DEM not gonna CON dis NATION: Rolling UK politics in the short-lived Cleggeron era

This man is a total cock. Surely he's too busy leaving his wife for Ayaan Hirsi Ali to be of any value to the rest of us.

Don't see anything wrong with a narrative approach in one sense - certainly I came out of school with a sense only of isolated events and would have liked at least some sort of sense of beginning to end (even in a Kings and Queens of England sense).

Of course the big problem is which narrative you choose, and I think, like most, that the 'rise of the West' is going to be an increasingly unhelpful structure with which to interpret not just the past but also the events of today, if that Whiggish approach was ever really justified other than as the justification for power. It can lead naturally to the clash of civilisations rubbish. Niall Ferguson isn't quite as unnuanced as that article makes out I think, but still, 'the syllabus was "bound to be Eurocentric" because the world was Eurocentric' = nagl.

Tapas and smorgasbord history! om nom.

ha, i really dislike niall ferguson but am a total stan for whiggish, narrative history. fwiw so is eric hobsbawm: marxist history is basically whiggish really.

think history teaching already *is* eurocentric, as are the questioners when they talk about the "fates of the oppressed". kids shd study the euro-indian relaish.

I agree that narratives are the way to go but I would haaaaaate to be stuck with Ferguson's. I'm quite startled at how compartmentalized the curriculum here has become, maybe because my school's history/social studies department was amazing: we had mandatory US history, European history, government/civics, USSR (with Imperial Russian history too, obviously), world religions in historical context, a further governance course called Political Behaviour... took 'em all, only discovering 20 years later that most US high schools including my own no longer teach civics as a mandatory thing (which leaves a lot of dumbass, entitled Americans not actually knowing how the Constitution etc. works). There were also history modules in science and cinema. I cannot bear thinking what's sprung up in the place of this amazing curriculum (although I checked and students there can now do an IB).

xpost to hm

Completely agree. I mean, there are obviously all sorts of other factors here, that make me wonder how workable this Gove/Ferguson hand waving is - how much time there is (do you really want a syllabus where a lot is studied at the expense of learning in depth about other subjects, + historiography and stuff). + You're naturally going to want to study things that apply to the country in which you live, allows you to interpret your context (although, as with any colonial country, this gives an awful lot of scope for far-flung histories - Boxer rebellion anyone? wd've been great). And how much will this really change things anyway? Far as I know, Romans, Victorians and Second World War - imperial stuff - are still the meat of the syllabus.

I know what you mean about narrative history (I still love HAL Fisher's History of Europe, wch Norman Davies is v sniffy about), although I'm not convinced by the Marxist approach (which I absolutely agree is whiggish - as is Marxism generally), and find all concepts of ideological progression in history to have a whiff of the millennarian about it.

But my main gripe would be this West is the Best thing. Don't think it's helpful or meaningful, or even fruitful as an ideological approach (or even true as far as it goes). It's kinda complacent about democracy imo as well (something that is naturall victorious and comes about when common sense prevails - I tend to see it as something that needs defending). + it's not a useful armoury with which to approach all the thorny ethnological issues, and shifting about in a globalised economic system.

Very Conservative approach. I thought David Cameron didn't want to interfere with teachers?

iirc we basically learn about totalitarianism now

honestly though: gcse was all 20th century history for me. there *must* have been *some* other stuff but i can't remember it.

and we didn't have any equivalent to civics/citizenship classes... or one explaining that we aren't citizens lol

xpost

ha -- boxer rebellion is exact;y what they shd teach kids. opium wars too.

Right, didn't realise that about the heavily 20th bias to the syllabus. xpost to suzy, that does sound great, and as history mayne says, no idea of civic role at all in this country, hardly surprising.

We had this dreadful thing called personal, social and religious education, which was none of the above. Hope that's gone (this is about 20 years ago now).

It's hard to say that totalitariansim isn't a vital part of any modern history education. My solution: children must learn ALL history, across ALL classes, have a sense of narrative and an in-depth understanding of important eras, at home and abroad and have a sense of interpretative and historiographical methods and collating primary source material.

It's hard to say that totalitariansim isn't a vital part of any modern history education. My solution: children must learn ALL history, across ALL classes, have a sense of narrative and an in-depth understanding of important eras, at home and abroad and have a sense of interpretative and historiographical methods and collating primary source material.

EXACKLY

despite my internet display name, feel kind of short-changed by school on this score

n e way

on other matters

Yeah the idea that the Tories would want any Cabinet minister to resign over a scandal two weeks into a new government is ridic.

― The Men Who Stare At Goatse (Matt DC), Sunday, May 30, 2010 10:24 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

well, ok. but there are tories and tories. it's surely interesting that the telegraph decided to do this. and it's interesting that laws's replacement isn't exactly of the same calibre, and is already getting heat from the selfsame paper:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/7787010/Opinion-divided-over-Danny-Alexanders-move-to-Treasury.html

Pretty nauseating hearing a succession of "Coalition" figures queueing up to waffle on about Laws' intergrity, when if a guy on the dole in Hartlepool or somewhere had been lying about cohabiting and screwed 40K out of the DSS he'd be denounced, by the same people, as a scrounging scumbag.

I heard a bunch of this on the radio yesterday, as well as pro-coalition ppl kind of inferring that it was because he is gay. It made me furiously angry, the fucker was blatantly on the make! How hard is it to "get" this.

xposts Governments really have no business going on about rights and responsibilities if the education system isn't equipped to teach people what those are.

HM, if you're a history education stan, google Lee Smith and Wes Bodin - I had no idea how renowned these guys were until long after I left school, but, basically, WHOA:

By far the most influential program now in use is that developed by Lee Smith and Wes Bodin of St. Louis Park, Minnesota. Originating in a suburban system near Minneapolis, their course on world religion grew out of a controversy about school holidays. The local community, approximately one-third Lutheran, one-third Jewish and one-third Roman Catholic, was sharply divided. The high school elective course that Smith and Bodin developed has significantly improved interfaith relations. Its carefully crafted materials (filmstrips, tapes and texts) are used nationwide -- indeed, throughout the English-speaking world. Funded by three successive grants from the U.S. Department of Education, the project was able to develop class-tested materials and to enlist the support of recognized historians of religion.

One term of the four terms in ninth-grader Civics was taken up with driver's education (end of year, kids in class were 15) and I am sure that if we'd done UK history specifically the class would have been called Empire. Bodin's USSR class was most people's favourite because of a unit called Czar Power, in which students were given roles and a kid who happened to be great-nephew of Trotsky was made Czar for LOLs.

We covered European history from 1870 until the beginning of the cold war in pretty good depth, with half of our time was covering Irish politics from the Act of Union onwards.

Would love to see a curriculum created by Hobsbawm, btw

Me too - in America as well. I now know that we were unusual in that our version of the Pledge of Allegiance was the Godless, original one. If we had any fundie retards objecting to this at the time, I'm sure teachers just said 'don't be crazy, we display this and Jewish parents go mad if you pass out disposable stuff with God written on it.'

The article (about Gove and Ferguson) backs away from it's sub-heading pretty quickly.
Niall Ferguson asked to rewrite school syllabus by Tories
Rapidly becomes - ...help us design a more exciting and engaging history curriculum? And from what the article says he's not actually been officially asked yet?

I've nothing vs. a narrative approach, although tbh my kids seem to getting just that. They have detours into, shock horror, non-European history but to call it a smorgasbord or tapas is going too far (and made it sound pretty good - was it an attempt at a eurosceptic joke? I have no doubt that other parents/teachers experience will differ.

BBC Breakfast this morning "Eric Pickles is throwing his weight behind a scheme to reward householders who recycle".

Kudos to whoever got that one through.

was it said with the appropriate smirk?

on history, I don't remember doing anything in high school apart from the Industrial Revolution, and maybe something about Roman central heating. Then, when it came to doing GCSEs, there was a timetable clash, probably with IT, and that was the end of what could've been a distinguished career as a historian.

I don't think narrative is dispensible but I don't think it's the be all and end all of History and on the whole I think it's over-valued.

I am channeling a family member who spends all this time on this, but here we go: I think the difficulty with putting too much stress on a narrative approach is it can bump out attention to historiography and how to do history, because of 1. limited time for history in the curriculum and 2. hard to understand how competing historical accounts are produced if the stress is on a single narrative.

The thing with the "interpreting sources" stuff is that it's really valuable but really hard to actually *teach* - when I tutor students for History exams I sometimes up giving them a list of specific things to look for but short of that kind of basically dishonest approach it seems very "you've got it or you don't", whereas I imagine if you do narrative for 20 lessons you end up knowing a lot of narrative.

I can see value in teaching under 16s predominantly narrative, it's more the place of narrative in historical writing I'm thinking about. But sure critical skills are probably harder to teach than Facts, but in a general pre-Uni education mightn't critical skills have more long-term use for most students than a set of general knowledge answers?

nah, coz narrative isn't just facts, it's ideas too

It's often ideas asserted as facts without acknowledgment of their ideological contestedness?

As I say, I'm not anti-narrative - I enjoy reading narrative - but I think it disproportionately dominates History, especially popular History, and that domination distorts our sense of the past.

Cameron's judgement on the economy "it's even worse than we thought". So far, so predictable. And yet, "Let me be clear. Our debts are not as bad as Greece. Our underlying economic position is much stronger than Greece." Uhhhhhhh, that's not quite what you were saying before election. So prognosis: things are worse AND better than we said! Trebles all round!

Cameron is talking shit on the deficit, according to - get this - the Telegraph's Economics Editor.

You expected a former PR boy not to talk shit whenever his mouth happened to open?

I know we're not supposed to get all Class War in these shiny 21st Century coalition times, but when Cameron says the cuts will affect everybody, cd somebody in lol Opposition not ask him how much they'll be affecting wealthy families who use private education and healthcare?

it's hard to ask that question when they all are kind of weather families who use private education and healthcare?

Noodle, since we've been told to not get all Class War by people with millions of pounds, I kind of ignored the request.

xpost

imo you could use that shit but still be politically opposed to it, but the cut and thrust of parliamentary democracy is based on the ad hominem iirc.

xpost to Gravel - yes, I think it is hard to teach, but those who do would agree with Noodle that it's entirely feasible and worth the effort. The Schools History Project people have probably got a lot to say about this: http://www.schoolshistoryproject.org.uk/

I think my region is expected to lose 1200-1800 council jobs (Scotland, of course, and in an area where major industries have shut down and destroyed the workforce recently), so I doubt here is a level of class was I wouldn't support.

Amazing age of austerity stuff:

Local government minister, Grant Shapps, said it should be possible to quickly and easily check the food hygiene record of your favourite 'chippy' or pizza delivery service from your mobile phone without even leaving the sofa.

"This is data which is already collected, but by making it freely available the so called 'wisdom of crowds' could drive hygiene standards much higher," said Shapps.

^^^must be a Yelper already. God, what a tool.

How many times have you heard 'age of austerity' in the media to-day? Four times to-day so far and it's only lunchtime.

Err, the Scores On The Doors website has been going for at least a year, and already makes its data available to the public and has a "mobile" version. How is this a marvellous achievement for the new government again?

Has someone looked at twitter, found a cluster of beards saying the govt should share data in open formats, and gone "right, obviously we're not going to put any money into that, what do we already have that we can fob them off with?"

I'm now getting almost as irritated by people who claim we don't need to cut anything and it's all a right-wing conspiracy/bond market blackmail as I am with the "we must cut NOW otherwise the markets will grind us into dust" brigade. Some sensible debate would be appreciated.

Does anyone have any idea how much the UK Gov get from part-owning (what are now becoming) profitable banks and how much it will get from selling them off again? Don't they have something like £70b worth of banks to sell off at some point?

Won't that alone get the deficit down below its pre-omg-we-need-to-cut-the-deficit levels?

I don't know (ok cba looking up and hope someone here knows) the ins-and-outs of the rescue package but it's frequently described as costing £800bn, which is more than the deficit in total. How much of that £800bn rescue came from govt borrowing? What, if anything, is in place to recover the prop-up money from the banks?

iirc Alastair Darling claimed at the time that the deal would make a profit for govt in the longer term while protecting the banks and savings in the short term. (In other words "omg these bank shares are stupid cheap, let's have them!")

Surely none of those banks are paying a dividend yet? That would be mentalism.

Theoretically yes, selling off the bank stakes should make a huge dent in the deficit assuming that the banks are stable enough to be sold off, which is a big if. The govt *should* my all accounts make a profit on all that, but it depends on who's buying and when.

The deficit before the bank bailout wasn't any greater than it was in 1997, so this is being falsely framed as a debate on govt profligacy. That said, the debt itself is still much much bigger, and the recession + lower tax revenues + means the govt has to borrow more money to keep even the same amount of spending up, regardless of bailout money.

It's the interest on that debt that's the killer, especially if it continues to eat up a chunk of all tax revenues in the future that could be spent on, well, anything else. The problem is the way the Tories are going about it (ie welfare bills seem to be the first thing under the axe and that could be catastrophic for the people that rely on them, even if the cuts don't plunge the country back into recession).

Also for all the "lol 'the markets' all they do is fuck us over" they're also a big part of the reason the govt has been able to borrow so much money in the first place.

Coalition government defeated for first time!

OK, so it's just a technicality but still well done Your Lordships.

I'm pretty sure that the money spent on buying stakes in banks isn't counted in the deficit figures because the government assumes it will get that money back.

I expect it is counted, because there's no guarantee they'll get it back, and even if we assume they'll get it back we have no idea how much money they'll get for it.

Also for all the "lol 'the markets' all they do is fuck us over" they're also a big part of the reason the govt has been able to borrow so much money in the first place.

Yeah, see, there are people who might argue this isn't an entirely great thing.

Also: "we must cut" vs "hai guyz vote for your fave service in Britain's Got Cutz" plus I dunno some mad notion that maybe the lowest paid sector of society shouldn't maybe be the peeps to pay for fuck-ups inflicted by unaffected bankscum plus hey maybe the IMF is a tool of capitalolist hegemony and fuck them with a rusty barge pole or something

agreed that we're all post-history now tho

akshully recognise that I'm out of step with economic realism here now tho so Good Luck UK and i'm gonna give up on giving a fuck any more. pretty sure all's for the best and I will go live in russia

Also: "we must cut" vs "hai guyz vote for your fave service in Britain's Got Cutz" plus I dunno some mad notion that maybe the lowest paid sector of society shouldn't maybe be the peeps to pay for fuck-ups inflicted by unaffected bankscum

Yeah this is the core of it really. Unfortunately there's almost no one in mainstream politics that can articulate this effectively, given the dog of a position that Labour maneuvered itself into.

akshully recognise that I'm out of step with economic realism here now tho so Good Luck UK and i'm gonna give up on giving a fuck any more. pretty sure all's for the best and I will go live in russia

― every time i pull a j/k off the shelf (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 9 June 2010 09:31

this probably explains why this thread has a fraction of the traffic of the us politics thread, even while this country's in a far busier phase of the political cycle

maybe not the bit about going to russia, but the sentiment

even while this country's in a far busier phase of the political cycle

It isn't though. They haven't started screwing the poor just yet.