Education articles from March 2001

Education archives from March 2001

R. S. Thomas, 1913-2000.(Brief Article)(Obituary)
March 22, 2001... In 1958 R. S. Thomas agreed to become a sponsor for a new journal, Critical Quarterly, which I was about to launch with A. E. Dyson. He joined our honorary committee. Tony Dyson was already an enthusiast for his poetry, and in subsequent years...

Editorial.(Brief Article)(Editorial)
March 22, 2001... Few governments who have made election pledges to put education at the heart of their agenda have carried them out in office. But then none have had a prime minister with school-aged children in the state sector and a secretary of state whose...

Text, culture, rhetoric: Some futures for English(1).(Transcript)
March 22, 2001... In his book on character analysis Wilhelm Reich describes character as a kind of armour, a rigid suit that one bolts on and that its wearer then comes to resemble.(2) It's a metaphor that Jacques Lacan picks up in a phrase about the `blazons of...

Not in front of the parents: How `education speak' prevents teachers from being heard.(Transcript)
March 22, 2001... On a lamp-post halfway across Parker's Piece in Cambridge, at an imaginary dividing line between the university and the rest of the town, an anonymous wit once put up a sign that read: `Reality Checkpoint'. In my dealings with many, but not...

History of an Ordinary Doubt.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... 1 In southern Mesopotamia, around two and a half millennia BC, the city of Mashkan-shapir displayed a new kind of manufacture: synthetic black-basalt slabs for all exterior walls. Fine metallurgical ...

Including the socially excluded: League tables and Labour's schools policy.
March 22, 2001... In the autumn before he was elected prime minister, Tony Blair, in a fit of possibly misplaced hubris, announced that his party would have a thousand days to prepare for the next thousand years. In the event it was only 974 days from the...

Mind the gap: The creative conundrum.
March 22, 2001... Senior politicians, including the Prime Minister, argue that it is vital to promote creativity and innovation throughout education. This was a theme of Tony Blair's electioneering speeches in the run up to the 1997 landslide. He made it one of...

How not to educate the information age workforce.
March 22, 2001... Tony Blair, in the 1997 general election campaign, famously made education his top three priorities. He was more emphatic than most, but it is every politician's top priority, and certainly every parent's. Yet there are no aspects of modern...

Walking the Loop.(Poem)
March 22, 2001... 1 You are out walking the loop, a 3 mile circuit along elderberry, fir and wild blackberry -- water on all sides. Though you have walked this loop many Sundays, nobody knows your name or who you are. It's a...

Increasing educational opportunity.
March 22, 2001... The time has come to question the easy assumption made by politicians, particularly the present government, that education -- implicitly compulsory -- is, of itself, a good thing. Education, education, education has become more, more, more. Not...

What kinds of more mean better? Continuous scholarisation or lifelong learning.(higher education research, Scotland)
March 22, 2001... I write from an institution which has been concerned for 175 years with the education of adults. The Mechanics Institutes, of which Birkbeck was an early member, were set up in the early part of the nineteenth century to provide educational...

The really useful company: Graduates, employment and the humanities.(higher education research, United Kingdom)
March 22, 2001... What are universities for? No, seriously. For enlightenment? Intellectual debate? `Widening participation'? Development of skills? Training for the professions? Ah, now we see it. The slippery slope of current political rhetoric becomes...

Grand Forks.(poetry by Louis Simpson)(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2001... The old woman who still bears some strong vestiges of former beauty, once played Broadway in Hello, Dolly! and toured with a road company. Now she lives alone. For company she has three dogs, an unspecified ...

Filling an emptying bath, or Understanding humanities funding.(higher education, University of Wales)(Column)
March 22, 2001... When I came to work in Cardiff in 1994 and was soon invited to take over control of the School budget, it became clear that we had a serious leak in our funding. Because of the educationally admirable University of Wales practice whereby...

Checking the books: What are universities for?(higher education finance, United Kingdom)(Column)
March 22, 2001... One of the first things I learnt when I took my first university job was that academics are even worse whingers than farmers. Gather two or three together and within minutes conversation will turn to what's wrong with students, colleagues,...

How it was that exam results became the talk of the steamie.(Higher Still education policy, Scotland)(Column)
March 22, 2001... Teenagers can often be heard wailing and gnashing their teeth in summer when the public exam results are published. But never have so many cries been wailed or teeth gnashed as there were in August last year in Scotland. From Kirkcudbright to...

Language: A Light(er) extinguished.
March 22, 2001... `After 16 Years, Dr Lighter's Lexicon, Half-Done, Still Earns Experts' Praise' Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2000 Thus the terse summation of sixteen years' work, brought to an abrupt halt, as the story that follows explains, not, for...

Art: The value of things.
March 22, 2001... Wilful blindness of the forces at play in the value of things has accompanied the rise of the marketplace as a universal equivalent, slowly eroding any distinctions between the economic and non-economic. The ideal of the museum, a repository...