Cuttings: January 2018

Astonishing fake in education and training: the graph that never was - post in Plan B blog by Donald Clark. "I have seen this in presentations by the CEO of a large online learning company, Vice-Chancellor of a University, Deloitte’s Bersin, and in innumerable keynotes and talks over many years. It’s a sure sign that the speaker has no real background in learning theory and is basically winging it. Still a staple in education and training, especially in 'train the trainer' and teaching courses, a quick glance is enough to be suspicious.... This is a sorry tale of how a simple model published with lots of original caveats can morph into a meme that actually lies about the author, the numbers, adds categories and is uncritically adopted by educators and trainers."

A matter of taste: six remarkable women and the food they ate - article by Laura Shapiro in The Guardian, based on her book What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories. "Tell me what you eat, I longed to say to each woman, and then tell me whether you like to eat alone, and if you really taste the flavours of food or ignore them, or forget all about them a moment later. Tell me what hunger feels like to you, and if you’ve ever experienced it without knowing when you’re going to eat next. Tell me where you buy food, and how you choose it, and whether you spend too much. Tell me what you ate when you were a child, and whether the memory cheers you up or not. Tell me if you cook, and who taught you, and why you don’t cook more often, or less often, or better. ... One of the reasons I began writing about women and food more than 30 years ago was that I was full of questions like these, and I couldn’t find the answers that would satisfy my … well, hunger. ... Food talks – but somebody has to hear it. William Knight, the philosophy professor who was one of the first and most dedicated scholars of the Wordsworths, read through Dorothy’s journals early on and decided they should be edited for publication. ... One gets the sense from Knight’s brief preface to the journals, which he published in 1897, that he was a little irritated by all the meals and domestic doings that Dorothy insisted on telling him about, possibly at the expense of providing more information about the great Romantic. 'There is no need to record all the cases in which the sister wrote, "To-day I mended William’s shirts," or "William gathered sticks," or "I went in search of eggs," etc. etc.,' Knight explained wearily. He assured readers that he had snipped out only the material that plainly lacked 'literary or biographical value'. Later editors put the shirts and the eggs right back in; and to this day The Grasmere Journal is recognised as a classic of intimate prose, with a charm that has outlasted a fair amount of her brother’s verse. This dismissive attitude toward women’s domestic lives continued to flourish for another century or so."

A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War by Patricia Fara – review by Wendy Moore in The Guardian. "Grainy images of women driving ambulances and working in munitions factories in the first world war have become familiar to us all. Yet the remarkable story of the extraordinary women who took over men’s jobs in hospitals, laboratories and government research facilities only to be forced to relinquish them once men returned from the front is largely unknown. Patricia Fara’s important book, the first of many being published to commemorate the centenary of women receiving the vote, is written as a paean to these forgotten pioneers. ... Catapulted into posts previously confined to men, female scientists now turned their talents to the war effort. Women at Sheffield University developed anaesthetics for the wounded, while at the University of Wales they worked on new drugs and explosives. At Imperial College London, chemist Martha Whiteley headed a mainly female team testing hand grenades and poisonous gases, including the first sample of mustard gas, in experimental trenches."

The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain by Lynda Nead – review by Frances Spalding in The Guardian. "This is a luminous book about the greyness that delayed Britain’s search for modernity in the postwar era. It evokes the physical and psychic fabric of this country after six years of war damage. Much was dismal – the slums, poverty and dirt in Victorian cities. Change was desired and imminent when in December 1952 a horrendous fog descended; for five days it kept 8 million Londoners indoors, huddled beside coal fires. The smoke, trapped by a canopy of cold air, made the fog worse. Postwar Britain was still inextricably connected with its 19th-century past.... The Festival of Britain ... set out to portray the present, offer a vision of the future, yet also remind visitors of the past, in a set of buildings on the South Bank that rested on a muddy bombsite, its foundations constructed out of rubble from the Blitz. Picture Post, with its eye for telling detail, described this area as a 'dispiriting no-man’s land, an abandonment of slum and confusion, dust and decay: a hopeless place'. Yet when it was translated from mud into festival many flocked to see the decorative murals, the Skylon, a 300ft-high steel construction which seemed to hang miraculously in the air, and the famous Dome of Discovery, while all around were sudden flashes of strong colour on walls, doors and screens. This began the association of the South Bank with culture. Yet three weeks after the festival closed on 30 September 1951, a general election terminated the Labour government’s programme of social renewal and returned the Conservatives to power under the premiership of Winston Churchill. One of his first acts was to dismantle the entire South Bank site, which he regarded as a symbol of Labour’s profligate spending. With it vanished a sense of forward progress."

‘Never get high on your own supply’: why social media bosses don’t use social media - article by Alex Hern in The Guardian. "For all the industry’s focus on 'eating your own dog food', the most diehard users of social media are rarely those sitting in a position of power.... Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, broke the omertà in October last year, telling a conference in Philadelphia that he was 'something of a conscientious objector' to social media. 'The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them … was all about: "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?"’ ... These addictions haven’t happened accidentally, [argues Adam Alter, author of Irristible]. Instead, they are a direct result of the intention of companies such as Facebook and Twitter to build 'sticky' products, ones that we want to come back to over and over again."

Children are tech addicts, and schools are the pushers - article by Elaine Glaser in The Guardian, related to her book Get Real: How to See Through the Hype, Spin and Lies of Modern Life. "As a culture, we are finally waking up to the dark side of new technology. 'The internet is broken', declares the current issue of Wired, the tech insiders’ bible. Last month Rick Webb, an early digital investor, posted a blog titled 'My internet mea culpa'.... He called on the architects of the web to admit that new technology had brought more harm than good.... Not only is screen technology harmful to children per se, there’s little evidence that it helps them to learn.... Education technology is often justified on the grounds that it boosts disadvantaged children, yet research shows it widens rather than bridges socioeconomic divides. ... I don’t want my kids fed into the sausage machine of standardised testing and the bureaucratic 'information economy'. I don’t want them to become robotic competitors to the robots we are told are taking their future jobs. I can opt my children out of RE, but where technology is concerned, I feel bound by a blind determinism. Surely we have a choice, as humans, over the direction technology is taking us, and education is the perfect illustration of this capacity. Our children turn up as blank slates, and learn to design the future. It’s time for schools to join the backlash. It’s time to think again."

How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt: Trump and the shredding of norms - review by David Runciman in The Guardian. "In early 2016,... the Senate did something it had never done in more than 150 years: it refused even to grant [President Obama's supreme court nominee] a hearing.... Their shared view [was] that any Republican supreme court nominee would be better than any Democratic nominee, and any price was worth paying to achieve that.... This was a preeminent example of what Levitsky and Ziblatt call the erosion of norms, which they consider the greatest threat to contemporary democracy. Norms are the unspoken rules and conventions that hold a democracy together, many of them based on the idea that what’s good for your side in the short term may not do you any good in the long run, because you won’t be in power for ever (if you are, it’s no longer a democracy). When the other side get their turn, your impatience to take advantage will become their licence to exact revenge. ... Levitsky and Ziblatt want to get away from the idea that so long as the constitutional order is intact, democracy will be OK. They are deeply suspicious of any naive faith that deviant politicians can be 'contained' by the right institutions, and not just because it didn’t work out for Weimar Germany with Hitler. They point out that US history is littered with examples of political behaviour that stayed within the letter of the law but still did catastrophic damage to democracy. The racist regime that prevailed in the American south during the first half of the 20th century was underpinned by a set of norms that made hard-won African American voting rights meaningless. The constitution did not have to be overridden to allow this to happen."