Harry

The remarkable Anthony Seldon has an article in today’s Independent about the place of private schools in Britain’s education system. As Head of Wellington College and perhaps Britain’s most prominent private school headmaster, its no surprise to see him defending these bastions of privilege thus the following might surprise people who don’t know him:

the only vision the independent sector has today remains entrenched in the 20th century – dedicated to excellence and carrying on as we are in splendid isolation, detached from the mainstream national education system, thereby perpetuating the apartheid which has so dogged education and national life in Britain since the Second World War.

It is not right for any longer for our schools to cream off the best pupils, the best teachers, the best facilities, the best results and the best university places. If you throw in the 166 remaining grammar schools, which are predominantly middle class and private schools in all but name, the stranglehold is almost total.

Independent schools defend themselves by pointing to the numbers of bursaries they offer to those of lesser means, and many children from non-privileged backgrounds are indeed given a leg-up. But they also pluck children out of their social milieu as well as taking them away from their state schools, depriving those schools of their best academics, musicians, sportsmen and women and future stars.

Its my dad’s birthday today — Seldon’s present is better than mine. Read the whole thing.

Update: Report on the new Charity Commission guidelines here.

Weather-permitting I’ll be giving a talk called “Putting Educational Equality in its Place” at the University of Toronto on Monday. IT looks as if it is a public talk, and I’ll even be using a powerpoint. More details here (Henry will be delighted to notice that the first name on the pdf of the text is his, not mine) I’m looking forward to it, partly because I’ll get to see frequent CT commenter Tom Hurka, who, rather cruelly, pointed out that I was going to be missing the chance to see Dave Cousins live by about 2 months. Well, its 28 years since I last saw him live, so a few more won’t make much difference. Still, some free Dave Cousins here.

Radio 4 has given us an embarrassment of riches recently, and due to the remarkable snowfalls here I’ve had ample time to listen (while shovelling our over-long driveway). Still online, and well worth a listen are Simon Bovey’s dark mystery, The Iceman and Robin Brooks’s witty tribute to M.R. James, A Warning to the Furious. Best of all is a repeat of Marcy Kahan’s 20 Cigarettes, which was a 2007 Tinniswood award nominee, and deservedly so. (Kahan is the writer of the brilliant Noel Coward comedy/mysteries, and also wrote the screenplay for the excellent, but apparently not-yet-on-DVD Antonia and Jane). Find an hour for 20 Cigarettes if you can.

Via Chris Brooke comes the sad news that Andrew Glyn has died, apparently from a brain tumour that was diagnosed only recently, and was inoperable. The only obit I can find so far is at Socialist Unity blog. I realise that a good number of our readers must have known him, so I’m sorry to be the one who brings the news. I didn’t know him, but our circles intersected a good bit, and mutual friends and acquaintances always spoke very warmly of him. So I always imagined I would meet, and enjoy chatting with, him someday.

It has always been a bit difficult for me to take Peter Firth seriously. Its not his fault. Tess of the dUrbevilles was a set book for my A-level English syllabus, and serendipitously Polanski’s Tess was released while we were studying it. I went with a friend who was, in fact, dating a teacher at the time (but would occasionally get me to go out with her as cover, which I was happy to do). Unfortunately, as Angel Clare appeared on screen she shouted out “Ooh, look, its Scooper from the Double Deckers”, to my mortification, but the delight of the rest of the audience (several of whom said “Oh, yeah, look, so it is”). (Recognise him?) The phrase comes into my head pretty much every time he comes on screen in MI-5/Spooks, which is inconvenient at best, beating out even the wierdness of seeing him teamed up with Jenny Agutter again after so many years.

Fortunately, you can’t see him on the radio. All last week he appeared in a series of wonderful and moving radio plays about the life of Jesus, based on Luke’s gospel (Firth plays Peter). I nearly skipped them, thinking “well, I know the story, what’s the point of listening again”. What a mistake that would have been: brilliant writing, acting, and producing, with an all-star cast (Firth, in particular, is excellent). I was rivetted. If you have five 45 minute breaks in the next few days, this is the only way to use them. The first play will go offline Monday, the second on Tuesday, and so forth, so you’d better get listening. Better than anything the TV writers who are on strike were producing when they weren’t. And if you’re lucky nobody will shout “Oh, listen, its Scooper from the Double Deckers”.

Most people in the political theory/philosophy community probably know that G. A. Cohen is retiring (that’s a verb, not an adjective, as anyone who knows him would know) from the post of Chichele Professorship of Social and Political Theory. A rather brilliantly prosaic job advertisement is on the Vacancies page at the Department of Politics and International Relations (deadline Jan 7th). There’s a grander job ad here. The holders of the position since it was established in 1944 (a very odd time to be establishing Chairs, I’d have thought) have been G.D.H. Cole, Isaiah Berlin, John Plamenatz, Charles Taylor (not the famous one) and G.A. Cohen (who has held it for quite a bit longer than any of his pedecessors). Very curious who will follow.

Apparently England’s new manager has promised to learn English. I was going to do a clever post on this, but then the excellently if improbably named Jimmy from Glasgow (scroll down to third comment) took the words out of my English-speaking mouth:

I don’t see the problem here with Cappello not speaking fluent English. I can’t think of many English football players who can speak fluent English either. They usually speak in general cliches peppered with generous helpings of ‘you know’, sometimes with the ‘what I mean’ added on. E.g. “They put us under a lot of pressure, you know, but Gav-o did well, you know, because sometimes in football you have to score goals, you know and the first 90 minutes of the match are the most important because, you know, I’m a firm believer that if the other side scores first you have to score twice to win, you know.”

A terrific paper by Matthew Smith, Michael McPherson and Sandy Baum called “Financial Independence and Age: Distributive Justice in the Case of Adult Education” (pdf) is at the Equality Exchange. Currently, American colleges consider students over the age of 24 to be financially independent of their parents for financial aid purposes, and the paper argues that this rule has regressive consequences, showing that it unfairly favours students in advantaged circumstances. They argue for replacing the ‘age condition” with a ‘minimum income’ condition. It’s a great model of applied philosophy, demonstrating complete command of the (labyrinthine) institutional details in the US context (well, with these authors anything less would be disappointing) and making a compelling normative case for a modest, but valuable, reform.

People regularly ask me advice on what to do when they visit London, so I thought, since a bunch of you are probably visiting in the coming year, that I’d put my advice up for general consumption. It falls into two categories; places to visit, and general “being a tourist” advice. It all assumes that people have limited budgets. If you don’t have a limited budget, stay at the Savoy, ignore most of what follows, and really enjoy yourself. Please feel free to disagree (anyone willing to defend MT?) and to add your own advice.

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Engels takes the first wicket, Felix Gilman mops up.

This link will work for a very short time, I presume, but it’s curious to note that Samuel Freeman’s book on Rawls is currently ranked #9 in Amazon’s bestsellers list for titles in Archaeology. Why?

I admit that I wasn’t certain that Samuel Freeman’s book on Rawls would be terrific. Two reasons. First, it is very long, and I imagined that a good introductory text would be less than 462 pages long (514 incl gloassry and notes). Second, although I’m a huge admirer of Freeman as a philosopher, all his work that I’d previously read is aimed squarely at scholars; he works on exceedingly difficult questions, makes complicated arguments, and although the pay off is always, in my experience, more than worth the effort, I never expect undergraduates, for example, to be able to make that effort.

But Rawls (UK) is a triumph. A brilliantly careful, utterly transparent, account of Rawls’s thought and an admirable presentation of the state of the debates around Rawls’s work. The amazon reviewer who says “this is the one” gets it right. Forcing students to read Rawls is the right thing to do; but I shall never again force them to read him without providing Freeman’s text as indispensable help.

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Ed Balls makes the following, bizarre comment, in yesterday’s interview with Andrew Marr:

Also make sure that every child is being taught a foreign language in primary school.

What is he thinking?

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Talking of music, can it really be 4 years since we asked what the most annoying Christmas record is? Well, since then, youtube has enabled us to play them for you. So, instead of most annoying, this year I’d like your favourites. Here are the rules. The recording must be recognisably related to Christmas, must be non-traditional in some hard to define way, and while jokes are entirely welcome, they must be funny. One more rule: no wry, ironic, or mean references to Cliff.

Let me kick off with two secular songs, and two religious. First Jona Lewie’s Stop the Cavalry. Despite the wierd anachronisms and slightly unrespectable ott anti-war message, I love it simply for the refrain. When I used not to be home for Christmas, I would sing the whole thing to myself over and over, knowing neither the name of the song nor the singer. I know our British readers will be appalled by my complete lack of sophistication, but I also love Merry Christmas Everybody (even if you hate it, as I’m sure you do, it’s worth watching the first few seconds just to see Kid Jensen and John Peel not enjoying themselves). My wife won’t allow it to be played in the house.

From the ridiculous to the sublime (and religious). I once read that In the Bleak Midwinter is Britain’s favourite carol, which surprised me; sung here by Bert Jansch, with slightly different words than I remember. And finally, for Lindsey in France and Val in Madison, here is Def Leppard (yes, really) with what I find the most moving Christian pop song of the lot, Lindisfarne’s Winter Song. (“for Lindsey and Val” — I should have been Michael Aspel, or perhaps the other Cliff). And after you’ve listened, whatever you think of the religious message, take up the secular message, get out your credit card, go to Oxfam and donate a little bit more than you think you can afford.