Does it matter that no one likes Ed Miliband?

In another disastrous week for the Labour leader backbenchers have been openly stating what everyone else thinks- that Ed Milliband's effect as leader on Labour's electoral prospects has been and continues to be disastrous. Quite why he has been such a liability seems open to debate amongst political pundits- some say he has surrounded himself with the wrong people, whilst others that he doesn't listen to his advisers. The consensus in the general population though is that he is just too weird to be taken seriously.

My question is, does it matter, and if so why? Although we long ago entered an age of more presidential and personality-based politics (thanks principally to that unholy pair, Maggie Thatcher and Tony Blair) the power of a prime minister, let alone a leader of the opposition, personally to effect any change in anything has become minuscule. So large and sophisticated is the machinery of government these days and so surrounded are they by "teams of advisers" that political leaders are probably given a briefing paper on what to have for breakfast. They don't write their own speeches any more (even if they disastrously pretend to have made the whole thing up on the spur of the moment) and every decision, every casual utterance, will have been pored over and studied in advance to gauge its potential political and PR impact.

The age of mass media has made it appear that we are much closer to our political leaders than we used to be- instead of occasionally glimpsing them from the back of a smoke-filled hall at a hustings we see them out jogging, watch their smoothly polished smiles at countless televised "informal visits" and hear them chat disarmingly and personably (or defensively and with a slight nasal whine in the case of our Ed) to TV interviewers from the domestic comfort of Sunday morning sofas. Yet in fact we have probably never been further from them. Every contact with the great unwashed is so carefully choreographed and stage-managed that the authenticity we feel that we are witnessing is all a construct.

We know all this of course, at one level. We know that when David Cameron thumps the lectern and says "I am going to demand my money back" he is not actually going to march into Jean-Claude Juncker's office with a bill for £1.7 billion clutched in his plump pink fingers. What he means is that various treasury mandarins will now rush around cobbling together a form of words that makes it look as though Britain has won massive concessions. When Ed Miliband says to minimum-wage cleaners that "I feel your pain" (or some such bollocks) we know that he is simply doing his inadequate best to emote with a line that one of his team of speechwriters has determined will sell well with that particular sector of the electorate.

And yet we persist in sort of believing that it is the leader of a political party who, more or less single-handedly, determines the electoral success of that party and (if elected) the prosperity and international reputation of the entire country. In recent news broadcasts I have begun to notice how, in EU negotiations newsreaders and commentators use the phrase "Britain believes that..." or similar, when what they mean is "David Cameron's advisers have told him that he really ought to pretend to believe that..."

This process of embodiment of the nation is nothing new of course. It is always easier to imagine a single leader doing something than getting our heads around the complex and messy process that actually went on. Historians routinely say things like "The castle was built by King ..." when I am pretty sure that the king in question would not have known one end of a trowel from another.

We have always needed to "put a face to" large, complex or abstract ideas and processes. George Orwell understood this- in 1984 the phrase is not "The State is watching you," but "Big Brother is watching you." and it is the ease with which the (fictional) Big Brother can be imagined as a real human with a real face that gives the phrase its power. This seems to be hard-wired in us: I remember once reading of a psychological experiment that showed that incidents of deviant or anti-social behaviour (such as theft) reduce markedly in the presence of a poster which features a pair of eyes.

Nowadays mass media has intensified and focussed this process. Ask anyone to think about one of the UK's political parties and they will imagine variously an overfed and smoothly pink weirdo (Steve Bell's salami in a condom), an affably laughing weirdo with a pint, a crooked-nosed weirdo with haunted eyes or... (no, they might actually struggle with the Lib Dems). These have become literally the human faces of the parties they purport to lead, and are realer to us than those parties' actual policies.

All of which is ironic of course, because each human face is (as far as their advisers and PR men are capable of making them) an entirely artificial construct. David Cameron is no more authentically enraged by EU politics than he was authentically concerned about the environment or the plight of misunderstood hoodies. Nigel Farage is an urbane politician, well practiced in the art of milking the EU cow for funds and Ed Miliband is... Well, to be honest his human face is the most authentic of the lot really. Teachers I knew at Haverstock school described him as a frightened little geek who spent all his time hiding in the library. Plus ca change, eh?

So modern-day politics is about personalising and embodying the message so that the populace can relate to it, and that is something Ed Miliband is manifestly crap at. But does this matter? You could argue that the modern presidential style of politics turns the vital business of running the country into a personality contest and that focus on style over substance trivialises politics. Or you could argue on the other hand that what this reveals is our need as a species to engage with each other's essential humanity. The policies of political parties are vague, waffly and (especially in the case of the Lib Dems) inconstant things. So how can we really be expected to become exercised about them? Political leaders though- well they are human beings, and so in a vital sense open to our genuine human scrutiny. We can look into our political leaders' eyes and (without really listening to their words) ask ourselves, "Do I trust this person? Do I like him or her?"

Or we think we can. In fact another fascinating psychological experiment I read about had an actor tell both the truth and lies to participants, who had to guess which was which. The twist was that one set of participants got only the words, delivered as if on the radio, whilst the other could see the actor's face too, as on the TV. The results were conclusive. One group was far better than the other at telling the truth from lies, with the poorly performing group telling truth from lies less than 50% of the time.

So which group was it that was more easily duped? The ones with the TV pictures of course. The ones who could look deep into the actor's eyes and use their essential human connection with them. But use it not to make an informed decision, but to fall deeper into the fiction the actor was trying to create for them.

So yes, it does matter that Ed Miliband is utterly crap at convincing people that he is telling the truth and that he has the prescription for a healthy, prosperous and egalitarian Britain. But it really, really, really shouldn't

The Today programme and its attitude to scientific study

I was half listening to the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning when an item came on about learning poems by heart. It was introduced by a long clip of Alan Bennett talking about Larkin's I Remember I Remember. I enjoy listening to poetry read well and at first was interested to hear the guest being interviewed by (I think) Justin Webb talking about the importance of its sound to the understanding of poetry. He compared the textual analysis of poetry with trying to engage with a piece of music by looking at the score and I was sort of with him even then, despite the huge value I have always found in the textual analysis of poetry.

However it was when he segued into extolling the virtues of learning the times tables by rote that I began to wonder what this item was actually about. I had to piece it together- I had missed the start of the interview and never got the interviewer's name- but it appeared that he was from the University of Cambridge and that he was announcing a large-scale study to examine the benefits of learning poetry by heart. This was presented by Justin Webb as a scientific study, though a key element appeared to be getting people to post favourite remembered lines of poetry on Twitter.

If this was an item about a scientific study then it revealed something that I have noted many times about the Today programme: they simply do not understand the scientific process. How else could one explain an item announcing a scientific study into the benefits of learning poems by heart that consists almost entirely of discussion and illustration of those supposed benefits? No scientist would start a study into something by explaining what the outcomes of that study were going to be, and anyone who did so should not be considered a scientist. Yet routinely on the Today programme (and elsewhere) this is how scientific studies are presented.

I have no objection whatever to an item for National Poetry Day extolling the virtues of learning poems by heart. Just don't call it science.

What are schools for?

There has been a flurry of debate following Michael Wilshaw's comments about behaviour management in schools and I don't want to enter the debate as to whether behaviour in schools actually is a problem or not (for what it is worth, I believe that there is a certain type of teacher and of parent who will always complain that behaviour is deteriorating). Instead, I wanted to reflect on much broader questions about the relationship between students and their schools, and the central issue of what schools are actually for.

On the face of it there seems to be a pretty clear consensus about the purpose of schools: just look at school slogans. Usually heavy on abstract nouns ("achievement", "success", "challenge", "diversity", "tolerance", etc. etc.) they pretty universally present the notion that schools encourage students to learn and prepare them for adult life. Easy.

Except of course, it isn't. It is for instance clear to anyone who has ever had children (or indeed has ever been a child) that children learn best when they are enjoying what they are doing. However most schools (even those with the imperative "enjoy" in their slogan) do not put much of a premium on students actually having fun, at least not in lessons. Schools see a clear duty to take learning seriously, and to transmit that seriousness to their students. How could they otherwise, with the Damoclean sword of league tables hanging over them?

Similarly, it is clear that the best way to develop life skills and interpersonal relationships is to be given the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. Yet the schools that Mr Wilshaw admires are those that give students no opportunities whatever to do this. Effective behaviour management, according to his prescription, involves intervening immediately a student does anything like swinging on a chair or talking to a neighbour.

One would think that students would learn best (both in terms of academic learning and social skills) from teachers whom they saw as human beings and to whom they could relate in a natural, unstructured and responsive way. Yet the most "successful" teachers are generally those who lay down and rigidly enforce non-negotiable codes of conduct for their students. Once I was walking behind two students on a corridor and one (unaware of my presence) said, "Mrs ___ is a really good teacher. She never listens to you." This sounds absurd, but what he meant by it was that the teacher in question never listened when you tried to make up excuses for why you had not done your homework.

I struggled with this issue throughout my career as a teacher. A part of me wanted to relate to each student as an individual- to afford them trust and give them responsibility for their own decisions. Yet another part of me recognised that that simply made me a soft touch, so that eventually none of my students would ever do their homework. It is a shame though. Fear of the consequences of not doing Mrs ____'s homework is certainly an effective motivator, but to what extent does it lead to real learning?

In a similar way, students who learn to walk in silence on the left of the corridor and stand up when a teacher enters the room are certainly receiving a training of sorts in appropriate modes of behaviour, whereas the classrooms of the liberal and "nice" teachers are always where the fights break out, but to what extent is behaviour training internalised as a mode of interaction with the world? It is certainly possible to create a school ethos in which students are universally quiet, submissive and polite, but are we sure that that will make for better members of adult society?

I am genuinely not sure. One argument would be that people adopt habits of being around other people that can stick with them and inform their entire lives. Another argument is that "repressive" school regimes simply store up resentment and hatred which are never addressed within the school system. Certainly my experience is that the incidence of bullying is in direct proportion with the rigidity of school codes of conduct and discipline.

I would never argue for a Summerhill approach to schooling. I believe that schools are important social institutions, and to some extent should model the functioning of society as a whole. So I strongly believe that schools have to have codes of discipline and clear statements of acceptable behaviour, with structures of rewards and sanctions to reinforce them. I also believe that students have to perceive a clear authority structure, and know who makes the decisions and where they fit into that process. I think schools do have both to teach and to model ideas of citizenship with all that that implies and that students need to learn to thrive within an environment of constrained freedoms.

The problem, as I have argued in a previous post, is that what schools often seem to tell us instead (and tell their students too) is that as a society we really do not like our children. Take the crimes identified by Michael Wilshaw of "talking to your neighbour" and "swinging on your chair". These are entirely normal behaviours of children who are enjoying being in the company of others and enjoying what they are doing. And yet they are to be eliminated if PROPER learning is to be carried through.

Next time you are working with a group of colleagues on a particular problem, imagine that as soon as you started discussing it in an animated fashion, or someone told a joke, your boss glared at you and told you to be quiet and get on with your work. How long do you think you would stay in that job? And how successful would that company be? Yet this is how we are to treat our school children, apparently.

Surely there is something wrong with that.

The lessons of history

Just a short post today. I was listening to Start the Week this morning and there was an interesting item on the unification of Germany. In it, one of the contributors referred to a sense that for Germans history can be defined as that which must never be allowed to happen again.

This got me reflecting on our own nation's attitudes to the past, which had already been thrown into sharp relief by the Scottish Independence debate. In that context, the Yes campaign became pretty clearly identified with the future and the No campaign with the past. The strongest emotional arguments on the Yes side were all to do with moving forward and embracing change, whilst the No campaign's emotional trump cards were about appealing to a sense of shared history.

Because it seems that, in direct contrast with the Germans, the British have a pervasive sense of the past as a better, nobler time, and by definition of the future as something tricky and threatening. I have written on this subject before (here for instance) but the simple comment I heard this morning really pointed up the weaknesses implicit in the British attitude to the past. Whilst Germany today no doubt still has negative aspects (some attitudes to the Turkish immigrant population for instance) the country does seem ot have a much more positive and forward-looking ethos generally. Economically successful, yet embracing renewable technologies and environmental concerns wholeheartedly; a significant player diplomatically on the world stage whilst avoiding military adventurism; with a young people who seem creative, alive and thoughtful it is a world away from both the brainwashed, militarised dictatorship of the Third Reich and the traumatised and divided wasteland of the post-War years. Because they see history as something to learn from- as containing lessons one ignores at ones peril.

So how about the British? Do we learn from the lessons of our own history or do we bathe in the comforting warm fug of nostalgia? It is clear what 45% of Scots think. What about the rest of us?

The changing balance of power between the genders

As the father of an only daughter but also as a teacher and head teacher I have always been very engaged with issues about post-feminist gender roles and gender equality. The area is full of paradoxes: gender equality is absolute in terms of UK employment law and yet women's average pay still lags way behind that of men; women are far more likely to be the victims of domestic abuse yet young men are the ones most likely to kill themselves; in every field of life successful women are becoming more prominent and yet only a tiny proportion of the biggest companies are led by women and the BBC have only just started addressing the massive gender imbalance that exists in terms of the profile of women onscreen.

There are those who believe that the cause of feminism has been won and others who feel (with some justification) that the 'new ladism' approach that began in the 90s represented a massive retrograde step. Some see the emergence of the ladette, and the increasing social acceptibility of heavy drinking by young women as proof of their equality of status and others decry it as nothing more than an excuse for loutish and sexually exploitative behaviour by young men to continue. Within school one can see both the seemingly unstoppable rise of girls and young women in terms of achievement and also their vulnerability to messages about body image and sexual availability.

In the area of writing, with which I am now most personally concerned, the picture is potentially a very interesting one indeed. The Forbes list of top-selling authors has just 6 of the top 15 as women, but what is interesting is that almost without exception the men are long established and now fading stars. At the other end of the market it is notable that almost every site anywhere that appeals to aspiring authors is illustrated with photos of young women and I get a strong sense that the massive expansion of interest in writing as a career is fuelled very largely by women. There are two very different genres of novel that are reserved for women authors- chic-lit and women's literary fiction- with nothing comparable for men.

This is hardly surprising in a way. A recent Associated Press poll found that in the US women read on average nine books a year and men five and the imbalance is probably far greater for adolescents I have taught. However I do not believe that it is simply an issue of women being more interested in fiction than men. I actually think that this rise of women in the world of novels is an illustration of a fundamental change that will turn our notions of the power balance between the genders upside down.

Whether it is something inherent in the difference between men and women or merely the result of social conditioning, there does seem to be a broad difference in the skills and attributes more commonly associated with men and women. Women in general seem better at what might be considered the 'soft' skills- of empathy, communication, emotional intelligence and the ability to build and maintain networks of friends and associates, whereas men have always been considered better equipped with the 'harder' attributes of competitiveness, problem-solving, independence and ambition.

For a long time there has been a belief that women too should lay claim to these masculine attributes- hence the power-dressing of the 80s and even the emergence of the ladette. Hardly surprising, because it has long been felt that these were the attributes that brought success. The language and iconography of big business has always presumed this: why else would the word "thrusting" ever be used to describe a successful executive?

But what if all that were to change? What if, in today's social media dominated world it were interconnectedness rather than thrusting individuality that led to success? What if the 'soft' skills turned out to be the only ones that really matter in the 21st century?

Take the aforementioned exponential rise in female aspirant novelists and compare it with more masculine hobbies, like football. Most 'hobby' novelists will never be published and most Sunday footballers will never play for any real team, but the difference is that the women are acquiring and practising the hugely empowering skill of writing, whereas the men are merely offsetting a small proportion of the deleterious health effects of the post-match session.

There is no question that women today still suffer unacceptable levels of sexual discrimination. The overt sexualisation of young women in the media is an appalling thing, as are the absurd and demeaning pressures on women as regards body image and ageing. However more and more I am beginning to see these as the last lashings out by the wounded beast of male hegemony and I really don't think they can last long.

The 21st century, it seems increasingly clear to me, will be the century in which generations of gender power imbalance will be reversed. And we men had better get used to it. And in preparation, we could at least start reading more fiction.

The astonishing lack of an evidence base to support education policy

Maybe I am late to the party on this, or maybe it is because I have been out of education for a while that I can look at the situation with fresh eyes. In my last post I commented on the lack of evidence presented to support the government's line on setting by ability. However it turns out that this is far from the only area in which the government seems utterly uninterested in evidence when it comes to education.

To illustrate this point, it is really unclear to me where one should even go to find evidence that the government might be using to inform its policy-making decisions. Ofsted apparently conducts no research other than its 'surveys' of groups of schools and its dataset seems to consist largely of its own inspection reports. This is useful in its way, but hardly rigorous or objective as a means of cross-checking the assumptions that no doubt underlie said inspection reports. There is in fact an enormous wealth of such objective data available: Ofsted has access to a huge amount of achievement, attainment and contextual data for every school they inspect, but there is frustratingly little real analysis of this in any of Ofsted's reports or surveys.

I did eventually track down the "Research and Statistics" page on the DfE website. There are 143 publications about schools by the DoE, which sounds promising. However the very large majority are evaluations of specific trials, or papers about research priorities for the future. In fact I could find fewer than half a dozen that impacted in any way on the massive sweeping changes the government has been carrying out. "The evolving education in England" seems a promising title, but in fact the paper makes clear from the start that it does not contain any analysis of performance, but is simply a "temperature check." Not the sort of evidence I was looking for.

Ah ha! But there is also "Attainment in Academies at Key Stage 4". Finally, some data to support the government's policy of near universal academisation. Except that it doesn't, of course. The analysis in fact shows that outcomes at academies are broadly the same as those in "similar schools", despite the significant boost to funding that these academies received. There are ups and downs- academies for instance do less well by students in receipt of Free School Meals but are improving faster.

OK, so what about "Do Academies make use of their autonomy"? Even more inadequate as evidence to support policy, I'm afraid. It is full of emphatic statements about how marvelous it is for a school to become an academy, but remarkably devoid of evidence to support its claims. Here is an example of a key finding:
"This [autonomy as regards curriculum] is helping them raise standards for their pupils"
and the evidence provided?
"- Two thirds believe these changes have improved attainment"
Note, it says "believe". Not "can demonstrate" or even "have shown."

So what about Free Schools- that other enormous experiment? Well there are 850 documents available by search on the DfE's site, and a further 5 from Ofsted. I have to confess that I gave up after the first three pages of results, but I could see nothing that contained any sort of research or data analysis into their effectiveness. Nothing at all.

So what about PISA then? This is the one piece of objective data that Gove appears to have paid any attention to, repeatedly using its findings to rubbish the entire UK education system he inherited. I have to confess that until today I simply had not looked at the PISA test process or data. In fact their 2012 report makes for interesting, and on the face of it puzzling, reading. The focus in that report is on maths, and whilst "Pupils in England showed greater motivation to learn mathematics than the OECD average and reported a high sense of belonging and satisfaction with school," on the other hand "In mathematics, 19 countries significantly outperformed England."

Why is that then? Why are children who enjoy and are confident in maths not apparently learning it as well as those in other countries? Perhaps looking at the tests themselves might give a clue. Well, yes. Here are some sample questions: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/test/form/ . They are like the worst sort of maths textbooks from when I started in teaching. Textually dense and full of utterly irrelevant details and imagery they wrap up simple mathematical questions in nonsensical "real world problems" in such a way that the student actually has to decode the "real world problem" into an actual problem before they can answer it. This is a skill that is of no relevance outside maths lessons and the UK education system has quite rightly moved on from that approach, so students are less skilled at it than they might be in countries with more old-fashioned approaches.

Which is perhaps why students from countries with much more formal education systems do better in PISA tests. It doesn't really matter if you do not have as high a "sense of belonging and satisfaction", or even if you "enjoy the study of mathematics". If you have spent your entire school life endlessly practising pointless and artificial maths "problems" like those in the PISA tests then eventually you will get quite good at it.

But is that seriously the only evidence Gove had for tearing down decades of good practice, action research and pedagogical innovation in his time as Secretary of State? It was perhaps naive of me to think that the current regime retained some sort of commitment to evidence-based policy making. Clearly they haven't.

The old mixed ability/setting debate

The old debate about mixed ability v. setting has been given another airing, with Nicky Morgan denying rumours that the government planned make setting effectively compulsory by ensuring that a school could not be granted an 'outstanding' rating unless it set students by ability. Michael Wilshaw has long been in favour of setting, apparently, and David Cameron is a strong advocate. Interestingly, the plan to make setting compulsory has reportedly been axed not because it is bonkers, but because "it would run counter to the longstanding Conservative commitment to enshrine the independence of academies from policies set by the education department."

All of which suggests that the case for preferring setting to mixed ability teaching has already been made, and it is simply a question of how far the government should or shouldn't go in enforcing its policies on academies. So, given the need for evidence-based policy-making, where is the data that supports this case?

Ah, well. That's the problem, and the point of this post. You would think, wouldn't you, that a government that seems so clear on the correct answer to the setting/mixed ability debate would have some pretty good evidence to support its decision. Well, if they have then it certainly isn't accessible from the DfE website. As I have mentioned in a previous post the DfE website seems to have been stripped of anything much to do with education at all. A search for "mixed ability" or for "setting" reveals nothing at all germane to this issue and there are no links whatever to any other source of evidence or research.

So what about Ofsted? Well, hurrah, there is a research paper there (just one). It is entitled The most able students and has a foreword by Michael Wilshaw himself. It is this paper that is most often cited by those making the case for setting as against mixed ability teaching, but there are actually a number of problems with that. First, the tone is polemical from the start, which is not what one would expect from an objective, academic analysis. The first sentence is "Too many of our most able children and young people are underperforming in our non-selective state secondary schools."

Secondly, there is actually very little in the report that is relevant in any way to the setting/mixed ability debate. In the page and a quarter that contains the twelve key findings only one sentence has any relevance to that question: "School leaders did not evaluate how well mixed-ability group teaching was challenging the most able students." This is not in itself a key finding, but part of the unpacking of the sixth key finding, that "Many students become used to performing at a lower level than they are capable of."

Thirdly, the only evidence adduced for the above (part of a) key finding is lesson observations by Ofsted inspectors and no figures are given to support Mr Wilshaw's statement that "in too many lessons observed by inspectors , teaching is not supporting our highest-attaining students to do well. We know from our inspections that this is particularly the case in mixed ability groups." How many is too many? In my opinion one would be too many, but what does Mr Wilshaw mean? We have no way of knowing.

It is odd, to say the least, that no attainment or achievement evidence is presented to support or challenge the idea that setting is superior to mixed ability in this regard. Ofsted and the DfE have all this data of course. It would have been be easy enough to examine rates of achievement and attainment in subjects and in schools where students are set by ability and compare them with schools and subjects where they are taught in mixed ability groups. So why not make such data readily available? Why not refer to it in Ofsted's 'research'?

Perhaps the explanation is that this data did not make the case that Messrs. Wilshaw and Cameron wanted it to make. It is frustratingly hard these days to get hold of any national achievement data, but the only relevant piece of research I could find on the DfE website is this. It is dated July 2009, but it's the best I could find. It shows that rates of progression for Maths (in which almost all schools set by ability) are actually slightly poorer than those in English (where a larger proportion of schools teach in mixed ability groupings). The most definitive analysis to date that I am aware of is still Ability Grouping in Education from 2001. Its conclusion, broadly, was that neither setting nor mixed ability teaching made any significant difference to academic outcomes for children. Hardly a ringing endorsement for setting by ability.

I suppose I should pin my colours to the mast: as an English teacher and a head teacher I was always more persuaded by the case for mixed ability, not least because it forces teachers to engage with the range of abilities and weaknesses that exists in any group of students, whether set by ability or not. However had anyone presented clear evidence to me that setting by ability raised achievement then I would have been quite prepared to consider changing my position.

Only no one ever did. And no one, it seems, has presented such evidence to Messrs Cameron and Wilshaw either.

Evidence-based policy-making? Yeah, right.

Why does beheading horrify us so much?

As an organisation that is very much aware of the power of the media, Islamic State must be delighted with the level of coverage it has received as a result of the beheading of two US journalists. Newspapers, radio and TV are currently dominated by the issue and it has got the world's leaders into a flat spin. Barack Obama has confessed that the US has "no strategy." David Cameron has not said as much, he has merely exemplified it with everything he has done over the last couple of weeks.

Anyone would think that this was the first cross-border insurgency the world has ever seen. In fact it seems like only yesterday that Kurdish separatists (now loyal allies and staunch defenders of minorities) threatened the stability of the entire Eastern Mediterranean region.

So what has marked out this insurgency, to the extent that anyone simply participating in it has overnight become a key threat to Western security whose passport has to be seized and statehood removed? (Except that that isn't legal of course, so what are we going to do to prevent these green-under-the-bed jihadists from poisoning our country on their return? Damn. Where are those US drone strikes when you need them?)

Not long ago, young 'radicalised' muslims who took themselves off to Syria to fight the Assad regime were seen as misguided ideologues who didn't understand the dangers they faced. Now they are all, to a man, the spawn of satan. Why?

Beheadings. I honestly believe that it is that that has changed public perception so dramatically that a man in black robes holding a knife has become the predominant bogeyman image of the day. It is not as if one has to see the footage either- it is the concept of the thing that carries the force. The simple mention of the word is enough.

Why is that? We are surely accustomed to the notion of violent death. Recently, did not coverage of Gaza innure us to it, to the point where an Israeli air strike only made the news if the death toll was in three figures? And US drone strikes are responsible for violent extra-judicial killings all the time without them making the news at all. In more directly comparable cases we have certainly seen images and heard accounts of pretty horrific terrorist outrages before, but none seemed to carry anything like the emotional force of a single beheading.

For all our apparent exposure to violent death we are, in a sense, insulated from it too. From death itself, come to that. And, slightly paradoxically, representations of death that reach us via our screens increase rather than remove that insulation. We know very well what death looks like, yet know too how different that is from knowing what it feels like. Nothing nowadays forces us to confront death, because it is taken from us and either sanitised by hospitals and funeral directors or dramatised by journalists and film- or games-makers. Yet the reality still haunts us around the margins of our existence. Whenever there is a fatal crash on the motorway police have to factor in major tailbacks on the other carriageway as drivers slow down to look.

Beheading though is an existential act that forces us to confront the reality of death in a way that nothing else can. We can look at the victim of a stabbing or a shooting- even of a bomb attack- and at a level not confront the essential reality of their death (or our mortality). We can't do that with a beheading. I have not seen, and will not see, any footage of either recent incident but (because) I know that I would see another human being who was in one moment alive and in another suddenly and incontrovertibly dead, with the essence of their being (their head) no longer a part of them.

So, in our safe, sanitised and insulated world it is the sudden and inescapable confrontation with the reality of death that has so shaken our "single state of mind that function is smothered in surmise and nothing is but what is not" (to quote Shakespeare). And horrific as the notion of beheading is, maybe that is no bad thing. Because death is horrific. And sudden violent death at the hands of another is something we should react to with horror, whether it be inflicted by means of a jihadist fanatic's knife, a terrorist's bomb or a remotely piloted high-tec US drone

Is learning supposed to be tough?

I am already officially fed up of hearing how tough Gove's new National Curriculum is. There may be a mention of the curriculum changes somewhere which does not include the word 'tough', but if so I have yet to find it.

Leave aside for a minute the important (but so far, it seems, unasked) question of whether learning a string of facts is in fact tougher than acquiring the skills to make use of them. What about the core issue: should toughness be a central criterion for a school curriculum?

On the face of it this seems a no-brainer. We are, as we never cease being reminded, living in an increasingly competitive world and education is one of the key tracks on which the race for global supremacy will be run. The analogy of competitive sport is always there and the implication of that analogy is clear: if you want to race competitively you have to train, and train hard. Toughness is key and a trainer who goes easy on you is doing you no favours at all.

But education is not athletics, and learning is not the same as running in a race.

For a start, athletics is predominantly (not purely of course) about physical prowess. To do well you need your muscles, your heart and your lungs to be capable of operating at peak capacity, and physical systems like the adrenal gland, the central nervous system and the pituitary gland can all facilitate that process. It is what evolution selected them for after all. Tough training feeds into all of the inbuilt mechanisms the body has for getting fitter and stronger, and the body even provides a positive feedback mechanism through endorphin production- the so-called runners' high.

Learning really isn't the same. We use various sports-based analogies (getting match fit for an interview; training for an exam) but the development of mental capacity just isn't a physical process in the same way. Proponents of Brain Gym approaches briefly tried to persuade us it was, until it became clear that the only capacity that Brain Gym activities build is the capacity to do more Brain Gym activities.

So is toughness (another favourite word is 'rigour') the best way to speed up the process of learning? Certainly there is a satisfaction in having worked hard to acquire a new skill or new set of knowledge, and in some circumstances, certainly, an awareness of the difficulty of what you are attempting to master is a strong motivator to put more effort into it. Surely we all remember some occasion when we worked seemingly day and night to get some killer essay finished or to revise for a particularly tough exam. Doesn't that show that toughness spurs us on to feats of learning we would not be capable of otherwise?

But is it just coincidence that that is precisely the sort of learning that goes immediately out of one's head once the essay is handed in or the exam finished? Sure, adrenaline increases the brain's working capacity in the short term, and toughness is a good tool to promote the production of adrenaline. So we can psyche ourselves up to cram in large amounts of fact-based information ready to regurgitate it in response to some 'tough' exam question. But that isn't all that learning is.

There is absolutely no doubt that the most profound and longest term learning takes place when we are doing something we find rewarding, fulfilling and fun. It's why people always retain far more about things they are interested in than things they have to learn. Many is the pub darts player who was always crap at maths at school, yet can work out a 3-dart finish to a score of 123 in seconds (3 * 19 + 2 * 17 + 2 * 16). Or the football fanatic who could never remember dates in history at school yet can tell you immediately who Southampton beat in the 2003 FA cup semi-final (Watford).

And to what extent does 'toughness' in a school curriculum offer opportunities for students to enjoy their learning? Mr Gove (and now Mrs Morgan) are clearly with Gradgrind on this- it shouldn't..

And all of this is argued from the viewpoint of the successful. Learning, even more than athletics, is also about one's emotional state, and there is nothing more dispiriting, disempowering and inimical to future success than repeated failure. Yet the new 'tough' curriculum seems designed to build in failure and the fear of failure into every step of a child's journey through school. Children are now expected aged nine to know the 12 times table by heart. This seems to have no purpose in this age of ubiquitous smartphones but to make those who can't do it feel inadequate (12 is an interesting choice, by the way. It goes back, of course, to the days when there were 12 pennies in a shilling). My daughter struggled with her times tables all through secondary school, giving up entirely once she saw through my attempts to make them seem important to her. She is now a Cambridge graduate.

There will be many who struggle to remember the kings and queens of England. Why? Because it has utterly no relevance to them, and the only purpose in learning them is because it is difficult to do so- toughness replacing usefulness or relevance in order to convince children that they aren't as clever as they think they are.

And given that the huge issue with so many kids today is that they don't think they are clever at all, that is an insane thing to do.

The Scottish independence referendum and the nature of political debate

This post was prompted by the quite extraordinarily patronising Better Together advert of a woman, effectively telling the electorate that she didn't understand any of the issues in the debate and was therefore going to vote "No." There has been uproar in the Scottish Labour party that Danny Alexander let this advert through, but it got me thinking about broader questions of the nature of political debate.

I am just old enough to remember a time when politics was about impassioned ideologues addressing mass meetings to rail against the iniquities of capitalism or the unworkability of socialism. Politics was, almost by definition, about big ideas and grand concepts. You voted for an MP because he or she (mostly he back then, if the truth be told) shared your ideals- spoke to your deepest convictions about what is right and proper and true.

It was actually one of the most impassioned ideologues of them all who changed all that. Margaret Thatcher had the grand vision (I use the term loosely) and the overarching principles (even more loosely this time) and went straight for the big changes, rather than tinkering round the edges. Yet probably this disconcerting sound recording tells you all you need to know about her big ideas. They were in the end not grand at all but utterly mundane- even petty. Her political vision was founded on self interest. Her "no such thing as society" line was precisely about that- reducing the grandness of the post-war social project to a simple question of what is best for you and your family in the immediate future.

And in political terms this has been her legacy even more than the subsequent drift to the right or the madness unleashed by her and Reagan's conversion of the financial markets into vast casinos. It is almost axiomatic now that politicians need to stay away from big questions of principle. They bore and confuse the electorate, received wisdom seems now to say. Interpret everything in terms of how it will affect Essex man, or Worcester woman, or one of an increasing congregation of 'ordinary people.'  People will become politically engaged once they see the relevance of what you are talking about to their own lives, and not before.

Of course this hasn't really worked at all. Levels of political engagement have plummeted to a quite embarrassing degree. Turnout in the police and crime commissioner elections is so low that a candidate has a significant advantage if he/she has a big family. So long as their family turns out to vote of course. Basically, no one really believes that political engagement is going to make any direct difference to any of the specifics of their own lives, so they don't bother voting. And who can blame them? A prospective MP may base their entire campaign on protecting a local hospital, despite being in a party that is committed to reducing the number of local hospitals.

And whether they recognise that the reality of government is much more complex than the simplicity of electoral campaigns, or whether they just think politicians are a load of lying twats, the electorate have learned pretty well that political engagement and petty self-interest are more or less incompatible. Occasionally a single issue will arise that politicians can jump on, whipping up petty self-interest into a simulacrum of principled politics, and that is what has led to the ludicrous rise in UKIP support, but I guarantee that the turnout at the next election will still be under 50%.

Yet in Scotland, it seems, something very odd indeed has started happening. Alex Salmond has suggested that turnout in the referendum may reach 80%, and whilst he has his own reasons for saying that I have certainly been made aware of a quite extraordinary degree of engagement in the debate amongst ordinary voters. And what has triggered this hugely uncharacteristic level of interest in an issue that is all about politics and the constitution? Well not principally narrow self-interest it seems, which is where the Better Together campaign is suddenly beginning to flounder.

For those who haven't been following the debate, the Better Together camp have pretty much been telling the Scottish electorate that if they vote for independence they will lose the pound sterling, will be kicked out of the EU, will be saddled with debt and will no longer be supported by the rest of the UK. So far better not risk any of that- better just follow the example of the woman in the advert. Don't worry your head about the big issues, just vote No.

Only it seems that the Scottish electorate WANT to engage with the big political issues: about nuclear disarmament, and social welfare and reducing inequality, and finding alternatives to unbridled free-market philosophies. It's like something out of the 70s for God's sake!

Of course I am not pretending that Scotland is some sort of Utopia. If they do vote for independence then there is every chance that once the euphoria dies down the political classes will descend into a series of very unseemly cat-fights. And Scots, deprived of a Tory-voting England to rebel against might start drifting rightwards themselves. And quite possibly some demagogic Scottish Thatcher will at some point whip up all their basest instincts.

But none of that is the point of this post. The point is that it turns out that the way to get people genuinely and passionately politically engaged is not to remind them of their own narrow self-interest. It is the very opposite. It is about raising the really big questions: what sort of country do we want to be? what are our core principles? what unites and what divides us? And raising them with a genuine sense that if people really take these questions seriously then there is a chance that we could actually do something about answering them. Collectively not individually. As a nation, not as an assemblage of self-interested individuals.

The novel and the short story compared

I find myself contemplating developing my writing in two different directions: the novel and the short story. I have applications pending for both the Word Factory's short story writing apprenticeship and the York Festival of Writing novel writers' workshop. Which leads me to wonder to what extent the two forms are compatible with each other. What in the end is the difference between writing novels and writing short stories?

The short story is memorably described on the Word Factory site as "an espresso shot" and in many ways this is the perfect analogy. Small and intense, an espresso packs all the power and flavour of a normal coffee into one small but satisfying cup. The effect can be fulfilling, exhilarating or even terrifying, giving rise in the susceptible to palpitations and a racing heartbeat. The aroma can be almost unbelievably complex- absorbed in an instant yet filling the senses for some time afterwards.

The term espresso covers a large variety of forms, from the half-cup favoured in Northern France to the bare teaspoon you get in Naples: from the satisfying completeness of a near-novella to the pithy force of the best flash fiction. There is also a place in the market for a huge variety of producers, from the globally successful high street chains to the obsessive ex-backpacker who imports beans green from a Peruvian village and roasts them by hand in the back of the shop: from the internationally renowned superstars of short fiction to the passionate amateur whose writing "reinvents the form" to such an extent as to be virtually unreadable. Here, mind you, the analogy fails somewhat, for whilst I would rather drink heated cat-piss than a Starbucks espresso I regard Alice Munro as not only one of the most successful but also one of the best short story writers around.

However all in all, the espresso remains the perfect metaphor for a short story. So what then of the novel? To equate a novel with a cup of filter coffee would be entirely unfair. A cup of filter coffee is, to coffee aficionados, no more than an espresso that has not been subjected to sufficient pressure to extract the flavour from the beans and has then been adulterated with half a pint of scalding water. Perhaps a closer analogy would be a bottle of wine- intoxicating, often complex in flavour and lasting a lot longer than a single espresso.

Doesn't quite catch it though, does it? For a start, a bottle of wine is all one thing, the first glass tasting identical to the last. And whilst it is possible to consume a bottle of wine alone, I have found that this is frowned on by the general public, particularly on the Tube in the morning rush hour. Most importantly though, however good a bottle of wine it is fundamentally unsubstantial. All you are left with the following day is a headache and a lingering sense of regret.

So another analogy then. Perhaps we need to broaden the range to incorporate food as well as drink. A full dinner is both more satisfying and more complex than a bottle of wine. Does that make it more like a novel? Well not really. Again, a large meal consumed alone speaks of nothing more than gluttony and leaves one feeling bloated and almost as regretful as a bottle of wine would. Furthermore, unless one is involved in a Mediterranean country wedding even the largest meal is not something one consumes over several days.

No, in the end the only true food-and-drink-based analogy I could find for the novel to set against the short-story-as-espresso was a rather odd one: a fruit tree. Fruit trees bear their bounty over many days, or even weeks. You can disregard them for a time, then go back and pick a few more fruits, or lie underneath and gorge yourself until time and the world disappears and there is only you and the tree. The fruits can be soft and luscious, like the pears on the tree in my garden: easy to pick and with soft and yielding flesh, or they can be as challenging and difficult as sloes. The blackthorn tree makes its fruits virtually inaccessible through an impenetrable tangle of dark, thorny branches and the sloes when picked are almost unpalatably bitter, setting the teeth on edge with their jarring force. Yet steeped in plenty of gin and left to marinate for a few weeks and their flavour is as subtle and complex as any you can find.

And in fact the two analogies speak to some extent of their mode of production too. Creating the perfect espresso takes experience, fine judgment and the ability to focus one's attention entirely on that one moment- that one cup. It is about juggling the interconnected factors of pressure, temperature and volume with the subtle blend of aromas in the coffee beans until what emerges into the cup is the pure and intense essence of the thing.

Growing a fruit tree is a much longer-scale thing. It involves intense effort, a considerable amount of patience and the willingness to prune ruthlessly when the tree is out of shape or fails to produce fruit. The tree grower is never entirely in control of the finished thing: can never fully know what fruits it will produce for those who visit it. All that he or she can do is to raise it in the best possible conditions, tend it carefully over a long period of time, then walk away and leave it for others to discover.

So there you go, I think. If a short story is a shot of espresso then a novel is a fruit tree. Obvious when you come to think about it.

When is political correctness not political correctness?

The now universally pejorative term "politically correct" has reared its head again in the discussion of the appalling Rotherham child abuse scandal. The term is nowhere used in the report by Professor Alexis Jay that exposes the full extent of the tragedy but that has not stopped commentators from declaring that political correctness was what was to blame for the abuse being allowed to go unchecked for so long.

The narrative is clear: almost all of the abusers were of Pakistani heritage, this fact being repeatedly reported by abuse victims, and the police, social services, (Labour) councillors and other public officials consistently refused to acknowledge that fact for fear of appearing racist. So abusers were left unchallenged and the girls' pleas for help ignored, purely as a result of stultifying political correctness.

This is an appalling charge, and the danger is of course that it appears to call into question the belief system that underpins any positive interpretation of the term "political correctness": that it is unacceptable in today's society to make judgments purely on the basis of factors such as race. If political correctness can lead to the turning of a blind eye while 1400 children are being abused then we are better off without it, aren't we?

The term is an interesting one, coined apparently in the mid 20th Century by serious-minded communists and socialists to describe the acceptability or otherwise of any thought or utterance within their particular political belief system. However it quickly proved a term and a way of thinking that was easy to parody and ridicule. Hardly surprising, given the etymology. "Correct", from the Latin corrigere (to set to a rule) implies a certain rigidity and absolutism. Politics on the other hand is the art of the possible. The connotations of the two words are poles apart.

So political correctness came to sum up a certain blind rigidity of thought amongst those over-influenced by some particular political ideology. And slowly its meaning began to spread, until it now encompasses anyone who puts any sort of ideology (political or otherwise) above what the critical observer regards as common sense.

So was political correctness in these terms what lay behind the repeated failure by various Rotherham officials to act on allegations of child abuse? The Sun's leader column asks when left wing politicians and the police are going to place child safety over political correctness, and bizarre as it may seem, the consensus seems to be that it was an unwillingness to appear racist that prevented the police from intervening earlier.

Professor Jay's report certainly identifies "collective failures of political and officer leadership" that she describes as "blatant." She talks of reports into allegations of abuse being suppressed and ignored and of no action being taken. She states that "Some at a senior level in the Police and children's social care continued to think the extent of the problem, as described by youth workers, was exaggerated" and says that the Council leader's 2013 apology "should have been made years earlier, and the issue given the political leadership it needed."

Yet on the specific issue of the perpetrators' Pakistani heritage and its importance in how the situation was dealt with her criticisms do not perhaps make the case against "political correctness" quite as strongly as commentators appear to suggest. In her executive summary the only comment on this subject is this: "Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."

This is a serious point, but it is not her first comment on the issue of the ethnicity of the abusers. Her primary criticism is that "throughout the entire period, councillors did not engage directly with the Pakistani-heritage community to discuss how best they could jointly address the issue." In what sense could an unwillingness to discuss crucially important issues with members of a non-white ethnic group be regarded as political correctness?

The large majority of Professor Jay's criticisms though are on another issue entirely, and this is what really calls into question the interpretation of her report as a condemnation of political correctness. She says that "the scale and seriousness of the problem was underplayed by senior managers"; that "Police gave no priority to CSE [Child Sexual Exploitation], regarding many child victims with contempt and failing to act on their abuse as a crime"; and that "Some at a senior level in the Police and children's social care continued to think the extent of the problem, as described by youth workers, was exaggerated, and seemed intent on reducing the official numbers of children categorised as CSE."

This speaks of a systemic failure at senior level to respond seriously to concerns that were being relayed to them by social workers who "appeared to be overwhelmed by the numbers involved" and were "acutely understaffed and over stretched, struggling to cope with demand." There was clearly a fear that there was a can of worms here which, once opened, would lead to even more overwhelming pressures, and "Some councillors ... hoped [the problem] would go away."

The key issue though was the nature of the children who were being exploited. Professor Jay's report contains this damningly concise summary: "The majority of children whose files we read had multiple reported missing episodes. Addiction and mental health emerged as common themes in the files. Almost 50% of children who were sexually exploited or at risk had misused alcohol or other substances ... and two thirds had emotional health difficulties. There were issues of parental addiction in 20% of cases and parental mental health issues in over a third of cases."

Put this picture of the children involved against the "contempt" of the police and other agencies and the view at senior level that the problem was "exaggerated" and you get to the real nub of the issue. The girls were not believed and their stories not taken seriously because they were just not the kind of children whose concerns one ever takes seriously. They were runaways, delinquents and troublemakers and the daughters of drug addicts. One can almost hear the contempt in the voices of "those at senior level" when describing such people.

There is an interesting twist here. Many of Rotherham's councillors are of Pakistani heritage and, one imagines, successfully middle class too. Perhaps more than most these would be the people who would look down their noses at low-class trash like the girls described here. They may not actively have believed that such people deserve what they get, but from the security of their stable, affluent and well-regarded family lives they would be less than inclined to believe everything such girls said.

So if anything it was a failure in political correctness rather than its over-enthusiastic implementation that let these girls down. The victims of this abuse were ignored and their testimony was not believed because, primarily, of their social class. And that, far more than the unwillingness of some staff to confront the issue of race, was the enormous failing here.

An unthinkable solution to the Higher Education quandary

In my last post I bemoaned the increasing numbers of students on 'vocational' Higher Education courses. As of course have many others. The problem is that any sort of alternative seems to be fraught with difficulties. I don't believe that increasing the number of technical training courses is the answer, as I argued in my last post, and simply eliminating any degree course that did not meet some high-minded ideal about the pursuit of knowledge and understanding would be a retrograde and elitist step that would take us back to the 1970s.

So what can be done about it? First, it is important to recognise why it is that this increasingly utilitarian approach to higher education has taken hold. The central and unquestioned aim of any nation today is economic growth, and higher education is seen first and foremost as an engine of growth. Whether at a national or an individual level the aim (we are told) has to be to increase both production and consumption, to maximise economic activity. If we fail to do that we are failing to keep our place, whether as individuals or as a nation. If economic activity declines, or even fails to grow, then we are doomed.

This level of economic activity is even described (interchangeably) as our standard of living, and it is fair to say that until fairly recently in the rich West, and today in poorer countries, that is a reasonable connection to make. If increased economic activity means moving from a subsistence economy without clean water or adequate healthcare to one with these facilities then level of economic activity = standard of living.

The thing is though that in the rich West we are long past that point. Now the connection between level of economic activity and standard of living is pretty much defunct. For a start, increasing economic activity seems to go alongside increasing economic inequality, and inequality is bad for everyone's standard of living, even the richest. Secondly, a large proportion of the population of Western countries are at the stage where an increase in their personal economic activity will be likely to decrease rather than increase their standard of living. Once you have everything material you need to lead a comfortable life, relentless pursuit of the newest electronic devices and the means to pay for them leads not to improved standard of living but to affluenza.

In broader terms, national economic growth goes hand in hand these days with incomprehensibly vast gambles on the financial markets. Some ludicrously high percentage of the world's economic activity is actually in the form of abstruse and vastly complex financial transactions with no actual goods changing hands but literally trillions of dollars wafting to and fro on the electronic breeze. We have already seen the catastrophic damage this sort of thing can cause, and I don't believe that anyone believes that we will not face another global financial meltdown at some stage. Where economic activity is pretty much abstract anyway there is really nothing to control its growth.

So, whilst the pursuit of economic growth was (and is still for most countries) an essential phase in reaching acceptable standards of hygiene, nutrition, housing and healthcare, can it possibly remain as a realistic aspiration for those countries which have already exceeded the level of economic activity necessary to achieve those goals? Is there not a danger of something like the notorious potlatch of native American tribes, where vast amounts of valuable goods are simply thrown away in order for the relentless machinery of economic growth to keep turning? Should the richer nations not be focussing on actual standards of living- including contentment, social cohesion and stability- rather than simply on economic growth? That would involve a massive shift in direction of course, and individual aspirations would have somehow to be decoupled from the relentless acquisition of more and more increasingly irrelevant affluence, but perhaps soon we will be forced into that change of direction. I honestly cannot see our current obsession with economic growth as sustainable.

So what has all this got to do with higher education?

Well the question should be, I believe, how higher education can contribute to raising standards of living, rather than levels of economic activity. And as a passionate educator I absolutely believe it can. Everybody can and should be able to benefit from the unique opportunities higher education provides actually to learn to think- to explore and question and imagine and create. This is what we, as a country and a world, need to invest in, if we are to see a genuine improvement in living standards across the globe. And invest we must, because you can't ask a young person effectively to shell out up to £9,000 a year just to be taught how to think, with no clear prospect of a job at the end of it. Yet if as a society we make it possible for those young people to take that time, then we have a chance of ending up not with David Brents but with the next generation of filmmakers and artists, social entrepreneurs and creative thinkers. And those are the people we are really going to need.

This is a Utopian vision of course. It would involve substantially raising taxes, so that today's middle managers might have to make do with a Ford Focus and an Asus tablet rather than an Audi TT and an iPad. It would mean the UK losing its international ranking on the GDP growth tables. It would mean a fundamental rethink, so that the goal for young people was not to be a millionaire and live in a big house behind electric gates, but to be contented and involved and creative.

And none of that is going to happen, is it? So shall we just carry on saddling generation of generation of young people with unaffordable student debts so that they can get on the first rung of that much-vaunted ladder towards increased prosperity, increased affluence, increased isolation and (if I am not being too dramatic) the ultimate death of their souls?

Thinking the unthinkable about Higher Education

It is an inevitable fact that in a lot of areas of life those who make policy are of a different generation from those it principally affects. This is particularly true of education, an area where the experience of the policy-makers' generation (my generation) and that which it chiefly affects (today's young) is very different indeed.

I have written in a post some time back about how privileged my generation was, and nowhere more so than in the expectations placed on those who went to university. Most of us received generous grants, there were no fees and there was no pressure on us to find a graduate-level job as soon as we left. Some courses were principally vocational of course, but even those studying medicine were, as I remember it, more focussed on where the next pint (or 15) was coming from than what their future employment prospects were going to be like.

University study was in retrospect seen largely as an opportunity for intellectual exploration offered free and without condition to (an admittedly small proportion of) the nation's youth. Certainly there were tabloid stories of students spending their grants on drink and drugs without attending a single lecture, and the occasional moral panic about student militancy and sit-ins and revolutionary fervour, but such behaviour came to be seen as an intrinsic part of Higher Education: the actual course almost secondary. And yet a university degree had genuine currency, once the possessor got their act together sufficiently to start looking for jobs, giving a significant boost to lifetime earnings.

Then, over time, politicians woke up to the fact that these indulgences were being offered only to a tiny minority of the population and a massive expansion in Higher Education began, to the point where the HE participation rate is now around 50% and suddenly we find that the whole game has changed. Now, university degrees are far less about intellectual exploration and self-discovery and far more about preparation for the world of work. It is a ruthless market out there (as today's young are constantly reminded) and no one can afford three years of self-indulgent time-wasting.

The language of utilitarianism is everywhere. Universities advertise their wares on the basis of the proportion of alumni now in graduate level employment, and most crucially the whole thing is now far from free. University education involves a massive financial commitment from the student nowadays and as with any financial commitment they expect a return on their investment. Indeed it seems that that sort of hardening up of attitudes was pretty much the point of the tuition fee rises- since various studies have shown that they will raise no money at all for the government.

Higher Education, it seems, has become a tool for economic advancement above everything else. At an individual level students are told over and over again that without a degree their lifetime employment prospects will be minimal, and nationally investment in HE is seen as crucial for the UK to compete in tomorrow's high-tec global economy (or some such cliched formulation).

All this has happened quickly but incrementally, and with no significant national debate on the point of principal. The debate has been all about the level of tuition fees, the iniquity of student loans and the unfairness of access to the elite universities. What has seldom been asked is whether it is right for 50% of the country's population to be studying university degree courses, or whether it is right for the principal purpose of said degree courses to be improving employability.

A proportion of today's students certainly are following what one might characterise as HE-appropriate vocational courses- medicine, for instance, or engineering. Another tranche (largely the most able and/or middle class) are studying traditional degree courses. Many of these will duly proceed to graduate-level employment- the maths and science graduates as city traders and the Arts graduates as teachers or social workers, as civil servants or working in the charity sector.

But what of the rest- now the majority? Most of these will currently be on a variety of broadly business/management oriented courses at a selection of lesser-regarded universities. They may not have shelled out the full £27,000 in tuition fees but they will still be accruing a pretty substantial debt, and for what? Principally, it seems, to mensure that the next generation of David Brents have an even more secure command of management-speak bullshit with which to bore and demotivate their workforce.

I am not denigrating 'mickey-mouse degrees' here, neither am I seeking to undermine the right of the less well off or the less academically able to as extensive a period of education as I benefited from as a young man. What I am questioning is the justifiability of encouraging huge numbers of young people to go to university and saddle themselves with a mountain of student debt in order to follow supposedly vocational courses that neither afford them any significant vocational skills nor give them space and encouragement to broaden their minds more generally.

Neither, incidentally, am I joining the traditional clamour for more technical training courses. It is a seductive argument that what the less academic (whatever that means) need is to be taught a trade. However I do not personally believe that it is as simple as that. It is not just a question of disparity of esteem, and the fact that a return to technical training colleges would set in stone a whole social system based on class division of employment. The other problem is that the world is changing so rapidly that training for a particular trade might soon be seen as having been as cruelly useless as teaching Sheffield lads of a generation ago to work in the steel industry. "We will always need plumbers," the cry goes up. Well maybe, but recently British plumbers have found themselves out-competed by their Eastern European colleagues, and changes in technology are making a lot of the old plumbing skills (like soldering joints) redundant.

So what is the answer? Well it seems to me that before attempting to find an answer to this quandary, society actually has to consider some much deeper questions first. Which I think means another blog post... -->

I suppose it's time to go back to the novel again...

Over recent weeks virtually everything I have written (in this blog) has been in a sense journalism, but my real ambition is to become a novelist. Next month I am going to the Festival of Writing at York and will be attending workshops on various aspects of the novelist's craft. I will also be pitching my work to two agents in face to face meetings- my chance to hear what professionals might actually think of what I have written. And since that is only a month away, maybe I should stop writing these blog posts and get back to my novel.

The question is whether the two sorts of writing can coexist, and whether blog post writing such as this will tend to help or hinder my novel writing. Robert McCrum seems to argue here that there is no conflict, and cites a number of novelists who have been journalists, including PG Wodehouse, Graham Greene and George Orwell. However my initial surprise was that the list he compiles is so short. Writing is writing, isn't it? If you are good at one sort, why would you not be good at the other too? Why do far more writers not work in both genres?

When you look a little closer, there are actually a number of quite significant similarities between novel writing and journalism. Both types of writing depend for their effect on an understanding of character, narrative and the power of language. Both use research and/or creative imagination to a greater or lesser degree and both, crucially, are required to engage the reader quickly and maintain their interest.

Yet novelists (and others) have always seemed to look down their noses at journalism as "hack" writing, seeing novels as unquestionably the higher form: as an art rather than a trade. Stella Gibbons satirises this attitude brilliantly in the spoof dedication of Cold Comfort Farm to "Anthony Pookworthy Esq.":

The life of the journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style. You, who are so adept at the lovely polishing of every grave and lucent phrase, will realize the magnitude of the task which confronted me when, after spending ten years as a journalist, learning to say exactly what I meant in short sentences, that I must learn, if I was to achieve literature and favourable reviews, to write as though I were not quite sure about what I meant but was jolly well going to say something all the same in sentences as long as possible."

Her point is, of course, that if journalism is a trade it is a very demanding one. Both forms of writing may be required to engage the reader quickly, but whilst a novelist probably has a chapter or two a journalist has the amount of time it takes to get from Highbury and Islington to Kings Cross on the Victoria line. A novelist may be asked to cut 20,000 words from their novel prior to publication and be given three months to do it, but a journalist will be told to get the bloody piece down to 200 words by one o clock or it's not going in the paper.

However, though it would be pointless to debate which form of writing requires more skill it is clear that they are very different, both in intention and (therefore) in form. The purpose of a piece of journalism is (in the words of John Reith) to inform, educate and entertain, probably in that order. It seeks to engage its readers in an issue or situation in the world and encourage them to think about it in a new way. A novel would seek to place the three verbs in the reverse order, with almost all of the emphasis on "entertain." Rather than seek to engage its readers in a real world situation in a new way it encourages them to inhabit an entirely new world (even if it is one that closely resembles the real world).

What is interesting is the role of the author of a piece of journalism vis-a-vis the reader. I would argue that the reader is always very much aware of the presence of the journalist. In opinion pieces this is obvious of course. Many use the first person, whether single or plural, but even where they do not it is very clear that this is an individual's opinion being expressed. In reportage the presence of the journalist may seem less obvious, but such pieces always read (in my head at least) as an account being given by someone who has collated all the relevant information for me. The journalist in a sense stands between the reader and the events being reported. Even at its most engaging and immersive, journalism does not truly make us feel we were there: rather it makes us feel that we can imagine the journalist being there.

Novels are rather different. Gone are the days when authorial voice intruded directly into novels (as it does in Tom Jones, for instance, or the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman). Now we expect the author effectively to disappear when we read a novel, because we engage with the events and characters of a novel directly and personally. When a novel is engaging and immersive we truly do feel we are there and have no concept whatever of an author intruding in that process.

The form of such writing reflects some fundamental differences too. Journalists know that the first paragraph must essentially carry the entire import of the piece (because many readers will never make it past the first paragraph). Indeed, wherever one stops reading an article that article must be able to hold together as a complete and coherent argument up to that point. No holding back the key point until the killer last paragraph, because a proportion of readers will never even get there.

A successful novel is the precise opposite. It builds in tension, complexity and engagement with characters. Sometimes the start may seem slow or baffling or you may be unsure where it is going, but you stick with it because you are confident that the author knows what they are doing. Then slowly the novel gets its teeth into you, so you can't stop reading until the end, which duly floors you with the intensity and force of its emotional energy. Whilst a fair proportion of readers do not read every word of a newspaper article (including many who found it quite interesting, but couldn't be bothered reading it to the end) hardly anyone gets properly into a novel and then fails to finish it.

However the biggest difference for me between journalism and novel writing is an element of the process by which it is produced: namely the time it takes. Journalists write quickly- they have to. There is simply no point in producing even an opinion piece about something if people have stopped talking about it. Journalism is about deadlines and quick turnarounds and responsiveness to changing events. What is more it results almost entirely from the functioning of the conscious mind. A journalist cannot afford to go for a long walk or sit daydreaming and waiting for vague ideas to coalesce in her head. Her job is about obtaining, collating and processing information and presenting it in a form that is readily accessible to the reader. It is partly why the journalist is so upfront in the finished piece. We are aware that she worked to produce this- that this article arises from the sweat of her brow.

Some novelists write quickly (though nowhere near as quickly as journalists) but extensive periods of waiting seem utterly intrinsic to the process of getting a novel onto bookshelves. Jane Austen reputedly put a draft of a novel she had completed into a drawer, locked it, gave the key to Cassandra, and told her sister not to give the key back to her for a year. Only then would she be able to redraft the novel well. And even today every stage of producing a novel seems designed to take the finished book away from any sort of journalistic immediacy of writing it.

And novels are produced at least as much from the unconscious as the conscious mind of the author (as I have argued here for instance). The effect of this, I would argue, is to reduce still further the sense of the author's presence in the finished work, because it is the novel we engage with, not the author's efforts in producing it. In fact when we start noticing the latter too much it can kill our enjoyment and engagement entirely. A successful novel takes us directly into a world of the author's unconscious imagination and we live in it and explore it as if we were the first people there.

So what does this tell me  in regards to the questions I posed in the second paragraph of this piece? Well, not much I suppose. Except perhaps that a novelist needs time away from their creation in a way that a journalist simply does not.

So maybe it's no bad thing that I haven't so much as looked at my novel in weeks.

What defines a nation state?

Many of the world's crises recently have revolved around the question of nation states and how they are defined. Ukraine's turmoil is caused in part by being a pawn in power games between Putin and the West, but in part too by the history of Ukraine as a nation state, and the way that Crimea was allegedly added to it by Khrushchev when he was drunk. The ability and right of the Palestinian territories to function as nation states is of course central to the Gaza conflict, and we appear to be witnessing in Iraq the demise of that country as a nation state at all. And in a more domestic (and far less serious) context, both the Scottish independence referendum and the EU debate centre around the changing nature of the nation state.

All of which cases lead me to ponder on how a nation state can be defined. We tend to think of the concept as being inevitable and permanent but it is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon: Germany and Italy for instance only came into existence in the late 19th Century. In reality in many cases nation states are pretty arbitrary constructs: many do not have a unifying language (look at Belgium for instance), religion (think of Iraq) or ethnicity (virtually any African nation) or even coherent shape in terms of borders. On the face of it France seems to have very regular and logical borders (mainland France is called "the Hexagon" by the French), but look at the country's actual geography:

What is more, in today's world there are often more connections between individuals and groups in different countries than those within the nation state itself. Jet travel is no respecter of national boundaries and neither is the internet. Multinational companies (as the adjective implies) ignore differences between nation states, except for reasons of minimizing tax. A high street in London is now more similar to a high street in Brisbane than it is to one in Lerwick and it is almost impossible to discover where the goods we consume have actually been produced.

So how can a nation state be defined, if not by the companies trading in it, the ethnicity or religion of its peoples or the language spoken. Even social groupings won't do the job, as social media creates and maintains social groups that transcend national boundaries, and if the neo-cons have their way government won't either, as all the erstwhile government services are outsourced to (multinational) private sector companies. In the UK we already have a significant proportion of our public services delivered by French, German or American companies, and China is to be developing our new generation of power stations apparently.

It seems that all we are left with to define a nation state are the following: the national anthem and the flag. Both are on display (in the event of victory) at games such as the Commonwealth Games and the Olympics, and the visual image of the victorious athlete mouthing the words of their anthem in front of their nation's flag is about the strongest symbol of nationhood one gets to see.

So what of these national anthems and these flags? Most were chosen some time ago of course, so one might think that they are too out of date now to tell us anything meaningful about the nation states they symbolise, but in fact there are some surprising insights to be gained just by looking at them more closely.

Take for instance the flags and national anthems of Britain, the United Sates and France- three countries locked in a long history of mutual support and distrust since the American Revolution itself (it was France that donated the Statue of Liberty to the nascent United States). The flags are an interesting comparison as they all use the same three colours: red, white and blue, but the use made of these colours is very different:

The French flag is by far the simplest and boldest. To the French it speaks of clarity of thought and the Age of Reason that saw the creation of the Republic. It is the one true Tricolore, and as such the pattern for countless flags that followed, whilst remaining unique and archetypal. The problem is that to everyone else, France's flag is that one with the red, white and blue stripes, but are they horizontal or vertical? Or is that Hungary anyway. And which colour is it on the left? Who bloody cares anyway. They all look the same.

The British flag speaks of unity in diversity with its complex of overlaid crosses, and of the centrality of our great nation in the converging lines of power and influence that reach across the globe. Except that it is a bugger to draw, is probably hardly ever hung the right way up (which is the right way up? Does anyone actually know?) and shouldn't even be called the Union Jack at all.

The US flag is both powerfully simple and somehow on a different scale to the other two. It is instantly recognisable and would be the easiest to win Pictionary with, even without coloured pens, yet it has an unfeasibly large number of elements that always make it look bigger than it actually is. And its visual symbolism is on an epic scale: the red lines representing the lands and oceans and the stars the overarching skies. The earth beneath and the skies above- all are ours, the flag seems to say.

The anthems are just as different one from another, and the connotations of their words just as telling. The Marseillaise, for all its warlike evocation of revolutionary struggle is also surprisingly intimate and familial in its language. It refers to enfants (children), bras (arms) and fils (sons), and evokes a rural scene of campagnes (fields) and sillons (furrows). What is more, however defiant its tone there is an air of defeatism about the song. It is the citizens the chorus calls to arms, not the soldiery, and it calls them to put up barricades- surely a futile last-ditch attempt to resist the inexorable march of the feroces soldats who are approaching to égorger (slay) our sons and our companions.

The British national anthem is almost ludicrously overblown. One use of an adjective such as "gracious" one could maybe get away with, but in the first verse alone (the only one anyone knows) we have "gracious," "noble," "victorious" and "glorious." And what is telling is what the song in the end wishes for. Unlike the French and US anthems, the British national anthem positively invites subjugation. "rule us," or "be our Queen" would be one thing, but the anthem actually asks for the monarch to "rule over us."

So if the Marseillaise encapsulates France's parochial yet truculent defeatism and God Save the Queen manages to sum up Britain's pompous subservience, what of the Star Spangled Banner? Like the Marseillaise the US national anthem is an evocation of revolutionary struggle against a tyrannical oppressor, and if its depiction of "the rocket's red glare, [and] the bombs bursting in air" is nowadays more reminiscent of Hamas or the Taliban than of the all-conquering US Army then that is simply one of history's ironies.

In essence the Star Spangled Banner is a simple yet powerful summation of a myth that has kept the US at the top of the heap for a very long time. For a start it is a song about the nation's flag, so the two symbols work hand in hand. Secondly its imagery is actually quite surprisingly uplifting. There is a great deal about light ("the dawn's early light," "twilight," "gleaming", "gleam," "morning's first beam," "reflected," "shines," and of course the "star spangled banner" itself). There is powerful evocation of place too, with "the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep," "the breeze," "the towering steep" and "the stream." Together these give a strong sense of the land as the first European pioneers found it: unsullied, vast and shining. The people in the song are "brave" and "free" and this is their "land" and their "home."

Small wonder then that Americans have seen themselves as the undisputed leaders of the free world. The Star Spangled Banner is an anthem that can really only be sung with one's fist held over one's heart, unlike God Save the Queen which must be droned out in an embarrassed dirge and the Marseillaise which can only really be bellowed whilst in a state of inebriation.

So does any of this matter at all? Do these symbols prove that there is some indefinable essence to nationhood that was somehow captured by the designers of flags and the composers of anthems, and that still holds true today? Or is this some variation of nominative determinism, and a country's people learns over time to live up (or down) to that country's national symbols?

Who knows? What I would say though, to my fellow Scots is this: if you do vote for independence then think long and hard before you officially adopt Flower of Scotland as the national anthem.