Mary B on public schools and sex at Newnham (the women-only college at Cambridge where she's professor of Classics:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/02/are-public-schools-a-blight-on-british-society-and-sex-at-newnham.html#comment-6a00d83451586c69e20120a87b20c1970b
My comment:
Well, there's a lot to chew on here!
1) "Education is about civilisation not dumbing us all down." Nonsense! And no offence whatever to Priscilla - this nonsense is so widespread it's a commonplace. As Michael B makes very clear, the dumbing down is not "civilization" at work.
I'd develop that further to argue that it's capitalism doing its damndest to deskill us as much as it can. Why else do they pour all this money into the perpetuum mobile of machine translation? And since deskilling only pays dividends in the capital/wage-slave relationship, then anything outside that is irrelevant - as we are seeing.
Deskilling by the way is probably better called despecializing. If everybody has a high level of training, then this higher level becomes the norm and can be paid normal (low) wages as against specialist (high) wages. As we see in medicine and education, frinstance.
1) "Education is about civilisation not dumbing us all down." Nonsense! And no offence whatever to Priscilla - this nonsense is so widespread it's a commonplace. As Michael B makes very clear, the dumbing down is not "civilization" at work.
I'd develop that further to argue that it's capitalism doing its damndest to deskill us as much as it can. Why else do they pour all this money into the perpetuum mobile of machine translation? And since deskilling only pays dividends in the capital/wage-slave relationship, then anything outside that is irrelevant - as we are seeing.
Deskilling by the way is probably better called despecializing. If everybody has a high level of training, then this higher level becomes the norm and can be paid normal (low) wages as against specialist (high) wages. As we see in medicine and education, frinstance.
2) Classroom disruption. Good article on ways of handling this in the Guardian today:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2010/feb/09/pupil-behaviour-management-tips
I have a comment on this at around no. 20 that deals with this issue.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2010/feb/09/pupil-behaviour-management-tips
I have a comment on this at around no. 20 that deals with this issue.
3) Making love/fucking. Well, the higher the proportion of making love (hi girls!) to fucking the better. Authoritarian repression and anti-sexual brutality and ignorance don't improve this proportion. They increase the proportion of violent and savage sex to consensual and pleasurable (or even boring old once-a-month that'll-do-him) sex.
4) There's a wonderful private school (US) in the wonderful film (learn all you need to know about practical rhetoric and advocacy here!) "Thank You for Smoking". It's name is St Euthanasia. Which says it all.
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