Trusted truths

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help.
His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.

Psalm 146, a chorister’s favourite (it has just ten verses — and that could be one of few verifiable truths in this post).

And so, by a natural progression, to Anthony Wells at ukpollingreport.co.uk.

Wells had spotted an oddity in the ICM/Guardian poll:

More unexpectedly the ICM poll also found a jump in support for the BNP, up to 4%, the highest any poll has had then at for years. This is strange. The BNP have certainly not had any great publicity boost, at the local elections they seemed essentially moribund. It may just be an odd sample, or perhaps as Tom Clark suggests it is just a case of confusion amongst respondents, with some people getting the names of the BNP and UKIP mixed up.

ICM also asked about voting intention in an EU referendum, finding voting intention fairly evenly balanced – 40% would vote to stay in (22% definitely, 18% probably), 43% would vote to leave (32% definitely, 11% probably).

UPDATE: ICM tabs are up here. Topline figures without reallocation of don’t knows would have been CON 27%, LAB 35%, LDEM 9%, UKIP 19%, BNP 5%.

That strange boost of support for the BNP is almost wholly amongst women, almost wholly amongst C2s, almost wholly amongst over 65s and almost wholly in Wales. The unweighted number of 2010 BNP voters in the sample was 1, increased to 18 by weighting. What that strongly suggests to me is that there was one little old C2 BNP-voting Welsh lady who got a very high weighting factor, and probably makes up almost all of that 4%! Such things happen sometimes, but it means the BNP blip is probably just a data artifact that can be ignored.

A euphemism newly minted

Now, there’s a nice one: “just a data artifact”. Try typing that, and most spell-check utilities flag up an error. That’s because the preferred version is subtly different, another form of “truth”.

It’s also a prime example of word-drift. Once upon a  time there was:

artefact: An object made or modified by human workmanship, as opposed to one formed by natural processes.

At some point the alternative spelling seemed to be the norm for an alternative signification:

artifact: Science. A spurious result, effect, or finding in a scientific experiment or investigation, esp. one created by the experimental technique or procedure itself. Also as a mass noun: such effects collectively.

As a point of fact, Mr Chairman, the entire public opinion polling business is based on such “data artifacts”. Notice, even in what Wells says there, how an eight-point Labour lead (35-27) is manipulated down to just six points (34-28) for a headline figure.

Today there are two types of truth …

That’s the start of page 40 of the current Private Eye (#1340, 17th-30th May, so verifiable, if not a “truth”). It becomes an exposé of a criminal Yorkshire property developer who is running the usual rings around the Serious Fraud Office, but begins with a telling generalisation:

Today there are two types of truth. Electronic truth — provided via the ever expanding knowledge universes of the internet. And historic truth — provided by those facts not yet or no longer recorded on easily searchable internet databases.

An American truth

There is a poem by the American romantic, Professor John Russell Lowell, which Malcolm has always assumed to be essentially anti-slavery and pro-”freedom”. Its best-known snippet is the eighth stanza:

Careless seems the great Avenger; history’s pages but record
One death-grapple in the darkness ‘twixt old systems and the Word;
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

A bit too theist for Malcolm, but he appreciates the sense and sensibility.

[For the record, Lowell was President Chester Arthur's appointee as US Ambassador in London. Here he was a literary lion, running Henry James around the Bloomsbury salons, and becoming Virginia Woolf's god-father.]

Trussed truths

Electronic “truth” contains too many “data artifacts” for comfort. Pseudo-statistics (those perpetrated by serial-offending politicians as much as by their natural allies, the opinion-pollsters) are just one source of this creeping corruption.

Psalm 146, of course, prefers the eternal (and unprovable, and frequently controvertible) truths:

Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, whose hope is in the LORD his God:
Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that therein is: which keepeth truth for ever:
Which executeth judgment for the oppressed: which giveth food to the hungry. The LORD looseth the prisoners:
The LORD openeth the eyes of the blind: the LORD raiseth them that are bowed down: the LORD loveth the righteous:
The LORD preserveth the strangers; he relieveth the fatherless and widow: but the way of the wicked he turneth upside down.

Therein you may find your “truth”. If so, it is where you find all you need to know about:

• how Huhne was released after 62 days of an eight-month incarceration (and there are still many of us wondering why Vicky had to go down, too),
• why Tory policy on immigration is misguided (thank you, Gordon, we knew you still had decency in you),
• why Iain Duncan Smith needs to review his unChristian welfare policies,
• why ATOS are malevolent rascals,
• indeed, all about life, the universe and everything. Though that “electronic truth” comes close to the mark:

Who owns Pythagoras?

Or photosynthesis? Or 9 x 7 = 63?

Daft, isn’t it?

Then we hit upon this, from Stephanie McCurry, in this week’s Times Literary Supplement:

It has become increasingly difficult to say anything new about the American Civil War or even just to tell a different tale … [with] … a marketplace with seemingly inexhaustible demand for another version of the familiar story and the understandable desire of experts to shape public history.

As a well-bred Belfast girl, Professor McCurry will know all about the problem of who owns history. And that ‘history’ is not just a recital of Great Dead White Men.

The lustre of lucre

Note, though, she also brings in the commercial aspect: the gurus who have cornered the media market in their particular expertise. Tudors without Starkey? Unthinkable! The last word on Hitler? Well, Kershaw must be into the quarter-finals!

A couple of weeks on from the Old Vic production, Malcolm’s mental sound-track goes on full volume:

From Ohio, Mister Thorn
Calls me up from night till morn:
Mister Thorn once cornered corn and that ain’t hay!
But I’m always true to you,
Darlin’, in my fashion —
Yes, I’m always true to you,
Darlin’, in my way!

Read between Cole Porter’s lines, and Lois would do anything for her Great White Men.

More hay

So, this afternoon, there was Malcolm at the old-reliable London Pride in the Famous Royal Oak (well, it’s famed within a quarter-mile of Muswell Hill’s St James’s Lane). He has Professor McCurry flitting about his consciousness when he reaches the Comment & Debate page of the Guardian, and another contender for Ms Lane’s transient affections:

Harvardian Ferguson
Says I’m really quite très bonne:
If that’s the Harvard ton, and he’s really on … Okay!

… well, mainly on his own status and importance. As here:

It’s the way history has been taught in British schools ever since the advent of the schools history project in the 1970s and the rejection of historical knowledge in favour of “source analysis” and “child-centered” learning (“Imagine you are a Roman centurion …”).

Only someone living in a dreaming Oxonian spire could be unaware of how badly this has turned out, despite the best efforts of thousands of hard-working teachers. I know because I have watched three of my children go through the English system, because I have regularly visited schools and talked to history teachers, and because (unlike Evans and Priestland, authors of rather dry works on, respectively, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia) I have written and presented popular history. 

The new national curriculum is not flawless, to be sure. It runs counter to the advice I gave Gove by being much too prescriptive. The 34 topics to be covered by pupils between the ages of seven and 14 already read a bit like chapter titles and, if there is one thing I hope we avoid, it is an official history textbook (even if it’s written by Simon Schama).

Nothing like putting the boot (alongside a personal puff) in, Niall!

The rest of the piece has at least three other conditional clauses (if … if … If), four rhetorical questions, and rather more subjective first person singulars than is truly tasteful.

Yet, Ferguson has a point

It isn’t that history doesn’t sell. As Prof Steph (see above) opened that TES review:

Last December, thousands of Americans filed into cinemas to watch Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln. While Congress was stuck in its usual deadlock, a disgusted public was momentarily delivered by the large-screen image of a heroic figure and a heroic America. As the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed and slavery abolished, people cried. They applauded.

Meanwhile, as both main UK channels (and many others) exploit shamelessly, costume drama and a bit of pseudo-history writ small (Downton Abbey, Call the Midwife) put bums on family sofas. Rescuing ‘Richard III’ (perhaps) from under the Nissans and Fords of the Leicester car-park played a PR blinder.

So a kind of “history” excites, enthuses, entertains. What is ‘taught’ in school fails miserably by comparison.

But what should it be? Let’s try and decode Ferguson:

If you want to understand what’s really wrong with history in English schools, read schoolteacher Matthew Hunter’s excellent essay in the latest issue of Standpoint. As Hunter rightly says, it’s not just the defective content of the old national curriculum that is the problem. It’s the way history has been taught in British schools ever since the advent of the schools history project in the 1970s and the rejection of historical knowledge in favour of “source analysis” and “child-centered” learning (“Imagine you are a Roman centurion …”).

and (this is the on-line version, [not all of which made it into print]):

Among other things, the national curriculum explicitly aims to ensure that all pupils “know and understand the broad outlines of European and world history: the growth and decline of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires”; that they “understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance”; and that they “understand how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims”.

[At key stage 1, children will be introduced to "basic concepts" such as nation, civilisation, monarchy, parliament, democracy, war and peace. At key stage 2, they will study the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome.] As for “the essential chronology of Britain’s history”, to which Evans and Priestland object so strongly, it is a model of political correctness: not only Mary Seacole makes the cut, but also Olaudah Equiano – hardly escapees from Our Island Story.

What is missing there is: who owns history?

For those “basic concepts” are intensely and inescapably partial and ideological. Try a couple of thought experiments:

• Reconcile Cromwellian England into an approved primary-school perception of monarchy, parliament, democracy, war and peace.
• And how does the average eight- or ten-year-old meaningfully study the ancient civilisations of Greece and Rome? In the Goveian world-scheme, were Greece and Rome essentially slave-societies, or is the slavery thing a mere incidental to the cultural glories?

What sticks in Malcolm’s craw is, about the only time Roman slavery cropped up at Wells County Primary School, it involved Pope Gregory I and his Non Angli, sed angeli. Which may feature as every-window-tells-a-story in St Mary, Docking, as elsewhere, but as far as a critical observer can determine is as verifiable as Star Trek.  And, no, it’s not in Bede.

Two remaining issues

They’re in Ferguson, and implicit in the more cerebral McCurry:

• What is the authentic ‘scheme’ (which is what — in any sense of the word — a syllabus amounts to) for that overview of English and European history? Is it Anglocentric or Eurocentric? At the age of fifteen Malcolm switched from GCE “English and European history” to Irish Leaving Certificate “History”; and it was a painful re-appraisal, indeed.
• What is Ferguson’s gold standard of ‘historical knowledge’? Can he kindly provide, as a solid example, one single, absolute, indisputable, uncoloured ‘fact’? For, were he to do so, a whole phalanx of equally-eminent ‘historians’ would happily exhibit how that ‘fact’ could be, and has been ‘spun’. As Malcolm’s pert Young Piece never fails to repeat, a historical ‘fact’ is one which has been cited by a quantum (say, four) of historians. And a ‘historian’ is … precisely how qualified?

End piece

Consider, then, how Stephanie McCurry, in her shrewd Ulster way, presents ‘values’  rather than certainties, a basis of ‘interpretation’ rather than Ferguson’s ‘facts’, humanely and self-effacingly, warning but with a populist touch, and so concludes her extended review:

Civil War history is a growth industry. For authors, the opportunities are great, but so are the temptations — to repetition, over-reaching and jockeying for market share. There are valuable new interpretations emerging from the field, including a focus on the Civil War as a humanitarian crisis, and there are important voices cautioning against an embrace of war stories as the romanticisation of war itself. But in the fever of sesquicentennial commemoration nothing sells quite like President Lincoln and the war for emancipation. It makes the fantasy of Django Unchained to make the public focus even for a minute on the other America, the one that for so long had no problem with holding people as slaves.

A valued education

If you go here, you will find the “spend” per pupil across English local authorities.

What you won’t easily find is the “value” or the worth.

Malcolm puts it on record that:

• The most gifted pupils should invariably be handed a decent, readable text, told to relax in a corner, and report back at leisure. Chaise-longues should be provided, alongside umpteen sources of supplementary reference. Feed-back and even ferocious adult/student argument should follow. Cost: minimal, beyond a bit of intelligent teacher time (neither time nor “intelligence” is a given in the modern context).
• Then there’s the intermediate mass. Cajole with lots of staff contact and low pupil-teacher ratios. Precisely the formula that takes the public-school types to Oxbridge.
• Finally, there’s the really deserving. One example: no autistic child should cost less than £50,000 investment a year. Starting as soon as diagnosis — which ought to be around eighteen months. Since local authorities (thanks to Gove’s cuts) can’t afford that investment, it needs to be nationally-financed.

The only value-judgement should be outcome. If a school is delivering: that’s success. So bench-marking at infants/junior  and primary/secondary transfer, then let the professionals do their work. Just don’t keep opening the oven door while the soufflé is rising.

Mind how you Gove!

No, not the Singing Postman (of whom Malcolm has writ), but what may be going on behind the educational arras.

Watching Guido Fawkes’s recent bleatings, he may be onto something.

There is an on-going spat between Toby Helm ( a decent small-l “liberal” journo at the Observer) and the all-mighty Goveian Empire at the Department of Education. In such contexts, think Gove as Tarkin and his Death Star.

It looks as if:

1. The MinEduc Spads (an Orwellian reference there, please note) were let off the leash to harass Helm. For reference, the SpAds at the Department of Education have form. One is diabolically rude and arrogant, the other destroys the evidence. For the record,  they are (or, as of the next few days,were):
   • Dominic Cummings;
   • Henry de Zoete.
2. When that assault failed, heavy infantry, in the form of the redoubtable Sarah Vine, was deployed.

Sarah Vine? Oh, you know:

Oh Minister, what toe-curling secrets will your wife reveal about you next? His terrible driving. His love of scented baths. Is there ANYTHING writer Sarah Vine won’t disclose about life with Britain’s Education Secretary

 This one will run and run. Tomorrow’s Observer may be worth the read. Oh, look! here it is!

Run, do not walk, to this spat-fest!

“Popular”? With whom?

The Buckeye Firearms Foundation (as in Ohio, “the Buckeye State”) followed up the Sandy Hook child massacre with:

a program to provide firearm training to teachers free of charge…

“The long-term goal is to develop a standard Armed Teacher curriculum and make the training available to any teacher or school official,” said [Ken] Hanson ["BFA's Legal Chair"]. “To begin, we will use funds from our educational foundation and solicit donations from corporations to pay for the program. Going forward, we will seek funding from a variety of sources to expand the training.”

 No comments, please, on the possibility of an “illegal chair”. Or that the acronym “BFA” is ripe for umpteen alternative expansions, many of which are coarse or scabrous. Or, that in July 2011, the BFA organised its (somewhat ambiguously-named) 1st Annual Buckeye Firearms Foundation Youth Shoot, “north of Zanesville”.

Educationalists and parents will be delighted by the success of the BFA’s initiative:

So far, the Armed Teacher Training Program has attracted more than 600 applicants from all parts of Ohio and several from other states, including Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and West Virginia. More teachers inquire about the program every day.

“We knew this would be popular, but the response has exceeded our expectations,” said Jim Irvine, Chairman of the non-profit Buckeye Firearms Foundation.

That press release is a truly enlightening document. Malcolm savoured much thereof, and here adds some choice quotations:

• While Ohio generally prohibits firearms at schools, the law includes a provision that allows teachers and staff to carry firearms if the school board approves it. The Armed Teacher Training Program seeks to help teachers get permission to carry concealed firearms on the job and provide advanced training that goes above and beyond the typical requirements of concealed carry.
• Irvine says the program is entirely voluntary. “No one will be forced to be armed if they choose not to. The strategy is the same as ordinary concealed carry. No one will ever know who is or is not armed. Those who would seek to do harm in schools should be met with armed resistance even before law enforcement shows up. Over time, schools will no longer be considered easy, risk-free targets.”
• Irvine says the idea isn’t new. “For 25 years, citizens in the U.S. have been legally carrying concealed firearms. A total of 49 states now allow concealed carry, some with no licensing or training of any kind. The concept has worked remarkably well. Most of those who were initially skeptical now admit that citizens can be trusted to act lawfully and responsibly. Millions of ordinary people carry firearms in malls, on buses and city streets, and in restaurants and office buildings. It works for average citizens even in highly populated locations, so why would anyone assume armed teachers in schools would be any different?”
• A few people have questioned the idea of arming teachers who have no firearm experience or may be uncomfortable with guns. “That’s a misunderstanding of what we’re doing,” said Rieck. “Applicants for the program are not firearm novices. More than half already have a Concealed Handgun License. About 40 percent of our applicants say they have previous self-defense training. Over 60 percent say they have moderate to extensive firearm experience. And over 80 percent have experience with handguns.”

Cue Tom Paxton (or failing him, Pete Seeger):

What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
What did you learn in school today,
Dear little boy of mine?
I learned that policemen are my friends.
I learned that justice never ends.
I learned that murderers die for their crimes,
Even if we make a mistake sometimes.

That’s what I learned in school today,
That’s what I learned in school.

Or, here’s the nearest thing Malcolm can find from Paxton himself:

Hat-tip to Mother Jones.

Hinging?

Here’s a paragraph from a (rather good) The Daily Beast essay:

One of the toughest decisions [Obama as President]  had to make early on was whether to bail out Detroit. The country was suffering from sticker shock and simmering over government bailouts. And yet Obama and his advisers understood that letting GM collapse could have led to the loss of as many as a million jobs. What they probably also knew was that the president’s reelection might end up hinging on the northern belt of Ohio, which is heavily dependent on the automobile industry.

Daniel Klaidman (formerly of Newsweek) is propounding that Obama is the Fortunate One, but has helped his chances through a sequence of strategic calculations.

As for that paragraph above, the GM rescue was a no-brainer for a Democrat with blue-collar union and white-collar liberal constituencies to assuage. But that wasn’t Malcolm’s sticking point: it’s hinging. It jars: it falls somewhere between a hinge and hanging. After all the clause could have been rewritten as:

•  the president’s reelection might end up hanging on the northern belt of Ohio
•  the president’s reelection might end up on the hinge of northern Ohio

or

•  the president’s reelection might swing on the hinge of northern Ohio

or numerous other permutations of a decent metaphor, all more mellifluous and more easily comprehended. As it stands, it doesn’t read well.

Yet Klaidman has the right and the canon on his side here.

Hinge as a noun goes back to Middle English. John Wycliffe’s Bible, in the last decades of the Fourteenth Century, rendered Proverbs xxvi, 14 as:

As a door is turned in his hinges; so a slow man in his bed.

Shakespeare, no less, may be the coiner of hinge as a verb. Timon of Athens has withdrawn from Athenian society to a cave in the woods, whence Apemantus comes with some cynical, bitter and political advice:

A poor unmanly melancholy sprung
From change of fortune. Why this spade? this place?
This slave-like habit? and these looks of care?
Thy flatterers yet wear silk, drink wine, lie soft;
Hug their diseased perfumes, and have forgot
That ever Timon was. Shame not these woods,
By putting on the cunning of a carper.
Be thou a flatterer now, and seek to thrive
By that which has undone thee: hinge thy knee,
And let his very breath, whom thou’lt observe,
Blow off thy cap; praise his most vicious strain,
And call it excellent …

That’s no more than observation of how the knee is the hinge in the leg. By the time Oliver Goldsmith came to write his 1760 essay On the English Clergy and Popular Preachers, which is substantially concerned with dissing degenerate foreigners, denied the uplifting virtues of educated English divines, he has it as a metaphor:

Whatever may become of the higher orders of mankind, who are generally possessed of collateral motives to virtue, the vulgar should be particularly regarded, whose behaviour in civil life is totally hinged upon their hopes and fears. Those who constitute the basis of the great fabric of society should be particularly regarded; for in policy, as in architecture, ruin is most fatal when it begins from the bottom.

A Malcolmian aside:

Oh dear, and to think, contemporary with that convoluted thought by Goldsmith, modern democracy was being forged across the Atlantic (though with the greatest pains it should not actually be democratic, let it also be populist).

The American distaste for direct democracy persists to this day, with the creaking apparatus of the Electoral College, and the kind of jiggery-pokery partisan mapping can achieve.

As Dave Weigel is arguing at Slate, gerrymandering of the congressional districts ensures the Republicans can outwit the will of the people. Obama won Ohio, but — because the districts had been engineered to keep the rural and suburban areas red — only four of the sixteen House seats went Democrat. Even more so, in Pennsylvania, where Obama outpolled Romney 52-46½ but only five of the 18 congressional districts went Democrat. He even has a map to show how convoluted is the polling geography, ordained by a Republican local administration:

Welcome to the wonderful world of gerunds

That’s what they were called when Malcolm was learning his Latin grammar. Now they have to be called ‘verbal nouns‘ — though, as with hinging above, they might not be. Friends: you have just been inducted into the magic circle of those who recognise the weaknesses of teaching (and learning) formal grammar, when English as she is lived is about as informal as a language gets.

Anyway, we have finally arrived at hinging. By the look of the OED’s citation for John Nicholson’s The operative mechanic, and British machinist · 1st edition, 1825 (1 vol.), operative mechanics and British machinists were happily absorbing his advice on:

Some information on the subject of hinging in general.

Without checking that source, we might assume it involved door furniture, and so was not the metaphoric usage we seek.

For that we have to wait until John Ruskin, in 1846, was considering Modern Painters. In section 27 of the first volume of this shelf-bender Ruskin addresses Effects of light, how necessary to the understanding of detail. Well, yes, John: an — ahem! — illuminating point indeed. Else we might be reminded of Groucho Marx:

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

To Ruskin’s context:

All good ornament and all good architecture are capable of being put into short-hand; that is, each has a perfect system of parts, principal and subordinate, of which, even when the complemental details vanish in distance, the system and anatomy yet remain visible so long as anything is visible; so that the divisions of a beautiful spire shall be known as beautiful even till their last line vanishes in blue mist, and the effect of a well-designed moulding shall be visibly disciplined, harmonious, and inventive, as long as it is seen to be a moulding at all. Now the power of the artist of marking this character depends not on his complete knowledge of the design, but on his experimental knowledge of its salient and bearing parts, and of the effects of light and shadow, by which their saliency is best told. He must therefore be prepared, according to his subject, to use light, steep or level, intense or feeble, and out of the resulting chiaroscuro select those peculiar and hinging points on which the rest are based, and by which all else that is essential may be explained.

Well, perhaps that also proves one doesn’t have to be inside Groucho’s dog for lack of clarity.

The all-purpose magic “e”

After many decades of trying, Malcolm still doubts whether spelling is something that can easily be taught. One rule that is taught involves how a silent “e” at the end of a word lengthens the vowel before it:

That terminal “e” is also the softener of a “g”: rag/rage. That is why it is retained in the UK spelling of ageing and similar constructions. Otherwise we have problems with singing and singeing.

So, despite advice from Higher Powers, Malcolm still prefers hingeing.

Fancy that!

Why is it that old newsprint, about to be discarded, makes one last burst at survival, and unfailingly provides unexpected diversion?

Here was Malcolm collecting paper around the house, recycling bin for the filling therewith.

Here comes the Times Literary Supplement of 31 August.

Tom Shippey reviewing Diana Wynne Jones, Reflections on the Magic of Writing.

Malcolmian Wombling stopped instantly. Reading mode was engaged.

The book is:

a collection of some thirty pieces written over the years by the late Diana Wynne Jones.

Shippey identifies:

The themes which run through the collection are autobiography, thoughts on how to write and how books originate … and thirdly, robust defences of the value of fantasy and the importance of writing for children.

Were Malcolm being sniffy (and he is), he would wonder why the third of those should ever need robust defences. Fantasy is an essential element in any proper upbringing:

Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourishèd?
Reply, reply.
Is it engendered in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and Fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.
Let us all ring Fancy’s bell:
I’ll begin it, — Ding, dong, bell.

Put that into its context, Act III, scene ii, of The Merchant of Venice, and you have something very spooky indeed. That, too, is part of fantasy.

Half-way through his review Shippey opens a Cabinet of Dr Caligari:

Wynne Jones adds herself to the list of children’s authors — E.E.Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling, Beatrix Potter — who had troubled early lives. She writes, “I think I write the kind of books I do because the world suddenly went mad when I was five years old”. Then, in August 1939, Diana and her sister were suddenly uprooted from London, driven to their grandparents’ home in Welsh-speaking Pontarddulais, and left to cope as best they could. It was not for long, for their mother came and fetched them back: not, it seems out of affection, but as a result of a blazing row with Aunt Muriel: “I see my relationship with my mother never recovered from this.” The children were soon packed off again, this time to Westmoreland, where they saw Arthur Ransome in a fury over the noise the children made — “He hated children” — and Diana’s sister Isobel was smacked by Beatrix Potter for swinging on her garden gate: “She hated children, too.”

Ah, sweet!

Quite how good this book is, Malcolm cannot authenticate. The reviewer seems to like it, and is convincing in his observations. It might be something worth seeking out. from a library, or watch for a second-hand copy perhaps: at £25 it looks hardly a steal (even Amazon want £17.50).

One final thought: whenever over the decades of teaching, Malcolm has come upon a well-balanced child, there tended to be an imagination at work, an ability to cross into worlds of fantasy, even a native delight in jokes and word-play. On the other hand, there are far too many warped minds, who — for one lack of reason or another — have been denied that fantasy. Sadly, too many of these minds are the victims of cults of one evil kind or another: the strict Moslem boy who rejected any kind of fiction on principle (someone else’s principle).

There are many good causes to scorn, even despise the verbose spoutings of Ms Rowling: religious wailing about Witchcraft! should never be one of them.

You can diss Big Blue, but don’t mess with Big Bird!

Once upon a time the 600-pound gorilla on the corporate computing block was Big Blue — IBM.

One of the early Apple TV adds has a pair of old suits looking down at younger suits entering the building. These young ones (including the new wave of … women!) were carrying Macintosh SE30s. That would seem to date the memory back to about 1990. The old suits asked the redundant question: why were they bringing their “toy computers” to work. The message, then and still with Apple, is that their products “just work”.

A cynic might plausibly argue that the success of the SE in business owed less to Apple than to the way the hardware ran MicroSoft Excel (from a 1.4 MB floppy!) — and to the fact that Excel was way in advance of the clunky VisiCalc application to which behemoth mainframes were shackled.

You’ll still see SE30s in many laboratories — even if only used as door-stops, or under office desks. Plug ‘em in, switch ‘em on. Most still dong cheerfully, and boot up OS 7.5.5. Choose the right day of the week and you may get Arthur Dent telling you This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

We thought that neat, at the time.

Somehow that all seems relevant to Malcolm — but then he has a very disturbed thought-process.

Was Romney’s stab at PBS singularly ill-advised?

What he said to the moderator, Jim Lehrer, was:

I’m sorry, Jim. I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. I actually like you, too. But I’m not going to — I’m not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for it.

The “cost”of that “subsidy”, as PBS quickly made clear is trivial:

Over the course of a year, 91 percent of all U.S. television households tune in to their local PBS station. In fact, our service is watched by 81 percent of all children between the ages of 2-8.

Each day, the American public receives an enduring and daily return on investment that is heard, seen, read and experienced in public media broadcasts, apps, podcasts and online — all for the cost of about $1.35 per person per year.

Far from huge tranches of money from China to pay for it, the PBS “subsidy” amounts to 0.001% of the federal budget. Were that the scope of a President Romney’s ambitions to cut the deficit, he — and we — really would be in trouble.

All this, and much more, is being very elegantly and eloquently made by Charles M. Blow at the New York Times:

Big Bird is the man. He’s 8 feet tall. He can sing and roller skate and ride a unicycle and dance. Can you do that, Mr. Romney? I’m not talking about your fox trot away from the facts. I’m talking about real dancing.

Since 1969, Big Bird has been the king of the block on “Sesame Street.” When I was a child, he and his friends taught me the alphabet and the colors and how to do simple math.

Do you know how to do simple math, Mr. Romney? Maybe you and the Countess Von Backward could exchange numbers.

Blow is vamping on the educational values of PBS in general, and Sesame Street in particular. When told his American-born grandchildren had “etiquette” as part of their pre-school daycare experience, Malcolm had to control his eyebrows. Yet that, too, is in the overt Sesame Street curriculum:

Big Bird and his friends also showed me what it meant to resolve conflicts with kindness and accept people’s differences and look out for the less fortunate. Do you know anything about looking out for the less fortunate, Mr. Romney? Or do you think they’re all grouches scrounging around in trash cans?

Moreover, anything must be a good thing that dilutes and uplifts the pabulum, notably those crude (and, to Malcolm, violent) oriental- made cartoons, which is the staple fodder on the commercial networks.

Pester power

Were the Obama campaigners and their assorted PACs truly Machiavellian they would be running Save Big Bird! ads in the post-school hours. All that is needed is a trim of that clip of Romney:

It would work on the same basis as those confectionary and SimpleWare [©] displays so adjacent to the supermarket check-out. Never underestimate the niggle factor:

Mom! They’re not going to hurt Big Bird, are they?

Basic, under-powered and over-stated — rather like the Macintosh SE — but it might. similarly, “just work”.

PTR

Why is a struggling secondary school obliged to cut course options? What is the single biggest advantage the private sector has over state schools?

Pupil/Teacher ratio.

Staffing is by a long, long margin the most expensive item in a school budget. So, ladies and gentlemen of the Jury, consider:

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Two new free schools are opening in Suffolk next week with less than half of their places filled by pupils.

Saxmundham Free School will enrol 104 children when it has space for 216, while Beccles Free School has 68 pupils and a capacity for 162.

Critics said it showed the government should not have granted approval for the new high schools.

The Seckford Foundation, which runs the schools, said it was confident more pupils would join throughout the year.

Beccles will have 12 teachers and Saxmundham will have 14 when they open to year seven, eight and nine pupils next Thursday.

Malcolm reckons that means Saxmundham has a PTR of 7.4 and Beccles of 5.7. Most English secondaries would regard that grossly indulgent for the Sixth Form (where generous staffing is achieved only by having full — and over-full — classes in the lower school.

And no budget would be passed on the basis of “wishful thinking”, or, as the Seckford Trust puffery would have it:

“We are confident that pupils will join us through the year as more and more people learn about the quality of education we will be delivering.”

Six “free schools” did not make the cut, even at this level of generosity. The cost of these failures to the national education budget is £2.3 million — and rising. This whole programme, which sooner or later will be recognised as Gove’s folly, has a budget of £600 million over the next three years. Were this “new money”, the experiment might have some excuse. It is, of course, money filched from the essential school building programme. That is why primary schools across the country will be crammed to the gills and “teaching” in unsuitable accommodation this year.

Bleeding heart plutocrats

The Sunday Times [£] today has a first leader, bewailing

This is not a serious government

Most of the bewailing and bemoaning focuses on Nick Clegg. Which, in general, is fair and reasonable. Only when we get down to detail does the argument seem a trifle dysfunctional in itself:

Earlier in the year [Clegg] mused about a tycoon tax which led to the budget mess on tax relief for charitable donations. Now he wants another tax on the rich although he knows the top 1% already pay 28% of income tax …

Two glaring mistakes there:

1. The cock-up that was the 2012 budget mess is entirely down to one person, and it’s not Clegg. It’s the presumptive heir to a wallpaper fortune and the  Osborne baronetcy of Ballentaylor, in County Tipperary, and Ballylemon, in County Waterford.

2. That bit about the top 1% already pay 28% of income tax must be the most elastic of statistics going. It application seems to depend on how far it is intended to frighten the horses:

In February 2011, Henry Wallop for the Telegraph had:

Top 1pc of workers pay quarter of all income tax

A quarter of all of Britain’s income tax revenues this year will be paid by just one per cent of earners, according to official data.

This was justified on the basis:

HMRC published its forecasts for all income tax revenues for the current tax year. It suggested that 275,000 individual, those that will pay the 50p rate, will pay £41.4 billion in tax – 25.7 per cent of the country’s total income tax bill.

Meanwhile, in February of this year James Chapman for the Mail reckoned on more equine fright:

Highest-earning 1% pay £47 billion a year… almost a third of all income tax

The highest-earning 1 per cent of Britons pay almost 30 per cent of all income taxes, according to research.

The 308,000 on the 50p top rate – who earn more than £150,000 – pay £47 billion a year to the Treasury. 

Since 2000, the share of tax paid by the highest earners has risen from 22.2 to 27.7 per cent.

Interesting that: the Mail is usually yelling about the innumeracy of school students; but here we see:

Almost a third = almost 30% = 27.7%.

What’s the odd seventeen percent difference (33.3 — 27.7 = 5.6 = 16.8% of 33.3) between friends? Doubtless the Mail works to the same number system as Representative T.I. Record, who attempted to make the value of pi officially equal 3 (but that was back in 1897, and applied only in the State of Indiana).

The official HM Revenue & Customs 2012-13 figure for the top 1% is 24.2% of all tax, contributing £15.5 billion to the national tax take. Significantly lower than any of the horse-frighteners above.

For comparisons sake, Michael Meacher did a piece for the Guardian on 31 May 2012:

The richest 1% of the population own a quarter of total UK wealth, and the richest half control no less than 94% of total wealth. Ownership of land is even more skewed: 69% of it is owned by 0.3% of the population.

If that’s correct, it means the richest 1% take about a quarter of all income and are paying just under a quarter of the income tax.

So where’s the unfairness?