Empire Windrush Day, Harvest Home and others

All people in England know that our public holidays are a mess. Half of them fall within about six weeks in Spring, there are large gaps in the calendar with no public holidays at all, and none specifically celebrate England and its people. I therefore propose a new set of public holidays, spread a little more evenly through the year, and all designed to celebrate more than just a day off for the banks. First, the holidays we should keep:

▸    Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. These bracket what is now the most important holiday of the year - the one week we all celebrate together. It is impossible to imagine life without this long break in the middle of the cold, dark and wet English winter.

▸    Good Friday and Easter Monday. Let’s keep these as well. They are a bit of a problem because Easter wanders about in a way that is incomprehensible even to the devoutest believers. In this century, Good Friday has varied between the 25th of March and the 18th of April. Still, this is a Christian country with an established church, and we should celebrate its most important holidays.

We should abolish the early Spring break, late Spring break and late August bank holidays, and replace them by these new holidays:

▸    Empire Windrush Day (22 June). This is named after the passenger liner which bought 492 Jamaicans to England in 1948. England has been a destination for immigrants for centuries, and the English are a mix of Gaels, Germans, Scandinavians, French, West Indians, South Asians and a lot more besides. We could choose any day to celebrate the mixing of people that has created the English, but the Empire Windrush is special because many West Indians see it as their Mayflower. So we should respect that.

▸    Harvest Home (Monday after second Sunday in September). This is traditional country celebration of the harvest, which has been adopted by the Church of England as the Harvest Festival and by North Americans as their thanksgiving holidays. The usual time for harvest home is near the Autumn equinox, but I have chosen a slightly earlier date to space out the public holidays better. Harvest Home should celebrate the productiveness of this land and the people who work in it.

▸    Remembrance Day (11 November). This day is widely celebrated in many countries in the World, but not in Britain. This is an insult to the memories of the 994,000 British people who died in the First World war, the 450,000 who died in the Second World War, and the many thousands who have died in other conflicts. We should celebrate their lives quietly, and think also of those who serve in the armed forces.

▸    Shakespeare Day and St George’s Day (23 April). This falls in Spring and in some years even coincides with Easter, but there is nothing I can do about that. This day should celebrate England as a nation which has made a massive contribution to civilisation, science, the arts, and good government. Shakespeare was our greatest poet and playwright: a man who used our language like no other. We should therefore celebrate him every year, as well as the creativity we share.

Two new ways of making money

My search for financial security continues. So here are two new entrepreneurial ideas to be submitted to the Dragon’s Den of the Internet. Cash incentives to be sent to me in a plain brown envelope please.

No. 1. Smokers Airlines. My idea for this came when I heard some years ago that some friends of my parents were no longer taking their usual annual holiday in Tenerife because the airlines had banned smoking. Their need for nicotine was so great, that they were only able to bear the shortest of flights. Since then of course, smokers have been restricted even more, being driven out of restaurants and bars, public buildings and workplaces. This is driven by more than just concerns about health and ‘passive smoking’: all non-smokers can now take part in the joy of persecution, allied to the joy of feeling superior to those who apparently can not control their chemical desires. What better idea, therefore, than to enable this persecuted minority to gather together when they travel. Smokers Airlines will be staffed entirely by chain smokers and will only accept bookings from people who can produce a doctor’s certificate proving they are a smoker. Free cigarettes will be handed out when people board, and nicotine patches when they leave the plane and have to endure the smokeless terminal building. All our planes will of course have voluminous ash trays and plentiful supplies of fire extinguishers.

No. 2. Crash helmets for pedestrians. This idea came to me when I went last weekend to Holland to visit my son. The streets, pavements and squares were full of cyclists. All railways stations and public buildings had acres of cycle racks. Every piece of railing or fence had several bikes padlocked to it. Among all the thousands of cyclists, not one wore a crash helmet. This was not because the Dutch are neglectful of safety, but because cyclists are the dominant traffic life form in the Netherlands. There is no need, as there is in England, to signify vulnerability by wearing bright clothing or a shiny crash helmet. Indeed, pedestrians in the Netherlands are the most endangered traffic life form - my wife was run over twice by cyclists while innocently walking through Amsterdam and Leiden.

Selling the idea of crash helmets for pedestrians will of course require a substantial marketing budget. This will involve media scares about attractive young people (preferably female) who have suffered brain injury as a result of falling over while walking. The danger of tripping up and falling down would be emphasised. Papers would note that this is most likely to happen to young people and vulnerable elderly people, and suggest that crash helmets should be made compulsory for pedestrians in these categories (as a first step). An MP (supported generously by the crash helmet trade association) would introduce a private member’s bill before Parliament. The crash helmets will of course all be made in China.

If these ideas don’t make money, I can always go back to my original idea of complimentary therapy.

Compliments not complements

Antoni Cumella: the greatest Cumella of all

I visited Barcelona for the first time in the early 1970s, just after Franco died. This seemed to be a city on the edge of revolution. The streets were patrolled by menacing squads of the Policia Armada, dressed in well-cut gray suits and lemon yellow cravats. Each night, some would station themselves on the Ramblas, while the surrounding population jeered at them by voice and car horn. They could do so without fear because the old murderous order established by Franco was disappearing with astonishing speed, and the Policia Armada consequently no longer signalled fear. Street signs in Castillian Spanish were being replaced by Catalan. Calles were becoming Carrers. Around every corner in the Gothic Quarter there were headquarters of various short-lived Marxist and anarchist parties, each with a large red flag over the doorway. There were vast left-wing marches down the Passeig de Gracìa. The cinemas were full of pornographic films, mainly variations on Emanuelle. The whole city exuded excitement - Catalonia and Spain had awoke from their long coma, and were joining the world.

I was aware that my family had come from this city, but it never occurred to me to seek out a relative. And so I missed meeting the greatest person to bear my family name: the ceramicist Antoni Cumella. He was born in 1913 in the town of Granollers near Barcelona, and died in 1985. Antoni’s stepfather was a potter, and so he followed in the family business. But he was greatly influenced by Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion in the 1929 Barcelona Exposition, and began making ceramics as art. He was a medical officer with the Republican Army in the Civil War, and was imprisoned at its end. After his release in 1940, he exhibited his work internationally, achieving great success in Germany, where he had a joint exhibition with Marc Chagall. Antoni Cumella is famous in his home town, where the local high school (IES) is named after him.

The last time I went to Barcelona, I made up somewhat for my earlier ignorance. I visited the Royal Palace Museum, which has a museum of ceramic art and half a room is dedicated to the work of Antoni Cumella. His work demonstrates wonderful shape and colour, ranging from objects that are of recognisable form, to abstract ceramic sculpture. The pictures show some examples from the wide range of distinctive artforms that he created.

This raises the question for me of why sculpture is regarded by art critics as a kind of high art, while ceramics is seen as a craft. Both require great skill, and the ability to work in shapes and forms, but ceramic art adds colour. 

After I returned from Barcelona, I learnt (from Google) that Antoni Cumella’s work is continued by his sons, still in Granollers, at Ceràmica Cumella. So that’s the destination for my next trip.

More details are at this website:

www.antonicumella.org

The rise of X Factor politics

Once we watched television to see the best singers, actors, dancers. Now we watch incompetent amateurs get a little more competent week-by-week at singing, dancing, or other skills. These are amusingly called ‘reality shows’, but they are as staged and as fake as almost all television. Reality shows come in three distinct formats. The first and least-popular are the talent shows. These involve amateurs or semi-professional performers, cooks, and dancers who have a genuine talent and are assessed in a friendly but critical manner by a panel of experts in that field. In programmes like Britain’s Best Dish, or So You Think You Can Dance?, contestants clearly have a lifetime commitment to their skill, and usually state a wish to become professionals.

The second format is the celebrity learner show. The subjects here are people from entertainment, sport or some other field in which fame can accrue, who lack previous experience in dancing, cooking or whatever, but who learn week-by-week under the guidance of an expert. In Strictly Come Dancing (called Dancing with the Stars in many countries), the winners usually demonstrate a real advance in skill, but never seek a career in their newly-acquired expertise. Their fame may, however, be enhanced.

The third format is the most popular, and is the Cinderella show. These superficially resemble the talent show, but have a quite different appeal. A wide range of people from humble backgrounds are recruited, most with minimal talent. These are weeded out in some amusing but rather cruel episodes, and a select group go forward to become temporary celebrities. In The X Factor, this involves performing before a vast audience, surrounded by dancers, lasers and so on. The appeal lies not in the special talent of the performers, but in their ordinariness. They are cinderellas, transformed suddenly from the sculleries of life to become princes and princesses. The audience can empathise and imagine themselves as stars for a day. The ‘judges’ in these programme understand the rules of the Cinderella shows very well. They are usually not critical of the (lack of) talent of the performers - instead they judge them according to their personal qualities and their ability to withstand the pressure of fame. The mass media too report in intimate detail the personal lives of these new celebrities-for-a-day, but have little to say about how well they sing one pop song or another.

Reality programmes have become so dominant in popular culture that they can affect how the public sees the wider world, including politics. Politics, like other occupations, has its career paths. In most countries, this involves either a demonstrated skill in winning election through a sequence of ever more important elective offices, or some form of apprenticeship in national policy-making. Political skills are hard-won, and success usually requires great perseverance. But reality programmes promote the amateur: since complete amateurs can apparently become singers, cooks, and dancers on television shows, they can surely also become national politicians. Indeed, their very ignorance and lack of experience can be promoted as a sign of their integrity and their ability to represent the ordinary citizen. In the USA, the Tea Party movement extols this kind of X Factor politician, and Sarah Palin is the archetype Cinderella figure. Her opponents fail to understand that criticising her for her aggressive ignorance and lack of experience increases her apparent ordinariness and hence her appeal to voters. Critics, like judges in reality programmes, are booed and barracked by the audience if they dare to make a less than complimentary remark about the Cinderella performer in front of them.

In the UK, there is dissatisfaction but as yet no X Factor politics. Instead, we have gone in the opposite direction, turning to the old elites. The Prime Minister is an Old Etonian, and the cabinet is dominated by Oxbridge graduates who have been privately-educated. The Labour Party, which once provided a route of advancement for people from more humble backgrounds, is now dominated by a group of academic and media families from North London. These elites may be drawn from a narrow range of society, but at least they transmit an impression of confidence and competence. But if the economy and public services deteriorate, voters might decide that it is time for Cinderella to replace the prince.

What old men wear

Each generation lives in its own world of customs and tastes, carrying on into old age the habits and styles of dress they learnt in their youth. On the few occasions I go to the supermarket in the morning, it is full of the very elderly - people in their 80s and 90s trundling around behind their trolleys. What I notice most are the strange clothes worn by the old men: shapeless fawn jackets, often worn with fawn trousers and shiny black shoes. Some wear hats, flat caps being the most popular. This style of dress is not worn by any other age cohort, and certainly not by those in their 60s, who are usually seen in jeans and trainers and who rarely wear hats. 

This shows the peril of talking about ‘the elderly’ as if they are a single undifferentiated group. It is more true that there is a major cultural divide between those in their 60s and those in their 80s, resulting from the great postwar changes in British society. A man aged 85 would have been born in 1925, would have served in the armed forces in the Second World War (or at least in some war-related occupation), would have been raised at a time when what was once called ‘leisure wear’ was unknown, listened to swing music and crooners when an adolescent (teenagers had not yet been invented), and thought about sex before contraceptive pills were invented. Someone who is 65, by contrast, was born after the War ended, listened to rock music, wore jeans and casual clothes, and met women whose sexual desire was no longer constrained by fear it would lead to an unwanted pregnancy. A man in his 80s became of age fearing death in an actual war. A man in his 60s was raised in peacetime but feared nuclear war.

This is not to suggest that a man in his 60s resembles younger age cohorts. I was born in the suburbs of Birmingham in 1946. As a child, I lived in a world in which virtually no-one owned a car. The roads were therefore empty, and we played in them whenever we were not at school until it got dark. We walked to primary school by ourselves at quite a young age, and came home during the dinner break for a substantial meal cooked by our mothers who did not of course go to work. Children who stayed indoors were a matter of concern to us all. We knew of hardly any children from single-parent families, no-one with skin darker  than our own, and no-one whose first language was not English. The only celebrities were film stars, and television was broadcast for a few hours a day. There were no computers of course, but we read books and comics.

People younger than those of my age live in a world with new fears. There is the unspecific threat of some sort of ecodoom. But local fears are more important, and constrain the lives of children. Their parents are rightly scared of traffic, but also have fantasy fears that the streets are full of murderous paedophiles. Children still play in the street, particularly in quiet towns and villages, but spend much of their time in front of computers and television screens. The clothes they wear seem to designate membership of one or other youth tribe, each associated with a particular kind of music. This seems a more elaborate world than the mods and rockers I remember. Still, none of them wear shapeless fawn jackets.

The curse of the course

Beware of your metaphors, for they shall make you their slaves. We use metaphors so often in our everyday speech that we fail to recognise how they smuggle implications into our thinking. One example (discussed in a previous blog) is ‘stress’. Another, much used in education, is ‘course’. This word, presumably taken from horse-racing, has multiple smuggled implications. On a racecourse, all the horses start at the same line at the same time. They all jump over a pre-determined sequence of fences in the same order. They all complete the course at the same finishing line, being ranked according to the order in which they finish.

Applied to education in universities, the metaphor implies that groups of students on a course all start and finish their studies at the same time, progressing through their experience of learning in the same order and jumping over the same set of assessments. Students are ranked at the end of the course, with a mark taking the place of speed of completion. However, students who do not complete the course in the same time as others, are regarded as non-completers and fail. Lets challenge each of these smuggled implications.

In the first place, there is no need for students to start and finish a programme of study at the same time. Many people wish to study part-time, and combine university education with work. This usually means that their studies take at least twice as long as a full-time student. Many part-time students are mature and have families. They are therefore more likely to need a break of studies because of childbirth, change of employment , and so on. This is administratively inconvenient for universities, but part-time study may soon be the only way in which many people are able to pay for their studies. Part-time study has another advantage: academic education can be dovetailed with vocational training, also enabling students to apply their increased skills to the workplace and increase their productivity. Universities began, and largely continue to be, places where people are educated into the knowledge, skill and values required for particular occupations. But the domination of full-time study in British universities has split vocational education from vocations. As a result, employers complain that graduates lack the basic skills needed to perform their work, while many graduates fail to find employment appropriate to subjects they have studied for three or more years.

Secondly, not all students need to follow the same sequence of learning materials. In many areas of knowledge, some subjects do indeed have to be understood in sequence (the ‘building block approach’). But this is not always true. In many of the programmes and modules I have taught, much of the material could be studied in any order. Other approaches to learning require students first attain an overall (if rather simplified) perspective of the subject before studying a series of individual areas in more detail, leading to their developing a greater understanding of its complexity. In such cases, students need a shared introduction to the subject and in some cases a shared conclusion, but can explore the remainder of the curriculum in any order at their own pace.

Thirdly, ability should not be confused with speed of completion. Some people just take longer to learn, but are as capable at the end of their studies as the fast finishers. Why should they be penalised or categorised as failures because they take six months longer to acquire the necessary skills, knowledge and values than the average student? One reason is that universities do not have a defined threshold of skills etc which students should attain. Instead, they rank students at completion of their course by ‘first honours’, ‘upper second’ and so on. Yet this ranking system has become increasingly meaningless because of grade inflation. In the last 10 years in England, the proportion of students awarded a first honours has doubled, while another 60% now receive an upper second. This has happened at a time when the proportion of school-leavers entering universities has increased substantially and teaching hours per university student have decreased.

Why is the metaphor of the course still so dominant in British higher education? One reason is that it is convenient for universities and for the government agencies that fund them. Full-time students can all be processed efficiently on a three-year conveyor belt, exams can all be set at the same time for all, and universities can be freed from the difficult business of co-ordinating academic and vocational education with employers. Governments can fund universities using a simple block grant based on the assumption that the great majority of students are full-time. Indeed, the current funding system in England disadvantages part-time students.

Yet there are types of university education which does not correspond to the course metaphor. Professional training degrees (such as in medicine, nursing, social work and the professions allied to medicine) require students to complete part of their training in hospitals and other workplaces, where they acquire skills under the supervision of senior professionals in health and social services who have been co-opted into university education. Degrees of this kind also aim to produce students who meet a defined standard of professional competence, rather than rank them by the marks they achieve on their assignments.

This model could be expanded to other degree programmes. Then, instead of students being given a general education with limited vocational training followed by employment in a lowly administrative post, they could get a job and study for a vocational qualification part-time. This would probably require more distance learning, but we have excellent institutions in this country which can provide this. It would also free up large areas of our cities which have been given over for student rentals and are occupied for only 30 weeks each year. This would have the very useful side-effect of doing something practical to reduce homelessness.

See: My life as a steam engine