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You are here: Home / Archives for politics

This is a Dictatorship by Equipo Plantel ill. Mikel Casal tr. Lawrence Schimel (translator)

October 1, 2021 By achuka Leave a Comment

ACHUKA Book of the Day 1 Oct 2021

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This perfectly-formed (215mm x 185mm) Latvian-printed non-fiction picture book from Book Island, the Bristol-based publisher founded by Greet Pauwelijn with a mission “to publish up, not down” first appeared in Spanish in 1977 as Asi es la dictadura two years after the death of Franco with cartoon-style illustrations by L. F. Santamaria. The book was republished in Spain six years ago with these new illustrations by Mikel Casal who has a more graphic style of caricature. Now that it is available in English, it should be in every school library in the UK.

original cover

The Spanish edition is available direct from Book Island: https://www.bookisland.co.uk/collections/books/products/this-is-a-dictatorship-spanish-edition
A dual gift of both the English and Spanish editions of the book would make a splendid present for any young person beginning to study Spanish at school.

What happens to a country when one person makes all the rules? What would it feel like to live in such a place? And why is it important for us to know about? This book, first written in Spain soon after the end of the Franco dictatorship, set out to explain dictatorship to the next generation. The Spanish publishers believed that “Children are interested in everything adults are interested in. You must explain things to them, even if it requires effort.”

In an Endnote, we are told, “In 1977, when this book was first created, there were around 40 counties in the world that were considered to be dictatorships. Today, in 2021, according to various sources, there are 36… However, there are many forms of government that, although they are not labelled as such, are not all that different from dictatorships… So long as there is neither transparency in public management, nor the potential for citizens to participate and exercise their rights (including the right to complain and make demands), there can’t be true democracy.”

The endpapers depict two dozen dictators of recent times — at the front ordered by date of birth and at the back ordered by date of death.

Read more about the illustrator: https://blog.picturebookmakers.com/post/141480225261/mikel-casal

Follow him on Instagram:

 

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A post shared by mikel casal ★ Illustrator (@mikelcasal01)

And follow the translator (also a poet):

 

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A post shared by Lawrence Schimel (@lawrence_schimel)

Filed Under: BookOfTheDay, Illustrated, NonFiction Tagged With: democracy, dictatorship, freedom, politics, power, Spain

How To Change The World by Rashmi Sirdeshpande ill. Annabel Tempest

January 8, 2021 By achuka Leave a Comment

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Could you and your friends change the world? This book will inspire you with 15 true stories of groups of amazing humans who’ve changed the world.

Discover the astonishing things humans can achieve: from the campaign for women’s votes, to the efforts to heal the ozone layer. Or travel back to the start of democracy in Ancient Greece, and into space to see the incredible teamwork on the international space station. Above all, uncover just some of the MANY ways we can work together to change our world – all brought to life with astonishing story-telling and illustration.

Follow Rashmi on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rashmiwriting/
Follow Annabel Tempest, the illustrator, on Instagram:

 

 
 
 
 
 
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A post shared by Annabel Tempest (@annabel.tempest)



 

Filed Under: NonFiction Tagged With: action, activism, collective, politics, power

Alan Gibbons To Engage With ‘Momentum Kids’:

September 19, 2016 By achuka Leave a Comment

yahoo

Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters are setting up a youth wing to nurture the next generation of political activists. Momentum Kids will launch nationwide across 150 local groups, with the aim of boosting the political involvement of children and the Corbyn-supporting activist movement by "promoting political activity that is fun, engaging and child-friendly". Dubbed "Tiny Trots" by Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron, Momentum will run a kids’ programme at a four-day festival on the fringes of the Labour party conference next weekend.

Children will be able to attend campaigning workshops and story-telling sessions as part of the arts, music, politics and cultural event in Liverpool. Alan Gibbons, the children’s author who will run some of the kids programme over the weekend, said he hoped Momentum Kids would offer children an antidote to "an education system that treats them only as future productive drones" and "develops only part of their personality". Momentum Kids will provide creches, breakfast clubs and after-school sessions for children as young as three to allow single parents to keep up with their political engagement in the 18,000-strong organisation.

via 'Momentum Kids': Jeremy Corbyn's backers launch children's political wing – Yahoo News Digest.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: politics

What are the best politics books for kids?

April 7, 2015 By achuka Leave a Comment

guardiansmallFrom non-fiction guides and picture books to dystopian fiction, the [Guardian’s]
Book Doctor votes for the books that will help children understand the events of the next four weeks – and beyond

via What are the best politics books for kids? | Children’s books | The Guardian.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: politics

How About: Split Second + Every Second Counts

December 17, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

Simon & Schuster have packaged these two Sophie McKenzie thrillers really well. The book jackets, designed by Nick Stearn, are superb.

mckenzie

So how about giving both titles together? These are highly topical thrillers with a plotline that involves extremism, terrorism and bombing. But they have a reputation for being unputdownable, so if you give them to a family member prepare not to have much interaction with them once they start reading.

Filed Under: Blog, Books, How About Tagged With: bombing, bombs, extremism, politics, terrorism, thriller

Michael Morpurgo hits out at city-centric politicians

April 23, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

Michael Morpurgo hits out at city-centric politicians who do not have a feel for the countryside and are not interested in maintaining the quality of rural landscapes…

City-dwelling politicians do not care about the countryside, Michael Morpurgo the former Children’s laureate said.
The War Horse author said politicians had “no connection” to the countryside and put all their energy into tackling urban problems because “that’s where the votes are”.
Even the recent floods only attracted the attention of Ministers when it “came down a river called The Thames”, he told a meeting of the Devon branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
Politicians also back “out of proportion” wind farms because they do not understand “the landscape and architecture” of the countryside, he said.

via Michael Morpurgo: politicians are city dwellers with no connection to countryside – Telegraph.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: city, countryside, landscape, politicians, politics, rural, wind farms

Agitprop for toddlers: the oddly strident politics of CBeebies

January 25, 2014 By achuka Leave a Comment

Children’s shows now put environmentalism ahead of entertainment

Henry Jeffreys, writing in The Spectator

[you might also want to read this piece: Why do most children’s books have a liberal bias? also in The Spectator]

I think I might be a bad parent; whenever my wife is out, I plonk our two-year-old daughter in front of the television. The other day we watched a rainbow nation of children marching around the British countryside singing ‘Let’s make sure we recycle every day’, and I realised that something has changed in children’s programming since I was little. These young recyclers are from a show called Green Balloon Club, which is ostensibly a wildlife programme, but the song had more in common with one of those Dear Leader dirges you see in North Korea. It wasn’t education, it was propaganda.

The purpose of children’s stories has always been to educate as well as entertain. I was brought up on the Railway Stories by Revd W. Awdry, which later became the TV series Thomas the Tank Engine. These stories have a strict moral code: when an engine misbehaves he is chastised and often punished by the Fat Controller. In a story that terrified me as a child, my namesake Henry the Green Engine refused to leave a tunnel because he didn’t want the rain to mark his new paint job. To teach him a lesson, the Fat Controller had him bricked up in the tunnel.  The lesson was clear — don’t be vain about your shiny new paint job.

Compare this with a programme on CBeebies (the channel of choice for my daughter) called Mike the Knight. Mike is a knight in training and each episode consists of a ho-hum quest such as stopping the local Vikings stealing pies. He’s not a very like-able figure, Mike, arrogant and stupid, just the sort of character who might benefit from a bit of bricking up in a tunnel. Through over-confidence he initially fails in his quest and becomes disheartened. Rather than tell him where he’s going wrong, his companions — a couple of camp dragons and his sister — bolster his confidence and eventually, with a bit of luck and a lot of help from his friends, the quest is completed successfully. Everyone then tells Mike that he ‘has saved the day’.

via Agitprop for toddlers: the oddly strident politics of CBeebies » The Spectator.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: agenda, books, conservatism, education, leftist, liberalism, messages, politics, propaganda, reading, TV

Politics in YA – Melvin Burgess On The Lack Of

December 13, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Melvin Burgess, writing in The Bookseller just the other day, observing how few books for young adults address politics or political themes:

Issues of race, teen pregnancy, sex, drugs, gender and so on are widely discussed, but I can’t think of a single YA book that seriously tries to get to grips with the role politics has on the lives of young people—or of the role young people could play in political life in this country.
This despite the fact that many of the true political classics, including Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, have been widely read by young people for years and are regarded in many ways as forerunners of our genre.

via Politics in YA | The Bookseller.

Filed Under: Blog, Books Tagged With: fiction, Melvin Burgess, politics, teen, YA, young adult

Some Thoughts On ‘Some thoughts on education and political priorities’ by Dominic Cummings

October 14, 2013 By achuka Leave a Comment

Some Thoughts On ‘Some thoughts on education and political priorities’ by Dominic Cummings

This is likely to become a landmark document in literature on education. It is heady stuff.

I have only skimmed the surface of a paper that is festooned with footnotes, charts and hyperlinks. The links themselves, which I intend following up when time allows, will lead into further heady avenues.

Cummings cannot be said to wear his learning or his research lightly. He has a message to get across but he is out to impress along the way. Quite a number of the charts go uncommented and, to be honest, for the purposes of this quick review, I didn’t pay much attention to them. Mea culpa.

Let’s not beat about the bush, this paper is both challenging and a challenge.

It is a challenge principally to politicians and to educators.

Cummings has a pretty poor view of the current state of education.

“The education of the majority even in rich countries is between awful and mediocre.”

What he means by ‘mediocre’ will become apparent as we look at some key quotes from the paper.

Cummings is particularly scathing about the low level of understanding of mathematical concepts essential to modern debate – exponential functions, normal distributions, the bell curve, conditional probability – which he reckons less than 10% leave school having received formal training in.

This is something he returns to again and again.

The ideas presented in his paper are aimed, he says, mainly at 15-25 yr olds. How many 15-25 yr olds are likely to take notice is a moot point. Cummings says it’s the kind of paper he wishes he had stumbled on when he was 15. Which tells us a lot about the kind of 15-year-old he was, and the kind of 15-25 yr old he envisages as his audience.

His vision of an ‘Odyssean’ education comprises seven broad fields, the first of which is Maths & Complexity and (herein lies the challenge) Cummings wants Britain to become ‘the leading country for education and science’.

He thinks 15-25 yr olds today have no real choice. They either continue their education in “dysfunctional” institutions run by “middle-aged mediocrities” or become despised and unemployed.

He quotes E. O. Wilson explaining the importance and effectiveness of teaching from the perspective of Big Questions.

He acknowledges his lack of qualification to write such a paper: “This paper is very crude and written by someone with no relevant expertise in any subject except politics – it is a bad version of something I wish I had been given aged 15.”

He writes at length about the successful ways in which mathematical models have helped us predict (for example in weather forecasting) the behaviour of complex systems.

“This combination of a) precise real world data, b) mathematical modelling software that captures dynamic processes, and c) the potential for simulations of large numbers of virtual samples that vary according to real world data, has the potential to revolutionise our understanding, prediction, and control of complex systems and improve how we cope with failure.”

“However, there is also a danger in the use of statistical models based on ‘big data’ analysis – ‘overfitting’ models and wrongly inferring a ‘signal’ from what is actually ‘noise’. We usually a) have a noisy data set and b) an inadequate theoretical understanding of the system, so we do not know how accurately the data represents some underlying structure (if there is such a structure).”

This he believes is particularly the case when it comes to Education.

He extols the advances in “biomedicine” and believes GM crops could help feed the world.

The aspect of Cummings’ paper which has been most leapt on by the press and most misreported is what he has to say about genetics. A matter which will not have surprised him:

“Those working at the cutting edge in genetics are understandably reluctant to involve themselves in contentious debates and partly because, for understandable reasons given our history, people are wary of discussing the importance of genes in explaining human behaviour.”

He makes much of

“‘Missing heritability’… Twin and adoption studies have showed that many fundamental human qualities are at least 50% heritable (i.e at least half the variance between individuals is caused by genes): e.g. ‘g’ or ‘general cognitive ability’ (~60-80% heritable for adults) and some personality characteristics. After the success of the Human Genome Project over a decade ago, there was much hope of finding ‘the gene for X’. However, while some rare conditions and disorders (including learning disorders) are caused by a mutation in a single gene, most common traits and disorders (including learning disorders) are caused by many genes with small effects, making them hard to find.88 This became known as ‘the missing heritability problem’: we know that genes are responsible but we cannot find many of the specific genes. The combination of whole-genome sequencing and ‘Genome-Wide Association Studies’ (GWAS) is likely to allow us to make progress in finding this ‘missing heritability’.

When he reaches the section on Education he repeats his emphasis on the importance of Mathematics:

“Unavoidably, the level of one’s mathematical understanding imposes limits on the depth to which one can explore many subjects. For example, it is impossible to follow academic debates about IQ unless one knows roughly what ‘normal distribution’ and ‘standard deviation’ mean, and many political decisions, concerning issues such as risk, cannot be wisely taken without at least knowing of the existence of mathematical tools such as conditional probability.”

One smiles to think of the frustrations he must have experienced when debating and discussing such matters with political and civil servant colleagues who did not have the ‘required’ level of understanding.

“There is widespread dishonesty about standards in English schools, low aspiration even for the brightest children,118 and a common view that only a small fraction of the population, a subset of the most able, should be given a reasonably advanced mathematical and scientific education, while many other able pupils leave school with little more than basic numeracy and some scattered, soon-forgotten facts.”

After spending more than 36 years in education I have to agree with Cummings’ comments on the lack of objective scientific research.

“There is hostility to treating education as a field for objective scientific research to identify what different methods and resources might achieve for different sorts of pupils. The quality of much education research is poor. Randomised control trials (RCTs) are rarely used to evaluate programmes costing huge amounts of money”

He is clear where blame lies.

“Westminster and Whitehall have distorted incentives to learn and improve, have simultaneously taken control of curricula and exams and undermined the credibility of both, and have then blamed universities for the failures of state schools and put enormous pressure on Universities and academics not to speak publicly about problems with exams, which has made rational discussion of exams impossible.”

Here he is again bemoaning the level of mathematical understanding. We can choose to argue with Cummings about how important this knowledge is, but he’s probably correct in saying that only 20% of students currently leave school in command of these concepts.

“Because of how courses have been devised, ~4/5 pupils leave England’s schools without basic knowledge of subjects like logarithms and exponential functions which are fundamental to many theoretical and practical problems (such as compound interest and interpreting a simple chart on a log scale), and unaware of the maths and physics of Newton (basic calculus and mechanics).

Supporters of Sure Start and similar programmes will not like his assertion that billions of pounds have been wasted (and the “no real gains” he talks about are only one kind of gain), but there can be no doubt that there has been a woeful lack of control trials to validate government spending and that many interventions successful in one context have been enthusiastically copied and have had funds lavished upon them with very little generalised benefit.

“Overall, there is great political pressure to spend money on such things as Sure Start but little scientific testing, refinement, and changing budgets to reinforce demonstrated success, therefore billions have been spent with no real gains. The billions now spent in Britain should be tied to ‘randomised control trials’ and there needs to be more experimentation with how to expand experiments that seem to work (lots of small things work because of specific individuals and therefore do not work when expanded).

I agree with the following.

“Some argue that ‘rote learning is a waste of time /damaging.’ … lots of things require practice: who thinks that teaching the commutative law of addition would produce successful children without practice? Moving things from the short-term memory (which is extremely limited even for the cleverest) to the long-term memory needs building proteins in the brain and this needs practice (except in extremely unusual people who instantly remember things permanently). [My emphasis]

There has been a marked reduction in repetition and practice in primary education. The way the curriculum has been constructed (particularly in the teaching of Maths) has meant that lessons across a period of time move on at a pace that does not allow sufficient consolidation for concepts to become embedded in long-term memory.

“In 1993, Ericsson et al published research purporting to show that ‘10,000 hours of deliberate practice’ is what distinguishes ‘experts’ in areas such as music and chess, and that ‘innate ability’ is not relevant. ‘Our theoretical framework can also provide a sufficient account of the major facts about the nature and scarcity of exceptional performance. Our account does not depend on any scarcity of innate ability (talent)… [I]ndividual differences in ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice.’ This view had a large influence on the media and various books (e.g. Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’, Shenk’s ‘The Genius in All of Us’, Syed’s ‘Bounce’, and Brooks’ ‘The Social Animal’) have promoted the idea that people require the same amount of practice regardless of talent and that ‘10,000 hours’ is a sort of magic number – put in those hours and you too can be great, don’t worry about your genes.

That may be, but the notion that practice makes perfect remains a good one for educationists to espouse. I remember basing a school assembly on this 10,000 hours theory. For young children the notion that you become good at something by Doing It again and again is certainly one that is worth emphasising, notwithstanding the following:

“Recent analysis of these studies has confirmed that such claims are greatly exaggerated: ‘deliberate practice’ does not account for most of the variance in performance (only about a third of the variance in chess and music), and ‘some people require much less deliberate practice than other people to reach an elite level of performance’.

That in itself is something that is demonstrably true to children in their own experience and can become demoralising when they realise they require more practice than others.

Cummings looks to a future when advances in genetic and scientific research combine with the power of computers to result in a truly personalised education.

But personalised education will produce inequalities that do not sit comfortably with current educational “closing the gap” dogma.

“It is reasonable to hope that the combination of 1) finding the genes responsible for cognitive abilities, 2) scientific research on teaching methods, and 3) the power of computers to personalise learning will bring dramatic improvements to education – but this will not remove genetic influence over the variation in outcomes or ‘close the gap between rich and poor’. ‘The good school … does not diminish individual differences; it increases them. It raises the mean and increases the variance’ (Elliot Eisner, Stanford). Good schools, in the sense of ‘teaching children of different natural abilities as well as possible’, will not ‘eliminate gaps’ – they will actually increase gaps between those of different abilities, but they will also raise floors and averages and give all children the opportunity to make the most of their genetic inheritance (personality as well as IQ)

Cummings advocates an exclusive educational roadmap for the top 2% IQ, especially at university level. “We should give this ~2% a specialist education as per Eton or Kolmogorov, including deep problem-solving skills in maths and physics.”

Presumably based on what he perceives as a ‘bell-curve’ of human aptitudes, he has this to say about ambitions to make all teachers brilliant teachers.

“Only a small proportion of the small number of ‘significantly more than averagely talented people’ are, without huge cultural changes, going to want to be teachers (at least in the conventional career sense).

This is a breathtaking conflation of brilliance in teaching with brilliance in IQ. In other words, teachers are not going to be IQ high-fliers, and so they are not going to be brilliant teachers. That is manifestly nonsense, but it leads Cummings to conclude that the best that can be done is weed out the bad:

“We should give heads power to remove who they consider to be poor teachers; we should let schools experiment with rigorous methods of judging teacher effectiveness

And be a little more realistic about what can be achieved:

“Perhaps we should also stop discussing schools as if we are going to have a quarter of a million ‘brilliant’ teachers and instead think about what to do with tens of thousands of roughly averagely talented people… While some children will always be blessed by a brilliant teacher, by definition this is not a scaleable solution to our problems: real talent is rare, mediocrity ubiquitous.

When he talks about “mediocrity” it becomes clear from the above that he is not making a (scathing) judgement on current teaching quality, but making the philosophical point that at any one period of time the vast majority of teachers will be average (satisfactory = mediocre) rather than above average (outstanding = brilliant).

This acknowledgement/acceptance has repercussions for curriculum design and pedagogy.

“Whilst heads need to be flexible enough to allow talented people to experiment, we also need schools in chains that spread proven approaches (and ‘90% solutions’) without relying on innovation, inspiration, and talent. ‘Direct Instruction’ (DI), in which teachers follow tightly constrained rules to deliver lessons, is generally ignored in English education debates despite its proven effectiveness in randomised control trials around the world. However, standards might improve substantially if thousands of roughly averagely talented teachers simply used DI instead of reinventing square wheels.

Isn’t that, in large part, what we have had already, in terms of the National Curriculum, the Literacy and Numeracy hours, the Phonics Programme etc. Teachers have for a long time been working to a prescribed script not far off from Direct Instruction.

“Added value’ was introduced in 2002 on the basis that ‘raw’ attainment figures are ‘largely an index of the calibre of pupil intake rather than any indication of the school’s performance’. Although it was intended to correct for natural ability, analysis of twin studies shows that ‘about half of the variance of corrected-school achievement is due to genetic differences between children’ – that is, even stripping out g or previous attainment does not strip out all genetic influence in general; ‘achievement independent of ability may be just as heritable as achievement including ability because achievement is as much a function of genetically-driven appetites [such as motivation] as of aptitudes’.

I think that’s a very helpful observation, and goes part way to explaining why some schools are so often in and out of ‘special measures’ based on raw data.

‘Instead of thinking about education as a way of countering genetic differences among children, the field of education might profit from accepting that children differ genetically in how and how much they learn. This way of thinking is compatible with the current trend towards personalizing education by optimizing children’s learning, which is increasingly possible through the use of interactive information technology

I don’t have a problem with that. The use of the word ‘genetically’ WILL be a problem for some. So let’s repeat the essence of what Cummings says in that last quote, simply removing the word ‘genetically’: “The field of education might profit from accepting that children differ in how and how much they learn.”

In schools where the overarching educational effort of ‘management’ is for all children to make the same amount of progress each year (4 National Curriculum points, whatever) and to achieve the same outcomes this is a message that needs to be frequently raised by those who are actually doing the teaching.

I don’t think Cummings has any idea what makes a teacher ‘brilliant’. There are many more brilliant teachers amongst the mediocre hordes than he is willing to credit.

I hope some of them will be prepared to engage with the ideas in this provocative paper.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/11/gove-adviser-thesis-inflammatory-ideas-education

Filed Under: Blog, Education Tagged With: Donald Cummings, education, educationists, futire, genetics, heredity, paper, pedagogy, politics

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