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| The Green, Ruddington December 2010 |
Whilst writing what I will laughingly call my 'memoirs' last year I was reminded of the many wonderful books that I had read in the past, at college and whilst doing my M.Ed and I had a yearning to read some of them again. With the political, economic and social climate being what it is I was delighted to revisit authors who had a different take on life than the Tory party and this dreadful coalition government. It was good to remind myself that despite what the awful Michael Gove says there are other educational options. It was especially rewarding to rediscover Keynes as a realistic and preferable alternative to the Bullingdon club's recipe for government and financial management!
So, what I have I been reading? I thoroughly enjoyed Robert Skidelsky's 'Keynes - the return of the master'. It's satisfying to see that in the latest comments from the CBI and the world's leading financiers in Davos the pendulum is beginning to swing back to Keynesian economics after the brief and unpleasant flirtation with the free market and deregulaltion unloosed 30 years ago by Thatcher and Reagan and continued by various governments since. I also enjoyed enormously Ha-Joon Chang's '23 things they don't tell you about capitalism' - this really should be required reading for any would be economics student and Chancellor of the Exchequer ( perhaps it is!). On the political front Noam Chomsky's 'Hegemony or Survival' is a harrowing and perhaps worrying critique of American foreign policy. Written seven or eight years ago (and recently updated) it has been proved so true in the light of the Wikileaks revelations. I dug into my past by again reading 'The Rise of the Meritcocracy' by Michael Young - again half a century or so after its publication it has proved so correct in its vision of what would happen if we continue to use academic or business excellence as the defining criteria of a meritocracy. Only this week I read that A* are being increasingly used by universities to accept students so an increasing number of people - those without A* - are being cast aside as 'failures'. At the same time I read that the unrest in various Arab countries at the moment is largely fuelled by disenchanted educated young people for who there is little or no work. It is perhaps portent of things to come in this country. From Thatcher onwards we cast aside those with few academic qualifications and the honourable jobs were no longer there for them as 'tradesmen' - but in Thatcher and Blair's world they didn't count. But now we are in danger of excluding the talented, those who have ticked all the educational boxes, but are not quite at the very pinnacle of A* - it is, I believe, creating a ticking time bomb. On the same theme I've just finished - again - the subversive, controversial, difficult but thought provoking 'Deschooling Society' by the voice of dissent, Ivan Illich. As I read it I found, as an ex teacher, much to disagree with but also much to think about and as I turned each page the words of Pink Floyd's 'Another brick in the wall - we don't need no education' rang in my ears. And finally two biographies: the very readable, but I felt shallow, life story of a politician for whom I have huge respect - Shirley Williams - 'Climbing the Bookshelves'. Williams was one of the very few outstanding education secretaries and she really could have done better with her memoirs. But at the other extreme was the magnificent biography of Michael Foot by Kenneth Morgan. A wonderful book about a wonderful man. Foot was head and shoulders above others of his generation - and wouldn't he savage the politicians of today with his wit, his passion, his skills of oratory, his political knowledge and most important his belief in humanity, compassion and democracy. Sadly, no politician of today - of any party - is in his intellectual, political or humanitarian league.
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