“ Words ought to be a little wild, for they
are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking. ” John Maynard Keynes
Confessions of a Serial Prover
A space for anything and everything that seems worth sharing and which
I don't plan to write a bigger piece on. The odd (!) rant. Invitations
to think “outside the box” on all sorts of matters. “Weather
reports” on the energies of the moment. Insights provided by the
latest proving. Updated as and when I've got
anything to say and the time to say it. (I may also update existing posts
from time to time if they seem to need expansion and clarification.)
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This page changes every month. If you've
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see it on the page, the search engine listing is most likely out of date.
Try the archives and/or the site search (left).
" All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward internal dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. " H P Lovecraft
If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, you will only see
one color. Pink. If you stare at the black + in the center, the moving dot turns
to green. Now, concentrate on the black + in the center of the picture. After
a short period of time, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will
only see a green dot rotating. The image is a 12-frame gif file
of a circle of pink dots with a single one missing in rotation from each frame.
There are no green dots. There are no frames with any more than one pink dot
missing.
With this one, focus on the black dot in the centre and then move your head in towards the screen and away again. No changing frames in this illusion. It's a static image.
March 20 2008 | |
"The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men." Bill Beattie
"The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality." H L Mencken
"It is a thousand times better to have common sense without education than to have education without common sense." Robert Green Ingersoll
March 10 2008
Nuts and bolts
As Armando Iannucci so eloquently states in The
Observer the Sunday before
last, this is about "the stupidest, cack-brained, sherbert-headed nonsense more
likely to do more damage to children than a pile of witches".
Notwithstanding the slur on indigenous healing traditions of all stripes,
which we'll let pass for the moment, he goes on to say
It's a bizarre new initiative from the Department for Education and Skills
called the Early Years Foundation Stage and, like most devastatingly life-worsening
initiatives, it's been unwrapping itself slowly and unannounced, with few headlines,
no votes and under the guise of safe-sounding phrases that make it appear designed
for the greater good.
The EYFS is a series of targets anyone in the care of children as young as
three has to aim for. They cover aspects of child education as diverse as emotional
development and language skills and one would think the ambition behind them
was a good one - to make sure that there's a solid, standardised starting point
for all children's education. Except that because the targets are mandatory,
it means someone other than the teachers or the school or the child-minder is
telling you what to do with each child. Which is fine if the person setting the
targets is sensible and a disaster if he or she is not.
Given that the targets at the moment include the obligation to make sure each three-year-old 'understands that s/he can expect others to treat her or his needs, views, cultures and beliefs with respect' and that the child 'interacts with others, negotiating plans and taking turns in conversation' (all things which it's probably taken me more than 40 years to perfect) and given also that any child-minder actually has to fill in a form assessing this, one suspects that the target-setter might live in an ideal rather than a real world.
So let me get this straight. The good people in the Department for Children
Schools and Families (sic), the DFES that was, are so concerned that their own
needs, views, cultures and beliefs are respected they intend to make it compulsory that
our children have them rammed down their throats before they've even reached
an age where they're capable of understanding the concepts. Good one!
If we hadn't come to expect this depressing lack of joined-up thinking from
government, this would be so utterly crass as to defy belief, and takes "do
as I say, not as I do" to new heights of insanity. Children, before they reach
adulthood (by which time the education system has knocked all such sensible notions
out of them), are programmed to learn by example. They do this unfailingly, no
matter what you tell them.
So if our children are increasingly disrespectful and intolerant of each other,
it's plain there's only one way they could possibly have learned this. Mandatory
drilling of 3 year-olds will simply make the problem worse, not better.
As one respondent to the Observer article wrote
DCFS has an educational philosophy called EYFS, which requires every child
in England to journey to London between Birth and 5 years. The EYFS requires
each child to be assessed at 5 years to see how far s/he falls short of London.
There are also detailed markers along the way, which can alert their Carers to
a possible future failure to reach London by 5 years old. DCFS maintain that
EYFS is flexible (you can go to London by any means of transport you like) and
play-based (your play can be used to keep children on track for London), and
not a curriculum (though any destination other than London is not possible) Any
carer who has a different educational philosophy, such as one which sees it in
a child's best interest to spend the period from Birth to 5 years old in the
countryside by the sea and go to London when they are 6/7 years old, arriving
with inner self-confidence and emotional well-being, is acting illegally and
Ofsted has the power to close their school/nursery/playgroup/private home. No
parent has the right to choose a different journey or timescale from that prescribed
by the DCFS for their child, except by keeping them at home from birth to 6/7
years old as there will be no providers allowed to cater to them. No other country
in Europe has such a compulsory journey, nor such an assessment and testing regime
to enforce it. Those countries which are free to arrive in London as late as
6/7 years old, are the most happy and secure in UNICEF's 2007 study of 50+ countries.
The UK's children scored as the least happy of all. I wonder why?
There is a petition for UK residents to sign here asking the government to
reduce the compulsory status of the requirements to professional guidelines.
OpenDemocracy maintains a page cataloguing our loss of rights
and civil liberties since 1997 here.
March 10 2008 | |
DISCLAIMER
Thanks to the current insanity prevailing in the blogosphere revolving around
homeopathy in this country, it's become necessary to insult your intelligence
by explicitly drawing your attention to the obvious fact that any views or advice
in this weblog are, unless stated otherwise, the opinions of the author alone
and should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice or treatment. If you
choose to take anything from here that might be construed as advice, you do so
entirely under your own recognisance and responsibility.
smeddum.net – Blog: Confessions of a Serial
Prover. Weblog on homeopathy, health and related
subjects by homeopathic practitioner Wendy Howard
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