Political musings

[minkturtle]

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[Huguenot]

Google is your friend...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/UKExpenditure.svg/596px-UKExpenditure.svg.png

[minkturtle]

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[Siduhe]

minkturtle Wrote:

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> What's "social protection"?

Benefits such as disability, unemployment, housing, child benefit etc and state pensions.

From the UK National Statistics site: Social protection describes help given to those in need or at risk of hardship. Regarded as a safety net meant to provide a minimum decent standard of living it is designed to protect the vulnerable in society such as those affected by, for example, illness, low income, family circumstances or age.

[curlykaren]

minkturtle, put that in a manifesto and you have my vote.

Most worrying is the 4th largest amount of money is spent on some mysterious 'other' 72bn WTF?

[Huguenot]

curlykaren, it's nothing to panic about - it's not a secret!

If you want the full detail, then see here (use all the zoomy facilities to dive in and browse around!):

Public Spending 2009/10 by UK government department

[curlykaren]

ahhh, phew, but at least a good portion of it spent on designing fabulously colourful whizzy flow chart thingy. (sorry I just had five kids in my house for dinner, more technically specific, subject appropriate language currently escapes me!)

[????]

Where do we start?

8) There are plenty of 2nd and 3rd generation sons and daughters of immigrants in this country who are here (rightly) because their ancestors were exploited by yours and mine...plenty of them are also worried about immigration too.

9) Intellectual/cultural snobbey. The mainstream views of the intelligensia, artists and academics in the late 1960s and much of the 70s were for communism/the destruction of capitlaism and for many maosim...meanwhile uneducated fools watching Morecambe and Wise, doing the pools and reading the Sun by and large saw what a destructive and idiotic worldview that nonsense was.

I'll be back.

[????]

2) "As humanity has become more enlightened,".....behave

[????]

However, I like your post and interesting way of thinking about these things :))

[minkturtle]

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[Huguenot]

I'm with Plato.

Only problem is that I can't identify any philosopher kings. Most people who think they are one don't realise they've already made a fatal error.

[RosieH]

Sometimes I think that if he didn't live several thousand miles away, was already married, and was at times an incredibly pompous arse, I'd marry Huguenot.

But basically, what he said.

Minkturtle, there's a naivete to your post that I think belies your age.

Violence? I believe you to be a lover of animals, so I would say to you, look at Chimpanzees, our closest animal relative. Violent tribal rapist bastards. Cute as hell, but inherently bastards. I think you blithely disregard some fundamentals of human nature.

Why is politics in the news? Because it's the tax on your bicycle, our response to the revolution in Libya, waiting lists in hospitals, army size, class size, government size. And your politics is not your neighbour's politics, so you need to know who's saying what so you can know who you want in power.

One world policy - you mean, with China? with Russia? with Iran? Who's going to make them join us? Because I take it, it will be that way round, and we're not going to accept a fundamentally different, less free, way of life by joining them?

Lower class sizes - I'll come back to this - read something this week with a class size of 60 I think it was, that said performance was better.

More thoughts, more thoughts, more thoughts, but no time.

[????]

c. Support the arts! Seems to me that Britain?s greatest contribution to the world in recent decades has been in the field of music and television and comedy. So let?s rejoice in that, not slash funding.

Haven't some of the greatest artist emerged through struggle with talent and luck. If support the arts means I can get a grant for my rather poor poetry then on the whole I think we've better priorities with a LIMITED BUDGET.

Bacon

The Stones

Bowie

Freud

McQueen

The Beatles

The Smiths

etc

Arts funded? I dunno but not many of them I expect.

[????]

"b. Tailor an education more specifically to the child. Let everything be available but let?s not force someone who is obviously going to go into something like plumbing (and please don?t ever imagine that I?d think that a lesser trade; far from it) to endure countless wasted hours struggling with Romeo and Juliet, etc. People like to do different things: some people love to play sport. So more sport and less poetry if they want it! A bit of understanding of our differences and diversities."

And at 14 my choices would have been

1) Sport

2) Anything that Tina ********** chose

3) Anything with no homework or easy homework..eg Art

Thankfully, the school system did (and I presume does) recognise that

a)I, like most 14 year old boys who I knew, couldn't give a shite about application and learning and needed to be forced to do it

b)rather than being so forward thinking that they could recognise who is actually plumber material ...i dunno, Accent? Wot ther dad does? it should try and provide a reasonably standard set of education accross the board, in the hope that some 'oiks' might suddenly find a passion for say Shakespeare, or trigonomtry, or the laws of gravity, etc as an alternative too plumbing, very useful (and well paid) as it is...

sometimes..you/me/one needs a bit of imposed discipline

[minkturtle]

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[Huguenot]

Teaching Shakespeare shouldn't be about reading, it's about cause and effect, about motivation, about chicanery, about relationships and responsibilities.

I'd say it was a misinterpretation of English teaching at secondary school level if you imagine it's about technical execution.

There's a satisfying if somewhat trite scene in an early series of Spooks where Keeley Hawes has to masquerade as an English teacher. The kids are trying to read poetry, but can't connect with the subject matter, so Hawes instead concentrates on a Dido song where the lyricist clearly is intoning the opposite to what she's actually communicating, so this becomes the discussion point.

This is great English teaching.

On the one world government I think you're being ambitious but somewhat myopic.

Social theory tells us quite the opposite: that humans are essentially tribal and tend to work in social groups of less than 200 individuals. We know that society breaks down when access to vital resources become scarce.

A viable long term social achievement for humanity is more likely to be the opposite to one-world government. It's more likely to be a decentralised arrangement of self-sustaining communities. We'd rely on technology to facilitate that.

[zeban]

I'm with Huguenot about Shakespeare.

Shakespeare isn't about reading at all. There is so so much in Shakespeare, so many levels, so many ways to connect with it on a human, moral, philosophical level. And what is literature if it is not supposed to do this?

Shakespeare should always be taught in my opinion.

[minkturtle]

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[zeban]

minkturtle Wrote:

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> I don't think you guys are quite getting what I'm

> saying. Have you any experience of education

> beyond Dido and Spooks?

I don't understand this question.

I do know I went to an ordinary state school secondary school, we studied Macbeth, I went onto do A levels, I studied King Lear and Hamlet. Hamlet has now become my favourite play and I went on to study English Literature at very good Uni.

I don't understand why on earth children of secondary school level are unable to write basic sentences as you say? If that's the case then the education system and their parents have let them down surely. Maybe it was this that has made you feel cynical towards literature such as Shakespeare?

[minkturtle]

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[Huguenot]

The point I'm making minkturtle (and with your firm grasp of English I'm sure you've gathered it) is that you don't have to wait until you can read or write fluently until you can enoy and learn from Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is a performance art that deals with people and personalities. In fact it's easier to understand out loud than it is to understand it written.

Your insistence that they become technically proficient in written English before they're allowed to enjoy the chicanery of Iago or the hearbreak of Juliet strikes me as both spiteful and controlling. Conversely, it may just reveal that you never really understood what Shakespeare was all about either.

Your choice to make personal attacks on my experience with education is badly judged. I merely need to highlight your own poorly constructed stream of consciousness babble as evidence that the authorities seem to let any idiot loose in front of children these days. No wonder the kids are struggling.

For the record I come from a family of three generations of teachers, and about half my time is spent in educational work. Thankfully it's rare that I suffer semi-literate fantasists trying to take the higher ground with me.

[zeban]

I'm with Huguenot all the way minkturtle.

IMO you're writing off children being able to relate to, connect to, feel inspired by, and understand ideas just because their writing skills aren't up to scratch. How sad for those pupils that their teachers feel that way about them.

[minkturtle]

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[????]

On a very broad level and with no experience of teaching.....

I'd bring back grammar schools or some more rigourous selection/straeming

I'd make any private school that wanted to keep its charitable status demonstrate that 10% of it's pupils were from the poorest 10% of the population.

I'd get teachers to man up and force the small percentage of teachers who were not up to it out of their jobs rather than hide behind the 'collective' wall

I'd improve teachers who 'achieve' pay dramatically - this achievement wouldn't neccessarily be based on academic performance alone and so would require some sort of decentralised targets

I'd make all teachers have to demonstarte a good level of grammar and reasonable mathematics via an exam/test rigurosuly enforced with help for those that failed but not full teacher status