Shirley Dent

Censoring learning teaches us all nothing

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:34:54 GMT

For all those young people waiting in trepidation for their ‘A’ level results and looking forward to the new horizon of university life and the intellectual challenges ahead, good luck. And, if I may, could I offer you some advice?

Honestly ask yourself this question: am I intellectually prepared for the challenge of a university education - that is, am I prepared to have my prejudices and preconceptions about what is right and proper in the world rocked, ripped away, challenged to the core? Because if you are not prepared for this challenge, if university to you is a three-year pleasantry to confirm what you already think (with a ‘top-up’ bit of knowledge thrown in to make it worth the hall fees), then my advice to you is: don’t bother. You will waste three years when you could be earning a good wage. And, to be frank, a university education will be equally wasted on you.

I give this advice following the bizarre case of photography lecturer Simon Burgess reportedly recently in Surrey local press.

What seems to have happened is that Burgess, who teaches photography at East Surrey College, introduced a student to the work of self-professed ‘gender terrorist’ artist Del LaGrace Volcano. Volcano’s work, you may remember, featured in Sex and the City when Charlotte became a boy (complete with moustache AND well-placed sock). The student was working on a gender and sexuality project. A complaint that the work was pornographic and unsuitable for students has apparently been received by the college. As spiked’s Nathalie Rothschild points out, with all parties playing their cards close to their chest ‘the details around the case are not clear’. However, it has been reported and seems pretty certain that the college is conducting a thorough internal inquiry and that Burgess faces disciplinary action.

We may not know the exact circumstances of the Burgess case but we do know the trend. From classroom to lecture hall, the curriculum, particularly in relation to arts and humanities, has become prey to anodyne ‘appropriateness’. Let us be clear about this: in higher, further and secondary education ‘appropriateness’ is the refuge of scoundrels – bureaucratic, cowardly and know-nothing scoundrels at that. In 2007 I wrote a blog that baulked at the suggestion by the National Assessment Agency that 11 – 14 year olds should not study Othello because they could not handle the issues of racism and sexual jealously in the play. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/mar/28/dontkeeptoughbooksfromtee It was an appalling, spineless, philistine suggestion then, as it is an appalling, spineless, philistine suggestion now. Where does this stop? Can we only teach what students want to hear, only hold up a mirror to their own reflections, and air-brushed reflections to boot? We may as well teach in a vacuum.

The ideas that confront students in our institutions of learning should challenge, should change the individual in the world. Nothing that is human is alien to me, should be the watch words of a liberal education. I studied a course on extreme literature and film with Linda Williams and Geoff Ward when I was in Liverpool.

We read Henry Miller, Georges Bataille, Anaïs Nin and William Burroughs. We watched films such as Peeping Tom, Blue Velvet and Videodrome. Some of this course material was shocking. Some could be classed as pornographic. Some of it (go on, try The Story of the Eye) was hard to stomach. But I am eternally grateful that I had excellent tutors with the guts to teach it. These texts and films made me think long and hard about how individual imagination pushes against the limits of society and how society pushes back and shapes the individual’s imagination. It gave me an appreciation of the distinctions and connections between fantasy and reality. It shook up the safe suburbs of my world.

So, all of you about to embark on further study, if come the autumn a lecturer should hand you a book you don’t like the look of, that you think might offend your world view, do yourself a favour. Open it up and open yourself up to ideas and images you may find offensive, but which may change the way you see the world.

We need to take a wider view of 'the right to die'

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 12:33:34 GMT

Two stories in the headlines last week highlighted the clumsy truth of that old adage ‘hard cases make bad law’. These stories were both about ‘the right to die’. The law lords backed Debbie Purdy’s appeal to have the law on assisted suicide clarified and took us a step closer to legalising assisted suicide in the UK. At the same time, the story in the headlines two days before about teenager Hannah Jones’ literal change of heart concerning a life-saving heart transplant she had originally refused should make us stop and think about the consequences of enshrining a ‘right to die’ in law.

However, the law is made out of cases, easy and hard, and judicial precedent and test cases all have their part to play in both interpretation of the law and the formation of new laws. But as a society we should be wary of building a moral and social argument for or against euthanasia on the basis of individual cases.

To put my cards on the table, I am against legalising physician assisted suicide and I am deeply concerned about the ‘right to die’ becoming an everyday fact of life in our hospitals. Debbie Purdy could teach people who are blessed with full health a thing or two about fighting spirit and you would have to have a heart of stone not to be touched by what faces Purdy and her husband, Omar Puente. When you see the love and dedication between such a couple, as you could see the love and dedication between Diane Pretty and her husband Brian, it seems obvious that the humane and compassionate thing is to allow someone to help end their loved one’s life when death is inevitable and is desired. On the other hand, Hannah Jones is a cautionary tale against meeting someone’s desire to die, a 14 year-old who stated that she did not want any more medical intervention and wanted to die with dignity, but changed her mind when death seemed inevitable and a heart transplant was her only option.

Hard cases indeed. But neither case should be the starting point for working out what is right and wrong when it comes to what we, as society, think about the ‘right to die’. That starting point has to be society in its totality. As much as I admire the courage of Debbie Purdy I think what she is trying to achieve is wrong from a wider social perspective. Equally, I would be foolish to build a case against the ‘right to die’ on the example of a teenager changing her mind.

The truth is that all individual cases that touch on euthanasia and the right to die are hard. Everyone who has experienced a loved one dying in pain and degenerating into a shell of the person we knew will have asked the question ‘Wouldn’t death be kinder than this?’ And yet very often, however cruel the disease suffered, there are still moments cherished in the blackest of times and when death comes it can be equally a relief and devastating for those left. But personal experience – and whatever conclusions it may lead you to – is a dangerous touchstone here. We need to take a wider, longer view and ask more probing questions of our own society. Why, for example, is the growing and increasingly vociferous support for euthanasia not matched by an equally growing and vociferous support for more and better palliative care and state funding for hospices?

We would do well to keep asking what the ‘right to die’ and physician assisted suicide means not for individuals but society. What would changing the formal, legal relationship between a patient and doctor from ‘do no harm’ to ‘help end life’ say about us as a society and the value we put on life? The ‘right to die’ divorced from the context of individual cases, where it may seem to be both the right and compassionate thing, takes on a different tone and has different connotations. Where is the ‘right to die’ as a social mantra headed in a society where Malthusian views of population control are making a comeback and where we view an ageing population not as a success of modernity and medical progress but as a burden on an already stretched NHS? If we accept the ‘right to die’ as a social right, a social norm, are we on a slippery slope where we end up concluding as a society that some lives are not worth living, that there is an easy equation between physical well-being and quality of life?

I have tremendous sympathy for anyone who takes their own life, whatever the circumstances and for whatever reasons. I also sympathise with doctors who find that the most humane, compassionate thing to do is to help a patient end their life. But this is very different from society sanctioning and supporting doctors taking that life. It is right that doctors should fear the approbation of society when they take a life, for whatever reason. Society can be sympathetic when someone is on the edge of the bridge. But society should not cheer the push that sends that person to their death.

Has Torchwood touched on population policy?

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:19:13 GMT

‘It’s confirmed. 325,000 is 10% of the child…… the…… er…… units in this country.… It’s worth considering, Sir. The world’s population will be 9 billion by 2050. That’s a two and a half billion rise. The UK will go from 61 million to 77, every one of them needing food and water, a home, transport, fuel…’…’

‘Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick… What are you suggesting? That a cull of 10% would do us good?’’

‘I’m just saying if we need to spin this to the public…’…’

Hats off to John Hay, the Torchwood scriptwriter, who put these weasel words into the mouth of a fictional Whitehall mandarin, in sotto voce conversation with the prime minister. And let’s hear it too for the crafty scheduling that aired this episode of Torchwood’s ‘Children of Earth’ in the week leading up to World Population Day last Saturday. For seldom has the pernicious creep and logical outcome of modem Malthusianism been captured so well for popular TV.

To catch you up with the sci-fi script of Torchwood: the world is being held to ransom by a bunch of no-good aliens, the nefarious 456s, who hook themselves up to human children for recreational highs (look, this is sci-fi okay – it’s not meant to be realistic). To catch you up with the far scarier political discussion (all the more frightening because it’s science fiction masquerading as science fact): the Reverend Malthus’ discredited ideas about the need to control population are making a come-back and gaining ground.

To give you just one example: this March one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisors, Jonathan Porritt, declared that the UK’s population needs to fall to 30 million. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article5950442.ece How? is the question that immediately springs to mind. Let’s just hope Porritt’s not in contact with any drugged up aliens. The under-10s could be in trouble.

The misanthropy and scientific/economic muddle that lies behind population control have been the subject of some excellent articles in the build up to World Population Day, such as those by Brendan O’Neill and Pierre Desrochers and Andrew Reed.

But I was especially struck by the rebuttal in this short WORLDbytes film of the ‘educate women’ theme of this year’s World Population Day. As the commentator asks, if this is really about educating and empowering women to have real choices, why doesn’t this include a focus on infertility treatment for women in developing countries?

But before I sign-off for my holidays, let me end by telling you how the UK government selected the 10% of ‘units’ to trade with the aliens in Torchwood.

Those at the bottom of the school league tables, of course! When Malthus chums up with government bureaucracy, now that’s the time to start worrying.

‘Are you just being weird now?’

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:02:32 GMT

Watch this youtube video fully comprehend the sheer and utter frustration which drove Brian Cox, research fellow of the Royal Society and professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester, to ask this question of a gormless TV producer.

As is the way in the internet age, this youtube gem has resurfaced recently in pass-it-round fashion on emails and facebook. Brian Cox – dubbed the ‘rock star physicist’ because of his good looks, media friendliness and former life as keyboardist in D:Ream – is a man who knows about physics, cares about physics, and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Which is bad news for said hapless TV producer. The youtube outtake comes from the filming of a BBC documentary on gravity. The producer just doesn’t get the idea of what a ‘wave’ is and, with the arrogance of ignorance in full throttle, turns his own cluelessness around and makes it Professor Cox’s problem. I won’t say any more – watch and weep. Clocking-in even higher in the league-of-crass-stupidity-meets-stymied-exasperation is the same producer’s conversation with Professor Cox about whether or not to discuss the ideas that the moon landings were faked in the same documentary.

The problem here is not that Professor Cox is very clever and the producer is very stupid (although, fair enough – there is that too!). The problem is that the producer thinks WE are very stupid and if you are going to make a ‘popular’ programme about a specialist subject like science then god forbid that you would let a scientist just get on with explaining the science.

This is poppycock. What is striking in the youbtube outtake is that when Professor Cox gets a chance to explain what a gravitational wave is, it is mesmerising.

Why is television populated by producers who think the only way to enthuse an audience about difficult, complex and specialist subjects is to dumb-it-down or dress-it-up? The BBC’s recent poetry season felt obliged to pepper the poetry with ‘popular’ figures rather than just let the poets get on with it. Invariably, it was the poets you wanted to listen to rather than the bloke from Peep Show - I defy you not to be enchanted by Simon Armitage retracing the literary journey of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

It wasn’t always this way. If you need an antidote to the insulting idiocy of today’s knowledge-averse TV producers, hunt down a copy of Jacon Bronowski’s phenomenal BBC series, The Ascent of Man, made in the 1970s. A programme that has respect for its subject and its audience at its very heart.

Then, as the Hector in The History Boys would say, pass it on. And if you come across the Brian Cox’s TV producer, perhaps use the BBC box-set of The Ascent of Man to give him a good hard, thwack of sense.

Seeking cultural identity can divide, not unite

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:57:26 GMT

Just when you thought your teenager couldn’t get any more self-obsessed, up pops the ‘Who Do We Think We Are?’ week and website to get them really navel-gazing: ‘Have you ever asked yourself questions like: What makes me who I am? What is my identity? What makes me, unique? These questions are about IDENTITY’.

‘Who Do We Think We Are?’ week (WDWTWA) is coming to a school near you NOW. It is a ‘national educational programme’ initiated by Sir Keith Ajegbo’s 2007 Curriculum Review on Diversity and Citizenship and it ‘engages primary and secondary teachers in the exploration of identity, diversity and citizenship with children and young people’. This year it takes place between 22 – 27 June.

All well and good and what’s wrong with a bit of diversity and tolerance, you might well ask. Nothing, is the short answer. But this is a diversity that – however well intentioned – divides. Despite the very loud banging of the diversity drum, much of WDWTWA ethos seems to be headed for accidental sectarianism in the classroom. The idea that we all need to root around in ‘our personal and family journeys’ is not compatible with the ideas that a child can leave their personal circumstances at the door of the classroom, that knowledge is universal and for everyone, whoever they are. Education should be about widening the horizons of young people, taking them by the shoulders and turning them to face the often daunting – but exciting - world of knowledge and ideas out there. Instead, WDWTWA week is all about me, me, me, ‘designed to get young people talking about themselves... all young people can have something to say about who they think they are’.

But education is NOT about ‘who we think we are’. It is about the gasp of breath when you first encounter Hamlet’s soliloquy or the nail-bitten-down-in-awe when you first appreciate the elegance of Einstein’s equations. It’s about those moments, in a nutshell, when you realise the world is a bigger, more wonderful place than you alone.

Education that gives us such moments doesn’t have to worry about diversity. It is diverse simply in what it teaches and what it does – it blows apart the pigeonholes. In contrast, WDWTWA seems all too keen to scurry towards those pigeonholes and dig out those stereotypes. The WDWTWA website promotes the case study of a ‘largely white school’ in Cheshire which had devised ‘an exciting conceptual curriculum’, emphasising ‘the importance of developing cultural empathy and critical thinking to prepare pupils for a diverse world’. I am sure all of this is done and said with the very best of intentions. But this made me despair more than anything else I have read recently. The implication seems to be that in the 21st century we are now devising curriculums based on racial profiling of the pupils. No good can come of such a thing.

But we shouldn’t despair. Because our young people are smart and tough and open to the world. In all of this we need to remember that kids are not racists in embryo. Nor are they stupid. At the Institute of Ideas we run a challenging national debating competition for 16 – 18 year olds, which launched in India earlier this year.

But whether in the UK or India, we have never cared who you are or where you come from. We care about your arguments. And our experience over five years is that so do the young people: rather than looking back and dilly-dallying with identity politics, they want to grab hold of the word and the ideas shaping it right here and now. It is not a case of ‘Who Do We Think We Are?’ with these kids, but a case of ‘How are we going to shape the world?’ And in this they simply defy being pigeon-holed. The Indian champions are coming to London next week to compete against the UK winners and debate ‘Protecting the public from terrorism should come before civil liberties’. I would not dare to second guess what the arguments will be. But I look forward to engaging with those who will have to find answers to these real political questions in the future. ‘Who do you think you are?’ seems like a very small question in comparison.

Democracy and the strange case of the disppearing Daily Mail poll

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:37:01 GMT

"Vote now!" From Big Brother to European elections, we are constantly extolled to get out there and let our opinion be known. But voting isn’t always what it is cracked up to be.

I seldom vote. It is years since I voted at a general, local or European election. There was no party I wanted to represent me. But - breaking what was becoming the habit of a lifetime - I was enticed to vote last Friday. In its wisdom, the Daily Mail published a gobsmackingly reactionary online poll that asked readers "Should the NHS allow gypsies to jump the queue?" This poll followed an equally reactionary column on the subject by Richard Littlejohn, accompanied by a cartoon of a beshawled gypsy woman, babe in arms and clay pipe in mouth, dashing into the doctor's surgery ahead of the waiting crowds. I kid you not.

But something unexpected happened. An impromptu campaign to "Rock the Vote" in relation to this barefaced bait-’em poll occurred on Facebook, with posters urging people to vote "yes". I put my click on the "yes" button. I wasn’t the only one. The "yes" vote nudged towards 90 per cent, then 92 per cent. At one point the "Yes" vote was clocking in at 94 per cent.

And then the poll disappeared. Just like that. If you check on the Daily Mail site now there is no trace of it. Was this a technical glitch? What was the final result? I think we should be told.

Now I don’t care about this nonsensical poll nor the nonsense of Richard Littlejohn’s column. None of us have to read the paper if we don’t want to and nothing was really at stake in this daft little poll.

The real worry here is the underlying easy-come easy-go attitude to what a vote is and what democracy means.

From Britain’s Got Talent to the European elections, "Vote now" seems to be the siren call of modern democracy. The demos - we, the people - can exercise our democratic right to have an opinion on absolutely everything, from SuBo to MEPs. But the small print to the "Vote Now!" mantra is "Vote Now - in the way you are supposed to and for what you are supposed to." Somewhere along the line, people in power forgot that democracy doesn’t follow a script.

We saw this with the liberal disbelief that the electorate would even consider voting for a member of the BNP, let alone end up electing two of them to the European Parliament. Nick Griffin is a nasty little man who heads up a nasty little party. But if people vote for him and his party we can’t throw our hands up in the air and declare what a "terrible thing" this democratic result is, as Harriet Harman did. Griffin and co. aren’t my cup of tea either. But that’s democracy for you - people don’t just do what those in power want them to. You need to convince people by argument, not cajole them with moral approbation.

But then if all else fails you can simply ignore the vote. Like the European elite did when Ireland voted ‘No’ in their first referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. The Irish electorate returned the "wrong" answer in June last year, so the European leaders have simply asked the Irish to vote again - fingers crossed they get the right answer this time, eh?

We are becoming so inured to dissembling democracy in this way that you have to wonder if the Daily Mail didn’t just think it could simply pull-the-plug when things didn’t go to plan.

A vote is not an invitation to confirm the status-quo or collectively rubber-stamp the best-laid plans of any elite. A vote is you and me collectively making a decision or expressing an opinion. Voting doesn’t work if it is pre-ordained. Now when it is the fluff of online polls and Pop Idol-tastic phone-ins, it may be irritating but in the greater scheme of things it is neither here nor there.

But when it comes to shaping our society through the ballot box, that’s a different ball game altogether.

Innocent until proven guilty

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:10:22 GMT

Vanessa George – the Plymouth nursery nurse charged with sexually abusing the children in her care – is innocent.

So are the three people arrested this week in Nottingham in relation with the case. They may eventually be proven guilty. But the presumption here and now must be that they are innocent.

However, this basic principle is being eroded by both the hack media and a police force far too ready to speculate and spin.

One of the most worrying aspects of trial-by-tabloid is that the little matter of guilt-proven-by-evidence becomes guilt-inferred-by-oddity. And when hacks go to town the definition of aberrant behaviour is very loose indeed. ‘Ghoulish past of teacher in child porn quiz’ screamed the People last weekend. What was George’s ‘ghoulish past’? She was a member of the Haunted Devon ghost hunting group. If you were accused of such ghastly crimes as George, could you hand-on-heart say that there are no 'oddities' in your past that the press couldn't dig up and turn into something else? Your teenage death-metal band obsession? Simply keeping yourself to yourself?

Despite the bad behaviour of the press, this is not about restricting the media. The freedom of the press is important. The bigger problem is a wider climate of rabid supposition and intemperate reaction, particularly around children and sexual abuse. And the police are increasingly among the most intemperate peddlers of near-hysterical speculation in these cases.

Remember the dreadful headlines around the Haut de la Garenne children's home in Jersey, a house of horrors where children in care were alleged to have been raped, tortured and murdered over decades? Throughout 2008 the Jersey police very publicly insisted that they not only had found the remains of a child but that they would find more. By November, it was clear that there was no evidence of murders at the home and the ‘remain’ was most likely a shaving of coconut shell. The damage done in the Orkney child abuse cases, with children removed from families innocent of any abuse, should not be quickly forgotten.

No-one doubts the severity of the charges against George nor the anguish of parents whose children attended the nursery. But given the seriousness of cases involving child abuse, would it not be better for the police to be quiet rather than indulge in the sort of public speculation that so spectacularly backfired in the Jersey case? When the officer leading the George investigation told the press some of the children in seized photographs may never be identified, who does this help? It would seem only to increase general fear and confusion, reinforcing the idea that child abuse is everywhere, undetected.

Following yesterday’s arrests and the suggestion of an organized pedophile ring, we need cool heads more than ever. Justice demands this. To be judged on evidence by a jury of our peers goes to the heart of a democratic society. It is trust in the rationality of the majority to fairly judge each other. The danger is that when the press and the police lead the way with reckless speculation, the pitchfork-waving fringe has a green light. 'Vanessa George' groups on facebook are a sobering experience. 'Burn the bitch' is the general sentiment and the very few facebook members suggesting that George is innocent until proven guilty are given short shrift. 'Chop them up and cook them as roasties' is one reaction. And believe me, that is mild to what such posters would do to the woman herself.

George may well be convicted in a court of law. But any future conviction is not the point. The point is that her guilt can only be established through evidence of her actions presented to and considered by a jury. God help us all if we loose sight of this.