Suffolk wilder than Glasgow?

The schools are, according to this - from JEM (via Natalie Solent):

"My wife used to teach in one of the worst comprehensive schools in one of the worst sink estates (Drumchapel) in Glasgow.

Nowadays she teaches in a so-called specialist technical secondary school in rural Suffolk, not far from Cambridge.

Admittedly, she ceased teaching in Glasgow some twenty years ago when we moved here, but nevertheless she keeps in touch with her old teaching colleagues and so still has a pretty firm finger on the pulse of the educational situation up there as well as in East Anglia.

She is quite certain that discipline, quality of teaching, and educational outcome is far worse here than in Glasgow."

I know Drumchapel well. Bandit country for sure, although it has improved a fair bit in recent years. JEM would I think be impressed with how much educational lunacy has progressed in twenty years but in general, I don't doubt what she says is accurate - which is part of the point I was trying to make here: attributing the sub-Lord of the Flies situation in many of our schools to relative deprivation and/or the local culture is part of the rationalisation of failure which is endemic in our educational institutions.

I'm sure it's true that English schools - like the meals served in them apparently - are worse than in Scotland and it's a thought so depressing, I don't want to think about it too much. JEM goes on:

"Teachers in Scotland are on average more professional than in England. This is because in Scottish secondary schools only honours graduates can teach, and then only the subject they graduated in."

I'd like to agree with this rather ego-soothing description, but it's only partly true. It isn't the case that one has to have an Honours degree to teach here* and in general the academic qualification of teaching staff isn't taken nearly as seriously as it should be - but we don't have the absurd situation that exists in England where, for example, there are more than a few Chemistry teachers without even an A-level in the subject, never mind a degree.

It's probably unfair and possibly prejudiced of me to say so but if some of the characters I've seen in TV documentaries are even vaguely representative of English teachers, one of the problems that can't be helping the situation much is some of them seem a little - how to put it delicately? - lacking in firmness. Generally, I try and avoid the futile habit of shouting at TV programmes as if they can hear you - but I was unable to contain myself during this one about a school which unbelievably had been praised in an Ofsted inspection. One guy had a science class in which two girls were rampaging around the classroom chasing each other with one of them picking up equipment and throwing it around. In a science room...

"Now come along Cheryl, don't be silly - put that down", he says in this really limp voice, over and over again to no effect. (He had probably been taught how 'de-fuse' situations by being 'non-confrontational' in teacher-training college.)

"How about saying something like 'put that box down and get your delinquent ass out of my classroom'?", I'm screaming at the telly, "You have to tell them what to do - they have to be told what to do!"

Thing is, may well have not been entirely his fault; he was trained and works in a system that finds this simple truth about adolescents really rather unpleasant and they'd prefer not to talk about it, thank you very much.

*I should point out that having an Ordinary in Scotland means you did a three-year degree rather than four and doesn't necessarily mean you're a thicko, which I'm led to believe it does in England. Is that right?

Gordon Brown: will he be crap?

As Prime Minister, as everyone seems to have assumed he will be. There's good reason to think he'll be a massive disappointment, for reasons I'll attempt to explain in my cack-handed fashion - but this has nothing to do with coming from a Blairite position.

I'm by no means blind to his advantages: for one, Brown is clearly the intellectual superior between the two - and a historian to boot, always a good sign. Moreover, Dr. Brown has been sensible enough to eschew the academic title in politics - perhaps mindful of how much a gift this is for those responsible for coining the tabloids' headlines. Were he to become PM, he would be the most intellectually heavy-weight one since - oh, God knows who. Certainly more so than Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher and Major - to name just the ones from my lifetime.

Although much dismissed, I do also think he has a genuine interest in social justice and in this I do think there's more than a cigarette paper to put between him and Blair on this issue. Brown is genuinely more skeptical about market reforms in the public sector than Blair, who is a believer. Brown is more right on this.

And he was more right about the Euro than Blair as well.

He also opposed ID cards in Cabinet - arguing rightly that they're an expensive waste of time. One reason for preferring Brown to Blair that remains is that it's impossible to imagine him being more illiberal than Blair - plus I don't think we'd have to endure quite so much of all this low-grade management pish that Blair comes up with.

Add to this he's someone those of us from the West of Scotland immediately recognise and feel more comfortable with: the background in old Labour; paid his dues fighting the Tories and the Nationalists; morally earnest...in other words, a miserable Calvinist like so many of us.

But I think it's a mistake to think he will revive the Labour Party and be a blinding success as a Prime Minister, for the following reasons:

• The first point is the most trivial: while I might recognise him as someone I understand, the rest of the country may not. Scotland only represents around 10% of the population of the UK and the West an even smaller proportion. His appeal, in other words, is by no means universal.

• He's a grumpy sod. This no doubt related to the above and of no fault of his own I'm sure - but it ain't good for diplomacy or for keeping the various factions in the Labour Party happy. (Or at least keeping their animus at a tolerable level, if we want to to justice to the reality.)

• He is the intellectual architect of New Labour. Leaving aside the question of what you think about that, anyone that imagines Brown is fundamentally less pro-American or pro-market than Blair is deluding themselves and the actual reality of his position would eventually alienate the left of the Labour Party. One has to face the fact that this constituency are fundamentally unhappy with the exercise of power and it's politically pointless trying to make them happy; it's against their nature.

• If the way that he has conducted the Exchequer is anything to go by, there is absolutely no reason to think that this government's centralising of power and its politicisation of the civil service would not continue under a Brown Premiership.

• His political skills are too inconsistent. On occasion, he's been brilliant. Granting the Bank of England - regardless of what you think about its implications economically - was a stroke of political genius the significance of which has never, in my view, been properly acknowledged. This is the first Labour government in history never to have been derailed by a Sterling crisis. That's due in no small part to the fact that Dr. Brown knows his history. But often he has been inept. Remember the 75 pence a week dividend to pensioners? Remember how he caved-in to the fuel protesters? But above all, remember his really quite absurd behaviour in government. People look for a difference between Brown and Blair - skipping over the obvious point that what they fundamentally disagree about is who should be Prime Minister. Now, on this issue I really think Brown has been petulant and really quite pathetic. And you can be quite sure he would in reality be entirely unsympathetic to anyone behaving in the way he has in his administration.

But he'll probably be PM nonetheless. For what's the alternative? He has no equals in the Labour Party and he'll benefit from a Tory party with an on-going identity crisis. Which leaves the Liberals who like the left of the Labour Party, do not seriously aspire to hold power - which is just as well because it isn't likely to happen anytime soon.

Or if you want to become the political equivalent of the Jehovah's Witnesses, there's always the Respect coalition - or the SSP in Scotland. They'll come to power around the time you finish that novel you've been meaning to write...

McCarthyism today

Where I would agree with Natasha Walter is that no organisation should be legally proscribed for espousing views that are morally and politically repugnant.

Where I could not agree with her is in her misty-eyed comparison with the present day apologists for fascist death-squads with those in Europe and the United States who believed the Soviet model represented the best hope for socialism during the 1930s.

Which is not to say that these people, with the benefit of historical hindsight, come off particularly well. Has she forgotten the way in which the Webbs and and Bernard Shaws and all the other darlings of the literary left were either too stupid or ignorant to acknowledge Stalin's crimes? Aren't we forgetting that Orwell was in a minority when he saw through him immediately and denounced him?

And in other ways, hers is a rather one-sided account of the tendency to make common cause with totalitarian movements in the 1930s. Too many forget, for example, that prior to its utter discreditation when the gates of Auschwitz were opened, how popular eugenic ideas - and specifically anti-semitism - were in Britain during the thirties. Consider the background: for all the fears, no Western European state has ever fallen to a communist takeover - but two did fall in this dark phase of European history to revolutionary movements of the revolutionary right. The present day Islamicist represents this phenomenon, rather than Bolshevism, for a number of reasons:

• While all three hate the present, idealise the ancient past, and look for its recreation in the wake of a revolutionary upheaval - Marx's ahistorical "hunter-gatherer" society was one where human emancipation and liberty were imagined: fascism and Islamism idealise really existing societies that were warlike, hierarchal, brutal.

• Even in its most idealistic, furious, hellish and bestial phase during War Communism, the Bolshevik revolution always had as a cornerstone of its ideology a belief in the emancipation of women. In contrast, fascism and Islamism have as an essential component the view that God or Nature has given women a servile role.

• Whatever else it might have been, communism had a belief in the brotherhood of man at its core; fascism and Islamism do not. Moreover, within the narrowed community of the global uma, the notion of confessional solidarity has been honoured more in the breech than in the observance. For all the people they've killed, one should never forget that Al-Qaeda and their imitators, as the record shows, prefer to kill their co-religionists more than anyone else.
  
  

What communism, fascism and Islamism do have in common is, as Ms. Walker says, a belief in the perfectibility of human society.

Problem is, this is not the view taken by traditional Islam, which holds that no society can be perfect, given that it's composed of humans beings who are morally frail in a variety of ways.

This it shares with Judasim and Augustinian forms of Christianity.

Here at least they are surely right?

Blogging advice

Found this piece of advice posted at Norm's about blog traffic:

"Over 80% of the daily traffic to almost every blog is generated by people going directly to the main URL of a blog without any prompting from a link, blogroll or web search. If you want to build an audience for your blog, you are going to have to get them to come in through the front door on a regular basis."

I should say this is Chris Bowers' advice and not Norm's. Dunno about other people's but this certainly isn't the case with mine: according to the old sitemeter, were it not for kind people linking my blog and individual posts, I reckon I'd have about two readers a week - which brings me to the latest blogroll update:

Natalie Solent - new to me, but obviously not to others, given the amount of hits her kind linking of one of my posts generated. (Thanks also to Laban.)

I'm also adding this: following an initial misunderstanding, there's now an outbreak of love and peace - although not too much; you can't trust a hippy, after all.

And, um, I'll put this back after this conversation (silliness on my part; apologies to all readers who imagined this is a blog written by a mature adult).

Next task: a proper tidy-up of links, putting them in aphabetical order and all that - but the very idea suddenly makes me feel tired...

Scottish education system officially pants

You no longer have to take my word for it: here's some detail on how the drop out rate is higher in Scottish universities than in the rest of the UK - despite having no top-up fees. (Free-marketeers: I just know you're going to tell me that part of the reason is because of having no top-up fees.) Also our system is conspicuously failing to include those from poorer backgrounds.

Big part of the reason is this - conformation, as if it were needed, that the culture of compulsory euphemism harms those very pupils that it's supposed to benefit...