Across the pond

Reading the papers, listening to the news, and watching it on the tele, these days is depressing enough to drive a ‘normal’ into clinical depression. Capitalism, as we know it, is collapsing. The architects of our ruin are grabbing their inflated pensions and bonuses, and fleeing tax-wise to their offshore havens, so they can enjoy the fruits of their failure. Leaving the ‘workers’, who include many middle-class professionals, at risk of their jobs, and with fears that they can no longer afford their mortgages.

Gordon Brown, who convinced said bankers that New Labour was on their side, has remembered that he was a socialist and is now in Washington trying to persuade Obama to help him save the world and to regulate those bankers and other tycoons, who he has been cosying up to since 1997.

Many other people in the Labour party, and many Brit conservatives and lib dems, think he ought to be staying home, and dealing with baddest boy of the banking bunch, Fred the Shed, who is insisting, in a three page letter to GB, that he is totally legally entitled to collect his £12 million pound pension, although he has admitted that he was the boss when the Royal Bank of Scotland collapsed.

What Brown should be doing is inviting Goodwin for a cup of tea at Number Ten, and telling him, that whatever the legal position, he would be well-advised to do the decent thing and give up his £12 million. And take an honest job at aged 50, helping future generations not to make the same mistakes. I am sure the London Business School would be happy to make him a Prof, who would tell students the story of his life, and help them to understand, how he, and chums in City of the nineties got it so terribly wrong.

But all is not doom and gloom in the world of 2009.

This afternoon I went to, what I thought was a play, at the King Edward VI school in Totnes. In fact it turned out to be a fully-fledged modern opera, compressed into the lesson period of one hour, and put on by the Welsh National Opera. It was an opera about teenagers, put on for an audience of teenagers. I was undoubtedly the oldest in the audience, so much so that I thought that most of the teachers were nearer in age to my grand-children than to my children.

But the most important thing is that the kids were rapt. Not shuffling in their seats, or throwing paper aeroplanes at each other. But engaged with the action., moved by the music, and empathising with the characters.

Contrast my day, when a whole afternoon was spent marching us up to the Civic Hall in Wolverhampton to hear Beethoven’s Fifth, and hear from the likes of Sir Malcolm Sargeant, explain to us, in his best Blue Peter style, why Beethoven was good for us.

So at least parts of British education have moved on since the 1940s, whereas as we all now know the bankers and the rest of the financial community have been making the same mistakes made by their equivalents in the 1920s, which led to the Great Crash of 1929 and ensuing ten-year-long world depression.

So despite all the testing and vocational emphasis of the Blair/Brown years, British teachers have been doing, not Education, Education, Education.

But simply Education, delivered according to the old values, but addressed to an audience which is vastly different.

This blog as already long, so I will end here. And write the review later.