Here's part of a letter I received in 2008.
I hope that in the future we'll all talk and write like this. Every single one of us.
"At a time when the local government sector, more than ever before, must find new and more creative ways of delivering to meet the diverse needs of its communities, this year’s conference will explore the ways in which cultural services can impact on the priority needs of local communities,delivering shared outcomes and driving service improvements. The cross cutting benefits of placing culture at the strategic centre of local policy-making and delivery have been much vaunted, but the time has come to move from vision to delivery, and there are structures, mechanisms and partnerships emerging to help facilitate this. The new-style Local Area Agreements (LAAs), to be introduced in 2008, will be the delivery vehicles for agreed community outcomes and will provide the focus of the new local authority performance framework. Culture must be positioned strategically for this transformation of the local government landscape, and we must be able to convince others of these benefits.
We hope this year’s conference will empower service deliverers to put culture at the heart of their strategies and solutions and provide the tools needed to deliver better outcomes on behalf of their communities. And by attracting policy makers and strategic thinkers from other sectors to the conference we hope to provide the opportunity for constructive dialogue to enable us to put the vision into practice.
We'd be delighted to hear your thoughts and opinions as a key cultural educator and communicator. Culture has the power to break down barriers, cross boundaries, and capture people's imagination and unlock their creativity. We'd love to hear from you on why you feel culture is of value to local communities and why national and local government should be looking to culture for solutions beyond traditional service silos."
Thursday, 27 March 2014
Wednesday, 26 March 2014
British, British, British...but er...not.
This was a very odd programme:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03yzjy6/A_Very_British_Renaissance_The_Renaissance_Arrives/
BBC 'A Very British Renaissance'.
Its theme was that the Renaissance came to Britain, very few of us know about this, the presenter, James Baxter was going to tell us about things that we didn't know about, this Renaissance was brought to this country by foreigners but once it was here it was very, very, very British.
I haven't rewatched it but I suspect that the words 'English' and 'British' were repeated at least 10 times.
It was odd because it explained in fascinating detail how non-British people like Holbein came to Britain and introduced art that people in Britain hadn't seen before (said the presenter) and therefore changed that particular art form...or, people like Wyatt, travelled to Italy, learned about something in his particular art form (poetry), came back to Britain and started writing using this foreign form.
The argument then claimed that certain adaptations took place which then made this form (eg the sonnet, architecture, making of sundials, portraiture etc) 'British'.
This strikes me as a rubbish and misleading way of looking at culture. Consider another way: taking all the same examples eg of artists coming to Britain or British artists travelling abroad. Consider then that this is a matter of 'interculturalism', the sharing of cultures. And rather than this proving some kind of chauvinistic tosh about it all being so uniquely 'British', it proves something much more interesting: namely that much (perhaps all) of what we keep calling 'British' is in fact 'intercultural'. So Wyatt took the Petrarchan sonnet from Italy and of course adapted it according to his class, culture and sex to do what he wanted it to do. It's just banal to say that he rendered it 'British'. The result, the sonnet we read is neither 'British' or 'Italian'. It's an intercultural item and all the more exciting to see it and understand it as that.
I suspect that there's an agenda here. A huge amount of programming on BBC 2 and BBC 4 uses this term 'British' - whether it's in cooking (baking), jazz, rock music, or any of the arts. Is the BBC suddenly nervous that the concept of British has been 'undermined' by 'multiculturalism'. Has the word 'British' in its own corporation name been diluted by jonny foreigner? Is it all slipping out of control? Or is there some kind of cheapjack wooing of the licence fee going on with the Charter up for re-examimation, so instead of defying the murdochisation of the media with a belief in culture for all, there's some crude attempt to say that the BBC should at least stand up for Britishness - whatever that's supposed to be?
I don't know.
All I know is that even as the programme ground on and on boasting about the Britishness of what it was showing it was proving just how mixed culturally it all was. And, I for one, was excited and interested in seeing just how mixed these items were.
A case of telling one thing but showing another!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03yzjy6/A_Very_British_Renaissance_The_Renaissance_Arrives/
BBC 'A Very British Renaissance'.
Its theme was that the Renaissance came to Britain, very few of us know about this, the presenter, James Baxter was going to tell us about things that we didn't know about, this Renaissance was brought to this country by foreigners but once it was here it was very, very, very British.
I haven't rewatched it but I suspect that the words 'English' and 'British' were repeated at least 10 times.
It was odd because it explained in fascinating detail how non-British people like Holbein came to Britain and introduced art that people in Britain hadn't seen before (said the presenter) and therefore changed that particular art form...or, people like Wyatt, travelled to Italy, learned about something in his particular art form (poetry), came back to Britain and started writing using this foreign form.
The argument then claimed that certain adaptations took place which then made this form (eg the sonnet, architecture, making of sundials, portraiture etc) 'British'.
This strikes me as a rubbish and misleading way of looking at culture. Consider another way: taking all the same examples eg of artists coming to Britain or British artists travelling abroad. Consider then that this is a matter of 'interculturalism', the sharing of cultures. And rather than this proving some kind of chauvinistic tosh about it all being so uniquely 'British', it proves something much more interesting: namely that much (perhaps all) of what we keep calling 'British' is in fact 'intercultural'. So Wyatt took the Petrarchan sonnet from Italy and of course adapted it according to his class, culture and sex to do what he wanted it to do. It's just banal to say that he rendered it 'British'. The result, the sonnet we read is neither 'British' or 'Italian'. It's an intercultural item and all the more exciting to see it and understand it as that.
I suspect that there's an agenda here. A huge amount of programming on BBC 2 and BBC 4 uses this term 'British' - whether it's in cooking (baking), jazz, rock music, or any of the arts. Is the BBC suddenly nervous that the concept of British has been 'undermined' by 'multiculturalism'. Has the word 'British' in its own corporation name been diluted by jonny foreigner? Is it all slipping out of control? Or is there some kind of cheapjack wooing of the licence fee going on with the Charter up for re-examimation, so instead of defying the murdochisation of the media with a belief in culture for all, there's some crude attempt to say that the BBC should at least stand up for Britishness - whatever that's supposed to be?
I don't know.
All I know is that even as the programme ground on and on boasting about the Britishness of what it was showing it was proving just how mixed culturally it all was. And, I for one, was excited and interested in seeing just how mixed these items were.
A case of telling one thing but showing another!
Thursday, 20 March 2014
Gove had to listen to the science educators
Today, at a conference of primary science specialists, I got an interesting insight into the uneven way in which education policy is being arrived at. As many people reading this will know, when it comes to the English and History curricula in schools, Gove's fingerprints are all over the curriculum and - more importantly - the tests which de facto determine the curriculum. This has caused advisers to resign, send letters of protest and professional associations have sent written submissions which have been almost entirely overlooked. Decades of experience have been overlooked.
But what has happened with science.
It does seem as if Gove and gang have been forced to listen to what experienced teachers of science have told them. The draft curricula were rewritten. The science teachers and advisers seem to think that a truly awful document (the draft) has been thrown out and something much better has replaced it, though reservations were expressed about the fact that the notion of 'science' in primary schools was being weighted - perhaps too heavily - towards biology. A bit of a return to 'nature study' some felt.
So there is a clear politics going on here. Gove et al think that English, literacy and literature are essentially their property, their fiefdom. They seem to think that it's theirs to play with. They surround themselves with a tiny group of experts of one particular persuasion and have pressed ahead with curricula, tests and exams that are of their cultural and political colouring. When it comes to science, they appear to be out of their depth or ignorant and so are forced to accept what the most enlightened end of the profession is saying about science education.
Part of this is the long-standing (and woeful) neglect of science in British culture. A modern state founded on the massive stolen wealth of the British Empire found it less necessary to be at the cutting edge of science and technology than those countries (in particular, Germany) whose empires were much smaller. This country created a ruling elite whose knowledge of science, engineering and technology has nearly always been minute. The training to know how to rule was derived from studying 'the humanities' in private schools - most of which are not known for an active interest in science and technology. As we know from the Thatcher, Blair, Brown, Cameron regimes a further twist to this bias was delivered by the belief and practice that the country's wealth could be delivered fro m the financial sector. And as we now know, the wealth was always clustered round the top, trickle-down was like some Marvel Comic fiction, and the kind of wealth created within the financial sector is 'bubble wealth' - eventually it bursts.
So culturally speaking, science and technology play a role not much different from the way jazz is treated: it's cool, cerebral, clever-clever, background noise-ish - and under-funded. This is shown in the way Secretaries of State for Education talk - or not talk - about science. Gove's speeches are littered with references to novelists, poets, playwrights and historical figures but very rarely to, let's say, haemoglobin, cantilevers or pollen.
It also tells us that Gove views his job (and I don't think he's any worse than his predecessors here) is not really about 'education' as a whole. That's to say, neither the whole child/student, nor the whole spectrum of knowledge and know-how. It's more as a kind of cultural commissar, taking up positions on what are really matters of artistic taste (or what I would call 'prejudice'). When he and others in his place talk of 'standards' it's over an extremely narrow landscape predetermined by their own background, not much more than something self-serving: 'look at me, I grew up to be great by learning my verbs, so everyone should do that too.'
But what has happened with science.
It does seem as if Gove and gang have been forced to listen to what experienced teachers of science have told them. The draft curricula were rewritten. The science teachers and advisers seem to think that a truly awful document (the draft) has been thrown out and something much better has replaced it, though reservations were expressed about the fact that the notion of 'science' in primary schools was being weighted - perhaps too heavily - towards biology. A bit of a return to 'nature study' some felt.
So there is a clear politics going on here. Gove et al think that English, literacy and literature are essentially their property, their fiefdom. They seem to think that it's theirs to play with. They surround themselves with a tiny group of experts of one particular persuasion and have pressed ahead with curricula, tests and exams that are of their cultural and political colouring. When it comes to science, they appear to be out of their depth or ignorant and so are forced to accept what the most enlightened end of the profession is saying about science education.
Part of this is the long-standing (and woeful) neglect of science in British culture. A modern state founded on the massive stolen wealth of the British Empire found it less necessary to be at the cutting edge of science and technology than those countries (in particular, Germany) whose empires were much smaller. This country created a ruling elite whose knowledge of science, engineering and technology has nearly always been minute. The training to know how to rule was derived from studying 'the humanities' in private schools - most of which are not known for an active interest in science and technology. As we know from the Thatcher, Blair, Brown, Cameron regimes a further twist to this bias was delivered by the belief and practice that the country's wealth could be delivered fro m the financial sector. And as we now know, the wealth was always clustered round the top, trickle-down was like some Marvel Comic fiction, and the kind of wealth created within the financial sector is 'bubble wealth' - eventually it bursts.
So culturally speaking, science and technology play a role not much different from the way jazz is treated: it's cool, cerebral, clever-clever, background noise-ish - and under-funded. This is shown in the way Secretaries of State for Education talk - or not talk - about science. Gove's speeches are littered with references to novelists, poets, playwrights and historical figures but very rarely to, let's say, haemoglobin, cantilevers or pollen.
It also tells us that Gove views his job (and I don't think he's any worse than his predecessors here) is not really about 'education' as a whole. That's to say, neither the whole child/student, nor the whole spectrum of knowledge and know-how. It's more as a kind of cultural commissar, taking up positions on what are really matters of artistic taste (or what I would call 'prejudice'). When he and others in his place talk of 'standards' it's over an extremely narrow landscape predetermined by their own background, not much more than something self-serving: 'look at me, I grew up to be great by learning my verbs, so everyone should do that too.'
Monday, 17 March 2014
Starred review from Kirkus for 'Send for a Superhero' (Candlewick in US;Walker in UK)
SEND FOR A SUPERHERO! [STARRED REVIEW!] Author: Michael Rosen
Illustrator: Katharine McEwen
Review Issue Date: April 1, 2014 Online Publish Date: March 17, 2014 Publisher:Candlewick
Pages: 40
Price ( Hardcover ): $16.99
Publication Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-0-7636-6438-1 Category: Picture Books
An over-the-top comic-book adventure within a bedtime story aims for laughs.
Veteran children’s-book writer Rosen (Aesop’s Fables, 2013, etc.) proves he knows what kids like and what they are like. The story begins as Dad reads a comic book to “Emily and little Elmer” at bedtime: Filth and Vacuum are on their way to Earth to take over the world. Within the comic book, savvy schoolboy Brad 40 tries to warn Miss Nice and Class Perfect. In the frame, Elmer gets excited by the story, and Emily becomes impatient with his interruptions. Back in the story, Brad 40 alerts Mayor Troubleshoot of the dreaded duo’s approach, and the Mayor mobilizes the heroes. Unfortunately, neither Steel Man, Super-Flying-Through-The-Air-Very-Fast-Man nor Incredibly-Big-Strong-Green Man can fend off Filth and Vacuum. Brad 40 calls on Extremely Boring Man to come to the rescue. With his gray-on-gray outfit and seemingly endless monologue about selecting what to wear, he has a slumberous effect on everyone, including Filth and Vacuum—and Elmer and Emily (as if, Dad!). McEwan alters the style of illustration and palette to cue the back and forth between the stories. The comic adventure is laid out in frames with urgent declarations and sound effects, with a printed-on-newsprint effect, whereas the scenes with Elmer and Emily are often on full-bleed pages and pulse with saturated colors.
Although this approach has been used before, rarely has it been executed with such hilarious results.
(Picture book. 4-8)
Sunday, 16 March 2014
Big push to make education the next big market.
Because of the way education has become a matter of what any Secretary of State for Education wants, it's become very hard to keep up with what's really going on.
So, think back to NewLab who bustled into power shouting, 'Education, education, education' and turned this commitment into a parody of nineteenth century hospital, asylum, prison and school regimes, with every minute of every day laid down. Whether this was good for children or good for teachers doesn't seem to have been debated. It was, in truth, an electoral ruse, cooked up by David Blunkett. He thought that it out-Toried the Tories with its authoritarian, prescriptive and 'disciplined' way of going on, thereby leaving NewLab untouchable, unimpeachable by the Daily Mail (NewLab's criterion of success). That was the theory.
Bit by bit, we figured out that this method and this model wasn't based on any educational principles but was a direct transfer across to education of a business model of training and production. The child was to be 'produced' by the same systems that were being used to produce the labour-power ('skills') of a 'trained' labour force or indeed the same systems used to produce a mass produced car or biscuit: in a sequence of tiny, separate processes enacted on to the trainee or raw material. The fact that human beings (ie the children and school students) are not 'raw material' and that learning doesn't proceed in this tiny step by tiny step way, was irrelevant. It was, supposedly, Daily-Mail proof.
Now, it was possible to criticise this and point it out. I, along, with many others did and we soon discovered that those in authority were impervious to it. That's because they had discovered something else: if parliament has given you absolute power (which is the case with the Secretary of State for Education), you can do whatever you want. For a hundred years or so, education had been run through a system of 'checks and balances' between the ministry, civil servants, the inspectorate, local authorities, teachers' organisations, academics (researchers), and 'Reports' - the big commissions set up by government to research and advise on policy. This new totalitarian method took plenty of us by surprise, particularly as the politicians concerned were rather good at disguising it: they appeared to want to 'listen', they appeared to want to 'consult' even as they did precisely the opposite.
With Gove, we have someone who does a lot of opinionating. He takes centre stage and expresses opinions about learning, culture, history, children, schools and it's very easy to take this at face value. Plenty of us, me included, spend some time trying to read the runes, trying to figure out what his 'ideology' is and then we try to map this ideology on to his 'policy'. We argue with what he is saying.
What if we are wholly or even partially wrong to do this? What if Gove is playing a game? And the game goes like this:
"I, Gove, have a set of opinions about learning, culture and children and I will express these. At the same time, I have a deeper and more important set of convictions about the economy and the 'correct' way for things to be run and organised. Essentially, these tell me, Gove, that the best way to run all (and I mean, all) human affairs is through the market. The market is a place of freedom, it's though the market that people can best express themselves, best get what they want and need. Yes, the market does produce failure but in the end this is all to the good, because failure is produced by bad practice, bad management and bad teaching...and we all hate this, don't we?"
I, Rosen (!), am not going to argue with that for the moment, as I want to run with the consequence of what I think Gove is doing here, if I'm right about where he's at.
So, Gove, finds himself in charge of education - rather than, say, something to do with the economy. The question then for him is not really an educational one (in the way most of us think about education), it's one of how to marketise education. He knows that his problem here, though, is not simply liberal opinion, or 'the left'. He has a problem inside his own camp - 'traditionalists', if you like, who believe in a segregated, state-supervised system. Only very few people within the government believe in the total marketising of education. Put it cynically: they think that the exam-addicted, segregated system gets them the results they want....more or less. That's to say, the consequence of making education a national competition where the distribution of the results is fixed, means that education delivers up a neatly parcelled up segregated workforce, top, middle and a very large bottom ie those who 'fail', don't make the grade.
I think that Gove is working to a slightly different blueprint and Academies and Free Schools are staging posts on the way to what he's after. Academies and Free Schools represent a hybrid between the state system he's working to get rid of, and a fully privatised system he would like to see in its place. We see him hinting at this with his comments about having no objection to schools making a profit. We see this in the removal for the need for teachers in Academies and Free Schools to be qualified - and therefore not unionised. Meanwhile, big corporations are trying to figure out how best to make a raid on 'the curriculum' and Academies are the ideal vehicle. In an ideal world, as far as the corporations are concerned, a 'national' curriculum would simply be an obligatory 'core' curriculum (as is emerging in the USA). The 'education' to 'consume' this obligatory core would then be 'delivered' by no more than a handful of giant corporations, selling their curriculum software into schools. The core curriculum would only nominally be approved by anyone who knows about education but implemented with great trumpetings about standards and rigour - as happened for example with the imposition of the Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar test for 10 and 11 year olds - done with no pilots, no general debate, no research, no evidence. As the test is so reductive and only required 'right and wrong answers' (the Bew Report's own words), it is ripe for being turned into a)software programmes to 'teach' it and b) computer marking.
There are various models for the provision of these 'products', but in the jockeying for power in this new frontier for capitalism, one model is for the provider of the 'platform' (ie the server) to win monopoly control in a given area and off the back of this, to end up as the sole provider of the curriculum as delivered on to school students' tablets and PCs. This seems to be what google is doing in the US, where local councils accept google as the provider of superfast broadband, give them sole rights to provide internet access and the corporation comes in on the back of this with curriculum 'content' for school students' tablets and school interactive white boards.
Meanwhile, any of the present restrictions on corporations running the internal market of schools for their own benefit will be removed. So, we have seen in the US that corporations that sponsor schools also appear on the logos, provide their products within their schools (eg Macdonalds lunches in a Macdonalds sponsored school), and what we presently call 'education' will be geared even more towards the notion that the sole purpose and content of education is in order to provide the 'right' frame of mind to be the 'right' kind of employee. This requires a particular kind of acceptance of routine and authority. It requires a particular kind of passivity and acceptance of all rules and all structures as 'given' and 'correct'. It requires an acceptance that the 'knowledge' and 'skills' being dished up in that school at that time is the sole knowledge and sole skills that are needed or desirable (ie the exact opposite of a questioning, reflective approach to education or indeed the individual student).
We can see this kind of veneration of business and the market within education in the statements from someone like Liz Truss, indicating that what 'business' says about eg 'written communication' is self-evidently right. Or indeed that business leaders are self-evidently the sole voices that should be listened to when it comes to education.
I suggest that what is going on is a major revision of what we understand education to be for and about. Any ideas we might have had that education was somehow separate from 'business' or 'capitalism' will have to be thrown out. It will be even more than it is, part of capitalism. The only exception to this - irony of ironies - may well be the big private schools - which can go on being run as charities and can go on providing a 'liberal' education (music, theatre, art, technological and scientific experiment, debating societies, etc) which incidentally enable its ex-pupils to learn the intellectual apparatus and techniques required to be our rulers and top lawmakers and even some of our top artistic practitioners!
So, think back to NewLab who bustled into power shouting, 'Education, education, education' and turned this commitment into a parody of nineteenth century hospital, asylum, prison and school regimes, with every minute of every day laid down. Whether this was good for children or good for teachers doesn't seem to have been debated. It was, in truth, an electoral ruse, cooked up by David Blunkett. He thought that it out-Toried the Tories with its authoritarian, prescriptive and 'disciplined' way of going on, thereby leaving NewLab untouchable, unimpeachable by the Daily Mail (NewLab's criterion of success). That was the theory.
Bit by bit, we figured out that this method and this model wasn't based on any educational principles but was a direct transfer across to education of a business model of training and production. The child was to be 'produced' by the same systems that were being used to produce the labour-power ('skills') of a 'trained' labour force or indeed the same systems used to produce a mass produced car or biscuit: in a sequence of tiny, separate processes enacted on to the trainee or raw material. The fact that human beings (ie the children and school students) are not 'raw material' and that learning doesn't proceed in this tiny step by tiny step way, was irrelevant. It was, supposedly, Daily-Mail proof.
Now, it was possible to criticise this and point it out. I, along, with many others did and we soon discovered that those in authority were impervious to it. That's because they had discovered something else: if parliament has given you absolute power (which is the case with the Secretary of State for Education), you can do whatever you want. For a hundred years or so, education had been run through a system of 'checks and balances' between the ministry, civil servants, the inspectorate, local authorities, teachers' organisations, academics (researchers), and 'Reports' - the big commissions set up by government to research and advise on policy. This new totalitarian method took plenty of us by surprise, particularly as the politicians concerned were rather good at disguising it: they appeared to want to 'listen', they appeared to want to 'consult' even as they did precisely the opposite.
With Gove, we have someone who does a lot of opinionating. He takes centre stage and expresses opinions about learning, culture, history, children, schools and it's very easy to take this at face value. Plenty of us, me included, spend some time trying to read the runes, trying to figure out what his 'ideology' is and then we try to map this ideology on to his 'policy'. We argue with what he is saying.
What if we are wholly or even partially wrong to do this? What if Gove is playing a game? And the game goes like this:
"I, Gove, have a set of opinions about learning, culture and children and I will express these. At the same time, I have a deeper and more important set of convictions about the economy and the 'correct' way for things to be run and organised. Essentially, these tell me, Gove, that the best way to run all (and I mean, all) human affairs is through the market. The market is a place of freedom, it's though the market that people can best express themselves, best get what they want and need. Yes, the market does produce failure but in the end this is all to the good, because failure is produced by bad practice, bad management and bad teaching...and we all hate this, don't we?"
I, Rosen (!), am not going to argue with that for the moment, as I want to run with the consequence of what I think Gove is doing here, if I'm right about where he's at.
So, Gove, finds himself in charge of education - rather than, say, something to do with the economy. The question then for him is not really an educational one (in the way most of us think about education), it's one of how to marketise education. He knows that his problem here, though, is not simply liberal opinion, or 'the left'. He has a problem inside his own camp - 'traditionalists', if you like, who believe in a segregated, state-supervised system. Only very few people within the government believe in the total marketising of education. Put it cynically: they think that the exam-addicted, segregated system gets them the results they want....more or less. That's to say, the consequence of making education a national competition where the distribution of the results is fixed, means that education delivers up a neatly parcelled up segregated workforce, top, middle and a very large bottom ie those who 'fail', don't make the grade.
I think that Gove is working to a slightly different blueprint and Academies and Free Schools are staging posts on the way to what he's after. Academies and Free Schools represent a hybrid between the state system he's working to get rid of, and a fully privatised system he would like to see in its place. We see him hinting at this with his comments about having no objection to schools making a profit. We see this in the removal for the need for teachers in Academies and Free Schools to be qualified - and therefore not unionised. Meanwhile, big corporations are trying to figure out how best to make a raid on 'the curriculum' and Academies are the ideal vehicle. In an ideal world, as far as the corporations are concerned, a 'national' curriculum would simply be an obligatory 'core' curriculum (as is emerging in the USA). The 'education' to 'consume' this obligatory core would then be 'delivered' by no more than a handful of giant corporations, selling their curriculum software into schools. The core curriculum would only nominally be approved by anyone who knows about education but implemented with great trumpetings about standards and rigour - as happened for example with the imposition of the Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar test for 10 and 11 year olds - done with no pilots, no general debate, no research, no evidence. As the test is so reductive and only required 'right and wrong answers' (the Bew Report's own words), it is ripe for being turned into a)software programmes to 'teach' it and b) computer marking.
There are various models for the provision of these 'products', but in the jockeying for power in this new frontier for capitalism, one model is for the provider of the 'platform' (ie the server) to win monopoly control in a given area and off the back of this, to end up as the sole provider of the curriculum as delivered on to school students' tablets and PCs. This seems to be what google is doing in the US, where local councils accept google as the provider of superfast broadband, give them sole rights to provide internet access and the corporation comes in on the back of this with curriculum 'content' for school students' tablets and school interactive white boards.
Meanwhile, any of the present restrictions on corporations running the internal market of schools for their own benefit will be removed. So, we have seen in the US that corporations that sponsor schools also appear on the logos, provide their products within their schools (eg Macdonalds lunches in a Macdonalds sponsored school), and what we presently call 'education' will be geared even more towards the notion that the sole purpose and content of education is in order to provide the 'right' frame of mind to be the 'right' kind of employee. This requires a particular kind of acceptance of routine and authority. It requires a particular kind of passivity and acceptance of all rules and all structures as 'given' and 'correct'. It requires an acceptance that the 'knowledge' and 'skills' being dished up in that school at that time is the sole knowledge and sole skills that are needed or desirable (ie the exact opposite of a questioning, reflective approach to education or indeed the individual student).
We can see this kind of veneration of business and the market within education in the statements from someone like Liz Truss, indicating that what 'business' says about eg 'written communication' is self-evidently right. Or indeed that business leaders are self-evidently the sole voices that should be listened to when it comes to education.
I suggest that what is going on is a major revision of what we understand education to be for and about. Any ideas we might have had that education was somehow separate from 'business' or 'capitalism' will have to be thrown out. It will be even more than it is, part of capitalism. The only exception to this - irony of ironies - may well be the big private schools - which can go on being run as charities and can go on providing a 'liberal' education (music, theatre, art, technological and scientific experiment, debating societies, etc) which incidentally enable its ex-pupils to learn the intellectual apparatus and techniques required to be our rulers and top lawmakers and even some of our top artistic practitioners!
Saturday, 15 March 2014
Media do Tony Benn
"...and as his followers prepare for his funeral, it seems as if we have just seen the death of the last ever socialist. As all agree, it's goodbye to a very nice but also a very silly example of this extinct species. Tim Plonker, Media News, somewhere in the heartland."
[off screen aside: "The point is we've got to keep making it clear that everyone loved him but no one agreed with him..." "Yes, that's it, Tim. I think we did that, cheers."]
[off screen aside: "The point is we've got to keep making it clear that everyone loved him but no one agreed with him..." "Yes, that's it, Tim. I think we did that, cheers."]
Gove nicked our schools and handed them to his mates
Further to the question of 'hey Gove, where have the title deeds of our state schools gone?' there is a post on the Guardian comment is free site, in response to the story about Gove's criticism of Etonians in the cabinet.
I offer it with no comment. People better informed than me can judge whether it's on the button or not...
Start:
"Since Gove took over - schools all over England failing, free schools being shut down, academy companies being stripped of control of schools
Absolute CHAOS - so why did Gove deliberately create such chaos
Each time a school becomes an academy the council must hand over the title deeds for the school if it has them (avg value £5m per school)
As over 2,000 schools have been forced to become academies that is £10 billion (min) state assets Michael Gove has demanded the title deeds be handed to him
I wrote an FOI request to Michael Gove's department and asked him where are the title deeds to England's schools
After 3 months he still refused to answer - I had to involve the information commissioner who wrote and demanded they answer within 10 days
And now we find out why Michael Gove did not want to answer
the reply I got
The department of Education has absolutely no record of any of the title deeds for the school - not in paper format or electronic format
Now as councils held title deeds for state assets safely for decades - and Michael Gove used the Academies Bill to force councils to hand them to him - the Secretary of State For Education -
Where are all the title deeds for the schools Mr Gove
At the end they told me to write to a company the Tory Party Treasurer is on the board of - and ask the private company if they know what Michael Gove has done with the title deeds for state assets
Any good magician will tell you - create a distraction - to get away with the trick
And the trick here is - Michael Gove transferring £10 billion of state assets to private companies - where no payment was received for the state assets - and taxpayers forced to pay over £50,000,000 in legal fees alone to fund the trick
Thatcher sold state assets - Michael Gove gives them away - and some of the companies he gave them away to - just happen to have very prominent Tory party members on the boards - with us even paying all legal fees
Now I live in Scotland - but if it was my school that became an academy I would be writing to Michael Gove right now - and speaking to my councillors right now and demanding to know where are the title deeds for my school - because these schools are state assets (or they were until Michael Gove disposed of the title deeds with absolutely not a thing on record in the Dof E)
that's what you call magic
Now the reality is Michael Gove has set up Southern Cross For Education - where
Academy companies have the title deeds for schools - they can sell them - and then sign extortionate leases to rent them (and the money goes offshore to the Cayman Islands as "excess funds")
Now Gove changed the law to say Academy's don't have to publish their accounts publicly - unlike every other charity in the country
And Gove changed the law to say No Academy trustee can be held liable for any losses
And Gove is currently trying to change the Academies bill to say instead of the title deeds going to " the proprietor of the school" - to "someone associated with the school"
Now does that mean the Tory Party Treasurer, instead of putting your school's title deeds in Ark Schools name - he can instead put your school's title deeds in the Tory Party Treasurer's name
Now if that is not "cronyism" of the most absolutely shocking sort - I don't know what is
Serious investigations need to be asked as to how Michael Gove can have "lost" the title deeds for £10 billion of state assets without a trace - after councils kept them safe for decades!"
End
I offer it with no comment. People better informed than me can judge whether it's on the button or not...
Start:
"Since Gove took over - schools all over England failing, free schools being shut down, academy companies being stripped of control of schools
Absolute CHAOS - so why did Gove deliberately create such chaos
Each time a school becomes an academy the council must hand over the title deeds for the school if it has them (avg value £5m per school)
As over 2,000 schools have been forced to become academies that is £10 billion (min) state assets Michael Gove has demanded the title deeds be handed to him
I wrote an FOI request to Michael Gove's department and asked him where are the title deeds to England's schools
After 3 months he still refused to answer - I had to involve the information commissioner who wrote and demanded they answer within 10 days
And now we find out why Michael Gove did not want to answer
the reply I got
The department of Education has absolutely no record of any of the title deeds for the school - not in paper format or electronic format
Now as councils held title deeds for state assets safely for decades - and Michael Gove used the Academies Bill to force councils to hand them to him - the Secretary of State For Education -
Where are all the title deeds for the schools Mr Gove
At the end they told me to write to a company the Tory Party Treasurer is on the board of - and ask the private company if they know what Michael Gove has done with the title deeds for state assets
Any good magician will tell you - create a distraction - to get away with the trick
And the trick here is - Michael Gove transferring £10 billion of state assets to private companies - where no payment was received for the state assets - and taxpayers forced to pay over £50,000,000 in legal fees alone to fund the trick
Thatcher sold state assets - Michael Gove gives them away - and some of the companies he gave them away to - just happen to have very prominent Tory party members on the boards - with us even paying all legal fees
Now I live in Scotland - but if it was my school that became an academy I would be writing to Michael Gove right now - and speaking to my councillors right now and demanding to know where are the title deeds for my school - because these schools are state assets (or they were until Michael Gove disposed of the title deeds with absolutely not a thing on record in the Dof E)
that's what you call magic
Now the reality is Michael Gove has set up Southern Cross For Education - where
Academy companies have the title deeds for schools - they can sell them - and then sign extortionate leases to rent them (and the money goes offshore to the Cayman Islands as "excess funds")
Now Gove changed the law to say Academy's don't have to publish their accounts publicly - unlike every other charity in the country
And Gove changed the law to say No Academy trustee can be held liable for any losses
And Gove is currently trying to change the Academies bill to say instead of the title deeds going to " the proprietor of the school" - to "someone associated with the school"
Now does that mean the Tory Party Treasurer, instead of putting your school's title deeds in Ark Schools name - he can instead put your school's title deeds in the Tory Party Treasurer's name
Now if that is not "cronyism" of the most absolutely shocking sort - I don't know what is
Serious investigations need to be asked as to how Michael Gove can have "lost" the title deeds for £10 billion of state assets without a trace - after councils kept them safe for decades!"
End
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)