Education – Page 2 – Literary Connections

O Telegraph, o mores!

Typos, Spider-man (or the Bible?) and photographs (flattering and otherwise)

Michael Gove's new photo in the Telegraph — Flattering for Mr Gove: but not for the Telegraph, for all the mortar boards on view

The Telegraph has now found a much more flattering photograph of the Education Secretary – but its proofreading has, alas, not improved since (with sorrow) we drew attention to its deficiencies some time ago here and here. There has also been some debate amongst the anguished (but usually polite) commenters on the Telegraph site about the quotation: is it a turkey, is it Spider-man or is it the Bible? Meanwhile, Steve Bell seizes on the image to portray the Education Secretary as a mortarboarded Spider-man in today’s Guardian.

Not far below the warmly lit portrait of a cloistered Michael Gove we read:

Oh dear – and this in the paper of Simon Heffer. As if that weren’t bad enough, the awkwardly worded quotation came in for scrutiny. Telegraph_Reader wrote:

Perhaps Gove was being purposefully daft, but I think the quote is actually from the Bible, or a paraphrase thereof. A quick google suggests I am probably thinking of Luke 12.48:
From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.’

Purposefully daft or not (perish the thought!), Mr Gove (or his clever-ironic speech writer) would seem to have been thinking of the final lines of the film of Spider-man:

Peter Parker: [voiceover] Whatever life holds in store for me, I will never forget these words: “With great power comes great responsibility.” This is my gift, my curse. Who am I? I’m Spider-man.

Perhaps the conversation next day in the Department went something like this:

Mr Gove, you read English at University – please tell us who found that quotation for you and we’ll sack them. And we’ll have at word with the Telegraph to make sure they send the intern who checked the story back to her parents in the Home Counties.
Goodness, those Telegraph readers know too much! I was just trying to inject a little wit and a populist touch for the journalists and to amuse the Headmasters – not easy, you know, an assembly of Beaks can be quite scary!
Yes Minister – sorry, Secretary of State – but someone’s pointed out it’s rather like the parable of the talents in the Bible. Possibly uncomfortable reading, that book; you know: ‘Blessed are the poor, the meek shall inherit….’
No, stop – meek, that’s just right! I’ve just reminded teachers they should meekly accept paying more and working longer for reduced pensions! And look: even today’s Guardian approves of my style: ‘Striking rhetoric from Michael Gove‘.
Ah yes, sir, but I suspect that may also be the rhetorical device of irony – or just an old-fashioned Guardian pun. And I fear Steve Bell is now drawing you as some kind of cross between Spider-man, a bat and Mr Gradgrind. I’m not sure the PM will see this as good PR, as he’s wont to say.

‘Well read is well bred’ – but Telegraph overcooks the books (again)

The Telegraph cooks the books again and Headmaster over-eggs the pudding.

Cookery books — Nourishing the soul or the body?

An education that does not provide the tools and the hunger to read beyond the narrow confines of a subject is, in the wider sense, no education at all.

John Newton, Headmaster of the independent (yet also public) Taunton School, fears that students’ literary diet is as bad as the convenience foods too many of them eat. Writing in The Telegraph this week, he adds that ‘current students are no longer inclined to read tougher texts; they are encouraged to read what takes their fancy rather than what nourishes the soul’. The sub-editor seems taken by this culinary metaphor, for the article is illustrated by a photograph of old cookery books. The same books in fact, including (the no longer very) Modern Cookery that illustrated the report, back in March, of Michael Gove’s 50-book challenge to students – and noted here at the time as a rather odd choice of image. Still, who are we to argue with the illustrious ones of the Telegraph and the noble Doctor Newton (no mere ‘Headteacher’ he)? So I’ve used the same image too – I’m sure they won’t mind, it keeps costs down for everyone.

It does nonetheless strike me that the Head is over-egging the pudding when he goes on to write:

The arts have always been an area where the mind should run free within proper limits. Now candidates work like automata. We are seeing the persecution of the independent learner; the reader who imbibes a range of classic texts simply because they are beautiful in themselves is a rare species.

Ah, the pursuit of beauty! How exotic – but, of course, only ‘within proper limits’. Who (even in North Korea) could disagree with that? Especially when we read his approving comments on the International Baccalaureate and the Pre-U, very largely taken by independent schools, where (of course) students ‘enjoy an education which leads to a fulfilled appreciation of what great minds have produced’. No doubt Michael Gove will soon share with us his own list of the works by great minds that all students should read. Except, of course, when they are roaming free, reading round the subject and seeking out fresh culinary delights in Modern Cookery.

(The alert reader will have noticed that I have eschewed the hyphen in ‘overcook’ but used it in ‘over-egg’. Pussyfooting again….)

Is a university degree worth as much as a bag of washed vegetables?

Hyphenation leads to a discussion of private universities, private incomes and the Archbishop of Canterbury

I’m excited to bring you a lunchtime update on my previous post. I’ve just got round to reading Terry Eagleton’s splendidly splenetic article about Grayling’s private university in Tuesday’s Guardian. There (at the foot, appropriately, of column two), is today’s word – hyphenated! But it’s also on a line break, so it’s ambiguous. The online version settles it – and is worth quoting for its own sake:

If education is to be treated as a commodity, then we should stop pussyfooting around. I already ask my students at the start of a session whether they can afford my £50 insights into Wuthering Heights, or whether they will settle for a few mediocre ideas at £10 a piece.

He’s clearly underselling himself: today’s edition of the paper reveals that Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen (currently in the news for matters from which we shall avert our gaze) is the non-executive chairman of a company, AB Produce plc, selling pre-washed vegetables. ‘The register of members’ financial interests records that he is paid £7,773 monthly for six hours work.’ I make that £1295.50 an hour, which is probably rather more than Terry Eagleton gets, even (as Simon Jenkins points out in an equally acerbic piece in the paper) ‘as “excellence in English distinguished visitor” to America’s private Notre Dame Catholic university. There he gives three weeks’ teaching per semester for an undisclosed sum.’ Jenkins tuns the knife in the man he dubs ‘the Kropotkin of our age’ (Jenkins must have had a luxury education too), saying ‘moral consistency has never been a Marxist strong suit’. It’s a safe bet that this is a lot more than the hourly rate of AB Produce’s vegetable washers. Why, it would take him a mere 42 hours to pay for a whole degree at Grayling’s New College of the Humanities!

There’s nothing academics like more, of course, than a good scrap with their colleagues. So immediately underneath Jenkins’ article today, Giles Fraser, formerly lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford and now Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, writes about yesterday’s blog post topic, Archbishop of opposition. With the skill of a true philosopher, the Reverend Doctor manages to spear both Ian Duncan Smith and A C Grayling with one blow:

The “quiet resurgence of the seductive language of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor” needs a proper kicking. Perhaps our atheist intellectuals are too busy setting up their private universities to get stuck into the fight.

Still, as the old saying goes, fine words wash no parsnips.

PM’s empire line: it’s just not cricket

Can we wash our hands of the mess we leave?

That David Cameron is a right tease: let him off on his travels and he says all kinds of things. I don’t know, he needs a public relations minder with him. (What do you mean, public relations used to be his job? You’re having me on!) Today’s Guardian, under the punning headline I’ve stolen for my title (sadly not used online), reports:

Cameron later sparked controversy about Britain’s imperial past by claiming it was responsible for many of the world’s problems. He made his remark as a semi-jocular aside at the end of a question and answer session at a university in Islamabad.
Asked what Britain might be able to do settle the war in Kashmir, he replied: “I don’t want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world’s problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place.”

Semi-jocular? You need to watch that sense of humour Dave. I mean, just imagine if folk get hold of the idea that people responsible for the issue aren’t the ones to clear it up:

Ah yes, Miss, I know the classroom’s a bit of a mess. but we can’t clear it up because we’re the ones what done it, see, and we only do untidy. I mean really, have you ever seen us leave a foreign country tidy? Look at that Kashmir, Miss – such a mess they still haven’t sorted it out 60 years later!

As for what the Daily Mail and the hang ’em and flog ’em brigade might make of the idea that criminals can’t possibly be expected to make restitution – well… Already Peter Oborne in the Daily Telegraph has told us bluntly:

Sorry, but it’s not right to apologise: The Prime Minister’s mea culpa over the conflict in Kashmir is neither welcome nor wise… He could have pointed out that we gave Pakistan (and indeed the rest of the world) many splendid bequests: parliamentary democracy, superb irrigation systems, excellent roads, the rule of law, the English language and, last but not least, the game of cricket.

This article is rather bizarrely accompanied by a series of images, including ‘David Cameron, a life in pictures’ and ‘Top Right-wingers: 25-1’. Are those the odds on a coup, or the way the paper counts down to the very top, rightmost right one? Ah no, it’s the cricket score: right wingers put in to bat, 25 quangos for one wicket – that careless David Laws out for a duck. Well, it’s better than being out for a duck house, innit?

Pakistan, public relations and a delicate question of freedom

Thawing relations, boosting education, protecting minorities – and taxing the rich….

It’s good to see that David Cameron’s short visit to Pakistan included the promise of ‘£650m of additional aid to train teachers, build new schools and provide text-books’. Perhaps he might like to ensure that those who commission this work read Three Cups of Tea, commended here – and already ‘required reading for US high command’ (see, we told you)?

It seems that David Cameron and his foreign Office advisers have realised that a good public relations exercise in India last year was a disaster over the border – or, to use the Guardian’s metaphor, ‘put British relations with Pakistan in the deep freeze’ (yes, it gets pretty cold in the North-West Frontier, I can tell you).

I wonder whether the British Prime Minister found time, amidst the defrosting, to mention another thorny issue in Pakistan: the notorious blasphemy laws, mostly recently highlighted by the assassination of Pakistan Cabinet Minister Shahbaz Bhatti? There’s more about Shahbaz Bhatti and Pakistan on the Christian Solidarity Worldwide site. Given the UK government’s new-found enthusiasm for freedom in countries such as Libya, the Prime Minister will doubtless be keen to encourage Pakistan to act on the latest UN resolution on religious defamation.

Breaking news: Tory PM says tax the rich: at midday today, the Guardian posted a report headlined: David Cameron tells Pakistan: raise more tax from the rich. To show this is no repeat of his PR (and arms sales) trip to India, our Prime Minister tells Pakistan like it is, based on tough lessons learn back home: ‘Pakistani fiscal position was a serious one because “too few people pay tax. Too many of your richest people are getting away without paying much tax at all – and that’s not fair”.’ Dave, you are a true man of the people, even if it takes a trip abroad to give you the courage and vision to speak your mind!

Non-words or nonce-words?

Telegraph tests its readers grasp of phonics

Telegraph phonics blooper — Can you spot the irony, chidren?

“Phonics: chidren to identify ‘non-words’ in new reading test,” says the Telegraph, with a nice touch of irony. No doubt the eagle-eyed staff, fearful of the wrath of Simon Heffer, will soon correct this headline – though it has been on the site for four days already – so here’s a screenshot. The online commenters first vented their spleen about schools, teachers, modern life and everything dangerously left-wing:

One way of assisting children would be to impose heavy fines on any parents who are found not to speak English to their children at home (if they are capable of doing so).

The problem with junior and primary schools is that they have dropped their standard due to having to follow inclusion policies created by the labour party [sic].

If you want to improve state education in this country, try the following:
1. Raise the bar for those wanting to become teachers
2. Rid teacher training colleges of left wing union influence
3. Rid Local Education Authorities of left wing union influence.

Eventually, after about 30 other comments, someone noticed:

Non-words like chidren?

Thank you, Pelton Level!

Sarkozy, syncope, The Princess of Clevès and the Beano Annual

Who got to the novel first: the French or the English? Or would we rather have the curriculum at the mercy of Mr Gove or President Sarkozy?

Thursday’s Thought: Sarkozy’s syncope

Beano Annual 2011 — Only 49 more books to go...

This Thursday’s Thought from Word of the Day was stimulated by an article by Hélène Cixous in the Guardian’s series on France. Hélène Cixous is one of those French intellectuals who fill many Anglo-Saxons with a mixture of terror and mockery, ‘known,’ it says in her biography at the European Graduate School, ‘for her experimental writing style, which crosses the traditional limits of academic discourse into poetic language. Her practice crosses many discourses, and she is admired for her role as an influential theorist, as well as a novelist and playwright.’ Her target is Nicolas Sarkozy‘s philistinism, manifested in his syncope:

Pushing syncope to the limit, he swallows half the syllables and he spits the rest in his opponent’s face. He imposes his idiolect on the world. Only he ‘speaks’ this idiom; only stand-up comedians imitate it. Language gets a hammering from him. Upon its ruins he proclaims the disgrace of culture and the reign of ignorance.

His especial crime in her eyes is his contempt for The Princess of Clevès:

Just imagine an English potentate breaking the good news to the people: a ban on bloody tedious Robinson Crusoe, cluttering the mind. And Shakespeare, what a drag! Old stuff. We’ve got the telly now.

The Beano annual – and 49 other books

O blessed Anglo-Saxons! For have we not Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education and single-handed saviour of our nation’s culture? Lo, hear him proclaim that children should read fifty books a year. No matter that distinguished authors have expressed their ‘outrage at the “great big contradiction” of Mr Gove’s claim to wish to improve literacy while closing libraries across the country,’ they still tell the Independent what they’d include in their fifty. I love it that Michael Rosen’s final choice is the Beano Annual: ‘a cornucopia of nutty, bad, silly ideas, tricks, situations and plots.’ Just the place for Mr Gove to find his next wheeze for schools?

Who invented the novel?

Never mind that the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge rubbishes his ideas for that subject in the London Review of Books, what would Michael (English, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford) make of Hélène Cixous’ claim that ‘The Princess of Clevès is the first novel in literature’? (‘Worse,’ she adds, ‘it’s written by a woman (Madame de La Fayette). Worse, it immortalises a woman.’) Blinkered Anglocentric that I am, I’d believed we invented the novel – I even have a volume from my own university days confidently titled Shorter Novels: Elizabethan (Deloney, Greene and Nashe: expect them in the new National Curriculum). Fortunately, Ian Watt comes to our rescue, having firmly put the French in their place back in 1957 in The Rise Of The Novel:

It is perhaps partly for this reason that French fiction from La Princesse de Clèves to Les Liaisons dangereuses stands outside the main tradition of the novel. For all its psychological penetration and literary skill, we feel it is too stylish to be authentic. In this Madame de La Fayette and Choderlos de Laclos are the polar opposites of Defoe and Richardson, whose very diffuseness tends to act as a guarantee of the authenticity of their report, whose prose aims exclusively at what Locke defined as the proper purpose of language, ‘to convey the knowledge of things’, and whose novels as a whole pretend to be no more than a transcription of real life – in Flaubert’s words, ‘le réel écrit‘.

How masterly the put-down! ‘The French? Too stylish! But of course, their President is so philistine!’ For something less stylish but more topical, we turn to Mrs Cameron’s diary in today’s Guardian on why war, especially alongside the French, is so tedious:

Obama did not man up until Dave set an example and the maddening part was he had to man up with Sarko who is such a ghastly little squit and only doing it to impress Carla, pathetic. But there are pluses because next to Sarko Dave looks so buff that tbh you feel sorry for Carla having such a weird little husband even if he is a president.

Now what was the thought?

Ah yes, who got to the novel first: the French or the English? Or was it whether we’d rather have the curriculum at the mercy of Mr Gove or President Sarkozy?

War on language? Or cooking the books?

Some minor skirmishes and broken shins on the field of language: Cicero, Wittgenstein, Kant and marketeers.

Steve Bell in today’s Guardian comments on the confusion about whether Gaddafi is a ‘target’ in the current action over Libya. I’ll leave that to the commentariat and offer instead a few minor skirmishes on the fringes of the linguistic battlefield:

A new quango limps into life Yesterday, the recruitment site for the Standards and Testing Agency Executive had ‘Lorem Ipsum… Find out more’ on its home page; sadly, they’ve now corrected this charming touch, thereby removing what, I have been fascinated to discover, is a (kind of) quotation from Cicero: ‘Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself’. (Rhetoric again: there seem at present to be plenty of people anxious to pursue pain – oh, wait a minute, it’s the poor what get the pain.) This quango is, after all, supposed to be about standards….
Labeling and gaming Yesterday’s print edition of the Media Guardian had an advertisement from the Marketing Agencies Association headed ‘Life’s a game that marketers need to start playing’. The call-out quotation spelt labeled the American way: is that what marketers do, or this part of the war on language? Of course, the marketing people haven’t found anything new; as Ludwig Wittgenstein said many years ago, language is a game of two halves.
Brave marketeers Talking of alternative spellings, marketers are sometimes called marketeers, which makes them sound rather brave, dashing and – by association with buccaneers and privateers – also cavalier, irresponsible and untrustworthy. Thanks, as ever, to the OED, I learn that marketeer goes back to least 1665. It also helpfully tells me that ‘in many of the words so formed there is a more or less contemptuous implication, as in crotcheteer, garreteer, pamphleteer, pulpiteer, sonneteer.’
Pure Kant? In Sunday’s Observer Christopher Bray provides an upmarket example of the put-down rhetorical question:

Kant isn’t much fun either, of course, but which of us would deny the certainty-subverting genius of the “first critique”?

Come on, hands up: which of us?
Cooking the books? One from the literature front: today’s Telegraph reports Michael Gove’s latest wheeze: ‘pupils should read 50 books a year’. Splendid! But why did the paper choose to illustrate this with an image of old cookery books, one ironically titled Modern Cookery? Is Mikey cooking the books again? Does he want a generation of cooks and scullery maids? The Secretary of State himself appears on a second version of this same story on the Telegraph website, pulling that face of his (‘Yes, this is a bit of joke, but what larks!’). He’s not actually holding any books either, just a clutch of files – probably containing cunning plans to take us forward to the age of Nigel Molesworth. It seems the Telegraph marketeers are intent on gaming with their content.

Contains mild language

Is mild language so rare as to be shocking?

Spotted on a poster at Buxton Community School last night, advertising a student production called Threads: ‘contains mild language’. As the OED definition of mild includes ‘not giving offence to others’, I assume this isn’t the 1984 television drama about nuclear war written by Barry Hines. I wonder if this warning is to prepare an audience hoping for something satisfyingly controversial that they might be shocked by the bandying of terms such as nesh, soft and even nice.
Alas, such thrills were not for me: instead, I enjoyed a two hour presentation on the future for the local authority, the challenge of academies, free schools and the like. Some folk didn’t seem very mild about that, though (to quote Friday’s Phrase) no sabres were rattled.

Who should wear the dunce’s hat?

Daily Telegraph gets heated about errors in an email

It’s easy to detect the Telegraph‘s disgust when reporting that a Head teacher has been forced to apologise for an error-laden report – it is, after all, the paper of Simon Heffer. The journalist duly comments that the fourteen errors ‘indicate a need for the teacher to be sent back to primary school’.

More surprising, for me, was the content of the discussion thread that followed the article, in which many of the commenters end up tearing into the Telegraph‘s journalist and editors – and even each for misplaced pedantry. Here’s a taste – you can read them if full here:

There’s also the cretinous use of a comma instead of a full stop, right after the “8’s”.

So says ‘Col Dee’ (hardly diplomatic language – oops, we’ve just learnt from Wikileaks how diplomats really talk).

‘Dunces’ hats’ has an apostrophe. Several hats belong to several dunces or possibly Telegraph reporters….
“7’s and 8’s” should not have apostrophes. There is no ownership, just a description of a group. The Telegraph should have spotted this….

This provoked ‘micha2600’ to complain:

Unfortunately the readers of the DT seem to have lost their grasp of reality and appear to prefer navel gazing and discussing minutii….

Which elicited the response:

Actually, minutii (sic) should be minutiae as it comes from a Latin rather than a Greek root.

At least ‘osaycanuck’ had the good grace to add:

Should that error detract from the meaning of what the writer was trying to say? IMHO, no.

The use of the abbreviation IMHO in the response here is hardly the norm for, say, a report to parents, though part of the lingua franca of online conversation. It’s all a matter of register (as teacher might say) isn’t it?