"Tory leader David Cameron says there is more to life than making money, arguing that improving people's happiness is a key challenge for politicians.
In a speech to the Google Zeitgeist Europe conference, he said the focus should not just be on financial wealth.
Under a Tory government, the public sector would become "the world leader in progressive employment practice".
But he conceded that some on the right would believe people's well-being was nothing to do with politics."
Would they ? I thought the idea on the right was that independent people were happiest and that politics should facilitate this by getting the state out of the way as much as possible. Maybe not.
Mr Cameron does seem to be a bit of a Boho.
"To calculate a person's status, you take his net worth and multiply it by his antimaterialistic attitudes. A zero in either column means no prestige, but high numbers in both rocket you to the top of the heap. Thus, to be treated well in this world, not only do you have to show some income results; you have to perform a series of feints to show how little your worldly success means to you.... You will ceaselessly bash yuppies in order to show that you yourself have not become one. You will talk about your nanny as if she were your close personal friend, as if it were just a weird triviality that you happen to live in a $900,000 Santa Monica house and she takes the bus two hours each day to the barrio. "
It's the education bill today, in which Labour MPs will once again try to deny working class kids the sort of education most of them had. Tim Worstall has the links here and here.
Robert Crampton tells it like it is :
The people I’ve met who went to grammars learnt in greater depth and breadth than I did. Their lessons were more rigorous and more challenging. Roy Jenkins? Denis Healey? Harold Wilson? I don’t think they were baking sheets of paper in the oven to make them look like medieval parchment for history homework in the Thirties, as I was 40-odd years on.
I didn't do that at grammar school either. But my sons did, in year 8 comprehensive.
They should consider this, these Labour men and women who detest their leader and educational selection in equal measure. For more than 30 years, from the death of Hugh Gaitskell to the death of John Smith, when the grammar school generation was on stream, the Labour Party did not feel the need to choose a public schoolboy for its leader. Since 1994, when the comprehensive generation started to become available, they’ve had Blair from Fettes, and soon they’ll have Brown, the product of a ruthlessly selective fast-track education. And before too long, I suspect, we’ll have Cameron from Eton. He’ll be that school’s nineteenth Prime Minister. We’re still waiting for the comprehensive system to produce its first.
Well, Of Course We Will, Emma…
10 hours ago
7 comments:
Bloody right. I am *still* bitter about the comprehensive sausage machine I was forcible rammed through at age 11. Many of my contemporaries had way more raw ability than many public school alumni I met at Oxford; but, as Crampton says, who suggested to them thay they apply?
I have yet to meet anyone with a comprehensive education who supports the concept ideologically.
Well I have and I do. The idea that a one-off drop-dead exam taken at the age of 11 should determine one's entire future is ridiculous. I have gone on to get one Bachelors and two Masters degrees. Judging from a swift visit to Friends Reunited, many of my contemporaries did a great deal better than that. So the taxpayer didn't provide you, the moai, with a top-notch education? Well boohoo. Perhaps they had a lot of other demands on their money. Perhaps they expected us to continue learning throughout our lives, at our own expense. (I took my last degree aged 44). Blame your parents for not buying you a fancy education, not the over-burdened taxpayer!
However I agree wholeheartedly with you that many public schoolboys are lazy, neurotic, thick as pigsh*t and a waste of oxygen.
"However I agree wholeheartedly with you that many public schoolboys are lazy, neurotic, thick as pigsh*t and a waste of oxygen."
And yet they are vastly succesful. Rather proving the point that the stat is dismal at improving minds.
Lazy public schoolboys? Whilst the academic quality of education provided by public (private) schools is assumed to be superior, a very real benefit is also derived from the work ethic and desire to succeed that is engendered in these establishments. I can only speak from my own experience, but I’ve never had reason to question the application of public school educated colleagues or employees. Ditto the kids from my own family who went on to medical or engineering school (university). The problem I have with Crampton’s piece is that very few kids from the bottom of the pile ever make it to a grammar school, most of the students are probably from middle class homes that are too tight to pay for a private education, they’d rather bus driving tax payers foot the bill.
The premise:
"The idea that a one-off drop-dead exam taken at the age of 11 should determine one's entire future is ridiculous."
The counterfactual:
"I have gone on to get one Bachelors and two Masters degrees. Judging from a swift visit to Friends Reunited, many of my contemporaries did a great deal better than that."
It certainly is ridiculous that failing the eleven plus determined your whole future.
Tosspot
Those bent on hammering the grammar school concept do like to focus on the 11+ almost to the point where that is their only criticism.
Ive got a radical idea! Why dont we reinstitute the 11+ or something like it and - this the really clever part - allow people at least one chance to retake it.
Anon, that's an old idea. In Scotland when I did it you took an exam two years in a row. If your scores differed much, an educational psychologist would interview you and re-test you to settle the matter.
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