Meandering analysis
I have just read a remarkably silly article in a popular news website. The apparently well educated author has decided her seven year old has to study towards job opportunities, and has reacted to AI by forcing the poor child to study coding (which AIs can do) instead of drama (which they cannot). The reasoning [ ]
I got a spam phone call from a tuition seller, but it is a worrying symptom of the rise of tuition in the UK. He asked whether I had children at school, to which I truthfully, albeit misleadingly, answered no because I do not choose to send my daughter to school. I do not know [ ]
People often say maths is useless in real life. it is boring, we do not use it, etc. We should teach useful skills to kids. I am writing this in response to a social media comment that kids should be taught about finance instead of things like Pythagoras s theorem. One interesting thing is that it [ ]
I recently visited the website of a amateur theatre company, and any web designer would say it is awful. Anyone with the slightest aesthetic sense will say it is ugly. As a user of the site, it is perfectly good and better than most sites a designer would like. Here is the site. http://www.caramba-theatre.co.uk/ Just [ ]
This passage from (Pseudo-)Xenophon s Constitution of the Athenians, the last sentence in particular, could have been written today, and it seems we cannot run things better now than then. It is these poor people, this common folk, this riff-raff, whose prosperity, combined with the growth of their numbers, enhances the democracy. Whereas, a shifting of [ ]
I have lived in two countries, and worked in another, on different continents, and been obviously ethnic minority in all three. I will start with my own birth certificate. It states my race. It states my parents races. This was regarded as normal and necessary until just three years ago. I have heard it defended [ ]
Schools have been deteriorating for many years, and lockdown hastened the crisis this caused but the deterioration dates back many years, and the underlying cause is the stubborn focus on a Victorian model of education and the addiction to metrics. The solution lies in empowering pupils and parents. The problem is that schools are [ ]
We have had many climate change agreements that have not changed anything. The greenwashing was inevitable and to be expected. This graph from Our World in Data says it all: there has been no change in trajectory. Europe and North America have reduced their emissions, but that has been more than offset by increases in [ ]
My daughters were both home educated for many years (the younger one still is) and I want to share some things I have learned along the way with parents who find themselves temporarily home schooling because of lockdown. This is all written from a British viewpoint (e.g. it assumes under 16s will be aiming to [ ]
The public view (shared by media and politicians) of home education often seems to be that it simultaneously means parents assiduously coaching children to get firsts in maths when they are 14 while simultaneously neglecting their education so they never get any qualifications. The problem is that they expect home education to exist in a [ ]