Posts Tagged Fabian society
Punish ambition and reward failure ? There is an alternative
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education, Tax and Spend on 04/01/2011
Years since he first proposed the idea, Sunder Katwala, General Secretary of the Fabian Sociey, still has the same solution to Britain’s educational woes: big government should pick up its clunking fists and pummel the most successful independent school system in the world, preferably with a VAT on fees. This, somehow, will atone for all the sins of educational failure in the state sector. It was a bad idea then; it is a bad idea now.
Should Inheritance Tax be defended?
Posted by Nick Cowen in Tax and Spend on 30/04/2008
Yesterday evening, I attended the Fabian Society’s debate ‘How can we defend the inheritance tax?’ although it might have been more aptly labelled a strategy meeting on how to set-up a pro-tax alternative to the Taxpayers Alliance. For when I had a chance to speak, the only one present to deny the explicit premise that inheritance tax was morally justifiable, the room itself seemed briefly to close in on me. While responses to my argument were never less than polite and well mannered, the initial incensed glares from the front of the room gave the impression that in a less civilized age I could have wound up being sacrificed inside a giant wicker construct of George Bernard Shaw.
The Butterfly Effect
Posted by Nick Cowen in Education on 19/12/2007
Our recently published children’s reading and writing course, The Butterfly Book by Irina Tyk, has become a hit in the run up to Christmas. In the wake of one Daily Mail report, the office telephones have been positively buzzing with calls from parents (and grandparents) eager to offer the gift of literacy to young members of their family. We have reported before on the efficacy of books like the Butterfly Book. Simplicity is at the heart of this successful method. It is called ‘synthetic phonics’ although that is just a new name for a traditional method that has long been used to teach children to read. All it involves is teaching the correspondence between the 44 sounds of the English language and the 26 letters of the alphabet. One course is enough to teach the vast majority of the underlying principles of our language, giving children a toolkit of skills that allow them to unlock literature for themselves.
