Those Who Can, Teach by Andria Zafirakou: a lesson in education – review by Lamorna Ash in The Guardian. “‘We are the ones alerting social services to child-protection issues, severe poverty, or the fallout of police intervention,’ Zafirakou writes. It is this kind of granular information, she believes, that cannot be ‘captured by the facts and figures’ the government focuses on, and which makes the idea of solving the issues faced by today’s students by way of more rigorous exams (as Michael Gove did in 2010) or ensuring children remain silent in corridors (another Williamson proposal) appear laughable. ... As Kate Clanchy’s celebrated memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me does so well, Those Who Can, Teach relies on case studies of students to illustrate, for instance, the impact of social media, of poverty, of mental health or learning difficulties on young people today. Both books demonstrate how leading lessons is but a small portion of what it means to be a teacher in 21st-century Britain.”
The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months – article by Rutger Bregman in The Guardian, extracted from his book Humankind. “The real Lord of the Flies ... began in June 1965. The protagonists were ... pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school in Nuku‘alofa [capital of Tonga]. ... They had one main thing in common: they were bored witless. So they came up with a plan to escape: to Fiji, some 500 miles away, or even all the way to New Zealand. ... The boys took little time to prepare for the voyage. ... ‘We drifted for eight days,’ [one of the boys] told me. ‘Without food. Without water.’ ... Then, on the eighth day, they spied a miracle on the horizon. A small island, to be precise. ... These days, ‘Ata is considered uninhabitable. But ‘by the time we arrived,’ [their rescuer] Captain Warner wrote in his memoirs, ‘the boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.’ While the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year. The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. [One boy] fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat ... and played it to help lift their spirits.”
Musa Okwonga: ‘Boys don’t learn shamelessness at Eton, it is where they perfect it’ – article by David Shariatmadari in The Guardian. “It’s 1996 [and] Musa Okwonga ... goes to school at Eton College... [He] thrives at the school, which he set his heart on after being dazzled by a documentary he saw as a child. He wins a scholarship and aged 13 becomes a boarder, putting on the school’s distinctive morning suit every day... He becomes a model student, almost to a fault. But he’s carrying around a double burden of responsibility: first to his father, who was killed amid political violence in Uganda when he was four, and his widowed mother, who works hard as a doctor to pay his fees. Then there’s the second, crushing weight imposed by society’s expectations of young black men and the mostly white environment of the school. ‘I think it is unlikely that many of my contemporaries,’ Okwonga writes, ‘have had a close black friend, and so I don’t want to conform to any of the stereotypes they might have about black people. I resolve never to get drunk around any of them, never to get stoned in their company. I don’t even risk getting a haircut that I might enjoy.’ ... Okwonga tries to make sense of the pressures, absurdities and rewards of his schooldays in his latest book, One of Them: An Eton College Memoir. ... [He says] ‘It felt like it was time. Look at our society – politically and socially, where we are.’ (In the book, he writes of the current moment that ‘It feels like the bad guys have won’.) ‘I’ve gone to this boarding school which prides itself on creating prime ministers,’ he says, ‘but then I look at the job those prime ministers have done. David Cameron promised stability, but he’s given us – well, he hasn’t given us stability. And Boris Johnson has done terrible damage to the country.”
The poisonously patronising Sewell report is historically illiterate – article by David Olusoga in The Guardian. “Since its publication, the report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities has been denounced... As a historian, for me the most disturbing passages are those in which the authors stumble, ill prepared and overconfident, into the arena of history. ... Shockingly, the authors – perhaps unwittingly – deploy a version of an argument that was used by the slave owners themselves in defence of slavery 200 years ago: the idea that by becoming culturally British, black people were somehow beneficiaries of the system.... The report argues that young black people should reclaim their British heritage. Which is exactly what black British people have been doing, by recovering the contributions of their ancestors to British history and culture. Yet the report crudely characterises those struggles to bring marginalised black figures and communities into the mainstream of British history as ‘token expressions of black achievement’ – a poisonously patronising phrase.... The report [falsely characterises the] demands made by students and staff at many universities for the decolonisation of the curriculum ... as the ‘banning of white authors’.... [which] the authors dismiss as the ‘idealism’ of the ‘well-intentioned’. What is really happening in our universities is that curricula are being expanded to include the voices and the stories of formerly colonised people. Is the report’s reduction of this to the ‘banning of white authors’ deliberate provocation or just ignorance? Have they begun to believe their own culture war disinformation?... The government has been quick to point to the ethnic diversity of the commission. What is lacking here is not ethnic diversity but diversity of opinion.“ See also the Report itself.
Boris Johnson is a man of principles. We should thank Jennifer Arcuri for exposing them – article by Catherine Bennett in The Guardian. “In 1994, Nolan was tasked by John Major with rescuing politics from Tory sleaze. 'We seek to restore respect for the ethical values inherent in the idea of public service,' Nolan wrote of the resulting Seven Principles: selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty, leadership. ... Johnson recently hinted at the existence of a parallel Johnsonian code, but it has taken Arcuri, with additional input from Cameron, the PM turned lobbyist, to bring home the thoroughness of the rewrite.... 1. Greed.... 2. Shamelessness... 3. Self-interest... 4. Unaccountability... 5. Concealment... 6. Fabrication... 7. Entitlement.”
From pencil sharpeners to a $539m lawsuit: how big tech weaponised design patents – article by Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. “It was designed to make sharpening a pencil feel as thrilling as flying a jet. A gleaming chrome teardrop, tapered to a point and adorned with a bullet-like handle, ... [the] go-faster pencil sharpener never made it into production, deemed one chrome-plated, deco-styled step too far. The design does survive in the form of its patent, filed in 1933 and now republished as one of 1,000 such protected inventions, brought together in a new book.... The recent boom in design patents has mostly come from the electronics sphere, spurred on by a landmark supreme court case between Apple and Samsung, which began in 2011 and was finally settled in 2018, when Apple was awarded $539m in damages. The case revolved around Apple claiming Samsung had copied numerous elements of the iPhone, from its ‘bounce-back scrolling’ interface to the ’rectangular product shape with all four corners uniformly rounded’. ... The unprecedented ruling unleashed an arms race, with big tech companies amassing vast arsenals of pre-emptive patents, conceived as assets to be sold or traded, as well as providing an insurance policy against any potential litigation. If someone sues you for infringement, you are more likely to be able to countersue for one of the thousands of other patents in your possession.”
Why are Britons complaining more about what’s on TV? – article by Jim Waterson in The Guardian. “Every time a woman of colour appears on a BBC television channel, an employee in the corporation’s complaints department prepares to write a polite response to a disgruntled viewer. ‘It’s always the same words – “rude, opinionated etc” – but it’s very clear why people are complaining,’ said one individual who works in the sprawling department. They said that every appearance of the BBC Breakfast host Naga Munchetty now prompts formal complaints from viewers. ‘The amount of people who genuinely are just complaining about the presence of a person of colour on screen and, to a lesser extent, a woman, is incredible.’ If you want to understand the culture wars that rile some segments of modern Britain, you could do worse than study the feedback received by the BBC’s complaints department or its commercial equivalent at the media regulator Ofcom.”
Britain’s royal family is an accident waiting to happen. Prince Charles should dismantle it – article by SImon Jenkins in The Guardian. “Back in 1969, the Queen gave in to pressure from her husband, Prince Philip, and her dynamic Australian press secretary, William Heseltine, to modernise the monarchy. The decision was made to validate hereditary monarchy as a ‘royal family’, and present it as such to the world. Cameras were invited into royal residences, to attend royal barbecues and see the teenage royals as ‘ordinary’. ... No other European royal family took Britain’s monarchical route to A-list celebrity. This path was not only unnecessary, it was high-risk. ... A racing certainty was that as each heavily publicised child stepped forward into adulthood, the searchlights would come on and the public glare descend. ... the policy was to harness the potency of celebrity to enhance the constitutional status of monarchy. The policy was a bad mistake.... Prince Charles is known to want a ‘slimmed down’ royal family. That is insufficient. He should dispense with it altogether. He should dismantle it as an official entity of state. He should guard his son and heir and tell the rest that, after a painful transition, they are on their own. They can do anything they like. The British constitution has no role for this latter-day Stuart retinue of courtiers. If monarchy is to survive at all, as an unobjectionable symbol of statehood, it should concentrate all its efforts on one goal: being boring.”
