Archive for October, 2008
Education for Morons… by Morons
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 14/10/2008
Last month, Britain’s biggest examinations board AQA decided to drop a popular poem from its GCSE syllabus written by Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy.
Entitled ‘Education for Leisure’, the poem takes the form of a stream of consciousness account of the thoughts and increasingly violent deeds of a bored and alienated unemployed teenager while he languishes at home, immediately before picking up a bread-knife to go out and commit an act of gratuitous violence.
Explaining his board’s decision to drop the poem, AQA’s director-general Mike Cresswell said that it had been taken out of ‘concerns about the topic of the poem in the light of the current climate surrounding knife crime’. A spokeswoman for AQA has added that: ‘the decision was not taken lightly and only after due consideration of the issues involved.’
Exactly what are those issues?
More EU hot air blown on financial crisis
Posted by David Conway in European Union on 13/10/2008
Open Europe, the independent think tank backed by some of the UK’s leading business people, has produced the first independent report estimating of the cost and wider effects of the EU’s new package of climate change measures, currently still under negotiation.
Wild Freedom or Civil Freedom
Posted by James Gubb in Economics on 07/10/2008
Many conservative leaders are in a quandary about the financial crisis. They approve of de-regulated markets but these selfsame institutions seem to be in need of regulation. Many people in the financial services industry have behaved without regard to the good of others and even without reference to the interests of their own companies. Their conduct has been so self-centred that the most stalwart defenders of a market economy have been embarrassed. Indeed some of the most trenchant criticism has come from enthusiasts for the market.
Potentially fatal flaw in Tory education policy
Posted by James Gubb in Education on 07/10/2008
The Conservatives’ plan to encourage social entrepreneurs, charities and parents’ co-operatives to establish new schools in our poorer areas is a promising idea that deserves the praise it has been getting.
But it has a potentially fatal flaw that could undermine any advantages it might bring. Above all, the new Tory academies lack the independence necessary to defy an interfering central government.
Continue at the Daily Telegraph Blog.
Making History
Posted by Nick Cowen in Social Cohesion on 07/10/2008
At last week’s Tory party conference, shadow education secretary Michael Gove committed his party upon their return to power to restoring the teaching of narrative British history in schools. He reportedly said:
‘Instead of being taught about the Magna Carta the Glorious Revolution and the heroic role of the Royal navy in putting down slavery, our children are [now] either taught to put Britain in the dock or they remain in ignorance of our island story, That is morally wrong, culturally self-defeating – and we would put it right.’
Commission Reposition
Posted by Pete Quentin in European Union on 06/10/2008
Last Friday, Gordon Brown’s latest attempt to appear at “getting on with the job of running the country” saw him reshuffle EU Trade Commissioner, Peter Mandelson, back into the UK cabinet.