MEST 4: Research & Production: December 2009

Guardian

Wasted: Why Education Isn't Educating by Frank Furedi
Frank Furedi launches an excoriating attack on our education system and its failings, says Rafael Behr

Sunday 15 November 2009

1) ‘Children are taught to mistrust teachers; teachers are taught to mistrust themselves.’ Photograph by Christopher Thomond
A few years ago, I visited a school in Leicester that inspectors had declared to be outstanding in the provision of classes in "citizenship". This was a subject only recently invented by government in response to nagging national anxiety over "social cohesion". No one seemed to have any idea how, pedagogically speaking, to make citizens. Except, apparently, in the Midlands.

I was told how the citizenship "agenda" was woven through the rest of the curriculum – sequins of political liberalism sewn on to the fabric of other subjects. One history teacher explained to me how she had met her citizenship obligations by placing al-Qaida terrorism in the context of CIA support for Afghan mujahideen during the cold war. A 14-year-old pupil proved he had internalised this long view by explaining that, while the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks were bad, they were also, in a sense, "payback". A statutory duty to inculcate civic mindedness had somehow equipped British teenagers with a pseudo-jihadi notion of terrorist murder as historical quid pro quo.

That Leicester classroom came back to me when reading Wasted, Frank Furedi's onslaught on schooling policy. Furedi devotes several pages to the ill-conceived citizenship agenda, but as just one example of the way our classrooms have become inadvertent laboratories in queasy liberal social engineering. Teachers are also supposed to instil such useful attributes as environmental consciousness, emotional candour and respect for racial and cultural diversity. Some of these goals are made explicit in the curriculum for children as young as two.

Furedi does not necessarily object to the values implied by those requirements (although he is oddly dyspeptic about green issues). His core argument is that the aspiration to fashion children's souls according to political criteria is not really education at all; at least, not as he thinks that word should be understood.

No one could reasonably claim that education has suffered from a lack of political attention in Britain. It was famously Tony Blair's top three priorities before the 1997 election. There has been some new law or initiative every year since: literacy hour, "Every Child Matters", academy schools, Early Years Foundation Stage, the "Gifted and Talented" programme, personalised learning etc. This process, Furedi argues, signals a politicisation of education that makes schools responsible for the correction of social ills. As a result, their proper function – as transmitters of the accrued wisdom of humanity from one generation to the next – is squeezed out.

The curriculum, in Furedi's analysis, has come to be seen by policymakers as an easy tool for the correction of wider cultural and behavioural problems. Obesity epidemic? Teach children about healthy eating. Too much teenage pregnancy? More sex education. By extension, teachers have become mediators in a process of socialisation – policing "values" rather than directing thoughts; a secular political clergy with the education secretary as pope. Pedagogy, meanwhile, has come to look more like therapy, with motivational and psychological techniques coming to the fore, along with a fashionable horror of allowing children to get bored. Everything must be "relevant".
That imperative has, according to Furedi, a pernicious consequence. If schools must always adapt their material to contemporary circumstances, education becomes simply a mechanism for coping with modernity. This is manifest in a shift in emphasis from traditional subjects to a more functional, utilitarian agenda: equipping children with "skills to learn", responding to globalisation and obligatory use of IT in the classroom.

But if education is about negotiated surrender to economic change, the corpus of knowledge possessed by teachers is, by dint of their age, obsolete. Whatever adults know is old-fashioned, prejudiced and a barrier to learning instead of a precious commodity to be passed on.
That observation is central to Furedi's thesis: the current fashion for "child-led" and "personalised" learning is part of a misguided philosophy that is corroding intergenerational relations. Children are taught to mistrust teachers; teachers are taught to mistrust themselves. No one has confidence to extol or exert the simple authority of adulthood and scholastic knowledge. Discipline breaks down, leading to moral panic and even greater pressure on schools to fix the "broken society".

Furedi build his case methodically and argues it carefully, if not elegantly. He supports it with quotes (shrewdly selected, sometimes repeated) from politicians and educationalists. Frustratingly, he tends to give credence to anecdote and sensational news stories that support his account, but not to data – exam results for example – that might nuance the picture. That makes it hard to know if the problem he describes is a tendency on the margins of education or a crisis intrinsic to it.

But the analysis rings true, as does Furedi's defence of a subject-based curriculum and a philosophy of education that recognises the duty of one generation to impart a canon of knowledge to the next. Forget the management jargon and digital neophilia. Let children be inspired by teachers' faith in the great past achievements of humanity.

Furedi admits it is a small "c" conservative view, but he rejects the charge that it is elitist. If, in the past, only the elite had such an education, the policy challenge is how to extend it to all, not how to make it seem worthless by denouncing it as irrelevant in order to teach something easier instead. None of that solves the problem of how to turn children into citizens. But then, perhaps, if they have a good enough education, they can work it out for themselves

Hoodies strike fear in British cinema
If you want to scare a British moviegoer, you don't make a film about zombies – you cast a kid in flammable sportswear and a hoodie
Thursday 5 November 2009 21.35 GMT

2) Fear on the streets … Michael Caine in Harry Brown. Photograph: Rex Features/Everett
Who's afraid of the big bad hoodie? Enough of us, certainly, that the smart money in British cinema is going on those films that prey on our fear of urban youths and show that fear back to us. These days, the scariest Britflick villain isn't a flesh-eating zombie, or an East End Mr Big with a sawn-off shooter and a tattooed sidekick. It is a teenage boy with a penchant for flammable casualwear.

What separates hoodies from the youth cults of previous moral panics – the teddy boys, the mods and rockers, the punks, the ravers have all had their day at the cinema – is that they don't have the pop-cultural weight of the other subcultures, whose members bonded through music, art and customised fashion. Instead, they're defined by their class (perceived as being bottom of the heap) and their social standing (their relationship to society is always seen as being oppositional). Hoodies aren't "kids" or "youngsters" or even "rebels" – in fact, recent research by Women in Journalism on regional and national newspaper reporting of hoodies shows that the word is most commonly interchanged with (in order of popularity) "yob", "thug", "lout" and "scum".

Greg Philo, research director of Glasgow University Media Group and professor of sociology at the university, traces our attitudes to hoodies back to the middle classes' long-held fear of those who might undermine their security. That is what they see in what Philo describes as "a longterm excluded class, simply not needed, who often take control of their communities through aggression or running their alternative economy, based on things like drug-dealing or protection rackets".

"If you go to these places, it's very grim," says Philo. "The culture of violence is real. But for the British media, it's simple – bad upbringing or just evil children. Their accounts of what happens are very partial and distorted, which pushes people towards much more rightwing positions. There's no proper social debate about what we can do about it. Obviously, not all young people in hoods are dangerous – most aren't – but the ones who are can be very dangerous, and writing about them sells papers because people are innately attracted to what's scary. That's how we survive as a species – our body and brain is attuned to focus on what is likely to kill us, because we're traditionally hunters and hunted."

Once the images of the feral hoodie was implanted in the public imagination, it was a short journey to script and then to screen – it's no surprise that hoodies are increasingly populating British horrors and thrillers, generating a presence so malevolent and chilling that there are often hints of the supernatural or the subhuman about their form.
Daniel Barber's debut feature film, the much touted Harry Brown, is the latest and possibly the grisliest movie to exploit our fear of the young, but it follows a steady stream of British terror-thrillers including Eden Lake, The Disappeared and Summer Scars, as well as a seedier breed of ultraviolent modern nasties such as Outlaw and The Great Ecstasy of Robert Carmichael. Soon we'll get Philip Ridley's Heartless, a visceral supernatural horror in which the howling, snarling hoodies who terrorise the estate turn out to be genuine demons dealing not in crack cocaine but in diabolical Faustian bargains. Harry Brown's hoodies, however, are still very much human, and like most cinema hoodies, the ones who circle the eponymous vigilante hero (played by Michael Caine) hunt in packs and move in unison, commandeering the gloomy underpasses and stairwells of the concrete and steel London estate they inhabit. To Barber, the threat they present is very real and was, he believes, the motivating factor for Caine to make the film.

"I'm scared of these kids in gangs," says Barber. "They have no respect for any other part of society. It's all about me, me, me. Life is becoming cheaper and cheaper in this country." And from a director's point of view, hoodies are gold dust. "We're afraid of what we don't understand or know, and there's so much about these kids we just don't understand," he says. "That's a good starting point for any film baddie."

When we first see the bad guys in Harry Brown, they are an amorphous mob of hooded creatures cast in shadow, smoking crack in an under-lit tunnel. They shoot at a young mother pushing a buggy in a park, then batter an old man to death. They show all the hallmarks of the stereotypical youth of "Broken Britain" – the tracksuits, guns and dead eyes – and Barber's overhead framing and murky lighting of them as they swarm over a vandalised car or close in on a passing couple invite comparison with those other cinema villains who gather strength in the dark – vampires and zombies.

Txting: the gr8 db8 by David Crystal
A linguist finds text messaging nothing to fear, discovers Tom Lamont
Sunday 11 October 2009

3) In his study of text messaging culture, linguist David Crystal asks us to picture the investors' meeting when the mobile phone was first unveiled. We've created a method of calling anybody, any time, anywhere, the inventors might have said. Phone home from the middle of a field or hear the voice of a loved one atop Everest! One more thing: we want to put in a facility that allows people to thumb a message of no more than 160 characters, in case they want to communicate that way instead.

"In a logical world, text messaging should not have survived," writes Crystal and he is right. It is ugly, clunky and retrogressive. Yet the "short message service", or SMS, thrived during the mobile telecommunications boom and 250 billion SMS texts had been sent worldwide by 2001.
Such rapid and widespread adoption, inevitably, pinged panic radars, especially given the phenomenon's popularity with teenagers. Were all these abbreviations, initialisations and smiley faces fatally corrupting the English language? Might people forget how to communicate without a keypad?

These are the essentials of the book's "gr8 db8". Crystal's answers are convincing, particularly when he quotes clever "text message poetry" as proof that relentless word-shortening and a strict character count needn't limit linguistic craft. Besides, he suggests, Britain's moral panic brigade should be thankful that trends here haven't developed as they have in Japan, where teenagers enjoy a ritual called keitai dating, sitting around a table in near-silence to flirt by SMS. Or Italy, where texting vernacular has become so robotic it just about realises Orwell's newspeak, the plus sign replacing the superlative ending "-issimo", so that a heartfelt "I miss you so much", or "mi manchi tantissimo", is rendered "mmt+".

It all adds up to a jolly meditation, helped by the enthusiasm of a linguist revelling in newly coined lingo. Oddly, Crystal apologises for being unable to gather much of his own statistical data; it is hard, he says, to get participants to hand over such private information. But this is still a fun trot through little-mapped territory.

Independent

The world map of cannabis
Study demonstrates the extraordinary scale of the drug's global popularity
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Friday, 16 October 2009

1) It is 40 years since cannabis unleashed the "flower power" revolution of the 1960s, encouraging a generation in Europe and the US to "make love not war". Young people at the time hoped their legacy would be world peace. Instead, it has turned out to be a world of fuzzy dope-heads.

In the intervening decades, the drug whose intoxicating effects have been known for 4,000 years has been increasingly adopted by adolescents and young adults across the globe.
Today, an estimated one in 25 adults of working age – 166 million people around the world – has used cannabis to get high, either in ignorance or defiance of its damaging effects on health. Now, the extraordinary popularity of the drug is posing a significant public health challenge, doctors say.

Writing in The Lancet, Wayne Hall of the University of Queensland and Louisa Degenhardt of the University of New South Wales, Australia, say cannabis slows reaction times and increases the risk of accidents, causes bronchitis, interferes with learning, memory and education and, most seriously, may double the risk of schizophrenia. Yet these effects have failed to dent its popularity.

"Since cannabis use was first reported over 40 years ago by US college students, its recreational or non-medical use has spread globally, first to high- income countries, and recently to low-income and middle-income countries," they say.

Citing figures from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime for 2006, they say cannabis use is highest in the US, Australia and New Zealand (where more than 8 per cent of the population indulge), followed by Europe. But because Asia and Africa have bigger populations, they also have the highest proportion of the world's cannabis users, accounting for almost a third (31 per cent) and a quarter (25 per cent) respectively.

Use of cannabis among young people rose strongly during the 1960s and 1970s, peaking in the US in 1979. There was then a long decline until it increased again in the 1990s, before levelling off once more since 2000. In Britain, Australia and New Zealand, cannabis use has been falling for several years, but it is thought to be rising in Latin America and several countries in Africa.
The typical user smokes their first joint in their mid-teens, with use peaking in the mid-20s. The habit then declines steeply as young people move into jobs and discover they have to get up in the morning. Marriage and babies accelerate the decline. About one in 10 of those who ever smoke a joint become regular daily users, with 20 to 30 per cent using the drug weekly. Regular users are also more likely to use other illicit drugs, including heroin and cocaine, lending support to the theory that "soft" drugs act as a "gateway" to hard drugs. But the authors admit this supposed link "remains a subject of considerable debate".

However, they add that the ill effects of cannabis are modest when compared with the damage done by alcohol, tobacco and other illicit drugs. In Australia, it accounted for just 0.2 per cent of the total burden of disease.

Future to focus on rehabilitation for torture brothers
Boys likely to serve sentence in secure children's home
By Jonathan Brown
Saturday, 5 September 2009

DAVID SANDISON / THE INDEPENDENT
The Youth Justice Board will monitor the boys' progress

2) Support from psychologists and specialist social workers. Twenty-five hours a week of education. A life away from the alcohol, cannabis and violent films that characterised their troubled early years.

Yesterday as the two young boys in the Doncaster torture case awoke to the certain prospect of a lengthy sentence for their barbaric crimes, experts said the next few years of their life had to be as much about rehabilitation as punishment. They will get help from myriad agencies and professionals who will take responsibility for the future of the brothers, aged 11 and 12, to hopefully stop them from reoffending.
Today the boys' childhood home, a council house in an anonymous suburb of Doncaster, is boarded up. Their mother was moved by the local authority for her own protection when the first allegations were levelled against the second and third youngest of her seven sons.

Neighbours believe the mother and her five other sons are living in a caravan on the Yorkshire coast. Their father, who lived seven miles away in Edlington where the two boys – already on the child protection register – were placed with foster parents when they committed their crimes, has not been seen since.

Future contact between parents and offspring, both of which will be protected by lifelong anonymity in the media, will depend on the judgement of social workers compiling pre-sentence reports. They must decide whether visits will help the boys come to terms with their offending and speed their passage back into society.

The brothers are being held at separate secure children's homes and are likely to stay within these highly specialised environments for the duration of their sentence due to be handed down at Sheffield Crown Court in October.

Although a maximum sentence of life imprisonment will be available to the court – and despite the sense of public outrage following their admission of grievous bodily harm with intent – it seems unlikely the judge will impose more than the eight years served by their most notorious predecessors.

Jamie Bulger's killers Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were released from their secure children's home accommodation in 2001 following sweeping criticism of their trial and treatment by the European Court of Justice. The Bulger case led to reforms in British law that made it easier for children as young as 10 to be found guilty of serious crimes by removing the need to prove they were aware of the consequences of their criminal actions. But it also made increased the level of protection for the offenders.

Following sentence, the Doncaster youngsters' time in the so-called secure estate will be under the control of the Youth Justice Board (YJB). Younger more vulnerable offenders are normally sent – space permitting – to one of 15 secure children's homes run by local authority social services departments. Success rates for preventing re-offending among people who enter the system at a very young age are high, experts believe.

Barnardo's assistant director of policy Pam Hibbert explained: "When you have young children who commit these serious offences they tend to have a background of neglect and abuse. But it is very clear if you look at the history of the other notorious cases they actually tend not to go on to commit further offences on their release."

There are currently 165 young people serving sentences in secure children's homes out of a total of 2,500 offenders under the age of 18 in prison. Most are sent to young offenders institutions which are modelled more closely on adult prisons. Although the option of transfer at the age of 15 will be available, it is likely the brothers will remain in children's homes where they will benefit from 25 hours a week of education, the support of a key worker, psychologists and the possibility of a phased return back into the community towards the end of their sentence.
Peter Minchin, head of placement at the YJB, said: "The idea is to make a positive impact on young people, particularly the very youngest ones. These institutions are set up to work specifically with young people who have holistic needs not just offending ones. Our responsibility is to make sure they go into the most appropriate placement that meets these needs."
Inmates benefit from a high staff ratio, with the smallest establishment having five beds and the largest, at Aycliffe in Co Durham where the child killer Mary Bell was held, having 36. As in the Venables-Thompson case the media will be forbidden from identifying where the brothers are being held.

The YJB sets out to maintain family links where possible and to locate young people close to their communities where appropriate. It will meet the costs of a weekly visit for up to two adults and their children and pay for childminders. The board also pays a contribution to overnight accommodation and meals where necessary.

But experts yesterday pointed out that the brothers' case remained rare and that many staff would not have experience in dealing with such serious offenders. Jackie Worrall, director of policy and public affairs at the offender's charity Nacro said: "It will be a number of years before they are back in the community and they will be not be children any more – teenagers or possibly adults. It is so unusual for children of this age to be involved in such an offence so we are left speculating what issues they are going to face."

Sorted for textured alcoholic fruit gel-carb
'Alcopop' drinks should not make us fret about teenage boozing, but about marketing taking over the good night out
SUZANNE MOORE
Wednesday, 4 September 1996

3) You may have noticed there are some vile alcoholic drinks about. They look and taste disgusting and are consumed by strangely dressed types. Such beverages are sold primarily by the notion that they get you out of your head. They are named things like Headcracker, Sneck Lifter, Owd Growler, Original Sheepdip and GBH. Do they encourage alcoholism? Quite possibly, but as men drink them no one seems to mind. Do they make getting smashed seem cool and grown-up? Yes, if beards and beer bellies signify maturity.

No, what we like to get worked up about is another kind of alcohol altogether. The "alcopops", the soft options that disguise the hard drinking that young people, especially young women, get up to. It is all a cynical marketing campaign to turn the nation's youth into lushes. And here's another one. A tangerine hair gel disguised as something you want to knock back while you are dancing around your handbag. Or while you're desperately trying to pull those dancing around their handbags. Or you've given up all hope and want something for bladdered people rather than beautiful people. In other words - the words of the marketing reptiles - it should appeal to "the dance-floor element." A refreshing little "textured alcoholic fruit gel-carb" from Carlsberg-Tetley delicately called Thickhead. It's interesting in a Spacedust sort of way and is hyped as an essential feature of a fun night out. I think the essential feature of a fun night is being sick in bins at bus-stops, but I'm not in PR.

Actually no one could drink masses of this without gagging so the comparison with real ale holds up. Thickhead has done away with those dubious macho anxieties about the authenticity of booze. These new drinks are fizzy, fluorescent, infantile, saccharin-sweet and do a brilliant job of disguising the nasty taste of alcohol. While grown-ups may bore on about good wine,the sad truth is most of us would down a bottle of vinegar if it said Fleurie on the label and some hyperactive bint on TV said it reminded her of Chanel No 5. Indeed the much-maligned alcopops are unpretentious little numbers which just zap you with their artificiality. Just what you'd expect from such post-modern little potions.

They also come pre-packaged with a little post-modern moral panic about drinking and young people. Never mind the research which says that, as always, if teenagers want to get drunk, which they do, they spend their money on that which will get them drunk fastest - beer and cider. This new panic is imbued with the kind of memory lapses that one associates with progressive drinking. There have always been things like alcopops, but they were called shandy, lager-and-lime, cider-and-black.

It is not just lad culture in both its male and female incarnations that encourages excess. The gulf between new lad and old oaf was never as big and bold and bad as everybody liked to pretend. If it was, how come you could buy Oliver Reed T-shirts at the Great British Beer Festival?
The earnest worry about children being lured into "offies" to buy alcopops because honestly they just didn't realise that these drinks had alcohol in them is premised on denial - denial about the culture our kids grow up in, where every soft drink is sold as if it were a hallucinogen, in which imagery, graphic design, video have been under the influence of rave culture for a good few years now; denial about statistics that show that legal and illegal drugs are simply part of everyday experience for the majority of young people. This is not the same as saying that all young people take drugs and drink, but some of them do some of the time. Just like the rest of us. Some lives will be wrecked because of it and some will be enhanced because of it. Among 11-to-15-year-olds, 17 per cent, drink regularly and the majority do not have much disposable income. They are not the "repertoire drinkers" of club 18-30.

The logical conclusion of niche marketing is that new consumer groups have to be aggressively sought out. Drug dealers do it relatively openly; the drinks industry has taken to spiking lemonade in order to achieve its ends. Which is the more hypocritical?

What is most objectionable about these new products is that they no longer exist outside of the marketing loop. The line between product and packaging is blurred. The package, the trends, the inane definitions are conceived and a product invented to fit the bill. Portfolio products for portfolio times matching our taste for portfolio politics.

So don't worry your hungover heads about little girls drinking puke-flavoured Flavours for Ravers but ask yourself what happens when beliefs are replaced by "conceptual currents", when a good night out depends on a selection of chemicals "specifically styled to match the radically revised cultural concerns of pre-millennial youth culture". It's enough to make you yearn for the good old days when Jarvis's melancholy little refrain "Sorted for Es and whizz" sounded just like the real thing.

Ageism Debate
Selina stokes a diversity debate that needs addressing
Monday 8 September 2008

It will come as a surprise to few but a delight to many that Selina Scott is suing Five over ageism in its refusal to hire her for a maternity cover role and choice of younger presenters instead. It is a delight not because Five is worse than anyone else in this respect, but because it stokes a debate which urgently needs to be taken more seriously. Casual sexism, ageism and racism are the collective dirty secret of the vast majority of media institutions, and they represent as much of an industrial challenge as they do a moral one.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission's Report on Sex and Power, published last week, drew a depressing picture for women in the workplace. In general the progression of women at the highest level in the workplace is pitiful and the media are no exception: only 13.6% of national newspaper editors (including the Herald and Western Mail) are women; only 10% of media FTSE's 350 companies have women at the helm; and at the BBC, which has often been held as an exemplar of diversity, women make up less than 30% of most senior management positions. It puts into context Jeremy Paxman's deranged rant about the white male in television. Ethnic minority representation is even worse.
A couple of weeks ago Pat Younge, former BBC head of sports programmes and planning who left to work for Discovery in the US, caused a stir at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International TV Festival by saying that diversity targets should be like financial targets - you don't hit them, you get fired. I have to say that as board champion for diversity at Guardian News and Media I would currently be firing myself and most of the board for some missed targets. But Younge is right - because diversity targets are not just a feelgood add-on, they are vital to the health of any media business. The temptation to hire in one's own image for most managers is as irresistible as it is subliminal - which is why there are a lot of opinionated women working in digital management at the Guardian, and why we all need targets to remind us to look beyond the mirror.
On screen, any number of unconventional-looking ageing blokes (Jeremy Clarkson, Jonathan Ross, Chris Moyles, Alan Sugar, Adrian Chiles, Jeremy Paxman, Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan) are paid at a top rate for the talent they possess beyond their appearance. For women it is an altogether different story - appearance and age are clearly factors in choosing female presenters in a way that they aren't for men.
The media should be deeply concerned about this un-diversity - not because it represents moral turpitude on our part, but because it represents bloody awful business sense. What is happening to the UK population at the moment? It is ethnically diversifying, and it is ageing. It is also the case that it is, as of the 2001 Census, marginally more female than it is male. And we live longer - so older women, and non-white potential audiences are on the rise. In London, the major urban conurbation and key market for so many media brands, the population is around 37% ethnically diverse, yet this is nowhere near reflected in the management structures of media companies. Or indeed in their on-screen or in-paper representation.
How though, can you hope to address audiences for which you have no instinctive feel, and towards which you show casual discrimination? We are all in danger of becoming irrelevant to the changing demographics of our target audience at a time when holding any kind of audience is key to survival. If white men are so good at solving business problems - and given that they represent well over 80% of FTSE 100 directors we can speculate that this is a skill they must possess in measure - then I'm surprised they haven't grasped this one already.

MEST 4: Research & Production

Wednesday 16 December 2009

Research on my critical investigation 2

Thursday 10 December 2009

Research on my critical investigation

Wednesday 2 December 2009

Articles - Moral panics on teenagers.

Followers

Blog Archive

About Me