisation prepared to take on schools. On the minister's desk at this very moment are proposals from zoos, oil companies, banks, third world charities, housing companies, Oxford colleges, my business - weapon systems - and many more. Who knows, in a year or two's time you could well find opening up next to you the Facebook Primary School, the Royal Bank of Scotland High, Oxfam Academy or whatever.

And look, in widening up these opportunities for schools, teachers and pupils, I'm pleased to say that the government are going to look again at the old division between fee-paying and non-fee-paying schools. I have in mind that once we've broken the grip of the revolutionary communists and trotskyists who run local government across England, we'll be able to introduce means testing into the schools that used to be public sector. In other words, those who can afford it, will pay.

To those who say that the longterm consequence of all this is that some schools will go to the wall, I say, so what? That kind of school doesn't deserve to stay open. That will be a school with poor teachers letting down the children. So pupils and teachers can decamp to the good school down the road. In fact, there will be exciting times in many children's school careers where they will literally be roving the streets looking for a school to go to. It's what we do when we hunt for a bargain, so no reason why it shouldn't be like that when choosing a school. "

Opening soon: The Richard Branson School, House of Saud School; Apple Mac School etc etc

2012-01-30T23:36:00.000Z

Gor blimey, you have to move quick to keep up with these Tories on education.

I was listening to 'Analysis' on BBC Radio 4 this evening: 'Do Schools Make a Difference?' (The answer to that question, by the way, was 'not much' or, to be precise: 10%. The other 90% was 'background' and schools couldn't and don't affect that. ) The programme's line at the end, though, was that if you become a teacher and you have no optimism that you can 'make a difference' then you won't help anyone. So best to be an optimist. (I think I've got the dimensions of what was being suggested here.)

The programme leant towards the idea that all that New Labour stuff about school improvement was by and large tosh and was little more than a massive perk for New Labour trusties embedded in universities concocting 'research' which proved that this or that process 'worked'. More chattily, the programme came to the exciting new conclusion that a good school is....er....one with good teachers. (I kid you not.) However, no one on the programme could make the intellectual effort to consider ways in which teachers could be given incentives and structures to help them develop - (which I've always believed can be achieved by teachers researching their own work and sharing their study with each other.)

Mr Mossbourne (previously of this parish,now residing in Ofsted), Michael Wilshaw got his usual crack of the whip to tell us that schools needed a good headteacher and....er....good teachers.

But never mind all that - what exactly is today's Tory line on education? Last week, you'll remember Michael Gove was going down the market to flog them off - 'Not just one. Not just two. But three lovely schools - look, I'm throwing a playing field in on top for you. And a caretaker. How about that? To the woman in blue. Not for 1 million, not for 500 thou, not even ladies for 250 - take the whole lot with a recycling bin thrown in for a one hundred grand. Take it or leave it. Are you with me or against me? Let me see the colour of your money...'

Now Nick Gibb's line is slightly different. He seems to be saying, 'anything goes so long as it's good'. Yes, he said that the Tories were going to abolish 'top-down' directives. That's all over. (Tell that to the Haringey parents who are having their schools forced into Academy status! Tell that to the Year 1 teachers teaching initial reading with phonics only and preparing for the phonics test for 6 year olds. Not top-down? That sort of thing is more top-down than an Olympic toboggan race.) What the Tories are aiming for is diversity. So that if parents wanted to have a 'traditional' school, there'd be one for them. If they wanted a 'progressive one' with 'child-centred learning' there'd be one of them.

Yes, you heard it here: Tory minister says that if parents want the kind of schools that they've been mocking and despising for the last 40 years, then so long as it's good, says Nick Gibb Schools Minister, that's fine by him.

Yes, you have to run to keep up with these guys. We're looking at a moment in history where the role of the state in education is changing very fast. I suspect that within ten years they will have created an education system that is essentially an archipelago of institutions run by a mix of trusts, consortia, hustlers, charities, private companies with a complex network of scholarships, subsidies, sponsorships and the like.

We will be wrong to describe this as either the 'market' or 'state education'. This will be hybrid education; a hunting ground for 'outsourced providers' turning up with truckloads of 'materials'. If you were to mass together all the theatres in this country and asked, 'What kind of system is that?' you would see everything from commercial theatres, theatres run by a trust trying to get money from local authorities or the Arts Council, some with monies from an old foundation, - some with some kind of social commitment, some with none, some in upstairs rooms of pubs, some apparently lavish and so on. Maybe that's what schools will be like.

So,look if you work for a charity, an outsourced provider (eg refuse collecting), some kind of educational trust or charity, a university or if you're just plain bloody rich, then education is your new frontier. I predict it's a matter of months before we have the Richard Branson School alongside the Gulbenkian Foundation School alongside the House of Saud School alongside the Apple Mac School, all the present faith schools, specialist schools, free schools, private schools and so on.

I've waived my bonus

2012-01-29T22:22:00.002Z

"I would just like to say that I have made a decision to waive my bonus. I have looked at my salary of 23 trillion pounds and after a good deal of thought, I came to the view that I don't need 85 trillion shares in the company. I think you will all agree that this represents a victory for common sense and fair play. I get to keep my 23 trillion quid and the company just hands out the 85 trillion shares to some other guy sucking up the surplus. As we say here at the Bank, some people stick their bullion in trunks, we stick our trunks into the bullion and hoover up the bloody lot.

Look, as the captain of the slave-ship said to his slaves, we're all in the same boat - now row faster you bastards.

Good man. And he certainly collected his bullion in a trunk when he sold the lot in Trinidad.

I digress.

We live in straitened times. And I want to be straight with you. I work damned hard. And I have an enormous brain. That's why I need to be paid in trillions. People who are lazy and have small brains - that's all of you, don't need trillions. Why not?

One: you wouldn't know what to spend it on. You're too stupid.
Two: if you had loads of money you wouldn't come and work for me or any other slave driver. And then where would we be?

So you get fuck all and a slice of bread and I get 23 trillion. Roll on next year when I get my bonus back.

Take those glum looks off your faces, for chrissake. Don't tell me you suffer from depression. Depression? Gettit????

Never mind."

Let's put the beating back into Labour.

2012-01-29T21:49:00.003Z

"Hi! Look, there are major problems in our society - poverty, inequality, bad health, computer games, attention deficit disorder, dirty floors, imported tomatoes, climate change, pornography, fat cats, thin cats - and all of them could be solved if working class parents knew for certain they could smack their kids. I'm not talking about middle class people here. They're fine. It's working class people. They come up to me and say, 'Hi! We want to thrash our kids but the bloody middle class tossers who run everything say that we can't. If we do, we'll be hauled up in front of the beak.'

And that's where we're letting them down. And we saw what happened. Lawless, feral kids smashing up everything. If they had been beaten throughout their childhood, there'd be no rioting, I can tell you. Those feral kids would have respected their elders. Good elders like the police for example, who only take 300 quid a 'ping' from journalists in order to locate stars' mobiles; and who have cleaned up their act since the Lawrence case, I can tell you. Oh yes. Look at the Mark Duggan case. Completely cleaned up. Well, no. Not like that. I mean, yes. And er no. Good. Yes. Ahem.

Anyway, beating kids makes kids respect the person who beats them. I was thrashed when I was a kid and I respect the police. There you have it. You see, it's a matter of mind over body. You thrash me and my mind respects your body. And your mind. Yes. But if you don't thrash me, I don't respect your mind or your body. Or anyone. You see,working class people haven't got minds. That's why they can't use their minds to bring about respect. So we must give them back the right to thrash. Middle class people are different. They don't need to thrash kids because they've got minds.

I know that some middle class people do thrash their kids.And good luck to them. Take David Cameron. If he had been older he could have thrashed Boris Johnson. Look, I'm of the school that says, what's good enough for the toffs is good enough for us.

Let's use the lamming in Lammy and put the beating back into Labour. As I say to my three year old girl, c'mon, son, look at me like that again, and I'll have you."

How to profit from your education.

2012-01-29T11:50:00.000Z

"Many exciting new developments are happening in education at the moment. We are finally breaking the grip that revolutionary communists have had over your children and in their place bringing in the business community with their long record of superb management of the British and world economy. Schools can now choose to be run by anyone who knows how to make a profit. What we do is shovel tax-payers' money towards these companies up to and beyond a level where they can provide their share-holders with juicy dividends.

People have said to me, but surely, you believe in socially agreed and administered norms to guide us in how we run schools? Indeed, we have spent the last hundred years and more developing the systems of inspection, government commissions, exams, league tables, school management, governors to run education. Well, I'm getting rid of all this. From now on, there is only one measure of education: money. Of course, we will carry on with exams and testing and all that but the purpose of all this is to use all results and positionings on league tables and the rest as a form of market research and measurement of competitiveness.

In the past, I know that some people have wondered if it's the job of education to serve business (or capitalism as some would call it). I don't think we need to ask that question any more. Under this new dispensation: education doesn't serve capitalism. It IS capitalism.

Rejoice!"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/jan/28/state-schools-private-sector-revolution

Good news from Jerusalem

2012-01-27T23:29:00.001Z

Today an email arrived with some good news:

Dear Friends,
The Government of Israel has accepted the Israeli Supreme Court recommendation that my residency be reinstated. I have been granted 2 years' residence on the basis of a Jerusalem Identity Card, and pending good behavior, shall receive permanent residence thereafter.

I am deeply indebted to all of you and extremely grateful for your kind support during this year of particular uncertainty. There is still much work to be done for resolution in line with international law for the 130,000+ Palestinians whose residency has been revoked by the Government of Israel.

With Best Wishes,

Munther Fahmi

The Bookshop
at American Colony Hotel
Tel: 02- 627 9731
http://facebook.com/Bookshop1
Join me on Twitter: @muntherfahmi1

Here's how the Guardian reported it:

The Palestinian owner of an celebrated Jerusalem bookshop patronised by politicians, diplomats, authors and activists has won a rare victory in a six-year battle to be allowed to remain in the city of his birth.

Munther Fahmi, the proprietor of the small but well-stocked bookshop at the legendary American Colony hotel, said he was overjoyed at the news, received on Thursday, that he had been granted a temporary residency permit by the Israeli authorities. He and his lawyer are optimistic it will be made permanent after two years.

Fahmi's campaign to be allowed to remain in Jerusalem is backed by eminent literary figures including the Israeli authors Amos Oz and David Grossman and British and Irish writers including Ian McEwan, Roddy Doyle, John Banville and Simon Sebag Montefiore.

Following the reprieve, his immediate plan was to book a trip to the London Book Fair in April, he told the Guardian, confident he would be admitted back into Israel. "This has been a huge strain. I have been living with uncertainty for 15 years, unable to plan my life. Every time I left the country, I didn't know if I could come back."

The threat stemmed from Fahmi's absence from Jerusalem for almost 20 years, which resulted in him losing his residency permit. Despite having been born and brought up in Jerusalem, he had been forced to rely on a series of tourist visas since returning in 1997.

Thousands of Palestinians have lost the right of residency in the city under similar circumstances. According to the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, in 2006 there were more than 1,300 revocations, although fewer than 200 in 2010. Human rights groups say the measure is an attempt to keep a Jewish majority in the city, pointing out that the restrictions apply only to Palestinian residents.

Fahmi was born in Jerusalem in 1954. In 1967, Israel captured and later annexed the east of the city, then under Jordanian rule. Fahmi's family, along with most other Palestinians in Jerusalem, declined to take Israeli citizenship and were instead granted permanent residency.

At the age of 18, Fahmi left to study in the US. He married, had a child, acquired American citizenship and built an insurance business. Initially he returned regularly to Jerusalem in order to retain his residency, which can be revoked after an absence of seven years.

In the heady, optimistic period following the signing of the Oslo accords, Fahmi decided to return to live in the city of his birth. He opened the bookshop in 1998, stocking it with Israeli, Palestinian and international authors. The crowded shelves include history, political commentary, fiction, poetry and travel guides. It has become a magnet for visitors – tourists, pilgrims and dignitaries – and locals wanting to read about the Holy Land and the wider region.

But Fahmi had lost his residency permit, instead counting on a three-month tourist visa every time he re-entered the country after a trip abroad. Six years ago he started a legal battle to get his residency rights reinstated.

Two years ago, the Israeli authorities told him they would issue no more tourist visas, and Fahmi would have to leave. His appeal on humanitarian grounds was granted this week.

Fahmi said the international support for his battle "had a huge impact, and rightly so". He paid tribute to Andrew Franklin, founder of Profile Books, who had "relentlessly steered" the campaign. "My first plan when I get to London is to hug and thank him," he said.

The decision, he said, was "good news for people who want to see Israel in a different light". The state should be concerned about its "growing isolationism".

But, he added, there were still "tens of thousands of Palestinians whose residency rights have been revoked. I hope they too get reinstatement."

Not Just For Them: a story for Holocaust Memorial Day

2012-01-27T16:16:00.000Z

This is about France
This is about Germany
This is about Jews.
This is not about France
This is not about Germany
This is not about Jews.

In the family they were always the French uncles
The ones who where there before the war
The ones who weren’t there after the war
The family said that one of them was a dentist
And the other one mended clocks and that’s it.
Not quite it. There was a street that the relatives
Here and in America kept saying, which was:
Rue de thionville, rue de thionville
And places in France: Nancy, Metz, Strasbourg
And one of the brothers was Oscar and the other was Martin
And that was it. Though Olga, in America
Nearly as small as a walnut, said that she used
To write letters to them to learn how to write French
And Michael here in England said that he used to
Write letters to them to learn how to write French
And that was it. That’s how it was, they said.
Michael knew how it was. His mother was the sister
Of the French uncles and she waved him goodbye
When he was 17 and that was the last he saw of her.
And that was it. But I wouldn’t let it go and I
Started looking for the rue de thionville and at an
Airport I met a guy who came from Metz and he said
He would go to the mairie, the town hall, and look
Up Oscar and Martin, rue de thionville and he did
Or says he did and he wrote back to say he didn’t find
Anything. And that was that. But then Teddy in America
Wrote to say that some letters have turned up, a son
Of a brother of a mother or something and he’s got letters from 1941
And they’re from Oscar, and they’re from Michael’s father
And oh my god they’re asking for help, they’re letters
To Max , look I know the names won’t mean much to you,
I’ve been living with this stuff and I don’t even know why
I’ve tried so hard to find out about it, but there were these
Brothers and sisters, all born in Poland, one of them is
Michael’s mother. That’s Stella, she stayed there,
married Bernard, there are the ones who went to France
that’s Oscar and Martin; there’s Max who went to America
along with Morris that’s my father’s father. I know the names.
So when I see the letters I know who they are, Oscar asking Max
for help, Bernard asking that money should be sent to Michael
who is now in Siberia, he doesn’t know that he’ll never see
his son again, and I’m looking at the letters, and there’s
an address in France, not rue de Thionville, in Metz
or Nancy or Strasbourg. It’s 11 rue Mellaise, remember that
in Niort in Deux Sevres. The other side of France.
And I start to read about how they all fled, everyone fled
‘L’exode’ they called, it, Exodus, everyone fled from the east
To the west, and here’s Oscar in the west in Niort
Deux Sevres...11 rue mellaise, remember the address
I find the house on google, there it is, a shop downstairs
A flat above, the French street, the shutters, the grey
Render of the walls, the kind of place I’ve walked down
A thousand times on trips to the country I love to be in
The place I discovered things I couldn’t buy or have
In England in the 1960s: jus de pomme in big brown bottles,
Fresh melons, blue vests, espadrilles, I didn’t even
Know why it mattered and here was 11 rue mellaise
The kind of place I would have liked to have stayed in
But this was the address for the last letter any of us have
From Oscar. And that was that. But I wouldn’t let go
Of it, and I started looking for what happened to Jews
In Niort, in Deux-Sevres and I found books which spoke of
‘rafles’, round-ups and a young rabbi who did all he could
But it wasn’t enough and every time I found a book
I went to the index to look for the name, Rosen. It’s
Something I’ve done, looking for my own name, or
The name of my brother or father or mother but now
I was looking for Oscar or Martin, and then, somewhere
I found something that I should have known about but
Didn’t. Le fichier juif, the Jewish file, the document or dossier of
Jews. In France, there’s a job called Prefect and Sub-prefect
Like local officials and these prefects and sub-prefects
Carefully wrote out the names of every Jew, date of birth,
Place of birth, job, married to...names of children. And there
In one of the books was page 1 of the fichier juif for
Deux-Sevres. But where was this fichier juif, I wanted to
Know, I don’t know why, and it seems as if most of the
Fichier juifs just disappeared after the war, they just
Slipped away and would have been lost, vanished
But for some reason a pile of them turned up in a
Basement of a building and carefully and slowly
They had been put together and copied but all I
Could see was page one. A facsimile of page one.
And that was that. But then at the back of a book
I found the name of another book: ‘Les chemins
De la honte,itineraire d’une persecution, Deux-Sevres
1940-1944', by Jean-Marie Pouplain....the path of shame
The account of a persecution, Deux-Sevres 1940-1944
And I ordered it. It arrived into a house we were
On the verge of moving out of, so there was
Something temporary and on the move about
Us at that point but the book arrived and I pulled
Off the cardboard packaging and I did what I’ve done before
I looked in the index for Rosen and it said, 34, 65,
96,108,197,202,203,205,210,212,213,236,240,244
And I turned to page 34 and there was the fichier juif
And number 40,it said, 'Rosen, Jeschie, né le 23 juin,
1895, polonaise,bonneterie, marié a Kesler, Rachel,née en 1910,
11 rue mellaise.' Some things very right, some things not so right
The name Jeschie, Oh I figured it was a nickname. Jews have Hebrew
Names and sometimes their Christian names are echoes of the
Hebrew names, perhaps he was Oscar because it sounded like
Yehoshua and the Yiddish nickname of Yehoshua was perhaps Jeschie..
But the job, ‘bonneterie’ it means the person who sells clothes
In the market. Not a dentist or a clockmaker and I slowly
Looked up each number and each page number told what
The prefect and the sub-prefect carefully wrote down, how
Jeschie and Rachel were given their yellow stars, how they
Had to pin a sign saying Entreprise Juive, Judisches Geschaft
Jewish business to their market stall, how everything they owned
Was taken away from them in a process called ‘aryanisation’
The business was Aryanised...whatever that meant and there
On one of the entries it said that Jeschie was an ‘horloger de
Carillon’ – a mender of chiming clocks. But what about the
Last pages? and I turned to the last page numbers –
Page 234 and 236, 240 and 245 and Jeschie Rosen
Was arrested outside of Deux-Sevres, he seems to have tried
To get away, ‘clandestinement’ – secretly but was picked up
somewhere else and then he and Rachel appear on another
document, the lists that the Nazis made in Paris of every Jew
they put on what the French called ‘convois’ – ‘convoys’
and there they are on convoy 62, leaving Paris on November
20 1943 going to Auschwitz.
And when I had read all that, as I stood there with the book
In my hand I knew that I was the first person in the family to know
All this and it felt like I had to tell everyone and I sat down
And started to write a letter to all the relatives which I
Didn’t finish because I had to go and find out – and I knew
Where to look – how many people were on that convoy, how long
Did it take to get to Auschwitz, what happened the moment
The train arrived, how many never came back, how many
Survived.

I read: 1200 Jews left Paris/Bobigny at 11.50 am on November 20 1943
Arrived Auschwitz November 25, as cabled by SS Colonel Liebenhenschel
1181 arrived.
There had been 19 escapees, they were young people
who escaped at 8.30pm Nov 20 near Lerouville.
In the convoy there were 83 children who were less than 12 years old.
Out of the convoy 241 men were selected for work and given numbers
164427-164667
Women numbered 69036 - 69080 were selected too.
914 were gassed straightaway
In 1945, there were 29 survivors - 27 men 2 women.

I looked over what I wrote before I sent it off to my brother,
And my cousins who would pass it on to Michael and to Max’s
Son in America – who I haven’t told you is 103 years as I write this,
I thought about what kind of war was it, what kind of people
Was it, who looked at a mender of clocks and his wife and put
Them in a document, made them wear a yellow star, made them
Put a sign up on their market stall, took their money away
From them, arrested them, put them in a transit
Camp, put them on a train and sent them to a camp in Poland
Where they were killed. This is a story about France,
A story about Germany, a story about Jews. This is a story
That’s not about France, not about Germany, not about Jews.
I found these things out in order to know. I found these
Things out, I know now, in order to tell other people.
I found these things out so that Jeschie and Rachel will be known
But in the end I know that the point of them being known is
That this is a story not just for them and about them.

london underground: shoving etc

2012-01-27T08:44:00.000Z

...london underground there are shovers, passers and divers. shovers shove. passers pass. divers dive in front of you at the last possible moment. I'm thinking: shovers are shovey people, passers are passy, divers are divey. shovers shove their feet into shoes, shove bad thoughts to the back of their minds. passers pass you on the stairs in a movement of air, pass their thoughts around their minds in a flow. divers dive in to get to the seat in front of you, dive to dodge a thought.

probably not. this is too fixed. on monday I did a bit of shoving. day before yesterday I did some neat passing. yesterday I did a dive...

Oswald Mosley and Holocaust Memorial Day

2012-01-26T21:46:00.000Z

In the many different ways, people will be looking at the Holocaust, I don't suppose too many will look at the strange story of Oswald Mosley. And yet, I can think of half a reason why perhaps he'd be worth including. The events of what has come to be called the Holocaust are of course focused on what the Nazis thought and did. (For my own clarity of mind, I tend to use some other words than 'Holocaust' because it's not always clear enough for my liking whether people are talking about some or all victims of Nazism. So, if the conversation is specifically about Jewish victims, I prefer the phrase 'the attempted genocide of the Jews'. Of course, the Nazis targeted many types of people (as they saw them), some specifically for genocide, some for extermination on the basis of their state of mind, some for extreme confinement, some for slave labour and so on. I feel much more comfortable if we remember all these victims by being precise about who they were, what the Nazis intended to do with them, what they actually did to them and, if possible, to figure out why.

A good part of Holocaust Memorial Day has come to be about the conversations with young people - education, in other words. But what do you say about it all? How? And why?

This isn't going to be a summary of HMD materials for schools - far from it. I'd just like to raise the question of whether there's any reason or usefulness in thinking about what Oswald Mosley wanted to do, actually did and how or why he didn't succeed.

In a recent book, 'Battle for the East End, Jewish responses to fascism in the 1930s' by David Rosenberg (Five Leaves), you get a clear picture of how Mosley's fascism evolved. Put much more crudely than DR puts it, there's a clear road from the authoritarian, anti-democratic model full of praise for strong, young, clean, vigorous, healthy men to a specifically racist party with most of that racism directed towards Jews. This is a reminder that fascist parties and fascist regimes don't necessarily target and scapegoat a specific group. Their function and purpose is wider than that - it's about the nature of how to run a government, an economy and a society: an authoritarian capitalism, with extreme limitations on freedom and human rights. Mosley figured that simply banging on about that wasn't going to get him to become Britain's generalissimo. So, he adopted the Hitler method (not the version tried by Mussolini, his first love); in other words, Mosley changed tack. He thought, by going for the Jews he was on to a winner.

David Rosenberg's argument is that one of the reasons (neither he nor I would say that it's the only reason) why it wasn't a success was an organisation called the Jewish People's Council Against Fascism and Anti-semitism. This grassroots, umbrella organisation, capable of drawing in tens of thousands of people including allies and sympathisers from outside the specifically Jewish groups, put at its heart a humanistic defence of people against persecution and for 'harmony'.

Now, this story of a fascist who found racism and a targeted minority who found self-defence seems to me to be a particularly interesting and relevant story to tell.

That said, I should declare my interest! Several interests. My parents were 17 years old when Mosley tried to march through the area where they lived, London's East End. They were also Mosley's specific targets in the day-to-say thuggery that his follows went in for on the streets. They were also very active in one of the most powerful bits of community action that undermined Mosley - the big rent strikes. Mosley tried to recruit non-Jewish tenants of the East End to his British Union of Fascists by saying that they were being swindled and cheated by Jewish landlords. By organising tenants' action (the Stepney Tenants' Defence League) in which thousands of Jews and non-Jews took part together, it completely wrecked Mosley's efforts to describe all Jews as racketeering landlords, and the rest of the whole anti-semitic bundle to do with Jews only owing allegiance to each other and/or being part of some conspiracy to achieve ends only of benefit to Jews.

Yes, at one level all a far cry from the terrible mass slaughter of the genocides and persecutions of the Nazi era. At another level, though, a keyhole into what fascists and racists try to do, and what we can do to oppose them.

Poor people are too rich

2012-01-24T22:27:00.000Z

"Good evening. Since my last talk, people have been saying to me, 'What's going on? What's happening?' So, tonight I'm going to roll up my sleeves and explain some things.

We're in trouble at the moment. Every single one of us. But why? It's simple. Poor people are too rich. Many of them work in places like hospitals and schools. This has brought the world economy to its knees.

Rich people have told us they need more money so what we're doing is rolling up our sleeves and taking money from the poor people and giving it to the rich people. Then the rich people will roll up their sleeves and save the world economy.

Of course there is a tiny minority of rich people who do bad things. And we take this very seriously indeed. We say to them, 'Naughty!' And I'm pleased to say that even the Labour Party - who brought the world economy to its knees - are saying much the same thing. We all say, 'Naughty!' So no one accuse us of not taking this matter very seriously indeed.

Tomorrow, I'm going to explain how we're working very closely with hedge fund managers, currency traders and tax avoidance companies to save the world economy.

Good night."

What to do if you see a poor person.

2012-01-24T08:48:00.000Z

"Good evening. These are hard times. Many of you are feeling the pinch and I feel your pain. But we know why it's so hard for you. It was the last government. They spent and spent and spent until they brought the world economic system to its knees. And now we're rolling up our sleeves and picking up the pieces.

First of all we've got to tackle waste. People say to me, look at all the people being paid out of the public purse. And I say, exactly. That's the kind of thing that had the world economic system on its knees.

Now, we've tried all sorts of ways to stop all this silly spending. We've got to get people back to work. There are jobs. All sorts of jobs. Big jobs. Small jobs.Tiny jobs. Tiny, tiny, tiny jobs. Jobs with pay. Jobs without pay. But they're all jobs. And there are loads of them. And we need to get people doing them. And they won't do them if we folk in government keep giving them money. The last government - who brought the world economic system to its knees - went on giving and giving and giving.

We're going to stop that. But we need your help. So we're starting something new. We've already launched the Big Society. And a great success it's been with big society thingies happening all over the place. And small ones. And tiny ones. And tiny,tiny,tiny ones. Everywhere. Marvellous.

Now we're launching the Big Sod Society. This is where you can do your bit. Here's how: if you're in the supermarket and you see a poor person buying something - go up to them and say, 'Hey you, where did you get that money from?' If they say, they got it by working for it, you can leave them alone. But if they say they're on benefits of any kind, kick them.

This is how we're going forward.

Good night."

Iain Duncan Smith turns nastiness into an art form.

2012-01-24T00:42:00.000Z

Iain Duncan Smith gives the impression of not having to try very hard to be nasty. Today, the Evening Standard reported him as saying of certain families: "They are incentivised, many of these families, to find more children so that they can stay out of work. This is utterly wrong and it's a benefit system which desperately needs change."

The Standard's headline was: 'IDS says families have babies to claim benefits'.

Of course, you can imagine that NewNewLabour would get stuck into IDS on this one. Well, you might imagine it, but that's not the Party spirit of the moment. Here's how the Standard reported it:

'His comments sparked an immediate backlash. Labour frontbencher Karen Buck said: "Iain Duncan Smith needs to think with great care before making these crass statements."'

What?! He needs to think about it?! That's the problem, Karen Buck. He did think. Then he opened his mouth and the poison fell out. Don't you get it? The Tories are trying to get poor people to eat each other. They have fairly successfully got whole sections of the people to think that in some complicated way the public sector caused the world economic crisis. Having more or less sold this lie, they proceeded to slash away at whole chunks of our public services, sacking thousands of people, while media jerks talk of unemployment as a most unfortunate side effect of Tory policy. It's not a side-effect, guys; it is the pre-planned intended effect. There have been signs of some fightback against these lies and attacks, but Miliband and Balls have signalled that they won't be backing any of it. They've handed the whole battlefield over to the Tories. Shameful.

But then along comes belt-and-braces IDS, who wants to make sure that any anger against the cuts is defused, so he makes up stories, hoping to unleash a storm of rage from one set of people affected by the cuts, straight at an even poorer group of people affected by the cuts.

And in the face of this nastiness, all that the NewNewLabour spokesperson could summon up was that IDS should bloody think with great care! Blimey, we don't want him to do any more thinking or he'll be thinking up vigilante schemes to attack pensioners.

Perhaps she could have said that there was strong evidence that very rich people have babies so that they can pass on their wealth in ways that usually involve tax-avoidance. The thing about trying to work the benefit system is that you don't get very much and more often than not you get done for it. The thing about working the inheritance tax avoidance systems is that your family stays eyewateringly rich and the rest of us don't benefit from the transfer of property from one generation to the other.

But we get the picture: NewNewLabour have turned into the Nice Party, the ones who won't spoil the Sunday dinner by mentioning money. And a fat lot of good, it'll do them.

Skins, tweets. Amazeballs. Apparently.

2012-01-23T16:00:00.001Z

Various technofreaks and futurologists champion the idea that young people are several steps ahead of education. The argument runs that they access ideas and knowledge in ways that standard, traditional education doesn't and possibly can't match.

I'm agnostic on this at the moment but I found myself catching my breath today interviewing Laura Hunter, who is one of the scriptwriters on 'Skins', the soap on E4. I didn't know (why would I?) that the characters are on twitter and people - that's real people - have conversations with the characters. That's not the actors, OK? It's the characters.

When she told me this - it was for an interview for 'Word of Mouth' going out on Radio 4 tomorrow - I was caught out. The first thing that came to mind is that this is the kind of 'empathy' work that English teachers, drama teachers and writers have been doing in schools for a good few years now. Instead of trying to tie students down to right and wrong answers, we try to get the students (or young children) to be the character in a book, play or poem and get others in a class to quiz them - why did you do that? what do you want to do now? - and that sort of thing. It harnesses the non-explicit knowledge that the class might have about a book or a character and gets them to think creatively about the dilemmas that they're in.

And whaddyaknow - there's a soap doing just that. So, yes, I thought, that might count as an example of how young people are accessing knowledge and ideas outside of school through new technology.

Then I got an ideological twinge. I suffer from them. Surely, wasn't this one step too far on the madness that is 'naturalism'? Getting involved in a drama as enacted by actors is fine, but isn't there a point where it's ideal that we come out of the involvement phase and start to put what we've seen and 'been in' into the context of our lives, the lives of people around us, and questions of ethics and values. Wasn't that what Brecht was saying in eg 'The Messingkauf Dialogues'? Isn't it what happens in Shakespeare's plays where characters comment on each other's actions - or their own - through thinking out loud and sharing those thoughts obviously with us the audience? We get round behind the immediate flow of emotions that arise within the watching of a particular scene. That's the idea: 'alienation effect' - so-called.

But here young people are tweeting the characters in a soap...and...er believing that they're talking to the character...not the actor...with no alienation effect in sight.

But then why should there be?

Amazeballs, as they say on 'Skins'. Apparently.

'Word of Mouth' Radio 4 Monday 4.00pm, Tuesday 11.00pm and then iPlayer.

Michael Gove: Prince of Chaos. It's worse than I thought.

2012-01-22T22:02:00.000Z

Here's one I missed. Perhaps you saw it. I didn't...

'Reforms to the national curriculum in England will not take place until the autumn of 2014 – a year later than planned – the Education Secretary Michael Gove has revealed in a written statement. However, the changes will be compulsory for a minority of secondary schools because academies are not obliged to deliver the curriculum.

"The longer timescale will allow for further debate with everyone interested in creating a genuinely world-class education system," Gove said. The delay puts back plans to change how schools teach English, maths, science and PE. However, it has been announced separately that history, geography, design and technology, the arts and foreign languages will become compulsory for all pupils up to the age of 16."'

(from www.publicservice.co.uk December 20 2011)

So let's unpack this:

Michael Gove is at present driving the academies waggon at breakneck speed through parents' and teachers' groups, kicking aside anybody in his way, demanding that 'county' schools (ones that come under the jurisdiction of a local authority) become academies. Presumably, his dream is that over the next eighteen months, many hundreds more schools will become academies - perhaps a majority.

All the while, some nibelungen in the underground caves of the Department of Education are sweating blood over the exact wording of a 'national' (snigger) curriculum for the subject that I'm involved with - 'English' - in the non-place we call England. In other words it'll be a national curriculum that won't be national and won't be a curriculum. It'll be the combined wit and wisdom of Michael Gove, the nibelungen and whatever thoughts emerged or will emerge from 'consultation', and then foisted on to those schools (and only those schools) which, perversely are NOT funded directly from the same corner of administration as this new curriculum - that is, Westminster! Academies are funded and controlled from national government.

Meanwhile, you could be a successful scrap metal merchant, a US bank (presumably one that hasn't gone bust or proven to be bent) or a religious foundation - or whatever - and you can set up your academy with your 'ethos' and invent your own curriculum for English. In other words money can buy you the right to set the curriculum in an ever-growing part of what we laughingly still call the state system, or indeed 'public' education.

Why should local authority 'county' schools have to suffer the imposition of any part of Michael Gove's fervid imagination? We've already heard him wittering on at Tory Party Conference about a utopia where all children (though, not the ones in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and not the ones in private schools, free schools or academies) will be reading the works of John Dryden. Why, if there is a genuine consensus that there should be national curriculum, where every pupil will leave with some kind of agreed entitlement, is it good politics to have a system where there is no consensus of practice? Either you have a national curriculum or you don't. What's the point of a make-believe one?

Then, in Michael Gove's statement we read of him talking about a longer timescale allowing for further debate. Why am I laughing silently into my beard? I won't compromise my friends but several people I know with thirty or forty years experience of teaching and research in literacy, literature and education have already had some experience of what the Gove team's idea of consultation and debate is. I've seen at first hand how Nick Gibb, the Schools Minister, for example, treated a group of librarians and advocates of reading for pleasure. At the launch of last summer's 'Reading Challenge' (the excellent summer holiday project which brings children into libraries to read books), Nick Gibb decided to give a five minute lecture on the virtues of phonics. This had nothing whatsoever to do with Reading Challenge, nothing to do with anyone in the room. I doubt if there was a single person in the room who, if convinced by the highly unconvincing Nick Gibb, and who then thought they ought to immediately rush out and do phonics with a bunch of children, had even the remotest professional chance or reason to do such a thing. They weren't early years teachers, Nick. They were people excited by the idea of getting children in the summer holidays reading books. Clearly, neither tact, empathy or a sense of occasion are Nick Gibb's strong points. Meanwhile, all accounts of his encounters with friends and colleagues have been one of a similar kind: short, sharp lectures on phonics and complete refusal to listen to or be interested in anything that teachers, practitioners or advisers have to say unless it fits his pre-conceived notions of what will and must take place in classrooms. Actually, by and large he doesn't seem to be interested in anything that any pupil does or might do after they've done phonics.

I had a much more enjoyable and friendly time with the 'Expert Panel' that Michael Gove set up many months ago. I (along with many, many other people) was invited to give opinions and advice and I ended up face to face with Professor Mary James, Associate Director of Research in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. However, on my arrival Mary James made it clear that no matter what I was going to say, several aspects of the outcome were already decided! 1. The final 'national curriculum' was going to be very slim, no more than some guidelines. 2. The people 'up there' had decided that content and pedagogy were two different things. The government would lay down the key areas of content, Teachers would be free to work out pedagogy. 3. At the time of our meeting (perhaps nine months ago?), she said that them 'up there' (my words, not hers) were rather keen on giving teachers and schools a list of prescribed or recommended authors.

I tried to find out how slim (I didn't find out) but agreed in principle that parents were entitled to know what schools were going to do in any given area of the curriculum and what they hoped were the outcomes. Like her, I suspect, I thought that the distinction between content and pedagogy is only really sustainable on a piece of paper but not at the moment of teaching and learning. (In the words of W.B.Yeats,'How can we know the dancer from the dance?' (or vice versa, I suspect)). As for the magic list of authors, I said that this had been tried before with the Cox Report in, (from memory) 1989 and had got booted out by a combination of teachers', advisers', researchers' and authors' contempt, derision and direct action.

My own contribution was around reading whole books, turning schools into book-reading communities, and thinking of English and literacy departments as publishing and performing houses. In that way, the issues so dear to the heart of Nick Gibb and Michael Gove - spelling, grammar and punctuation - take place in the real environment of producing texts for people to read, rather than exercises that end up purposeless and dead in...er...exercise books. That sort of thing. And then I went. End.

Given that this was the model of consultation that Michael Gove set up - expert panel receiving guest submissions in face to face encounters - then surely by now they have seen everyone they wanted to see? Perhaps not. Perhaps they're going to go walkabout now? Needless to say, this model of consultation is highly unsatisfactory because it's static. It doesn't involve practitioners showing education in practice, it doesn't involve them researching themselves in action in classrooms. As I've said before, the government has the model for this way of consulting and producing policy with the Language in the National Curriculum Project from the late 80s.

Ironically, at the very moment that the Ministry lets go of hundreds of schools' curricula (to academies, free schools and private schools), it resorts to the same old authoritarian way of controlling the schools left over. Even more ironically, even as they say that this is in order to perfect education so that it's 'world class', they are quite happy to let another year go by where these left over schools can actually do more or less what they want within the scaffold of the exam system. (I've even heard an adviser stand up in front of a hundred teachers and announce: 'The National Literacy Strategy is dead. Go back to your schools and devise your own.' And that was over two years ago, on the day that New Labour admitted through its deeds if not its words that the NLS had been a screw-up.)

So, we have a Ministry zig-zagging between diy curricula for some and an authoritarian one for others; a period without direction and a period with direction.

And of course there's every possibility that by the time this new curriculum appears - September 2014, Michael Gove and Nick Gibb will be off frying other fish, spending more time with their families or cooling their heels on the backbenches. And if a new government were to come in in 2015, whatever load of general or specific jaw-ache Gove and Gibb come up with, could be wiped from the record and the whole silly, top-down, piecemeal crap could start all over again.

Do they wonder why we hold them in such contempt?

92 of my poems on YouTube

2012-01-22T03:00:00.000Z

Many apologies if you knew about this, but for those who write to me asking where they are, they're here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/artificedesign/videos?sort=p&view=u&page=1

These are 92 videos that my son, Joe shot of me performing my poems and a few songs, including my version of 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'.

The first round that I did some three years ago were all from the same book, 'The Hypnotiser' which had gone out of print and is still out of print.

Then there were some shot while I was on tour in Scotland. (me in a gingery jumper for these)

And then Joe shot some more last year themed around family episodes. (the flowery shirt ones)

These come from:

'Michael Rosen's Big Book of Bad Things' (Puffin);
'Quick Let's Get Out of Here' (Puffin);
'You Wait Till I'm Older Than You' (Puffin);
'Centrally Heated Knickers' (Puffin);
'Mustard, Custard, Grumble Belly and Gravy' (Bloomsbury)

The other way to find the whole lot - plus some BBC ones - is to go to my website and navigate your way round there:

http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/

and click on 'Videos' on the menu bar across the top of the front page.

If you go via YouTube you will quickly come across what are known as 'poops'. These are adaptations, re-makes, over-dubs etc of my videos and I can't guarantee that the content of these is suitable for young children. YouTube is still a free-for-all and people can do what they want with what they find there.

Can poetry survive education? Yes.

2012-01-21T21:42:00.000Z

The principle lying behind some old ways of teaching children, school students and college students how to read and understand poetry is the deficit theory. That's to say, the reading pupil supposedly knows less about the poem than that alliance of the educator, text-book and examiner. The outcome here is that in the tests, the top 5% (very nearly all of whom come from homes where talk about literature and ideas goes on anyway) simply absorb this stuff through the pores in their skin. A sizeable chunk in the middle experience the process as mild humiliation, but go through the paces and do OK and don't bother with poetry very much ever again. The failing percentage have no idea what all that chat was for and learn to hate poetry. (Exaggeration I know, but bear with me.)

The reason for all this lies in the kinds of questions the reading pupils are given: most of them are variations on the theme of proving why the poem is 'effective' or, in lay terms, good. So, whether in short bursts or longer passages, the pupil has to spot and name bits of the poem doing what poems do (apparently these are metaphors, similes, alliteration, similes, personification, rhyme, rhythm, imagery) but, in this particular poem chosen by the text-book writer or examiner, are all done 'effectively'.

In truth, this is all pretty tiresome and has very little to do with how or why poets write/perform and probably, given half a chance, not much to do with how or why anyone chooses to read poems.

So what to do?

Unavoidably, we all read with two inter-related aspects of ourselves: our experience of life, our experience of texts. You can of course pretend to read with someone else's experience of life and experience of texts and a good deal of the test-crazy system tries to get pupils to do just this: coming up with rehearsed formulae disguised rather thinly as coherent responses. In order to tap into the two inter-related experiences (of life and texts), all that educators need to do is ask another genre of question altogether: the questions that clearly the educator doesn't know the answers to. Only then can the reading pupil position him- or herself as a fully entitled reader.

So -
you can ask readers to discuss (eg in pairs) what aspects of the poem remind them of anything that has ever happened in their life or in someone else's life they know about;

you can ask readers to discuss what aspects of the poem remind them of anything that they have read, viewed, heard by way of 'text' (including film, TV, song, etc) that aspects of the poem reminded them of. In both these questions, you can ask the reader to discuss why or how they were reminded - in other words to tease out the links and possible explanations for the links.

Then you can ask the readers (in pairs or small groups) to come up with questions that they would like to ask of the poem, the poet, or indeed anyone or any thing in the poem. You can then collect all these questions together and then, create some kind of forum in which to answer them. One way is to ask eg one of the readers to take on the role of the poet and the others to interview the poet. Similarly, a reader could, say, take on the role of the Duke, or the killed Duchess in 'That's my last Duchess' and field questions accordingly.

When it comes to the way in which the poem has been put together, there is a way in which the power can stay with the reader. You can point out that poems are a way of 'sticking language together' - what M.A.K. Halliday calls 'cohesion' - 'wording' has 'cohesion'. You could say, poems are a 'specialised form of cohesion' (for sixth formers and college students). For younger pupils you show how clauses and sentences and paragraphs are ways of sticking words together...eg 'The man walked into the room. He was wearing a hat.' ('He' back refers to 'the man' and so 'sticks' sentence two to sentence one.) Poetry does this same sort of thing as other language but has others ways too: eg anything that comes under the heading of 'prosody' - the musicality of language which ties words, phrases, verses, whole poems together (eg rhythm, rhyme, repetition and any repeated sound-systems). Poetry also uses patterns of images - a kind of secret network of recurring, image. It also often uses binary opposites of ideas, images, themes.These 'stick' the binary parts together. That's often how conflict and contrast work in all literature, but in poetry it can be over a comparatively short and dense piece of writing.

You can demonstrate this (once, say), or 'scaffold' it, as the jargon puts it, and in so doing you show that parts of a poem link to other parts (stick together) using 'secret strings'. If you have copies of the poem, you can draw these secret strings straight on to the poem. You put a loop round a letter, syllable, whole word, clause, verse, chorus or whatever and run the string to the next part of the poem that links with it. For younger children, I call the children 'poem detectives'. It's a game. Find the secret strings. And you say, 'You can't be wrong. If you find a string and can show how or why it's a string - it's a string! You're right.' This puts the power of 'spotting' into the hands of the readers. They can work in pairs doing this...and then share the discoveries.

You can then ask them to discuss why such strings are there...pointing out that the poet might well have not spotted them him- or herself.

You don't have to do this with every poem - of course! There are plenty of other things to do with poems: like reading one and then another and then another! Or reading it outloud. Or not reading it outloud. Or writing it out in your own notebook. Or reading it outloud while some other people do 'freeze-frame tableaux to 'illustrate' it. Or drawing a picture that is inspired by the poem. Or taking photos to go with the poem. Or making a power-point with the poem...and so on. Or sticking post-its on to a poem with your thoughts of that part of the poem on the post-its.

I offer the above questions, though, for those occasions when there is a reason for trying to make explicit how and why poems are interesting, how and why they might matter, how and why they might be effective (or not); how and why they are 'stuck together'. That said, it may well turn out that the questions people ask for which there are no definite answers, may well take readers to important aspects of the poem. That's because one major strand of poetry is about saying things in non-explicit ways, to suggest and imply things, or to say things that are intended to set up chains of associations away from the poem itself.

Picking up on a theme from an earlier blog: this keeps the processes of investigation, discovery, play and co-operation at the heart of the reading and critical processes.

Almond plus Gogol plus Durrenmatt at the Little Angel Puppet Theatre

2012-01-21T20:00:00.002Z

The Little Angel Theatre in association with Kneehigh are putting on 'A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings', a show 'inspired by Gabriel Garcia Marquez's short story'.

I'll declare my interest - I'm a patron at the Little Angel.

If you can imagine David Almond's 'Skellig', Gogol's 'Government Inspector' and Durrenmatt's 'The Visit' melting into each other, then you'll have some idea of what this show feels like. But of course this is a puppet show, which in this case means mostly four puppeteers operating hand-held 'rod' puppets in full vision. The stage is peopled with scores of lumpy Brueghel-like figures in a small village, dealing with the fact that an old man with wings has turned up there.

These are puppets whose facial expressions appear to change with the action (they don't - they're carved), speaking to us from different levels and corners, and from deep into some kind of journey-space far away. If you have any preconceptions about puppetry being cosy or sentimental, then this show will banish these.

It is indeed 'magical realism' - believable people dealing with unbelievable things, showing their naivete, their qualities of greed, hope and longing and then having to pick up the pieces when it all falls apart. At every point in the drama, you can find yourself asking yourself how would you behave, can you position yourself in some place that is superior to the character speaking? Perhaps, perhaps not.

This is a superb show - great for an all-age outing. I went today with my nearly-11 year old and 7 year old. Funny-sad-tense-beautiful-strange-thoughtful-ethical.

You can find the Little Angel on facebook at: facebook.com/LittleAngelTheatre
twitter: @LittleATheatre
YouTube: youtube.com/TheLittleATheatre
website: www.littleangeltheatre.com
Box Office 020 7226 1787

The theatre is in Islington half way between the tube stations of the Angel (Northern Line) and Highbury and Islington (Victoria Line, Overground and National Rail line to Welwyn and Hertford).

IMF - chutzpah or blether?

2012-01-20T18:21:00.000Z

Here's the Guardian's report on today's IMF Chutzpah report:

'With more than 200 million people currently unemployed around the world, the call to action said policymakers should "address youth and long-term unemployment to provide decent work prospects, along with country-specific structural reforms that are fairly implemented to achieve faster growth. Through dialogue, labour market reforms can be agreed that can both raise employment levels and ease fiscal adjustment."

It added: "Boosting jobs and investing in human capital is the most promising way of tackling inequality. We support the work of the ILO and others in assisting governments to examine realistic policy options, including cost-effective social policies to cushion the most vulnerable from adversity. Investment should target skills and education and thus equip people for the future.

"Rising inequality calls for heightened consideration of more inclusive models of growth. We must deliver tangible improvements in material living standards and greater social cohesion."

The call for action urged governments to resist the temptation to resort to trade barriers in an attempt to safeguard jobs. "Countries must reaffirm that none will resort to growth-destroying protectionism and demonstrate that trade restrictions introduced in response to the economic crisis will be rolled back."'

End.

This had me gasping.

First the horrific figure of 200 million people unemployed. That's 200 million people deliberately taken out of earning money, deliberately taken out of production because capitalists have no other way of organising the making of things. They produce so many goods and work so hard competing with each other to produce them at less and less cost (lower wages, more 'productive' machinery) that in the end, there aren't enough people with enough money to buy the goods. So they start destroying 'capital' - closing factories, laying off people.

Of course none of this has anything to do with what we need in terms of food, housing, clothes, energy supplies, transport, health care, education and useful goods and services. 200 million people are laid off because that's the only way this system can think of to keep itself profitable. That's 200 million people in poverty or worse. Capitalists think that unemployment is part of the solution to their problem. No. It IS the problem.

Now the IMF is a longtime proponent of this system and has in the past forced its way into countries, demanded that their public services (healthcare,education, care for the elderly, social housing) be slashed so that firms coming in can be profitable. Governments, hungry for money - often to run wars - have taken their loans and forced the people to accept these 'packages'.

And now they're posing as some kind of Keynesian angels, wittering on about 'social cohesion' and the dangers of inequality...what am I saying, 'Keynesian'?! - they're posing as commies. They're calling for 'investing in human capital'! That's what you and I call 'education and training'. They're calling for 'cost-effective social policies' - that's stuff like housing, disability and unemployment benefits - which most countries are slashing to bits because the bankers (and the governments who love them) have been straining every muscle to claim that the cause of the crisis is...er....'social polices' ie the 'deficit' - that's the money that governments spend...on...er...'cost-effective social policies' and...er...'investment in human capital'!

In other words, all this is contradictory, hypocritical blether.

How to control children's minds

2012-01-20T17:20:00.000Z

[I should have prefaced this with a disclaimer: what follows is not to blame teachers one jot or iota. The system in England forces many schools to adopt what is in effect a SATs course. I've heard headteachers explain to me how much pressure they've been under to do this. Even so, there are some schools and some teachers who do manage to resist that pressure. So, of course I'm not blaming them either! Finally, what follows is specifically about this moment in the year, in the lead-up to SATs in England. Disclaimer over.]

For people who like to control children's minds, the great advantage of the SATs that Year 6 children face in England is that for several months these tests (and the preparation for them) prevent children from putting together significant chunks of extended prose, stop them having to pay any close attention to words in any metaphorical or playful way, inhibit them from using language to express dilemmas and problems, cut them off from the chance to explore through language how a person might get out of dilemmas and problems; to explore through language ideas, possibilities, transformations, changes; or to express through language doubt, speculation, ambiguity, uncertainty.

In place of these uses and functions of language, are closed-ended questions which revolve endlessly around features of language which are supposedly 'in' a passage of writing. The writing that children are required to do is prove that they have spotted what's 'in' the passage, and it's of a highly formulaic kind - specific right-or-wrong answers to 'why', 'what', 'when', 'how', 'where'. Has anyone ever shown or proved that making children do this sort of thing achieves anything?

In actual fact, readers produce their meanings 'outside' of the text. The reader produces meanings in some kind of inter-relation with the text. Some part of this process is dependent on some basic shared , learned interpretations of the squiggles on the page. However, it's very easy to exaggerate the degree to which these interpretations are shared and fixed (as it were, before the reader starts to read) and very easy to ignore how the reader brings his or knowledge of texts and his or her knowledge of life in the reading moment. In order to turn writing into markable chunks of comprehension, a discourse of examination-ese has had to be invented which implies that all meaning is 'in' the text, the examiner knows what this meaning is because it pre-exists that moment of reading, and it's the job of the candidate to arrive at the same conclusion as the examiner ie to discover what's in the examiner's mind. Only then will the candidate get the marks, the measurable quantification of response to writing. It's the accountancy principle of reading - ideal for a capitalist society, because it puts a price on everything.

A subject largely ignored at all levels of education is the exploration of how readers' interpretations of texts are socially constructed. A reader isn't a free-floating asteroid. He or she is a social being who uses texts to navigate life, who has spent the whole of his or her life responding to texts. These texts aren't free-floating asteroids either. They come out of institutions, they are marked with purpose and intention. In a complicated formulation, this has been called 'the social construction of intertextuality'. No matter how complicated that sounds, there is no reason why children and school students can't explore this in many interesting ways: language maps of themselves investigating why they say this or that, where and how they acquired this or that way of speaking; examinations of the texts of their pasts in terms of where they come from, what purpose they might have, and why they were given them, investigations of the texts around them in terms of their origin and apparent intention...and so on.

If I want to make myself distressed though, all I need to do is focus on the kind of writing that English Year 6 children are asked to write, re-write and re-write again and again and again in the run-up to the SATs test. As a body of writing, it represents the removal of all danger, excitement, desire, problem, dilemma, problem-solving or subversion. It is in effect a censorship of the brain.

But even this over-simplifies. I always say to anyone (not only children) that the great thing about writing poems or stories or life-writing or even accounts of what you've done (so-called 'recounts') is that the potential in that moment of writing is discovery. However, if you do too much pre-structuring, pre-note-making, pre-planning, you miss one of the great achievements of the invention of writing which is to enable the writer to do the discovering as you write, in the process of writing. It's as if the pen (or keyboard) is a probe or a spade (see Seamus Heaney's poem on this) or a fork turning the texts and experiences over as you produce the words on the page (or as M.A.K. Halliday would put it, 'as you produce the wording').

In the name of teaching people how to write, we have invented processes in education which prevent, hinder and inhibit these acts of discovery - particularly as the children and students approach the time for testing. The schools are under immense pressure to do this because it's this way, they're told, the children will do better in the tests. So of course they do it. It can even be 'proved' that it's a form of entitlement.

In practical terms with Year 6 children in England, just at the moment when their level of maturation and understanding and experience offers them the possibility of writing long projects, stories, novels, collections of poems, autobiographies, biographies, they are squeezed into writing short, segments of closed-ended answers to questions that examiners already know the answers to.

I know this doesn't last forever, I know that most schools in England treat the post-SATs months as a fantastic opportunity for creative work of many different kinds. Let's just say that for many teachers and children, we're in hold-your-nose-till-mid-May time.

ps in the above I keep using the words 'investigate' 'explore' 'discover'. Wouldn't education be brilliant if every day at school was a day when you investigated, explored and discovered? I would add in 'play' and 'co-operate'. Yes, investigate, discover, play, co-operate. If you were in school for a day where you didn't do any investigating, discovering, playing or co-operating, you could summon the monsters of the deep to eat Michael Gove. Or something.

I seem to have hacked into Number 10...

2012-01-19T22:26:00.000Z

"I say, Samanth, do be a love and pass me one of those bikkies. Did you see my speech today? No? Well, I know this sounds boasty but I think I did pretty bloody OK. I've got this whole riff thingy going on 'popular capitalism'. What do you think? Oh, I didn't mean those bikkies, I meant the figgy roll ones. Anyway, the great thing about popular capitalism, you see, is that it sounds er...erm....popular. You see? I mean when it comes down to it, people like capitalism. Everyone does. Bloody hell, everyone does all bloody right by capitalism. Apart from er...erm....those who don't. So popular capitalism, you see dear, sounds pretty damned OK. And then one of the little chaps in the back room came up with 'turbo-capitalism'. Three years at Balliol didn't do him any harm, eh? Oh...have you? Take some nurophen, then...anyway, where was I? Yes, so this little chap, says, turbo-charged, y'know, Jeremy Clarkson, that sort of thing, turbo-capitalism, gettit? I pounced on it. Sound bloody bite or what? Did you find the figgy rolls? Actually, between you and me Samanth, it means sweet f.a., football league and premiership all in one. Turbo-capitalism! Hah, there's just capitalism and capitalism. That's what Vernon taught me when I was up. At least I think it was him. All a bit of a bloody haze to tell the truth. What? Yes, yes, yes, I know it's thin ice, darling. Don't start lecturing me. Look, don't you worry, I'll be spending weeks in bloody meetings with the City boys telling them that I didn't mean a bloody word of it. Of course I will. I'll just explain to them that I have to say that tosh in order to keep little Eddie Moribund on his toes. I'll just say to them: of course I don't mean it, go bloody forth and multiply, I'll say to them. And if there's one thing that lot know how to do it's multiply, eh, poppet. Samanth? Samanth? Bloody hell, it's only 10.30 and you're sparko."

Teacher power; children power; language power

2012-01-18T23:19:00.000Z

I had a great day today working with teachers in Richmond, London. We had two hours thinking and talking about poetry in schools.

If I'm not careful (and install my shuttup button in my brain) I could easily gas on for two hours about poetry in schools. The net gain for the teachers, their children and education as a whole would be about minus 23%. So, instead, what I try to do is convene a discussion where teachers pool their best practice. With some 50 teachers in the room, they proceeded to produce what was in effect a magnificent outline for a poetry curriculum in primary schools, much better than any document, or plan or outline I've ever seen issued from central government or for that matter in a book. It came directly out of classroom practice, related by classroom teachers, full of observations about how it actually worked in their classes.

So, for example, at least three teachers talked about reading a poem a day to or with the children, with a developing pattern of the children introducing poems that they read (or asked to be read) coming from books in the class, from home, or from poems that the children themselves wrote. One of the teachers said that poems were sometimes the way the children moved from one activity to another and she gave the example of her reciting Allen Ahlberg's poem about the scissors getting lost. This was how the children got the signal that it was time to come to the carpet.

Two teachers talked about ways in which they've made places where the children collect language - phrases they've heard or read, headlines, lines from poems or songs, odd words; one of them had a 'Magpie Wall' and the other had a big notebook for the children. We talked about how this can be a great starting point for poems. You go to the Wall or the book when you're stumped or looking for ideas.

One teacher talked about how the momentum of children choosing poems also involved the children going off and preparing performances of poems in their spare time, in the playground. Sometimes this would be group of them, working up a performance piece together, splitting up the lines, building in choral speaking and the like. This was coming from them, she pointed out.

One teacher talked about watching Attenborough's Frozen Planet and the children becoming collectors of language, picking out phrases they liked and then constructing a poem out of these 'found' phrases.

One teacher talked about having a special store or box under her chair, where the children knew she kept special books which she would read from. These include poetry books but she had discovered that the children were slipping books of their own into the special box, so that the teacher would read those out too.

I chipped in with the idea that if you want children to be interested in poetry, you can simply write poems out and stick them on the wall - and then change them every so often. If it's possible, the children can then write comments on post-its and stick them to the poem.

All this is informed by a notion of language and literature which works on the idea that what we're trying to do in schools is enable children to take up language and become owners and controllers of it. This is hard to do in schools where the curriculum is dominated by exercises which suggest that the examiner/tester who wrote the exercises and questions knows more than you, the child. That invisible questioner appears to own and control language and knowledge about it. You can only be right if that questioner says you are, and the rest of the time you're wrong and inadequate.

Poetry doesn't of itself break this down. It can repeat the pattern if poems are only chosen by the curriculum, if the pattern of work is always the same and predictable, if the work is dominated by questions which have right and wrong answers or 'right' ways of writing. What was interesting and exciting for me - and I hope the teachers too - was that a lot of the practice they were talking about seemed to be about children taking power to themselves as inspired and modelled and 'scaffolded' by the teachers.

This seems to be new. A few years ago, deep in the heart of the now-junked Literacy Strategy - teachers were inevitably talking about how to use poetry to implement the Strategy, following the requirements of that trivial and insulting matrix.Here though was a group of teachers who were talking about children discovering poems and poetry and making it their own.

In the second half I talked about some starting points for asking questions about poems and also writing them - again informed by the idea that what really matters is children taking ownership of the words, the language, the form and finding out new things about all that and themselves in the process.

Exciting day.

David Cameron: Books, Lies and Videotape

2012-01-18T22:28:00.001Z

The front page of London's Evening Standard tonight shouted out:

"Cameron visits the school we're fighting to save and gives this message to parents: However busy you are, read to your children"

There are a lot of messages flying off the newspaper here:
1. We're brilliant, because we're saving a school.
2. David Cameron is brilliant because he's helping us.
3. David Cameron reads to his children. (He tells us later that he does)
4. You should be like him and read to your children

Inside, we learn that the school didn't have a library but now it has, thanks to Selfridges who've come up with loads of dosh, and several publishers who've contributed loads of books.

So we can add some more messages:

5. If you can't afford a library, go and ask your local Selfridges.
6. If you haven't got any nice new books, ring up the publishers.

We also learn that, thanks to the Evening Standard, the school now has a team of reading volunteers who visit the school to hear the children read...so:

7. If you haven't got enough paid teachers to hear and encourage children to read, go out and recruit some unpaid volunteers.

We also here Cameron saying:
'I hope one day you will look back and think about this school and this great library and everyone who has supported it...because actually there is a huge problem with some kids not having access to books. And having a library like this, in a school like this, with volunteers like this, is a really great start in life.'

From which we learn:

8. Cameron is having a laugh. The 'huge problem' he's talking about is him and his cronies, whose actions over the last year have caused libraries to close and prevent children from having access to books.To which we could add the fact that the new enforced regime of phonics, requiring schools to buy expensive phonics' kits has taken money away from giving children access to books, and taken the energy and focus away from putting whole books at the centre of the school day and the centre of school life.

But, hey, shouldn't we welcome this wonderful intervention, this wonderful 'support' for books in schools?

Not a bit of it. This is Big Society Bollocks. It's precisely the piecemeal provision that old-style charity provides and with it the same old patronising you-should-be-grateful stuff that goes with it. What the Evening Standard has done is great news for that school. Not any other schools, because it can't. The kinds of money and attention pouring into this particular school can't be reproduced in every school. There aren't thousand of Selfridges queueing up to start up libraries in every school.

In other words, there is no substitute for universal provision.

Now, here's an ironic twist. When I was Children's Laureate, I was ushered in to see Ed Balls (then Sec of State for Education) and Jim Knight, then Schools Minister. I pleaded with them to start a proper universalised campaign for the reading of whole books in school and the provision through libraries of books in every home. I gave them the research on it, the articles on it, and my 20-point plan on how to create a book-friendly school and community.

I could see that I wasn't getting very far, so as a parting shot, I said, 'And you know what'll happen, don't you? The other lot will take this up, as part of their bid to stop looking like the nasty party.'

Balls thought that was very funny and that was it. I got precisely nowhere.

And guess what? It's happened. Balls is off perfecting how he is going to give the bankers the very clear message that he won't be supporting public sector workers now or at any point in the future.

Never mind,Ed. Cameron got his photo-opportunity, pimping off inner city children, presenting himself as Kind Politician Man while real progression towards universal provision and policy on the reading of whole books in schools and communities doesn't move one inch further forward.

My bid for leadership of the Labour Party

2012-01-17T23:45:00.001Z

I hereby promise that I will not support any campaign by anyone, anywhere to protect public services or to protect their livelihoods. I hereby promise never to point out on TV programmes or in newspapers that it wasn't the public sector which caused the world economic crisis; I hereby promise not to point out that we are in the midst of a transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest section of society: I hereby promise that I will let interviewers on radio and TV bark at me about 'deficit reduction, deficit reduction, deficit reduction' without ever mentioning any of these aforementioned things. I hereby promise that I will accuse union leaders of being unrealistic for trying to protect their members from the attacks on their standard of living. With these words, I pledge my support for the present Labour leadership and should it be decided that the present leadership isn't pretty enough to make the difficult decisions facing this great country of ours, then I hereby offer my heart and soul as the one to take its place and do even better than the present incumbent to ensure that the rich shall go on inheriting the earth.

Ofsted - stunning new development

2012-01-17T09:48:00.001Z

Breakthrough moment in education: Ofsted are changing the word 'satisfactory' to 'requires improvement'. This remarkable step forward (or is it a step up?) must have come from months of discussion, formulating theory, research and analysis. Finally, we've got some real intellectual clout at the top of the education tree. Imagine the committee meetings, the sub-committee briefings, the urgent break-out sessions in neighbouring seminar rooms...Hurried whisperings in corridors -
'Hey, Chazza, what do you think of 'Could do better'?'
'Not bad, not bad - hey, how about that?! 'Not bad'? What do you think?'
'I prefer my 'Could do better.'
'Hmmmm. OK let's get in there and get down to some hard thinking on this....'

Ofsted was always the wrong answer to the wrong questions, but now it's moving forward. Or it's going forward. Or: going forward, Ofsted is conducting a rebranding exercise. Or something.

So Michael Wilshaw, hotfoot from creating a school that has hoodwinked journalists into thinking that he 'turned round a failing school' - when in reality, money was poured in to create a selective school where there wasn't one before...is now 'turning round' Ofsted.

No chance of turning it round so fast, that it makes a hole through the floor and spins through it?

All that money on inspection rather than advice. Bullying rather than co-operation. And just think, Ofsted have no requirement to look at the provision of books, the reading of whole books, the level of home reading, the pattern of reading of whole books across a school. And yet, we know that high levels of all that is one key to success.

Word of Mouth does word of...er...mouth

2012-01-16T23:55:00.001Z

A 30 minute radio programme about traditional stories and storytelling here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0194mw1

It's BBC Radio 4's Word of Mouth and includes Monica from Uganda who learned stories from her parents, told them to her children and grandchildren and has never told them to anyone else before. And children from 'Translation Nation' who tell stories in their home languages and translate them in school.

Here's a link to that project:

http://translation-nation.heroku.com/

I'm working with them tomorrow at Eastside, the educational trust who devised and run the project.

The Power of Reading

2012-01-16T18:38:00.002Z

The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education has been working for seven years on the Power of Reading project. This is what they say about it:

"The Power of Reading project CLPE’s highly successful Power of Reading project enhances teachers’ and children’s pleasure in reading, and raises children’s achievement through teachers’ knowledge of literature and its creative use in the classroom.
The project has now been running for six years and has involved 10 projects based at CLPE in London with 31 additional projects in 19 different Local Authorities nationally. To date there have been nearly 1200 schools, 1,500 teachers and over 60,000 children participating in the project from Cumbria to Southampton and from Bristol to Hastings.
Project aims
The project aims to enhance teachers’ and children’s pleasure in reading and raise children’s achievement through developing teachers’ knowledge of literature and its use in the primary classroom.
Raised achievement
Analysis of data from four participating local authorities (2008-09) showed that 70% of children progressed by 2 or more National Curriculum sublevels and nearly and 33% by 3 or more. Data specifically indicates that as a result of the project the rate of progress for boys is narrowing the attainment gap between boys and girls."

Here's the link:

http://www.clpe.co.uk/professional-development/power-of-reading-project

Start the Week: capitalism is dead; long live capitalism

2012-01-16T17:31:00.001Z

On BBC Radio 4's Start the Week this morning, they were discussing money. Here's the line-up:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b019f8b5

Philip Coggan talked about the history of the money system and seemed to be pointing a finger at the fact that there is a perpetual struggle between those who lend and those who borrow - each wants something different from money - lenders want it to cost more, borrowers want it to cost less: hence the crisis, he said (though that seemed to be a big jump for me).

Detlev Schlichter said that all our problems started when President Nixon pulled the world off the gold standard. What happens, he said, is that governments print money to enable people to go on borrowing but this ultimately postpones problems until it reaches a crisis. Solution: money has to be tied to a globally agreed standard, and the best one found to date is gold.

Angela Knight said that the bankers need regulating but we keep giving them the wrong regulations.

Lord Glasman said that Germany gets it right because they have connected their money system to the 'Labour theory of value' which means that wage differentials between workers and 'the board' are much narrower; and workers have real training, skills and qualifications, governments have invested in this and it's quite literally paid off for everyone...er...in Germany.

That's how it went.

A couple of bizarre things about it: there's a strange, hollow feel to listen to four people with very different solutions for what is a major problem for capitalists and their governments but all arguing for ways to continue the very system that has caused the problem. In fact, though their structural solutions were different, all of them seemed to be certain that a) some major debtors would default and b) 'we' can't afford to have public services at the level 'we' have them.

On these occasions, I always feel like saying, 'Hold it there, guys.' The level of public service we had in our respective countries wasn't the cause of the problem. As Glasman pointed out, what happened was that capitalists decided not to spend their money developing productive capacity, finding out things we need and making them and/or making them better - they decided to put their money into futures, hedge funds and nebulous packages of debt which various wide boys told them would make massive and quick money.

Then again, our respective governments made a decision, arguably on our behalf to buy the debts that the major banks had run up. As a way of preventing the middle classes rioting, this was an astute move. Middle class riots merging with working class general strikes start to look like revolutions. However, the recoil blow of governments buying all this debt is that governments raise money through a combination of taxation and spending less. That's what they're doing. Through our taxes and rapidly shrinking public sector we are paying for the fun and games capitalists had lending money to people who couldn't pay it back. One key part of this 'policy'? Governments are all trying to introduce a programme of lower wages and/or no wages.

Now that sounds to me like a transfer of wealth from the poorest part of the population to the richest part. Or capitalism by other means. Usually capitalism does this by making people work very hard and paying them as little as possible: the milking principle. But here we have the governments we elect, effectively transferring funds directly across: funnelling the monies they raise on our behalf, for our benefit straight into bankers' and general financial services people's pockets.

(One of the more sickening features of the present crisis is to hear everyone from politicians to commentators talking about unemployment and lower wages as an unfortunate by-product of the 'solutions' that our governments are coming up with. Not so, they are the means. They are the deliberate choices they are making.)

In the midst of this, those of us much accustomed to the phrase the 'Labour theory of value' might be forgiven for a big head-scratch listening to Glasman. This theory states that the source of all value (not the direct or sole source of prices and profits) is human work, acting on materials, acting together to make things that human beings need or are taught or convinced they need. The fixing of prices and the ultimate figures attached to wages and capitalists' profits involve complicated maths but yes, ultimately it all goes back to human beings making things that alter stuff from being of no value to us (eg because it's in the ground, like oil) into stuff that is of massive value.

Glasman even described the capitalists' process of producing this value as one of 'exploitation' (he used the word once, I think) but is clearly reluctant to think that ultimately this is where the problem lies. That's to say, we have a system that works by, as he says, getting workers to produce 'value' (goods we want and need) but when this is transformed into wages and prices, it just so happens that the combined wages of the workers is never as much as the combined profits of the capitalists. All the goods and services are sold for more than the workers' wages, more than the cost of the plant hire and purchase, more than the cost of hiring space or land, more than the advertising and publicity all combined. In other words, the workers don't get the value of what they make or do. That's how and why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

The reason why this becomes a crisis may vary from era to era. In the present time, one major problem has arisen out of the fact that that extra 'value' that the capitalists have made off with (ie their profits) needs to be invested in order for it not to lose its monetary price. In the end, this means that capitalists find themselves taking bigger and bigger risks, lending it to ventures that go bust, or on this occasion to poor people who couldn't afford to pay it back. But why were they poor? Because other capitalists were trying to pay them as little as possible (in order to extract value from them) and/or had laid them off from work, or public services were being cut and so they had been sacked by the state. The system produced the very reasons why it failed - namely too many poor people, or at least too poor to pay back their debts, ie the money that capitalists had lent to them.

Now it might have been nice if there had been just someone in a discussion like this who might have represented this point of view. Glasman gets the nearest to it, but he's decided that he's married to capitalism, and so uses his Marxism in a strange truncated way- leans on concepts like the Labour theory of value for him then to apply it to saving capitalism from itself.

One other little 'apercu' that I don't think I had quite thought of before, though: Philip Coggan pointed out an interesting irony. Once the money system is represented by paper money, it is essentially a political system, one in which the supply of money is ultimately controlled by governments for their own reasons. It's a state system.

Isn't there a nice irony here that the great ideologies against the state, the free marketeers, the laissez-faire capitalists, Tea Party folk etc demand to be free of state control, the creeping state and the like? And yet, it's the state they need to run their money system (it's theirs because the really major credit-debt machine is for capitalists), it's the state they need to print money, raise and lower interest rates in order to safeguard their debts and savings (borrowing and lending) and,as now, to create unemployment which in turn depresses wages which - in their theory - enables them to run business more profitably, or start up new ones more easily. (They also want the state to act when workers start to protest about this: they demand that police and armed forces beat up and kill workers who come out on to the streets to say that they and their families are going hungry, their schools and hospitals are getting worse etc)

Governments do that for them. We may not knowingly elect them to do that. But that's what they do for capitalists. And then capitalists keep turning round and saying, down with the state!

We need the state to spend our taxes wisely and efficiently on things we need and want in fair and equitable ways - at this stage: health, education, social services and to an ever decreasing degree - housing.

One day, we will discover that we need the state to help us produce, distribute, provide and spend so that everything works out in fair and equitable ways. The 'value' that Glasman spoke about will be fairly distributed.

But that'll only happen when we are all confident enough and bold enough to act, to take over all the making and doing for ourselves. The idea that the 'state' (ie the power of which is supposed to lie in the hands of the people we elect) actually owns and controls money is in a way a glimpse of the way it could all be like that - though it'll have to be a very different kind of 'state'; one that we really own and control ourselves and works for the benefit of all of us).

The Poetry Station - poetry in secondary schools can live

2012-01-16T07:06:00.000Z

And here's the fantastic Poetry Station from the English and Media Centre. Poetry lives here.

Poets performing poems chosen with school students in mind.

http://www.poetrystation.org.uk/

Perform-a-Poem: your pupils become performance poets

2012-01-16T06:56:00.000Z

And while I'm posting links, here's one I made earlier:

http://performapoem.lgfl.org.uk/

If you're outside the London Grid for Learning, why not start up your own one - in-school, or between schools, or on quadblogging (see previous thread here) or with your own local grid?

Writing-in-schools breaks out of testmania

2012-01-16T06:48:00.000Z

I've received an email as follows:

"David Mitchell (a Primary Deputy Headteacher in Bolton) has developed an approach called Quadblogging which sets up groups of schools to talk, share ideas, information and comment on each others' work. At present there are more than 1000 classes in 27 countries working together creating some incredible moments of learning as well as fellowship. If you click on the link you will be able to see some examples of how quads have worked together. All of this is organised from David's back bedroom!

As an extension of the Quadblogging approach David and a group of other practitioners are trying to organise a festival of blogging on February 29th 2012 - our aim of the day is get school students engaging together on one blog site from across all age groups and continents from the start of Feb 29th in Tonga until its end back in the Pacific Rim which makes up 48 hours of fellowship time across the world. We are looking to join together students who might not ever otherwise have the opportunity to meet and communicate. This might be in text but also using video and sound clips and interactive writing programmes.

We are approaching you to see if you would be able to help us in the project. We hoped that you might be able to spread the word as our reach is limited to our contacts in education through Facebook, Twitter and the Quadblogging site. We also wondered whether you would have some thoughts on how we could improve it. You might even want to join in on the day or know other authors and poets who might enjoy this as well as we are certain it is going to be an amazing experience. "

Here's the link:

http://quadblogging.net/

Win £1000worth of books for ideas on reading....

2012-01-15T17:49:00.000Z

Yup, that's what Siobhan Dowd Trust are offering right here:

http://www.siobhandowdtrust.com/teachers-and-librarians/

A real opportunity to come up with new ideas to get children reading.

Boys can't write...

2012-01-15T16:32:00.000Z

Oh yes they can.

I was working with some Hackney primary teachers and they were sharing ideas about what kinds of writing-teaching seemed to have worked. One teacher, Mark Hanley, talked about how he had originally trained in IT but switched to teaching. He said he had some Year 6 boys who really didn't want to write, didn't know what to write, didn't know what the point of writing is.

So Mark had the idea of starting up a blogspot, which this particular group of boys could contribute to. They had the idea that it should be 'horror' writing, which they called 'Chillers'. So, like any blogspot, it can be moderated by the teacher (or anyone else), it can be given design and pictures as you want. And it's free.

The school is Princess May Primary in Hackney and Mark has told me that the school has now bought the children a  "small collection of iPads which they are finding some very interesting ways of using. Incredible how engaged in their work the children become when using them. I haven't yet used them in creative writing but will do very soon when we have a go at writing, performing and recording some children's poetry based on the Blitz in Hackney."

Here are the blogs from the last two years:

blogs from the last two years:
http://y6chiller.blogspot.com/
http://y6chiller2011.blogspot.com/

Afterlife for the rich - sorted.

2012-01-14T22:29:00.001Z

At the British Museum today, met quite a lot of 'shabtis'. These are the servants we will need when we're dead. Though in the really ancient times, this did involve killing your servants when you died, the whole thing became more humane (er...kind of) with servants being represented by little statues. This seems like a good way to go. Obviously, you have to be rich enough to get someone to put a whole stack of small figurines in with you in your coffin, but once they're in there, you're sorted. They will do manual work for you when you summon them. In fact, if you're really well off, you'll have 401 of them - one for every day of the year, plus overseers - so you won't have to do any of that sweaty, noisy slave-driving yourself. Interestingly, quite a lot of them are blue. But, hey, you're not going to object to your servants being blue, are you? It's amazing how tolerant people are about skin-colour so long as they're servants.

I wonder whether any rich or even middling sorts of people anywhere in the world have conceived of an afterlife for themselves in which they themselves were the servants or slaves? That the life they have projected for themselves would be the sheer pleasure of waiting selflessly on someone richer than yourself - for the rest of time?

This would have to be encoded in a sacred text of some sort. The excessively rich dying person would be found praying in front of a huge statue of the Great One:

'O Great One, I pray that in the Afterlife, that lies beyond the sea over which I must travel, I will forever cease to rule over my fellow man and in its stead will become a lowly servant, a drawer of water, a hewer of trees, a tiller of the soil, one who waits upon my rich master and mistress. I pray that I will eat mud should he so desire and in that lowly state enjoy the virtue of my lowliness, the dignity of serving others better than myself, in the full knowledge that I am making his life more comfortable.'

Yeah, right.

Nonsense: a generous review

2012-01-14T02:03:00.000Z

From people I don't know - or at least I don't think I know...or I think I don't know - an engaged and kind review of my 'Book of Nonsense' and 'Even More Nonsense', illustrated by Clare Mackie and, on occasions set brilliantly to music by the Homemade Orchestra, for a show that they and I do in halls, theatres, schools, converted stables and tents.

http://gatheringbooks.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/a-celebration-of-nonsense-poetry-a-michael-rosen-and-clare-mackie-2-in-1-special/

Debate about selection runs and runs

2012-01-14T00:39:00.000Z

The passage below is clipped from a Comment is Free thread at
the Guardian written by someone calling him/herself mwhite. It
comes from this thread started off by Roy Greenslade

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/12/grammar-schools-worked-reinvent?INTCMP=SRCH

which was in turn a response to this thread, started off by Melissa
Benn:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/10/grammar-school-return

"Grammar schools shouldn’t be reinstated because the myths peddled by the advocates of selection have been undermined by mountains of research going back decades. In fact, in 2008, even the right-wing think-tank Policy Exchange advocated ending selection on ability and aptitude.
The first myth is that selection raises standards. Atkinson, Gregg and McConnell (2006) found that selection resulted in gains for the few and disadvantage for the majority. PISA studies in 2000 and 2003 showed that overall standards were lower in countries with selective school systems than in those with fully comprehensive systems. A 2007 PISA study of 57 countries concluded that early differentiation of students by school is associated with wider than average socio-economic disparities and not with better results overall. Jesson (2006) found that educational attainment is lower in local authorities (such as Kent) which implement academic selection than in those which don’t – which is why average A-level scores are higher in Hampshire, which doesn’t select at 11, than in Kent, whose 32 grammar schools do. Finally, Finland, which consistently appears at the top of PISA rankings, has a fully comprehensive education system with no selection and very little private education.
The second fiction is that academic standards in state schools have deteriorated since comprehensive schools began to replace grammar schools nearly 50 years ago. A report for MPs by the House of Commons Library in June 2009 showed that, in 1961, 34% of Oxford students and 27% of Cambridge students had attended a state secondary school. In 2010, 50% of Oxbridge students came from state schools. Also, students from state schools leave university with better degrees than those from private schools.
It is also a myth that grammar schools increased social mobility in the post-war era. A paper by the LSE (2005) for the Sutton Trust is often quoted in support of this argument, but this paper did not attribute the slowdown in social mobility to ending selective education. What it did show was that the most socially mobile countries are the comprehensive Scandinavian countries. Furthermore, the claim that there was a golden age when grammar schools enabled significant numbers of working class pupils to go on to higher education was refuted by the Crowther Report in 1959, which showed that fewer than 10% of the poorest quarter of the population went to grammar school. Of these, over 40% left with no O levels.
Finally, advocates of grammar schools use Northern Ireland as evidence that selective education produces better results. Yet a DfES comparison (2006) showed that the percentage of people of working age with no qualifications in Northern Ireland was 23% compared to 13% in comprehensive Scotland. Similarly the percentage of people with qualifications levels 4-6 (degree level) in Northern Ireland was 18.1% and in Scotland 25%. Finally, an ESRC study in 2006 comparing England with Scotland showed higher participation in higher education in Scotland and that working-class Scots “outperformed their English peers”.
In other words, the existence of grammar schools means that the education of the majority is being sacrificed to the interests of a privileged minority. This is a fact and no amount of bluff, bluster or obfuscation can change it."
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Grammar in schools past and present: the state of play

2012-01-13T18:21:00.000Z

1.Many people talk about 'grammar' as if there is only one way to describe language. They use phrases like 'the grammar'; 'Children need grammar' and the like. To repeat: there are different ways to describe the systems of language. To date, there is no universally agreed 'grammar'.

2. For some reason, many people who were taught one of these grammars at school think that it is 'the grammar' and therefore don't need to look at anyone else's grammar.

3. There are comparatively simple ways to describe certain aspects of language. You can do this if you avoid trying to describe how we actually talk to each other and if you avoid anything that the old grammars used to call 'irregular'. A key question therefore is what is to be gained by doing this? There may be something to be gained, but it's best to be clear of the limitations and what are the problems with false, inadequate and incomplete descriptions.

4. We will hear again and again from politicians and many people who are fond of the grammar(s) they were taught, grammar helps you write, helps you understand, helps you deconstruct what people are saying or writing. This would be fine, if a) we had evidence to show that this is true, b) we could know which grammar-descriptions were better than others for children, or for helping you write or both.

5. Many people have told me that it was a disaster that schools stopped teaching grammar for some 20 or more years. It's also frequently suggested that the reason for this is to do with something 'trendy' or 'progressive' or 'dumbing down' or resistance to authority. In fact, it was for another reason entirely. For the whole period of 'O-levels' - some thirty years or so post-1944 Act - English Language, as it was called, had several components on the paper: grammar, précis, comprehension and composition. Composition was what we would now call an 'essay' and/or creative writing. The précis was a highly prescribed piece of summarising of a passage of writing, ie you had to reduce a passage to a fixed number of words but retain or extract 'the meaning'. The grammar question in my day involved such things as identifying the names for 'parts of speech' of the words in a passage or sentence; the names of 'clauses' in the passage; and, on occasions constructing sentences to include a feature of 'grammar' as laid down in the question.

In order to do this grammar question, teachers taught you a system of analysing language. This involved 'clause analysis' and what some called 'box analysis'. We were taught how certain words like 'when' or 'although' introduced clauses and as a consequence this meant a given clause was eg a 'clause of time' or a 'clause of concession' or a 'clause of condition'. We drew up matrices of these 'beginning words' and put the name of the clause next to them and chanted them in class, or the teacher would walk in, call out, 'Although!' and point randomly to someone in the class, at which the boy or girl, called back 'Adverbial clause of concession, sir!' This 'grammar work' happened, I would guess, for about an hour a week, sometimes with homework, which was usually doing exercises from books called things like 'English Highway' and the like.

This particular strand of education was directed at Grammar School pupils who were some 20 % of the population when they entered but by the age of 16 was down by some 5% because that percentage had left without qualifications. Of the 80 per cent, most of whom were at Secondary Modern Schools, most of them didn't stay to do any 'O-levels' at all. A tiny percentage (top stream) in some, not all Secondary Modern Schools, did do this English Language exam.

I say this, so that when people say, schools stopped teaching grammar, please bear in mind that most pupils didn't do this kind of grammar work at all. To say so is a big untruth. It would be fair to say, however, that in primary school and for some pupils in the lower years of sec mods, they would have encountered 'simple grammar' lessons - naming of types of words, chanting 'a verb is a doing word' and that sort of thing.

So we have some 15% or so of the country doing O-level English language. Now here's the secret stat: in all the time this exam was running, the examiners and inspectors didn't ever find any correlation between the scores that the candidates got for their grammar question and the composition question. In other words, teaching that grammar in that way, setting questions on it in that way didn't ever correlate with how they graded the writing of continuous prose.

Why not?

Was it that that kind of grammar didn't actually describe sentences properly? Was it that describing sentences doesn't actually help you write continuous prose ie it may help you write sentences but continuous prose is something different? Was it that the method of learning what they called 'grammar' involved a particular organised mindset (or some such) that didn't correlate with what's needed to produce continuous prose?

I don't know, but these questions have to be answered before we say that we know what works and doesn't work. At present, a grammar is being taught in all schools, at all levels. Do we know if it works? Or is it being done for some other reason? And who decided that it should be that particular kind of grammar?

But, to go back, I've stated the reason why the grammar question was dropped when GCSEs came in. They had no evidence to show that teaching grammar (or that particular kind of grammar) helped that particular range of pupils to write continuous prose.

This raises the question, then, as to whether there is another kind of grammar or another kind of teaching of a grammar that can and does help pupils write continuous prose (evidence needed, please)? Or are there other methods not involving the teaching of grammar that help produce more and better writers of continuous prose? And, whatever statements we make about grammar, the past, schools and writing have to take on board that most pupils were pushed out into the 'world of work' without the grammar that people frequently say was taught to everyone. It wasn't.

Quite independently of what Michael Gove says, or what you or I say, based on our past experience of learning school grammar - or even university grammar - I suggest that this is where the real state of the art is at. I don't for one moment imagine that this will stop the DfE from insisting that this or that grammar is taught (by asking certain kinds of questions at certain points in the testing regime), or stop experts insisting that this is enabling children to write well.

Grammar - rules, descriptions and systems.

2012-01-13T13:19:00.000Z

A pre-amble:

In talking about grammar in education, it's crucial to keep several things separate: what 'grammar' is (definitions, approaches, etc); methods of teaching it; suitability for, let's say, 5-11 year olds; suitability for 11-16 year olds; suitability for adults (!). The reason why I'm saying this is that in all previous conversations I've ever had about grammar in education, people have thought that I was saying that no person of any age should ever learn anything about grammar. So, to be clear: I am not saying that!

One of the most common assumptions about grammar is that it's a set of rules that we have to obey. If that were the case, it would need someone or some people to have made these rules up. What's more we could access these rules and these would explain how language works. In truth, there are no rule-makers and the concept of rules doesn't explain very much at all. Even where people have said there is a rule, what they're describing is a wish - a wish that we would all say or write things according to its requirements. Again, these aren't explanations. So, if a person wants rules, and that's all they're interested in, then what I'm writing now marks a parting of the ways. That person should find a book of such rules and follow them. On parting, I would just say, that 'following rules' without having explanations or justifications for those rules is a) extremely difficult (human behaviour mostly rests on having reasons for doing things) and b) following rules without explanations is a strange way to behave in a modern society - and even more so given that language is one of the most democratic media (if I can call it that for the moment) that human beings have ever invented. Apart from people who have great difficulty with some of our faculties, we are all language users and, if we choose, we can use language to make up things, using language in many different, experimental and new ways.

So, 'grammar' - what is it, if it's not 'rules'? We're all aware of systems in life and machines. So, the human body is made up of parts but all these parts are part of systems. So, though we can describe 'the eye' or 'the bones' - or say that we can - in actual fact, we can only ever describe them with some reference to what they do. And we can only ever describe what they do as a part of a greater part and frequently as part of the whole. Any description will involve a 'cheat' - namely that we only select what we describe on the basis of a system that we are thinking about. So, sticking with the body, we might 'notice' about the eye, the colour of the iris but when biologists and anatomists talk about the eye they rarely mention this. The colour of the iris (not that it is coloured, but its specific colour) belongs to a different descriptive system from the one that biologists and anatomists are interested in. So, all descriptions, no matter how seemingly objective (not attached to systems) are in reality always attached to systems, and systems are in essence theories, explanations, ideas about how things work, how they connect together, how they 'function'.

When it comes to language, there is precisely the same problem: parts or system? System or parts? Parts AND system? Parts IN system? And, if system, which system? and so on. And anyway, the thing that I say is a part, (ie separate from something else) may not actually be a part! And...help!...it's all connected.

Grammar that is useful is an attempt at the very least to describe a system, and in so doing implies or offers an explanation of some sort as to what this system is for. Much less useful is simply insisting that this or that is the way it is because it is. As with my posts about the apostrophe, it doesn't take long to find that things have come about inconsistently and quite frequently the descriptions we give are false. More of that in a moment.

Language is spoken and written with lots of variations and combinations of the two. (Think of Bob Dylan's famous video where he held up cards with words on, while his recorded voice-over sang (not spoke): a very complex piece in terms of the systems at work, but very easy to grasp as you watch(ed) it.) The language we're talking about here is made by humans - which is kind of obvious - but a good deal of writing about language suggests that 'language' can do things on its own. It can't. It is something (in this context) that humans do. All language-use , 'uttering' it or 'receiving it' takes place in a context. In truth these will be many contexts: the context of the utterer's and receiver's lives, the situation the utterer and receiver live in. However, uttering and receiving don't always go on in the same context. We have ways of communicating with each other over time and distance. I can read Homer though Homer can't read me. I can broadcast and blog.

Grammar exists within these contexts, not outside of them. It doesn't somehow float free as a system separate from the human beings who have produced it or use it or receive the language in which grammar operates. Because human society changes and it's only humans who produce grammar, this is why grammar changes and evolves. At any given moment, there are aspects of grammar which are, if you like, 'old' (which are themselves aspects of a system that was changing) and others that are contemporary or 'new' if you like. In other words, we are, excitingly, always implicated in the process of change in grammar. So, for example, once, many years ago, the main way to ask a question was through 'inversion' - 'Go you to market?'. We still have inversion but by and large we invert the other bits of the whole verb and not the core or stem of the verb - 'Are you going to market?' or constructions like 'Do you like going to market?' and when it comes to 'negatives' we say, 'Don't you go to market?' or some such. But you see how I slipped that 'do'/'don't' word in? That was a change in grammar. People who spoke English at one point in history didn't use 'do' like that, then they started using it. And now most of us do. According to the 'rules' way of looking at grammar, this would mean that at some point, the introduction of 'do' was wrong. Then it became right. And yet no one legislated on this matter. It just happened. Society evolved, people changed their language, changed their grammar.

With that said, what is grammar?

It's a way of describing the system(s) of language -or it's the system itself, if we can imagine that there is a system separate from the words that describe it! In fact, there are several or many ways of doing this. One fib that we hear from politicians and others is that there is just 'grammar'. In fact, grammar is what grammarians make up. They look closely at language and say that this or that is the grammar. There are areas of agreement but also massive areas of disagreement. So whenever a politician says, children will learn grammar - we are entitled to ask, which grammar? And how will it be taught?

So, going back to the apostrophe of yesterday as an example: we say that the grammar of apostrophes is that a 'noun' might possess another noun: 'the boy's hand'. And we're clear, it's the boy doing the owning and it's his hand. But what if we say, 'the queen of Ruritania's glove'. You can see we've put the apostrophe next to Ruritania but it's the queen who owns the glove. The first description of grammar I gave, falls down. We need some other description, perhaps something along the lines that 'the queen of Ruritania' in this example should be thought of 'one noun' or something! In fact, one term that some grammarians like is 'nominal group' because this is how they see a little mini-system working around 'nouns' as we use them in utterances.

Yet, when I was at school, we learnt about 'nouns' as if they were discreet little chunks, doing whatever they do on their own, with appendages on them like 'the' or 'a' and various ways of 'describing' the nouns called 'adjectives'. So when we came to describe a 'sentence' we said that the 'noun' was, for example the 'subject' or 'object' of the sentence. But, sticking with the queen, if I say, 'the queen of Ruritania's glove is flying through the air'; it's clear there are two 'grammatical' ways of looking at that: the single word 'glove' is what's being talked about here (ie that's what's flying) or it's 'the queen of Ruritania's glove'. Old grammar said it was the glove. Some new grammarians would say that it's the whole nominal group.

Now if you think is all fiendishly complicated, some new grammar has kicked over the traces even more. So, M.A.K. Halliday, for example, makes the claim that separating grammar from meaning is fundamentally flawed. He argues that we must always understand grammar (ie the system of language) as being there (ie created by humans) in order to express meaning. So if we talk about the 'subject' of a sentence we should do what we can to consider it simultaneously with the concepts of 'actor' and 'theme' and only then will we have a route through to understanding what we are saying and writing and why.

This is messy stuff. Nothing like the neat, clear grammar I had, where we used to recite what different kinds of word were - nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, gerunds, articles, exclamations, conjunctions, prepositions etc, then break sentences down into sections which we were told were bound by certain rules. Then we said that each of these parts did a job - nouns 'name', adjectives 'describe' , verbs 'do' - even though it became clear to us by the time we were 13 or 14 this was boloney. First of all 'nouns' don't do anything. Human beings do it. Then, is there any way that nouns do any more 'naming' than any other kind of word? All words 'name'! They are how we have devised ways of indicating, marking, identifying what's going on! We say adjectives 'describe' but then 'bungalow' 'describes a one-storey house to be distinguished from other houses. And when it comes to 'doing' we can have words that deal with doing like 'the jump' or 'energetically'. Either the concept is false or the means to describe it. Perhaps both.

Then we were introduced to another level of system - subject, verb, object. The subject did something to an object, we said. 'The dog ate the bone'. Yes, that worked, but then in real life, we say and write many things that don't do things to other things and the old grammar described a complex set of structures and functions to do with the verbs which could be, say, 'passive' ('The bone wa eaten by the dog') or that some verbs 'took' objects like 'eat' and others don't - like 'walk' and some require an 'indirect object' as with 'I sat on the mat'.

The objections to this are that it enshrines a grammatical function in a word, when all around us we see a given word not being used in this way: so 'I walk the dog' is me doing something to the dog. In English, we constantly move functions around: athletes win medals, but now they also medal. Noun-ness isn't enshrined in the word 'medal'. It can now be a verb.

This means that grammar has to describe what's actually there in the sentence 'I'm hoping to medal at the Olympics' and not pretend that 'medal' IS a noun. It's only a noun when it's functioning as one - which might mean, apart from anything else, that it's in a 'nominal group', because that's where we put them to make sense of the world, to make meanings. 'The dog' is very different from 'a dog', for example.

Meanwhile, the descriptions we use for 'verbs' are beset with problems too of course. In English we have created incredibly complex ways of talking about the processes of activity, sensation, command, thought, intent and the like, which are often but not always embodied in these items we call verbs. We can vary them in scores of different ways by adding bits on the end, adding other verbs and the like. We can go backwards and forwards in time. We can stand still or keep on going. We can have the activity with certainty, doubt, desire by adding more verbs, and so on: Thus: I go,I'm going, I went, I might go, I would have gone, I would have been going, I will go, let's go, I daren't go, I ought to go, I used to go, I would go...and so on.

And I do all these things, I use these verbs in this way because I'm trying to make specific meanings to specific people (or animals) at a specific time in my life, in a specific place, in a specific point in the development of the society I'm in. That's why I'm doing it that particular way.

Halliday tries to find a way of describing all this by constantly looking at the particular set of words any individual word has been placed in. He uses the word 'clause' but not in the identical way we were taught it! He tries to keep the meaning and purpose embedded in the particular grammar being used. It is always language in action, language in use, language for meaning. This distinguishes it from the grammar I was taught, and the grammar that I suspect is likely to be on the compulsory curriculum in English schools in the new dispensations coming in soon.

This means, I'm going to suggest, that what we will put in front of young children (let's say, primary school children), will involve a good deal of description that is false, inaccurate and unhelpful. That's why it won't actually help them make meaning - or if you prefer - to speak and write well.

To do that, I suggest we need a completely different model of learning about language. And that would involve observation, investigation, experiment, hypothesis, comparison and tentative conclusions. Not chanting of 'rules'.

Short PS to Apostrophe

2012-01-12T23:09:00.000Z

PS In the preceding I've gone along with what is really the 'folk grammar' of the 'possessive'. In reality, the grammar of what is technically the 'genitive' , expressed in English by 'of' and the 's' sound, is wonderfully complex. Possession isn't half of it. We are entitled to use the 's' genitive in many different ways to mean eg a purpose - 'Children's Literature' means 'for' children; or for classing things 'men's shoes', 'women's shoes' which aren't yet owned by the men or women! and so on. So in actual fact 'possessive' is yet another term we foist on to the unsuspecting (like me at school and college), probably in the hope that we wouldn't question them too closely about it. Remember: obedience is all.

The Politics (and lies) of the Apostrophe

2012-01-12T21:16:00.000Z

Waterstone's are now Waterstones. They've decided to drop the apostrophe. I was asked to go on World at One today to discuss this with John Humphrys. John's position is that the apostrophe saves us from some ambiguity and this is a good thing. Anything that saves us from some ambiguity is a good thing. What's more, there are rules. All we have to do is learn the rules. I don't want to misrepresent him, so apologies if I have.

My position is that the apostrophe is on the way out. It's an inconsistent item anyway; it was invented by printers - not grammarians or linguists - and like a lot of other 'rules' of punctuation is modified by use. No bad thing.

Apparently this resulted in a World at One postbag bigger than the discussions about torture or corruption in cricket. So is there a politics of punctuation?

Well, in a way, there is. We're talking here about 'orthography' - the appearance of the written text. Those who state that a) there are rules and b) they should stay the same way, don't have history on their side. The history of how the apostrophe has been used and not used makes for a little essay in itself. As it happens, most people find the detail of such histories deeply boring, but the story of irregularity and inconsistency in those stories is the interesting thing here. I will try to keep this brief.

But first, the inconsistencies - the stuff that makes it hard for us to learn. We say as a general 'rule' that we use an apostrophe for 'elision' (when we leave stuff out) and for possessives (when we want to indicate that someone or something owns someone or something). So when we write 'haven't' - that's supposed to show we've 'left out' the 'o' of not. When we write 'Michael's writing' that's supposed to show that the writing is possessed by Michael. He owns it. So far so good.

But is all possession marked with an apostrophe? Oh no. So if we use what have been called the 'possessive pronouns', its, his, hers, yours, ours, theirs - no apostrophe! Why not? er...well, no one really knows.Look at eighteenth century texts and you will find phrases like, let's say, 'the lands were her's'. Even Mr Strict, Bishop Lowth, the inventor of crap grammar, used an apostrophe there. So, if it was a 'rule' then, when did it become a 'rule' to not use an apostrophe in, 'yours' or 'ours'? Answer, it's only a 'rule' if you're the kind of person who thinks this sort of stuff is a 'rule' and not, what I would call a 'convention'.

And if a person thinks that there is then a 'rule' which says possessive pronouns don't take apostrophes, I'd say - not so easy, pal. There are other things we call 'pronouns' eg anybody, somebody, someone, anyone, everybody, everyone...and whaddyaknow, the convention is that they DO take a possessive apostrophe! Oh yes, here it is 'everybody's clothes', 'somebody's car'.

And now let's go back to the apostrophe of elision which we tell children is to mark missing out a letter. Well, in fact, to mark something missing, the printers invented quite a lot of different things which have changed over the years. Because we used to sound out the 'e' in 'loved', if you wanted to indicate that it shouldn't be sounded out, you wrote 'lov'd'. It was, if you like, a representation of speech. But a selective one. Now that most speakers of English don't sound out the 'e', someone decided that that apostrophe was redundant. Hurrah - its use wasn't a rule after all. It reflected changing use.

Now let's go to such uses as 'it's' , 'haven't' and 'ain't'. Well, 'it's' is mysterious because it represents two distinct forms 'it is' and 'it has' but when we write it, we only put in one apostrophe. OK, we might say, it represents the common sound of 'it's' when something or somethings are missing.

'Haven't' is slightly different because the printers decided that the 'n' had to be shoved up against the 'e'. Now,we're getting into a fairly arbitrary rules of page layout and nothing much to do with ambiguity or any such. (John mentioned 'there', 'they're' and 'their', and in some accents 'we're' 'were' and 'where' overlap too. But the overall usage (dependent on context) is of much more importance in these examples than the use of the apostrophe. Thus, 'there' and, let's say, 'theyre' and 'their' would pose no problems of ambiguity on the page.

But what of 'don't? This stands for two phrases: 'do not' and 'does not' (in the dialect usage, 'he don't like it.') I say 'stands for' but in truth it may not. It is quite possible that we should regard the usage of 'don't' as its own word. It's possible that when the innovation of using 'don't' in the many ways we use it,(English didn't always have these ways), that it came in as the sound 'dont' with nothing left out, as it were, and it was only the printers who decided that it was 'contraction' of , say 'doesn't' . (The history of how 'do' came to be used in the ways we use it today, is quite complicated!)

Meanwhile,what's happening in the real world, away from rarified conversations on the World at One? First of all, many different kinds of sign-makers and public displayers of language are making up their own rules. Saints' names in the names of churches and places are becoming increasingly apostrophe-less. Same goes for shop names - thus Waterstones but also the names of firms and many other titles. The people who own the names are doing it themselves. They're not waiting for permission from someone who thinks there are 'rules'. At one level this expresses who has power in society. Waterstones have the power to change their title. Ms Smith who is writing for a job doesn't and will have to write 'Ms Smith's letter' or some such or she is deemed to have had a defective education, or worse.

More politics.

And again,meanwhile, in the explosion of the written word with texting, blogging, forums, chat rooms and the like, people are making up their own rules, they're testing each other's tolerance of what's acceptable and what isn't. Hundreds of new abbreviations are coming in and, I notice, the apostrophe is losing out. It's becoming fiddly to bung in an apostrophe as you're thumbing away on your mobile or whatever.

So, my guess is that, the usage of the apostrophe is slipping away. It will be used less and less and it won't actually matter. The kinds of ambiguity that John Humphrys was talking about are, in the general run of things , trivial or easy to overcome - which is precisely what we find in texting and the like. (In fact, a pedant might argue that John's own name ought to have an apostrophe as it's really 'Humphry's son'. But for some reason, the 'rule' was never applied to 'Davis' 'Jones' 'Williams' and the like which are all technically 'patronymics'.

By the way that complicated stuff about plural possessives 'the boys' caps' - meaning two or more boys' caps only became a 'rule' in the nineteenth century. Up until then, people like Jane Austen and Daniel Defoe managed to get by without worrying about it.

And in case you're wondering if the decade was the 60's or the 60s, the answer is, it all depends on the house style of the whoever is publishing it. Again, it's a trade matter, not a grammatical one of rules.

And if you're wondering why the possessive apostrophe came in in the first place? Because most nouns used to express possession with an ending 'es' with the 'e' sounded out. 'dogges ears' - with the 'e' heard. That sounded out 'e' started to disappear just as the first efforts to standardise orthography came in so with the 'elision rule' they reckoned that they ought to mark the 'loss' of the sounded 'e'. So it wasn't a rule of possession after all! It was the old elision 'rule'. So when you hear people say that the apostrophe is for 'possession' as I did all through this article, I was talking nonsense. It was the 'rule' of elision but as with vast amounts of so-called grammar and information about language, we believe in the necessity of lying to children - or just foisting our ignorance on to them. That's because the old idea of 'investigating language' rather than laying down the rules has gone out the window.

If anyone doubts the possibility of the apostrophe fading away, you might like to know about the hours, days, weeks - nay months - I and my contemporaries used to spend, learning how to punctuate addresses on envelopes and letters. What happened? It all got junked by people in business. Punctuation is ultimately about power: about who has the power to make decisions.

What are stories ? What are stories for?

2012-01-12T00:59:00.000Z

It's hard to get behind this question because we are always inside it. We are in stories (narratives), we make them up, we use them, we are in some senses made by them. It's very hard to think, talk or write for very long without starting to put things into a sequence that relates something, retells something. In a way, trying to figure out what they're for is a bit like meaning-of-life and what-makes-us-human questions: too big. And yet...there ought to be some way to distinguish 'storying' from other things. We ought to be able to say that it's different from, say, philosophy without the anecdotes, an anatomy textbook, grammar, a good deal of sensory activity...
But then a lot of things that we don't call stories become stories when you look at them closely: instructions on how to assemble a flat-pack table? The narrative voice isn't the usual one of stories - 'Place leg (A) next to flange (C) etc...' but it has all the sequencing of story, it has very clear structure (beginning, middle, end)... I guess it lacks some sense that it's not only 'itself' but that it 'stands for' something other than itself. The instructions might be typical - stereotypical even - but they are there just for that table, or chair or whatever.

My father in his great booklet, 'Stories and Meanings' (NATE publications) pointed out that there are a lot of things we say and write which are in effect residual cores of stories: if you say a proverb, it seems to conjure up a story that you don't have to tell. All you need to say is, 'Too many cooks...' and that's the core of the longer proverb which in turn is the core of a scene which is in effect a story that says something like: 'Once there was a kitchen and there were some cooks making some broth. As they made the broth, it started getting spoiled and it became clear that the reason why it was getting spoiled was that there were too many cooks.' And that is the core of a yet longer story which explains that is was what each of the too many cooks was doing that ended up in the soup getting spoiled!

So, a proverb isn't a story, and yet it seems to stand for a story, represent a story and which is itself supposed to represent many other situations like 'too many cooks'. And that's how it does its work. It generalises the situation where too many people are working on something by summoning up a story which, funnily enough, has either never been told, or was told so long ago that we've all forgotten it.

Then again, a good deal of poetry doesn't seem to be a story. We say that it expresses a feeling, or describes something non-narrative like, say, a field or a face. And yet many poems are frozen moments in an implied story; they're freeze frames within a longer story that we could have a go at telling even though the poet hasn't.

The word 'science' appears to eliminate story but of course it's jam-packed with the stories of discovery, invention and exploration alongside chronologies of scientists' lives and the like. But what about the 'pure' science: the experiment, say. If you read a scientific paper, like the one I've blogged about in 'Books, books, books' earlier this month, there's a moment in the write-up where it goes into a narrative about what they actually did by way of running the investigation. The customary way of doing this is deliberately impersonal and without expressions of sentiment. It's the narrative of 'this, then this, then this, then this.' OK, it's not what we usually call a story but it certainly follows the pattern of narratives.

But does science have within its borders another way of doing story that is more like the customary meaning? What about the hypothesizing - the what-ifs? On just a few occasions I've been round people coming up with theories as to why, say human beings have a pineal gland, or some such and in order to get into the 'why', they throw a series of 'if' situations at each other - a bit like chess (aha, another story?). And in the iffing and butting, they imagine what might happen to things like frogs' skins if they're deprived of light or some such. As I say, on the occasions I've been around such conversations, they felt like stories to me. And there's even a representational quality about them too - the frogs in the experiment are going to 'stand for' all frogs, which in turn are going to embody pineal glands in all creatures that have pineal glands.

Sport tells two stories: the event and the report. As the event unfolds - whether you're watching it without commentary or with the commentary (which is possibly a simultaneous double-narrative: your own and the commentator's) that's the first story. Then there's the report which is a telling of that event. It seems impossible to either commentate or report on a sporting event without explaining how it fits into or represents other kinds of moments in life, in other stories. This means that the matches and games we watch are made mythic and many are mythic before they happen. The teams and players arrive wearing myth-kit.

But what's it all for?!

At one basic level, one way we have of saying that we understand things is to redescribe them, to say that this thing is like that thing. Stories do that all the time. In conversation we do a great deal of that. I tell you a story about the train being late. You tell me a story about a plane being late. We talk about what we did when these two things were late. We confirm and enlarge our own experiences through comparison, contrast , redescription. We make generalisations and say how 'typical' it was that this happened. Stories of a more formal kind (novels, plays, picture books, operas or whatever) do that too.

Understanding is slightly different from wisdom. In everyday conversation there's a blurry line when we feel that we've passed from this kind of sharing into what seems to us as an important truth. Quite often, people have wrap-up phrases to highlight them: 'Small world!', 'There's good and bad in all types.' or whatever which may or may not add anything to what's just been said but which indicate that what went before slotted into a an already existing category of knowledge, understanding or that person's wisdom

Even so, you know when you're in the company of something that appears to be handling something of new or great significance. It can be in any form of story - dance, folk-tale, 'true-life story', novel, poem or whatever. And it doesn't have to be in its wholeness - it can be in a moment or a segment though that moment will only have that power because of what you've brought to it from what preceded it in the story and what you've brought to it from your life and from other stories. That moment or segment exists at the end of many narrative routes back into itself and back into your life.

The wisdom is the marriage of ideas and feeling: two spheres we've learned to keep apart when necessary. We can talk about ideas - class, say. We can talk about feelings, shame, irritation. Put the two together attached to beings that we can believe in, can think we know and grow to care about and we have the potency of story - some might say its ability to deceive, confuse and confirm prejudice and useless 'common sense' ( the kind that says everything must stay exactly as it is!). Another view is that even when story appears to be doing that, it's also offering possibilities. No matter how conventional, how seemingly conformist in what it is saying or how it is saying it, it can't stop itself from offering possibilities for action, feeling and thought.

We're back with 'what if'.

In education, I'm disconcerted by the amount of stuff we put in front of pupils of all ages which has very little or no what-iffing about it. I've been looking at the Key Stage 2 SATs reading and comprehension training booklets for example. Yes,the SATs are in May but all over the country, 10 and 11 year olds are spending hours and hours every week doing SATs training booklets. These are largely devoid of what-ifs. They are virtually all right-wrongs. OK, some right-wronging is necessary, essential, desirable. Quite a lot perhaps. But how much? To what purpose? To give them wisdom? Is there more wisdom in a Key Stage 2 SATs training booklet than in 'Carrie's War' or even 'Horrid Henry' (I'll come back to him. I'm becoming a fan.)

Or is the current belief that training in SATs-type-thinking equips children to be able to read, understand and analyse the written texts that come at them from TV, radio, newspaper and computer? Do they really enable you to do what Americans call 'crap-detecting' - getting behind what's being told you?

I suspect that SATs-training for those who read very little, are read to very little is a training in humiliation (because they are about being found to be mostly wrong) and conformity (treating story and texts as something you obey). For those who read a lot, they are not so hard, not so humiliating, but just as boring and of less overall significance. Lucky them.

My joke of the day: home entertainment (1)

2012-01-11T23:22:00.000Z

Sometimes when I'm sitting on my own - on a bus or train, say - scenes and moments from the past float up in front of me. I like it when these are jokes - not set piece jokes, but some moment of repartee, a comeback that worked. It feels like your own diy comedy show where your friends and family appear on the screen of your eye, do their turn and disappear.

Today, somewhere between Reading and Didcot, brown, reedy fields outside, it was Ian Saville, magician and friend. About ten years ago, we were doing a show together at the Shaw Theatre. We were backstage when Ian noticed a sign up with the usual warning: 'If you see anyone acting suspiciously etc etc.' Ian was looking at it just before he went on stage and said, 'But isn't that the point? It's a theatre. It's what we're supposed to be doing, isn't it?'

I sat in the train smiling.

Story: What? How? What! Now?

2012-01-11T07:11:00.001Z

If you're a teacher and you know that you're going to do 'writing stories' today, tomorrow, in a minute...you have the permanent problem of 'how'. All sorts of people (myself included) will come at you with suggestions and plans as to how to do it. Some of the most appealing talk about structure. They offer you plans and blueprints: this is how a story is structured...so, children, all you have to do is follow the plan. And in the plan, there'll be all the tick-boxes of what the children are supposed to achieve at this particular point in their existence.

Hmmph.

I think this is the law of diminishing returns. If you want children to write because they want to write, if you want to generate excitement and interest, then you have to do 'other stuff'.

Can I suggest that writing done by professional writers tends to start out, (broadly speaking) from two sources which are linked: from the things they're reading; and from what I'll call an 'itch'. When you read, you're offered possibilities and the simplest and easiest thing to say to children can be the best - 'Hey, we could write something like that.' And the 'something' can be the structure, the theme, the method of narration or another aspect of what you're reading. The advantage of this is that it gives you and the children an emotional and structural resource - at the same time. Technically speaking this is the 'parodic' approach ie you're asking the children to write what is in effect a 'parody' - not in the comic sense...just as a way of 'borrowing' the shell of the story, or an aspect of the story and re-using it.

The 'itch' approach - and the 'itch' may have arisen from the reading anyway - says that writing starts from problems and dilemmas that need to be solved. And - this is the crunch bit - you solve them in the process of writing.

One of the problems with the structure and plan approach is that you're asking children to solve the problems or 'tell the story' before they've told it. Part of the fun of writing is to push your pen to solve the dilemma, whatever it is - you discover that you're a wizard, you find a million quid, you lose a million quid, etc etc. The advantage of this is that it makes writing a bit like a game. Game 1 - invent a dilemma. Game 2 solve it. You can even set people up in pairs where one person comes up with the dilemma and the other person has to solve it.

But starting from pure structure, pure blueprint...doesn't it wear you out? Wear them out? Wear your brains out?

Melissa Benn stirs up the narrative of decline

2012-01-10T17:37:00.001Z

Melissa Benn tries to bring some logic and analysis to the matter of selection. A dangerous thing to do on Comment is Free as the comments threads that follow the articles are now attracting a mix of ex-pats, immigration-obsessives, racists, snobs, totalitarians, class segregationists, Margaret Thatcher adorers who seem to fly to the Comment pages to vent their fury about the 'country they've lost'. In their narrative of decline, everything has got worse/terrible because of immigration, champagne socialists, Muslims, the PC brigade and trade unions.

Quite apart from the barely concealed, not-so concealed and entirely un-concealed racism of a lot of this, there's a bizarre way in which they give mythic status and power to liberals and lefties. You would have thought that UK Ltd had been in the grip of Tony Benn and Diane Abbott for the last fifty years, running schools, railways, the immigration service, the justice system through an evil network of marxists, black nationalists, Muslims and Communist trade union leaders. All the evidence points to the fact that by and large such people are not running the country and never have. You would have thought they had noticed this. On the rare occasions, eagle-eyed, macarthyite readers of people's back-stories could point to people with left pedigrees walking the corridors of power, they know full well that such people long ago purged their wardrobes of red garments.

What's particularly strange about it is that if you start at 1979, we've had a non-stop, market-led economy, with social policy being brought more and more into this sphere either through out-sourcing, selling off, or in the micro-detail of how information, knowledge and skills are treated as if they are commodities.

Anyway, here's the link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/10/grammar-school-return

Melissa Benn's latest book is a good and important read too:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/sep/01/school-wars-melissa-benn-review

Wiener Library: meeting and discussion

2012-01-10T12:48:00.000Z

Panel Discussion: Old Enough to Know the Truth?

Learning about the Holocaust is part of the National Curriculum for all secondary school students in Britain, but with a growing number of primary schools now participating in Holocaust Memorial Day, and information about the Holocaust being freely available via the internet, the likelihood of young children asking parents or teachers about the Holocaust is higher than ever before.

To help respond to this shifting educational landscape, The Wiener Library is holding a panel discussion on Thursday 2 February on how and when to introduce the subject to young people. The event will be chaired by former children’s laureate Michael Rosen. The speakers will include Sue Berelowitz, the Deputy Children’s Commissioner for England, Dan Stone, Professor of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Emma O’Brien of the Holocaust Education Development Programme at the Institute of Education.

Admission is free of charge, but places must be reserved in advance byemailing the Library or calling 020 7636 7247.

Memory, art, politics: notes

2012-01-10T11:17:00.000Z

Here's a conundrum: people produce 'art' - by which I mean, all of it - literature, painting,sculpture, dance, pottery, opera, song, mime - go on...add on what you like. People also produce 'criticism'. Criticism has different levels: the stuff we say to each other as we come out of a film, articles in papers and magazines, the books we might study at school or university, 'learned journals' and so on. Now, most of the written criticism is based on an assumption that I've always adhered to: that it should look closely at what's being said, how it's said, what it feels like to 'read' or 'view' or even be 'in' the piece of art. If necessary, this criticism requires me and anyone else doing it to revisit the piece of art and to read what others have said about it, usually on the same terms - that they are referring closely to what they have just seen.

So, in a way, apart from anything else, there is an in-built chronology to what we understand by 'criticism'. That's to say the critic has 'just' seen it, or is in the process of studying it or that they have lived adjacent to it for a good deal of their lives, they are particularly familiar with it because it's in the near-present, recent past in their lives. This is the nature of the 'discourse' around criticism and I've been in and out of that world in one way or another since school. And - in case any of the next bit appears to be contradicting it - enjoy it, am fascinated by it, and will go on doing it. For good reasons.

However,let's raise another possibility: not only do we go and experience art and have immediate experience and very recent memory of it, we also have memory. And memory works in a different time-frame, and in different ways. At least, I think it does. Consider the experience we all have of sitting thinking about stuff. At some point, and in unpredictable ways, bits of art-stuff intermingles with all the other stuff. So, we might be thinking about going to the bank and anything from a Dutch painting with money it, Shylock, Scrooge might come to the surface (as we say), in a flash (as we say). At other times, we might do something more contemplative about the piece of art itself. Our mind rests on a moment in a book or a painting or, very commonly on a chunk of a song and stays there, running and re-running this moment.

What I'm saying is that art exists in this environment and time-frame as well as in the immediate, close attentive looking, listening etc. In fact, I could make an argument for saying that across a lifetime, this is how art works. And yet what we call criticism very rarely takes notice of it. It has another job to do.

So what would happen if we, on occasions, consider how a painting or a story or dance has 'stayed with us'. And what would happen if we compared the way different pieces of art stay with different people. At quite a chatty level, this is what people do when they sit around talking about their favourite films. Though usually those conversations whisk by a bit too quickly to rest on how those memories interweave with other parts of our life, or with other pieces of art. This would mean sometimes approaching a piece (or pieces) of art via something else altogether - a tree being chopped down or some such. At other times, looking specifically at one's memory of a piece rather than going back to it. What would that throw up? Would it tell us that the things we sometimes think are important about a piece at the time of viewing aren't actually as important as other parts? And why would that be? I suppose that's in part an explanation why certain films which got panned by the critics, got lousy audiences, slowly develop into a cult and then into mass popular films.

A film I've seen twice and often remember is 'The English Patient'. At the time - both times - I was moved and amazed by it. I loved the emotion of it, the sense of impossibility wrapped up in the Ralph Fiennes character. (see I've forgotten his name. Perhaps he doesn't have a name! Ah, yes, at one point he doesn't have a name, I think...) In fact, the impossibility of who he was and indeed how it was impossible for him to be loved, seemed to be emotional and political. That's to say, part of his 'problem' ( I think) was because he was stateless. He wasn't of one nation, on one side.

That's the general stuff.

But also what happens in my mind is that scenes from the film just float into view (and of course hundreds of them don't) - the cave, the mummy-like figure on the bed, the Indian guy on his motorbike...the posh Brit club somewhere 'out there' where Empire types were hanging out joshing each other. But again and again the drama of the cave. Being left. Someone going to get help. Not getting back.

I could go on but it's incoherent. And some of it is 'wrong', you or I might say and part of me is self-conscious about writing down stuff that is 'wrong' even though that's how it might sit in my mind. It goes against the grain of the critical process. And yet, to repeat, this is how we are. We are all walking about with these fragments of art in our minds, some of which critical thinking would describe as 'wrong' or inaccurate. And yet, if it's there, it must be there for a reason. We must have selected it (and on occasions mis-remembered aspects of it) always for a reason. And aren't these reasons important?

I mean they're important in our own personal histories. But if you combined them, or shared them, in a room, in a journal, in a piece of research, say, wouldn't they combine to say something quite important both about the piece but also - more importantly perhaps - the piece in the context of that particular group of viewers in that particular time and place. Wouldn't it in effect be a kind of sociology of the memory of art? Or a sociology of response? Or a different kind of politics of art?

Winners, losers, capitalism and 'equality of opportunity'

2012-01-08T20:26:00.002Z

Here the Guardian's Deborah Orr considers whether there can be equality of opportunity under a system with inbuilt winners and losers. Apart from anything else, it's interesting that she's identified the front (some would say, effrontery) of the new Tory rhetoric which is to hijack 'freedom', 'equality' and 'fairness' as it institutes one of the most unfair, most exploitative, most unequal regimes of recent times.

The comments that come after Deborah Orr's article are worth a read, but I would say that because I got stuck in myself about 500 times. And as I write this, it's still running, but I suspect that the mods will switch it off soon.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/06/deborah-orr-welfare-winners-losers

'Fair' is the new rock'n'roll

2012-01-08T07:47:00.004Z

I'm running to keep up with what's happening in public policy, especially in education. As each government comes in they recruit gangs of willing ideologues to impose new regimes. Quite frankly, it's hard to unpick the philosophies that underlie these 'reforms' because they are swathed in the same blandishments: usually to do with efficiency or equality or both. Again, it's not always easy to distinguish between what is window-dressing by new governments ('busy work', 'we do new things and new things make everything better' etc) and what has real content involving real change. There's no doubt that what New Labour did in education, involved real change to children's and teachers' lives in schools. We are now the most measured, most micro-managed and controlled human beings (in that sphere) anywhere in the world. As a piece of productive effort, costing zillions, its only claim to be worth it, is that it provides graduate employment prospects in the world of testing, examining, examining the testing, testing the examining of the testing and so on. It's meat and potatoes for the special kind of person who has lost faith in the hard grind of face-to-face talking, sharing of experience, chalkface experiment and research by practitioners themselves and who quite genuinely believes that number-crunching 'levers up standards'.

So, what's about to hit us in education as dished up by the Eton boys who know and care so much about state education?

I've been reading a paper produced by the 'Centre for Market and Public Organisation'. Here's their website:

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/

and here's the paper:

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmpo/publications/bulletin/winter11/allenburgess.pdf

(Just a brief digression on the politics of all this: universities combine with major 'charities' like the Leverhulme Trust to get big research grants. They use this to examine 'policy' which may or may not be used, which may or may not land them jobs advising ministers or servicing organisations like the BBC, which is how I came across it in the first place. I would love to read a lively history of these 'Centres' and 'Institutes' and find out exactly what they've done over the last 30 years. Well, it keeps the graduate unemployment figures down, anyway.)

So the paper I've linked to has the virtue of analysing cutting edge Tory thinking on education - the White Paper. The writers, Allen and Burgess, have spotted that the justification for the White Paper is not 'efficiency' (one of the dodgiest, least useful criteria ever brought into the sphere of education), but 'fairness', 'equality of opportunity', and 'equal access to quality'. Pause. Yes, the Tories, the people who are smashing up the public sector, ripping into pensions, sacking tens of thousands, depressing wages, ramping up inequality, feeding the bankers dare to talk about 'equality'. This is the new battleground. The Tories have decided that in order to convince us that they are not in the pocket of plutocrats, rushing round Europe at the bidding of bankers, they will present themselves as the new egalitarians.

Needless to say, this paper doesn't get into this. It presses on taking such claims at face value - a bit of a problem as whole areas of the country (and Europe and the world!) are taking a big hit in terms of what people can do to earn a living and run homes. I shouldn't leave this aside, but I will for the moment.

The paper notes that there are 'differences in attainment by social background'. Yes, the history of education is about this. Up until the arrival of comprehensive schools, the differences in attainment were embodied physically and actually in the school structures of private, grammar and secondary modern schools. These almost perfectly matched the social class of the parents apart from some interesting exceptions that some people make an enormous lot of noise about without knowing exactly why or how it came about. I'm talking here of the tiny numbers of working class children who went to grammar schools and who Tory ministers now bring out of the woodwork as examples of how today's system could and should be 'fairer'. The laziness and lying behind this is that the legwork and hard research needed here is to find out how or why certain working class children broke through into the grammar schools. Was it some magic formula going on in that particular primary school (double the number of spelling tests? rigorous training in how to do IQ tests? Or what?) Or was it that in almost all those cases there was a key factor in the education or experience of one or both parents? Brian Jackson's book on education and the working class produced in the sixties addressed this very matter (because it wasn't really about education and the working class, but about working class children in grammar schools!) One of his observations was that, yes, key reasons for these exceptional cases were eg one parent - often the woman - was in fact of 'middle class' origins herself and had what was at that time a different attitude to books and learning from her less educated husband. From memory (or my own observations at the time and since) another factor in children bucking the trend and working class children getting into institutions like grammar schools was that either or both parents were active trade unionists, members of a political party or active members of a religious organisation. That's to say, forms of literacy not usually present in working class work had a powerful part to play in these families' lives. So beware of Tories telling us how much the old grammar school system did for 'intelligent working class children'. In grammar schools like mine, they also worked quite hard at nudging out quite a few of those bright working class children before they took their O-levels and certainly worked hard at keeping them out of the sixth form. ('Secretarial college would be ideal for you, wouldn't it?')

This matter of 'differences in attainment' according to social class is one of the blocks that educational researchers have been running around for decades. The old (and new) champions of IQ have a simple explanation: it's genetic. Poor people are stupid. Poor people have children. They're stupid. They go to school and do badly. Middle class people are cleverer and do quite well at school. 'Leaders' are brilliant. Their children are brilliant. They do really well at school. What's needed are schools that cater for these 'needs'. Stupid schools for stupid kids, better schools for better kids. Leader schools for leader kids. IQ-ers cling to their genetic explanation for everything even though everyday life shows us that 'intelligence' isn't just one thing, that people have the capacity to change given the circumstances, and we need a society where a variety of capacities and the ability to change (and co-operate) is our only hope for survival. We desperately need institutions of education (they may not necessarily be 'schools') which enable all this to develop.

Another explanation is that it's all teachers' fault. The education system is jam-packed with terrible teachers, most of whom work with poor children. These teachers have low expectations for the children, deliberately set them crap things to do, this makes them stupid. This is one of the nastiest lies to have emerged in public discourse: blaming the people who work in the most difficult and most challenging situations,usually doing so under straitjacketed systems that aren't of their own making. But, hey, maybe there's votes in blaming the teacher who sent you out the room once.

Another explanation is 'poverty' - which is one I'm obviously sympathetic with. After all, poverty is not just about not being able to buy stuff. It's about anything from a constant daily pressure on time, space, quality of food, availability of cultural and leisure-time facilities to a sense of yourself as a capable or incapable person.
My only worry about this as a sufficient explanation - I'm sure it's one of the 'necessary' ones - is that I can't quite get in my head the link between the daily life of poverty and the daily tasks of school...more on that in a moment.

Yet another is 'language'. The 'deficit theory' of language states that poor people use crap language, middle class people use good language. Crap language users come to school and can't 'get' the curriculum because it's written in the 'good' language. Several problems here: there isn't one unified poor people's language. Poor people's lives are highly variegated across age, gender, culture, work, lifestyle etc etc. Some poor people are bilingual, some are active politically, religiously, in sports organisations etc etc. What's more, what I as a researcher call 'crap language' ('restricted code') may just be a prejudice, mightn't it?

Even so, is there a way in which those children (usually but by no means always of middle class origin) who have long, sustained access to the written 'dialect' or code, do better at school than those children from backgrounds where there is little access, little exposure to the written language/dialect/code?

I think so.

And interestingly, the only way to address this matter would be to alter fundamentally our social and political attitude to the written word. And I say this precisely at the moment where one of the key and essential means to do this - free, public libraries - is being smashed to pieces. I'll return to this in another blog but the efforts being made in Calderdale are signposts to what any government seriously and honestly interested in altering 'differences in attainment by social background' would observe and implement nationally.

But back to this paper - the paper is firmly within the parameters of 'high performing schools' and access to them by children from poor backgrounds. The findings of the research paper from the University of Nevada which I wrote about in a previous blog (see 'Books, books, books' on this blogspot) are just off its radar. So, in questioning the government's commitment to 'fairness', it takes as read that a solution is to be found in upping the numbers of poor kids getting into high performing schools. It's an honourable intention but a) doesn't address the matter I've raised about what is in effect a form of community education (ie my point above about needing forms of education beyond 'schools', and these forms enabling us to survive and develop) b) doesn't address the matter of making all schools high performing - not just 'high-performing schools! c) doesn't address the matter of covert and not-so covert selection in 'high-performing schools' by virtue of 'specialism', 'faith' and systems of exclusion d) the subtle interplay between percentages of middle class children and the phrase 'high performing'.

If any of the theories as to why middle class children tend to out-perform poorer children in schools are valid (even the ones I fundamentally disagree with), then clearly 'high-performing schools' are more often than not (not always) ones where there is a high quota of middle class children! Watch out, for example, claims made for high-performing schools where the demography of the whole area (eg London Borough of Hackney) has changed. 'Improving schools' might just be a re-description of what's happening to the price of houses!

What the paper does address is post-code lottery and the ability of those with money to move nearer to high performing schools. As a solution, it suggests that places at schools should be determined by a real lottery. Just dipping into a bag and taking out numbers.

This won't happen because the Tory vote rests to a very large extent on post-codes. (A whole theory could be established here on how class, and micro 'caste' differences have been worked for centuries based on place. There are people who know which end of the same street is marginally lower in reputation, standard, caste, 'class' than another, let alone 'the other side of the tracks' and the like.)

But again, the theory is based on the notion that if you get more poor people into 'better schools' you will improve the overall 'performance' of the cohort of children going through the system. There is no evidence I've seen that allowing 'high performing schools' to take more children, to allow low-performing schools to close (ie to sink lower and lower) improves the performance of the whole cohort. In other words, we keep coming round to models of what I call 'local' education which persist in producing a weighing-scales model: when one goes up, another goes down. Why else do high-performing schools exclude kids in mysterious ways at the end of year 7 and 8? Why else do they have quotas of children who specialise in abilities that need specialist coaching out of school? It's precisely to prevent the other schools from having a 'local' distribution of them!

The one area the paper addresses which we can welcome is its demolition of free schools - an expensive way to satisfy tiny minority interests with zero effect on the education system as a whole. Expensive at the moment, (600 million quid) but likely to have its budgets and grants cut from under them, according to this paper. Watch this space.

But to return to the matter of where we're at. We'll be called on over and over again in the next period to investigate and challenge the new Tory claim that it is the champion of 'fairness' because, they will say, they are the ones giving poor people 'a chance in life', they are the ones 'opening up access' to the best schools. We will have to show painstakingly how these are never about universal provision, never about plans or methods to raise the standards of the whole cohort, never about whole-community action. They are about piecemeal provision, privileged access to the selected few.

It won't be easy. And it's not greatly helped by research that refuses to challenge the ideas and reasons that underpin ideas like 'differences in attainment' or 'high-performing schools' and how these two concepts inter-relate.

Under the Cranes, Renoir Cinema, Jan 8

2012-01-07T20:12:00.003Z

Apologies if you know about this but here goes:

I wrote what I called a 'play for voices' about the past and present of Hackney. It was commissioned by 'Ignite' an arts venture in Hackney and it was first put on by sixth formers at BSix College.

I tried to do a kind of 'Under Milk Wood' creating a montage of solos and choruses, documentary and fiction pulling together people of the past like Shakespeare (who worked in what is now Hackney), Anna Laetitia Barbauld, mingling them with people I knew like a Jamaican building worker, a Bengali restaurant owner, Morris Beckman - who wrote a book about the 43-group, the Jews who fought against Oswald Mosley after the war, a very old lady who had worked on the buses during the first world war, a fire warden from the second world war, and so on. I made their stories interleave with what was happening in Dalston where the council had worked with Transport for London to demolish part of historic Hackney, and put up high rise towers for young professionals.

I was trying to contrast the lives lived by people with the plans made for them by authorities, I was trying to show how migration and settlement enriches all of us but sometimes you have to fight for that.

Anyway,the sixth formers put it on at the Round Chapel in Lower Clapton, then a group of professional actors put it on, directed by the same director, Christopher Preston at the Rosemary Branch, Theatre. Emma-Louise Williams saw both productions and said that she thought it would make a good film. She's a radio producer and had never made a film, but she got a crew together and over the next period went out and shot scenes of Hackney, looked at hours of archive film, filmed some paintings of Hackney by Leon Kossoff, James McKinnon and Jock MacFadyen, recorded the actors re-doing the play in a studio, researched a wide variety of music and then slowly and painstakingly put the film together.

What's come out is a kind of double montage - a radio play segeued into a gallery of film, past and present and paintings. It's not a documentary, it's not a drama. It's a hybrid 'piece', a 'film-poem, a voiced montage. I love it, but I'm prejudiced.

I think it offers a serious critique of 'regeneration' by talking through imagined voices which I've summoned up from my memory - a kind of fiction, of course, but also a kind of documentary fiction. And the film and music and painting seem to flow with that, sometimes appearing to lead it, complement it, contrast with it. Past and present intermingle as well so that chronological time is less important than people's lived lives.

Anyway, it's on at the Renoir tomorrow morning, put on by the London Socialist Film Co-op, followed by a discussion with me and Emma-Louise. Please come.

Here are the links for the film's blogspot and the London Socialist Film Co-op. Please click on them for details of where to come and see the really nice reviews the film has had so far.

http://underthecranes.blogspot.com/

http://socialistfilm.blogspot.com/

See you there or at the next showing.

Book of the Week, Day 1; Word of Mouth, storytelling

2012-01-07T18:36:00.003Z

I'm on on Monday January 9 reading the first chapter of 'Stop What You're Doing and Read This', a version of the article printed in the Guardian on January 2. 9.45 am and then it sits about on iplayer.

Here's the link to the BBC Radio 4 website for the week's readings:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0194l3b

And here's the link for the Radio 4 page for 'Word of Mouth'. On Tuesday at 4.00 pm I'm doing a programme about people telling stories that their parents or grandparents told them.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0194mw1

This one and the whole series go up on iplayer too.

The Accountability Myth and the new Tory answer

2012-01-07T00:26:00.000Z

[Apologies, this blog has come out striped in pink and white and I don't know how to de-stripe it. Please ignore it as much as you can.]

One of the ways that Blair and New Labour got elected back in 1997 was to appear new-broomish, efficient and clean. The rump of Thatcher's government, then in the hands of John Major, had put on a very presentable show of being corrupt and inept. Those of us around at the time can remember that New Labour came in on a bandwaggon festooned with slogans about 'targets' and 'accountability'. The party that brought us the National Health Service and the first generation of universal secondary education now offered us the clip boards and spread sheets of Macdonalds trainee courses. By rebranding people and ( you know, us, human beings) as 'customers' and 'client groups', New Labour could present itself as something that would 'bring real change' etc etc. At the heart of this revolution in notepads and jotters was - and still is - the word 'accountability'.

I was reminded of its hollowness seeing a headline in today's Metro newspaper: " Schools accused of keeping bad pupils away during Ofsted inspections. Schools have been accused of bribing problem pupils to stay at home during Ofsted inspections to try to make them look better."

This story, it seems, originates with some teachers spilling the beans this week to the Times Educational Supplement.

O my gawd, we might gasp. Such dishonesty, such deceit. Heads must roll - preferably Heads' heads. Detentions must be dished out.

But a moment's pause, and assuming that the stories are true, we know why such things happen, don't we? Accountability. New Labour's shiny revolution involved a wall of metaphorical CCTV cameras inside every public service. In education, it was the SATs, mock SATs, league tables, Ofsted, self-assessment, monitoring regime which they said would make teachers and schools 'accountable' to us parents. In reality, it's given us misleading information and terrified headteachers. And with it a raft of dodges, cheats, subterfuges, fiddles, cons and wheezes which schools go in for in order to defeat the cameras.

In 1969, two clever sods, Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull invented the Peter Principle which states that in every institution and hierarchy everyone rises to their level of incompetence. I propose the Rosen-Del Boy principle which states that for every bit of accountability put in place, there is an equal and opposite dodge invented by the people who are being measured and assessed. The new broom ends up being bent.

And yet, I might argue, the hope or desire behind accountability is not a bad one: that the services we pay for do a good job. The problem lies in the attitude to the human beings who do the work in these services. If you treat people as if the only thing that will motivate them are systems of surveillance and control, run by managers, policed by spreadsheets and competition, valued solely in terms of narrow-based measurements, the people doing the work feel undermined, controlled, powerless, de-skilled and ultimately depressed. It creates systems external to the person doing the work so that they are no longer responsible for the job they are doing. In other words it has an effect that is precisely the opposite to the one intended.

The theory of Blunkettism (expounded in an earlier blog) stated that so long as New Labour did what the Tories did but more so, they would remain permanently electable. Indeed, New Labour built on what had already been started by the Tories with this whole accountability malarkey. Now the snag: New Labour ran it till it broke down, the Tories have rebranded themselves and let the right wing libertarians rise to the surface. Open the Daily Mail and you'll see a critique of accountability not far off mine. Here's Steve Doughty who today says that he knows what education system leads to teachers wanting to bribe disruptive pupils to stay away when Ofsted calls:

"For a start, it’s one where the merits of schools are decided by a bureaucratic inspectorate. You do not have to talk for very long to a head teacher or a social services chief to work out that very few of them hold the OFSTED inspection system in high regard.

I wouldn’t rely on the league tables for assessing a school either..."

What? But this is what 'our side' have been saying, isn't it? Haven't we been saying for the last decade that Ofsted and league tables don't help, don't tell us what we need to know? But we're in a new era, remember. The rise of the libertarian right. In this era, we're all going to be free because we all compete.

This is indeed the Doughty-Gove solution:

"In a rational world, you would allow parents to choose schools and schools to choose pupils. You would then get schools that were obviously successful, academically, in the arts, at sport, or in whatever field. They would be a modern counterpart of – here comes the taboo word – the old grammars.

Less successful schools could be boosted with special help in terms of staff and money. The worst could be closed, and new ones opened, perhaps like the tier of technical schools that was supposed to be started in the 1950s but which never appeared.

I know Michael Gove is pushing very hard in this direction...etc etc"

Let's look closely at this, because this is the politics of now, this is cutting-edge Toryism 2012. So, schools according to this plan would be in a state of permanent opening, closing, re-opening and reorganisation. We know that would be the case because several processes come into play: the so-called good schools (according to a mix of truth, reputation, gossip and prejudice) start to attract more pupils; they become perforce selective, turning away children they don't want to educate (as happens now); the neighbouring schools start to become less popular and get into all sorts of difficulties - particularly if they have to pick up pupils rejected by the 'successful' schools. According to the Doughty-Gove scheme, money starts flowing in one direction rather than another so that the schools most in difficulty get the least money and, ultimately close. Now what happens is that that generation of pupils have their education disrupted as they are decanted into the neighbouring schools, or they have to wait in a kind of limbo till some new dispensation takes over on the same site. Meanwhile, it only needs a bad appointment or two in a 'successful' school and the pendulum can work the other way: that school starts to run into difficulty and away we go again with the instability.

Meanwhile, the false charm and beauty of this Doughty-Gove system is 'specialism'. What does this mean in reality? It means that schools get a carte blanche to select a proportion of their pupils according to one or other ability - usually meaning that those pupils who specialise are children whose parents could afford to coach them in a particular ability. It also means that children are choosing at 11 whether they are more likely to be interested in languages or PE with no guarantee that in their specialist school they might get a good education in both - which, after all is the point of going to school ie that the whole of your schooling is good, not one part of it. As a consequence of all this instability and 'choice', some kids are junked and dumped, into 'failing schools' and/or sin-bins or 'off-site units' as they used to be known. All this is happening already. You only have to talk to teachers about the mysterious disappearance of children off their rolls (if they are the 'successful school') and the mysterious appearance of children on to their rolls from the 'successful' school at other schools.

As I said in a previous post, this is about:
not treating each cohort of pupils in each locality as the responsibility of the education service;
not treating the profession as a capable body of people able to develop their capacities and interests through inservice work and 'action' research on their own practice;
not treating parents as people who can participate democratically in their locality in the systems of selection for all local schools.

Instead of treating people as democratic individuals acting in a locality's best educational interests, we are offered a choice between 'accountability' (with the inevitable Rosen-Del Boy dodges built in) and a Tesco-versus-Morrisons model of schooling.

Lawrence, Suarez, Abbott - where are we?

2012-01-06T00:59:00.001Z

The start of 2012 seems to have put 'race' at the top of its agenda. The slow and awful unfolding of the Stephen Lawrence case drew into its sphere the Suarez-Evra case from football and now the Diane Abbott tweet. One way I can make myself miserable is to read the comments on the Guardian's Comment is Free forums. Good luck to people who can resist the temptation to go there or to comment.

An observation about each case:

The commentators and commenters who've talked about the Stephen Lawrence case solely in terms of murder must surely be missing why this matter stretches far beyond the matter of the presence of dangerous racist thugs hanging out on housing estates. First, racism and racist violence don't exist in isolated clusters amongst, say, incoherent, criminal fraternities. Racism exists as a phenomenon or structure built into how a society sees itself, expresses itself, divides itself. The murderers of Stephen Lawrence aren't self-fertilising, rare plants, sprouting out of obscure corners. They are only possible because of years of lies, omissions and dispossession, stretching back decades and more. I had a standard middle class English education in the state system - two primary schools, two grammar schools before things got a bit more exceptional and rarefied. Throughout that time, I was constantly and consistently informed through many different channels of education that Britain was great, though it had been greater when it ruled over most parts of the world and most foreigners were problematic: individually or culturally or nationally they were variously shifty, untrustworthy, lazy, dangerous, war-like, sadistic, stupid and so on. 'We' however were essentially good, kind, tolerant, intelligent, humorous and incredibly ingenious and inventive. What's more, some incredible chemistry of sanity and sagacity had combined to give us a long line of great rulers of state, culture and religion to have endowed the rest of 'us' with the world's greatest language, system of government, cultural heritage and village greens.

A glimpse of this last construction occurred twice on TV tonight - first, as I watched Michael Portillo travel from Epping to Hackney via the gunpowder works of Walthamstow where he announced that the 19th century was largely a peaceful time for Britain before arranging for a rifle to be fired as it was exactly the kind that had been 'used in the Zulu War'. The mixture of fibs, 'normalising' and omission here had me gasping. No, the 19th century was a time of permanent 'little wars' (and some big ones) all round the British Empire as the imperialists did all they could to maintain domination over millions of people and their lands. Talking of this rifle being used 'in the Zulu War' was a classic euphemism, gently removing the fact it was used to kill Zulus where they lived, not because they were threatening Britain but because they threatened the British rule in their country. Why not say it? And, in passing perhaps, mention that for all its brilliance the great British gunpowder (the theme of this segment of the programme) didn't bring victory to the British state on this particular occasion in southern Africa.

Then a few hours later I found myself watching some programmes about education: first a tribute to the grammar school, which mysteriously forgot to mention the kinds of schools people went to if they didn't go to grammar school and then a programme about Thomas More's daughter and Renaissance education in England. This last talked about England being at war as if it was dangerous foreign jonnies who wanted to invade; England 'discovering' other places (why? didn't jonny foreigner and native know they were there?), and expanding 'trade' - no mention of conquest, plunder, slaves and imperial rivalry. Incidentally, the programme also told the story of the English language as if it was something handed down to the people from clever grammar school boys and then received and learned. Any sense that everyone is a language-user and language-maker and meaning-maker was absent even though the very writer (and his companions and co-writers) they were looking at this point in the programme, Shakespeare, was someone who knew how to explore the voices of non-aristocrats and non-grammar school types. Hostile as the plays appear to be to the 'mob', Shakespeare gives lines of power, pathos and righteous anger to the citizens in 'Coriolanus', Caliban in 'The Tempest' and Feste in 'Twelfth Night'.

So notions of British exceptional talent, hierarchical ideas about culture and general all-round worthiness are alive and well. Past bloodbaths, exploitations and oppressions carried out on the other side of the globe are kept well out-of-sight.

The Stephen Lawrence case comes charged with something else though. I am proud to have met Neville Lawrence and shared a platform with him and though it's taken me years to 'get' it - and may have many years more to get it even more - one of the reasons why the case took on such importance for black people was that it showed to them - but not to most of the rest of British society - that the reason why the police didn't follow up the leads they were given and get into the killers' homes and 'do the forensics' was because his murder didn't matter and it didn't matter because he was black. What's more, it didn't matter how often they said that this was the problem and that this was why the case went cold, society didn't want to hear that. The whole matter was constructed again and again as the Lawrences doing all they could to get the killers and only that. But the reason why it was so difficult wasn't because this was some strange mysterious, motiveless killing by unknowns. It was for an opposite reason: it was because it was an utterly un-mysterious killing by knowns whose trail of evidence was deliberately allowed to be wiped clean. For racist reasons. A racism at the heart of the justice system, not just or only in the minds and deeds of a group of white working-class boys. What the British media seem to find hard to understand, appreciate or care about - though they are told it again and again - is that this state racism exists as a collective memory reinforced over and over again there is a death in police custody or the immigration security forces are involved in injuries and fatalities in what they do. Joy Gardner r.i.p.

Meanwhile, at a seemingly much, much more trivial level is the Suarez-Evra fracas. Anyone who has been around sport knows that the air is permanently thick with insult and abuse. A good deal of it is sexual either in terms of what the other person can or cannot do, has or has not physically got, or what might or might not happen or has happened to your opponents partner, wife, girlfriend, ex, mother, sister, grandmother. A good deal of it is about personal appearance - height, weight, hair, teeth, eyes and so on. The question in this case wasn't whether Suarez said something derogatory but whether he 'racialised' the conversation. Again and again, people have tried to say that whatever Suarez said was only or merely something that people say to each other in Uruguay, in Latin America, in colloquial Spanish etc etc. Well, let's remember first that Uruguay was once a slave-owning society and the idea that any word meaning 'black' is somehow neutral or 'only' or 'just' anything is hard to believe. I notice that there haven't been long lines of black Uruguayans queueing up to tell British interviewers how they love being called 'black' by white people when tensions are high in arguments and confrontations.

Even so, no matter what kind of codes Suarez was using at the time, there can be little doubt that he changed the nature of the 'conversation' (euphemism, I know) by introducing 'race' into it. And this is the key. Why does a white person do that? What possible purpose is there for a white person in the middle of a confrontation (for whatever reason) suddenly say that the other person is 'black'. It can only be part of the business of trying to get the upper hand. In other words, the white person reaches for the hierarchy he is part of, (the racist hierarchy,) and pluck the trump card from the pack: the one that says 'inferior' (in his book). It is completely irrelevant that black people use this or that term to each other or within the hierarchies of racism use the word 'white'. Racialising the confrontation is to get the upper hand by relying on perceived notions of who is top dog, based on centuries of domination and oppression. The thousands of column inches I've seen written on this case all trying to prove that 'negro' isn't a slur completely miss the point.

And so to Diane Abbott - who used the word 'white' and appeared to be blaming all white people for a long history of 'divide and rule' which has split black people, set them against each other, as a way of securing domination over them. If she meant that, then I would take leave to disagree with her for the simple reason, not all white people rule. Even so, both the Suarez case and the murder of Stephen Lawrence indicate that some white people with very little or no power try to lever themselves up an inch by taking it out on those whom society has positioned even lower than them - as if in the eighteenth century, the indentured labourer can find reasons to feel superior to the slave and express it in terms of contempt, violence or murder.

I suspect that Diane Abbott doesn't actually believe that all white people are guilty of waging divide and rule tactics but, I'm guessing, suspects that it runs very deep. So, we might ask, why or how might she have come to that conclusion? Is she a fantasist? Or does she have reasons to think that over time (her lifetime and history) those in power have tried and succeeded to divide black people up into different 'types' precisely in order to rule over them or to make it easier to maintain domination of them? Again - purely as a suspicion - I would think that she perceives her own life as an example of that. That white people have tried, as it were, to separate her off from other black people pointing out - as I have done - that her son went to private school, or that there are things about her style or job that make her less 'black'.

I have to look at myself pretty hard on this one. That moment when Diane Abbott's son took a place at a private school felt to me as someone living in Hackney at the time like yet one more thing to make fighting for fair, equal education in Hackney just that bit harder. It meant that we couldn't rely on our MP to fight the complete transformation happening to Hackney secondary education (closing comps, creating academies) because she had said through her deeds that she wasn't part of it.

So, on this one I'll admit to being more confused. As a broad statement about history, Diane Abbott is to my mind more or less right in that the elite that has ruled over the British Empire and continues to rule is of course 99.9 per cent white and one of the ways it has ruled was, say, to use black troops from one part of the empire to fight another, or to use 'mulatto' elites (as they were called) to rule over 'pure' black populations and so on. In terms of how Diane Abbott acts as a local MP - now an apologetic one - is for me less clear. I don't feel as if I tried to rule over her, trying to set black people against each other in the matter of education. To tell the truth, I felt that she did that herself. She set herself apart from all of us in Hackney at that time who were children or had children in state schools, many of whom were and are black. Perhaps, there is a tortured argument to be made that the very reason why she felt she had to send her child to a private school is because of discrimination and racism. Her comments about white teachers would appear to suggest that, though presumably most of the teachers at the private school were white too. Even so, I can't figure out how you fight racism that way.

That said, I would defend the broad political truth she was trying to express even though it needed clarifying. Depressingly, all we have now is the apology and the conversation we might have had about racism and society goes back a step. Yes, seeing her say sorry is much worse than the original tweet.

Towards a book-reading school community

2012-01-05T12:43:00.002Z

I offer the 20-point plan at this site as a practical blueprint for changing, adapting and altering to suit local purposes and needs. Please click on it, steal it, share it, change it, distribute it:

http://www.readingrevolution.co.uk/

The Politics of Literacy

2012-01-05T11:34:00.000Z

I refrained from putting my previous post into too much of a political framework in case it obscured the kernel of what the research is saying - namely that a home full of books, independent of the level of education, profession or class of the parent(s) will enable the child(ren) in that home get 3 years more schooling. And this applies in countries all over the world.

As I asked in the previous post, why aren't politicians falling on this as if it was manna?

Let's see if we can unpick some of this. Various people, me included, have actually spent time face to face with the guys at the top of the Education ministry. One of the big lies spread about Education ministers the world over is that education is in the grip of liberals and lefties and no matter what 'reforms' they try to bring in, they find themselves being obstructed. Michael Gove in his most recent speech tries the same tack portraying himself as some kind of embattled pioneer in danger of being strangled by the all-powerful conspiracy of local authorities (!), teaching unions and an amorphous lefty 'them'. As if. These education Secretaries of State and Ministers have had an almost free run over the organisation of schools - (that should be 're-organisation' really) - the content of the curriculum, teacher-training arrangements and even pedagogic methods. Since 1988, there has hardly been a year in which the Ministry in England (I do have to keep saying 'England' just to remind us all that every time Michael Gove and others open their mouths about all this, puffing themselves up as cocks of the midden, they are in reality only talking to the statelet of England) has not brought in a change, a 'reform', a re-organisation, an 'initiative'. Even now, in spite of his embattled rhetoric, Michael Gove is the minister responsible for the biggest shake-up in the organisation of schooling since 1944. I would love to think that some kind of all-powerful coalition was able to resist the progress towards a more fragmented, more unequal system. That's not to say that combinations of schools and parents (perhaps someone will tell me, Local Authorities too, but not in areas I've lived and worked in) have made collective decisions to stay fully accountable to local democratically elected councils rather than to millionaires, corporations and consortia.

So, on the matter of power, in spite of what ministers may say, they rule. And a long arm down from the ministry, policed by the inspectorate, regulated by the ministerial obsessive compulsive disorder of testing, backed sometimes/often (how often?) uncritically by nervous headteachers looking over their shoulders at league tables ensures obedience. Of course, England now presents a very interesting picture of right-wing libertarianism. Think Dr Strangelove, who you'll remember couldn't control the arm that wanted to do a 'Sieg Heil' in places where he or it shouldn't. That's right wing libertarianism. It says, 'Go off my little darlings and be free, do what you want, you know best, you're the professionals, you're the teachers...' but there is a hard, authoritarian reflex which wants to determine what is done in schools, how it is to be done, how schools should be run - and most importantly, wants to ensure that in localities - where education happens to the 'cohort' - becomes secretly stratified and segregated. Under the name of choice and freedom, schools under new dispensations ('free', 'specialist' etc) will ensure the excluded are excluded, the disadvantaged remain so. Listen to Michael Gove trotting out the false comparison between the old Hackney Downs Comprehensive School and Mossbourne Academy built on its site. The comp was completely non-selective and was being deliberately run down by the old local authority which was corrupt, incompetent and desperate to offload the whole secondary cohort on to neighbouring boroughs, and sell off the secondary school sites to developers. Mossbourne had millions pumped into it, a brand new staff imported with the result that it has become what is in effect a selective school. This is done simply by virtue of it becoming 'first choice' for many more parents. Gove and everyone else who fall upon the stats of Hackney Downs versus Mossbourne commit the classic error of false stats analysis: not comparing like with like. This is how power is exercised from the ministry, even as it pretends it isn't and can't! This is how libertarianism does a Dr Strangelove.

Talk about literacy has its long, long history but takes place in this context of school re-organisation. An agenda is taking shape: where the ministry retains direct or indirect control over early years education, teaching to read will be in the form of Synthetic Phonics. They will do all they can to make sure that this is the only method used and that's why they are introducing a test for 6 year olds which will test their 'phonic awareness'. Where a child fails this test, then he or she will be injected with more phonics. This is Strangelove at work again. No one in the world, not even the Synthetic Phonics people themselves believe that you can learn to read using only phonic methods! Around 25% of the words in their phonic programmes are not taught phonically! They are taught by a method which used to be known as 'look and say' or 'whole word recognition'. They tell children these are 'tricky words' - words like 'was' and 'come' that can't be deciphered in the same way as words like 'tip' and 'sit'. So in the midst of the 'systematic' use of phonic methods is something completely non-systematic, or at least inconsistent - namely, 'hey kids - look at that word -and...er...learn it!'

No matter, say the pragmatists and authoritarians - if it works, it works. Well, yes and no. The problems that are emerging here are:
Are children understanding what they're reading this way?
Are children reared on maxed out phonics able to switch to texts (ie real books) that aren't in phonics' schemes?
Are children reared on pure phonics better readers than those who learned to read by other methods when they're tested five years down the line?
Do children reared on pure phonics become avid, active, self-supporting readers by virtue of phonics alone?
Does anyone care about this so long as the children score high in their 'reading' tests?

These questions are being looked at by researchers grouped around the United Kingdom Literacy Association (UKLA) and already a much more complex picture is emerging than is being portrayed or countenanced by the ministry. Research however, is incredibly difficult in this area because it has to be longterm, it's very difficult to compare like with like over longterm (changing cohorts of children, changing teachers, changing schools) and it's almost impossible to keep 'all the variables' in children's lives constant while you're testing for the one variable: method of teaching to read. In other words, it becomes incredibly difficult to discern what precisely is making the difference.

Again, there is the mysterious fact that must always be ignored by those introducing the synthetic phonic regime - many children have for centuries learned how to read by other methods and indeed by a combination of methods. If that's the case, why bring in a method that is applied to all children all the time? Strangelove again.

This particular knot of problems gives rise to some absurdities. A headteacher with a national reputation for turning round a failing school presents in public one of the major planks on which the success of his children is based: synthetic phonics. As he does his presentation he reveals that in his school, right from the off, the children are immersed in 'whole texts' and 'real books', read to them, read by them, enacted by them, with a programme of visiting writers and outreach into the homes. I make the observation that this is part of how the children are learning to read. He becomes very cross and shakes his head.

Again, in the recent tests, a school came out 'top'. Journalists rushed to the school to interview the headteacher. Evan Davies quizzed her on the Today programme: do you do synthetic phonics? he asked. 'Yes,' she said. However, she was keen to point out that in the school they did a lot of other things: they do a lot of work on bilingualism where the children share their 'home languages' in the school environment; they have a system of parent representatives whose job is to explore ways in which books and reading are a top priority in people's homes, they emphasise reading of books in and out of school all the time.

So, is it synthetic phonics doing the trick? Or all this other stuff? Or both? Unlike the previous head, the SATs success head (if I may call her that), was quite clear. It was the school's culture in relation to language and books, of which synthetic phonics was one part, that did the trick.

Again, why aren't the right wing libertarians (and, for that matter the craven New Labour crowd) not making tracks to this school and trumpeting the virtues of this method? Because Strangelove wouldn't like it. Apart from the synthetic phonics bit, it all sounds woolly and multi-cultural, doesn't it? It all sounds humanistic and puts parents at the heart of literacy.

What? Literacy is something to do with what parents can do? And not just simply 'hearing children read'? But they can be active planners and participants in the process of building a whole school reading community? And the word 'literacy' doesn't have to be confined to reading scheme cards, sheets and 'readers', doesn't have to be confined to the deciphering of standard English writing? It can encompass everyone's 'literacy' (and 'oracy' ie how they talk) and if you value all these literacies and oracies you respect people and if you respect people you stand a chance of building networks of children,parents,carers, teachers who co-operate in order to learn.

And how odd, eh, that in Michael Gove's speech about academies and freedom and those who would obstruct things, he wasn't trumpeting the triumph of the 'best SATs' school and,more importantly, trumpeting the whole language, diverse language, whole community methods being used - the very point being made by the research I've quoted in my previous post. 3 years more schooling, Mr Gove...All you would need to do is ask of schools to prepare policies of their own to find ways of co-operating with parents and libraries to get as many books as possible into homes.

And why not? Why won't ministers do it?

Because of Strangelove's arm. And Strangelove's arm tells them that what schools, teachers and children need is control and containment. Sitting about browsing through books, talking about language, feelings and ideas doesn't sound tough, doesn't sound as if you're 'getting children down to it', doesn't sound like 'discipline'.

So we have universal provision of synthetic phonics, but we don't have universal provision of the reading of whole books. That's where we are.

Books, books, books

2012-01-04T21:29:00.000Z

I have sitting with me at all times a piece of research called 'Family scholarly culture and educational success: books and schooling in 27 nations'. It is authored by MDR Evans, Jonathan Kelley, Joanna Sikora and Donald J. Treiman, and it comes from a journal called Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 28 (2010) 171-197. It comes from the Sociology Department of the University of Nevada and you can buy it from www.sciencedirect.com or the British Library or access it through a university library that carries that journal.

OK, that's the referencing stuff over.

Here's the abstract:

'Children growing up in homes with many books - [later defined in the research as around 500 books] - get 3 years more schooling than children from bookless homes... [Yes, yes, yes, we might say here, of course they do. We know that. Children from homes with 500 books are middle class homes, with at least one parent who has had a university education who sits and reads to their children every night and goes to museums every weekend. Yes, yes, yes tell me something new...]...independent of their parents' education, occupation and class. [What? Seriously? Are you saying, Evans et al, that a home with 500 books, with both parents having no education beyond 16, both working in a factory as production workers results in children getting 3 more years schooling than children from similar homes but without the books????!!!!] This [500 books in the home]is as great an advantage as having university educated rather than unschooled parents and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father....
...
Data are from representative national samples in 27 nations, with over 70,000 cases...[and for the research wonks here:] analyzed using multi-level linear and probit models with multiple imputation of missing data'.

end of abstract

Now what should we make of this? Seemingly, it is saying that the single factor of a home having 500 books in it gives children those extra 3 years of education. Or put my way, having books around - and all the activities related to it - enables children of all backgrounds to 'access' the school curriculum in such a way as to further enable children to hang in there longer at school, to get more education, more out of the system.

The moment I saw that piece of research my mind flew off in several directions at the same time.

First, we might want to ask ourselves why such a piece of research is a trade secret? Why aren't the world's ministers of education waving it about as a basis for some kind of major 'initiatives' or democratic action? Wouldn't you as a minister of education fasten on to it, invite the researchers into your office, grill them about the evidence and methodology and if it all held up, wouldn't you then institute some kind of programme, some kind of plan for action which you could say would guarantee that millions more children would be able to benefit from school for longer? Wouldn't you quickly gather together librarians, bookshop owners and chains, local authority cultural officers, cultural administrators, all the reading NGOs and quangos, headteachers, literacy co-ordinators and get them quickly planning how to put a national programme into action which would enable every home to get hold of 500 books (perhaps this could be widened to include magazines and comics)?

But no. What we get is the Michael Gove model of encouraging reading - running through lists of desirable authors in front of audiences at Tory Party conferences. 'Read Dryden,' he commands airily from the platform. 'Read 50 books a year,' he says as if this has some kind of meaning.

Behind the scenes,charities like the National Literacy Trust, Booktrust and the like bust their guts to get children, schools and books hooked up together but it is inevitably piecemeal - and I say that as a passionate supporter of their activities. But it's not the universal provision that this piece of research points the way to.

That said, let's pause a moment and ask ourselves how or why the phenomenon of 500 books in a home 'independent of their parents' education, occupation, and class' can have such a dramatic effect?

The researchers are not trained teachers of 'English' or literacy but this is what they suggest. 'A book-oriented home environment, we argue, endows children with tools that are directly useful in learning at school: vocabulary, information, comprehension skills, imagination, broad horizons of history and geography, familiarity with good writing, understanding of the importance of evidence in argument and many others.'

Now, I might not want to express it in those terms but I can see what they're getting at and can relate it to the kind of home I came from and the kinds of home I've contributed to for my own children. I would slot in there several other 'endowments':

1. It's virtually impossible to live with 500 books and not talk about them. Talk about books and texts of any kind is, if you like, an 'unpacking' process. It breaks down the written code or 'dialect' as I inaccurately call it, into the usable chunks of speech and listened-to pieces. It also treats knowledge as 'dialogic' - that's to say, re-arrangeable and changeable through dialogue, through the different understandings of different people. This is mind-expanding stuff. To possess this kind of dialogic ability is to possess one of the key processes of education.

2. A group of people who talk about texts over and over again build up ways of challenging received wisdoms and creating wisdoms of their own. To have the confidence to do this is to possess another key process of education.

3. A group of people who own books, magazines and comics browse - and talk about browsing - through the texts. Browsing and selecting reading from piles of books is highly sophisticated use of text. It involves scanning, comparing, selecting and categorising. I have seen all my children do this with anything from comics to football programmes to fairy books to 'Horrid Henry' books or whatever and I've seen then do it from the age of 6 and yet these processes of scanning, comparing, selecting and categorizing of written texts are some of the hardest things to teach. Children at home with many texts do it as part of their 'tidying up' or chatting. It's higher order thinking, if you like done with ease and as fun.

4. Literature - one strong part of the 500 books we might guess - but of course not necessarily so - is one of the most powerful ways human beings have invented to pass on experience and ideas. As I've said before it marries ideas and feelings attached to beings we come to recognise and care about. If you sit with a child or young person when they read or talk about books, you will at some point engage with both: the feelings and ideas. What happens here is that you find that you move quickly from the concrete situation in the text |(let's say it's a scene to do with bullying) to a concrete situation in real life (again, bullying) and into some kind of generality about thought, ideas or 'what to do'. This movement between the concrete and the abstract is what literature nearly always offers. It is also a key component of what education tries to do: teach abstract ideas in relation to concrete phenomena.

5. The written code or dialect is a hard form of language to learn and get used to. No matter what methods of working out how letters and sounds relate to each other (or not) you have to also get a sense of how sentences and paragraphs sound - what MAK Halliday calls the 'wording'. You also have to get a sense of what this wording can do for you. When there are many texts about in a home, there is every possibility that someone at some time or another, probably quite often, reads some texts out loud. This makes the written dialect oral. It appears to lift the dialect off the page and puts it into cadences, phrasings, musical sequences that 'make sense'. It gives written texts what is known as 'prosody' - verbal music. This prosody is a crucial platform on which learning to read whole texts is made much, much easier. As a child, you get the sound of the written language and you get the point of the written language. You hear, let's say, a Roald Dahl novel read out loud, perhaps you couldn't read it for yourself, but here you are understanding it and enjoying it...doesn't this provoke you and motivate you to read whole texts yourself? A reader of whole texts is someone who can 'access the curriculum'.

I'm sure people reading this can think of other ways, the presence of 500 books in the home give children and young people this kind of power of access.

The key thing though is what do we do about it? What can we do? What should we do?