Category Archives: Politics

Gove in “has right idea” shocker

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As much as it pains me to say it, Michael The Chinless Wonder™ Gove, has the right idea in replacing the piss-weak ICT curriculum in schools with a programme in Computer Science.

Children are naturally inquisitive. They do not need to be taught how to use Excel, since any child with an ounce of sense, after being told to use the “help” feature embedded into the application, can figure it out for themselves. (If not, to be quite frank, they should qualify as ‘special needs.’)

Teaching applications is a colossal waste of kilowatt-hours, and of man-hours. Children will be far better served by this new programme in computational science. Teaching them about the workings of a computer is a far better solution: it will give students an in-depth understanding of how and why their computer works in a certain way. This, quite aside from preparing a new generation of digital pioneers, will make it easier for them to overcome problems in everyday computer usage.

Computer science is, essentially, problem solving with bells on. True, finding an army of CompSci-qualified teachers in the next nine months will be a big task (and I doubt it will be possible, possibly not even within a year and a half.) This will be especially true when many teachers are incapable of teaching basic applications work. However, I genuinely believe that, approached from the right angle, CompSci is an easy subject.

For instance, in both my primary schools (the latter of which was judged to be ‘failing’ shortly before my departure) we were taught a crude form of turtle programming with LOGO. This included using a Bigtrak, and a sort-of in-class role playing adventure game played on PCs in year 6, in which we had to (for instance) guide a boat to its destination by entering instructions and trying to avoid hitting the banks.

This was totally absent in the “ICT” curriculum in my secondary school. It was dull, “project”-based bollocks in which we were told to “make a website and some matching pamphlets,” for instance. Regularly, our teacher (let’s call her “Mrs T.”) would advise us to “really show off” in Dreamweaver, by making text bright blue on a shocking pink background and using the (deprecated) <blink> tag to make it flash. She also once opened a JPEG image in Dreamweaver’s text editor, and declared the resulting gibberish to be ‘hex codes.’

The shocking thing was that Mrs T. was qualified as an ICT teacher, while my (wonderful) primary school teachers, who inspired me to continue with computers to this day, were not specialised in any particular subject at all. I will maintain, therefore, that anyone who is willing to give the subject their attention will find CompSci easy to learn, and easy to teach.

As someone who dislikes this Conservative-led government, I am pleasantly surprised to say that this will be, if anything, a positive legacy of the Coalition: our next generation will be a generation of problem-solvers, as opposed a generation of accountants, secretaries and bullshitters. If the government is to knock a hole in higher education, this move represents a shocking return to common sense—and a new-found respect, in this government, for our heritage as a knowledge economy.

A few words on the #n30 strikes

Aside: A few words on the #n30 strikes

The work of the public sector is critically important, and the Government, with its programme of hastened mauls to public spending, is pissing on the good work these people do every day.

I therefore support the motives of people on strike today in principle. I particularly support my own lecturers, who are having their pensions ransacked whilst wealth-creation numbnuts sugar-daddies rake in millions in the City. I also support, and would protect with my life, their right to strike.

However, I shall not be joining anyone on the picket line today. I shall be crossing it later (albeit having returned from a food shopping trip.) Critically, I shall not be supporting this set of strikes in principle.

Of course, I shall defend the UCU’s right to strike, but that doesn’t mean I don’t consider it pointless. I am no political expert, and I’m not gifted with visions of the future, but at a guess, I would expect the outcomes of today’s strikes to be:

  • Minor inconvenience to users of the schools, libraries et cetera which have closed;
  • A far-from-trivial cost to the economy from the lost man-hours that result from the strikes;
  • A nominal increase in global temperature due to increased amounts hot air being pumped into the atmosphere;
  • An increased resentment towards unions and strikers.

The last time direct action genuinely worked on such a large scale was in the 1974 miners’ strikes. Ten years later, the same striking miners were soundly thrashed into submission by the Iron Dominatrix herself, Mrs Thatcher.

How can the UCU, Unison and the TUC genuinely expect this set of strikes to achieve anything?

I get junk mail: STRIKE!!!!111!!!

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Today I got two charming little bits of paper in the post.

Here are some points from a liberal-minded, broadly socialist student opposed to the speed and scale of the cuts, who, I imagine, falls into the target demographic for this literature:

  1. Direct action does not change anything. In recent history, there are probably four noticeable examples of protests, strikes and riots that have actually directly affected Government policy: the Suffragette movement (indirectly); the civil rights movement; the coal miners’ strikes; and the Poll Tax riots. All of these, with the exception of the coal miners’ strikes (the second of which resulted in a sound victory for Mrs Thatcher) were in cases of genuine social injustice: the disenfranchisement of women, as if a penis were somehow necessary to perform the task of voting; the treatment of coloured people as second-class citizens; and the policy that a person should be required to pay a Community Charge to their council simply for existing within the borough’s bounds. These were genuine social injustices—not a moderate increase in an automatically-deducted student loan repayment.
  2. The blue business card-sized thing advises me to show my anger at the fact it’s going to become more expensive to study by… not studying. Sod off. In an ideal world, yes, university education would be free. This is, however, not an ideal world. The Government will still be making a loss on student loans. Also, striking will not change one word of government policy.
  3. Here is the logo of the Socialist Worker’s Party, responsible for the Education Activist Network who distributed this landfill:

    Now, this may be a personal irk, but why is the symbol of the Socialist Worker’s Party a fist? Fighting the power? All this does is reinforce the perception (be it right or wrong) that the SWP consists of young, angry, middle-class students playing anarchist. (Oh, and a closed fist can’t put an X into a ballot box, and hence can’t change government policy.)

There’s a reason I don’t believe in the direct action trumpeted by the SWP and others. There is already a method of direct action built into our political system. It’s called voting.

In the 2010 general election, 10.7 million people voted for the Conservative Party. That’s two million more than those who voted Labour, and four million more than those who voted Lib Dem. First-past-the-post has mangled the results a fair bit, but the fact remains that the Conservatives won the popular vote. Therefore, we are stuck with their policy (albeit regulated by the Liberal Democrats) until the next election.

If you think the Tories’ policies are shit, vote for another party at the next election. That’s all that’s needed. No fist-logos, no revolutions, no re-creation of the final scene from The Birds outside St. Paul’s. Educate other people about why they shouldn’t vote Conservative. If you think Labour and the Lib Dems are also shit, then provide a credible alternative that you can vote for.

The SWP, and its ilk, are primarily manufacturers of paper recycling and idealistic hot air. Hot air does not make the world go round, and hot air does not change government policy. Votes in the ballot box do.