Lisbon Treaty

[Dmoney]

yo i just wanted to say i didnt take that comment personally.
It just gets to me sometimes because the kids where talking about are the people i grew up with, and while im not from a very bad area i had friends who where teenage parents, and who got drunk at 13. It doesnt mean those kids are dumb or that they don't care about their situations. i know ratrod wasn't getting at all that, i just get defensive.

the drummer is my band is polish ex-aristocracy, born in vienna, attended international school with diplomats kids, and he's a great but when we play shows in Hull for example, the first thing he'll do is rant about how scummy everyone he can see is. whats more worrying is i've not found where that ends because he'll call people from working class backgrounds, who've been through the same university as him "uncultured" in a derogatory sense. Even in other countries he'll be like "oh that guy speaks really bad german, if you could understand german you'd assume he is a mechanic or something like that. he's just not that bright. kind of like a thugish ape"... i mean! jesus!

so yeah, im use to having to deal with that rubbish. which is why i may have seemed to take rotrod more personally than i actually did.

[Afghan Dave]

People like your drummer (nothing personal - I don't know him to judge) - lack class.

Being of/from a class is very different to having it.

That is why I keep banging on about social mobility - it shouldn't matter where you start but where you finish & the people you affect positively on the way.

[choucas09]

I was interested to read what Andrew W said concerning the long term affect of the obsessive testing forced on the school system. The result I suppose of people (the Government) who have no background in a subject having hold of the reins. Vis a vis this topic Ian Hislop pertinently said, "You don't fatten a pig by weighing it."

[HTH AMPS]

I occasionally get BNP flyers through the door and now go to the door each time I hear anything coming through so I can give the moron posting those flyers a piece of my mind and tell them where to shove their flyer.

The state of the Labour party is a real shame, people are looking at the opposition as an alternative, but think of all the good things Labour have done which would never happen under the tories:

* minimum wage - you can laugh, but I remember the average wage for student-jobs before this and it was no joke (being a student at the time)
* investment in eduction - the schools where I live were crumbling when I left in 2000 under the tories, now we have two schools in a 5 mile radius that have been rebuilt and offer facilities more in line with a good uni.
* investment in the NHS - tories fundamentally don't believe in the NHS and I believe we'd see further privatisation.
* the civil partnership act - can you imagine the tories putting this before the house for consideration? (me neither)
* better pensions, winter fuel allowance, free public travel for pensioners

And that if superficially true benefits who..  :?

The wealth gap has never been higher and social mobility is a thing of the past - all the labour party ministers benefited from free University education but happily pulled up the ladder.

Investment in education infrastructure via PFI which means the private sector own all the assets and the taxpayer rents these back and never owns them at massive cost.

The standard of basic literacy has dropped with more children falling through the net. They can't even read.

Foxhunting and civil partnership legislation bulldozed through parliament for minority concerns but no debate on European Union or ID cards despite being manifesto promises.

don't even make me start on the pensions crisis and fuel poverty....

looking around me where I live I can't say that I agree with you, we've seen massive investment in local schools.  I remember my comprehensive school virtually falling apart and the resources being very poor.  I also worked in this school for a year while I was studying in the early 90s and the budget they were getting to run the place was insane - the music teacher had something like £500 a year as a budget; hence pretty much everything there was his own stuff.  the schools around my area now are more like universities in terms of facilities and I know that the average grades have improved lots too (Jarrow was historically very poor in the league tables).

its easy to slag off the labour government and sure as hell they're not perfect, but there is no way on this earth that the tories would have done anything for the working classes - minimum wage makes a difference to many people working shitety jobs and winter fuel allowance is a start at least.  I work in the gas/elec sector, so I'm well aware of fuel poverty and there are schemes in place to help with this, though more could certainly be done to help.

The basis state pension is a joke for sure, but you're only gonna get that if you've never really paid into the system - I know my parents worked all their life and we weren't well off by any stretch of the imagination, but my parents' state pension is pretty decent.  its a drop from the wages they were used to while working, but they can certainly afford to heat the house and do pretty much everything they've been used to.

again, ID cards - yes its a bollocks idea, but that wouldn't change under any government. 

uni fees, Labour certainly dropped a bollock on that one, but I can't see the other parties reversing that decision if they get in, can you?  in reality, the people who really need the help in paying for fees still get it. 

[dave_mc]

^ i just think the fees should be dropped. You should be encouraging people to go to university. and the lib dems were considering dropping them, but then clegg changed his mind. :(

i know ef all about plato. i aint that well read or cultured. i hear he's a solid bro though

oh i haven'y read the republic either. :lol: i always mean to...

In a way, it would be comforting to think we're no worse than anywhere else.... although that would mean the whole world is $%&#ed.

hehe.

you could copy our system. I know our schools have the rep of being pretty good (compared to england), and people actually want to be teachers so much here that there's actually competition for getting into teacher training colleges.

then again we still have grammar schools (i know some areas in england do, too- and actually i think we're starting to get rid of them, which sucks). and you probably don't want to copy the whole terrorism thing. plus we still do the curriculum, which is pretty poor.

[Afghan Dave]

The ONLY party in favour of ID card are the Labour Party. At a cost of £18 billion.

Nothing has changed since bailing out the banks...

Labour have sold all the countries assets Govt buildings / schools / hospitals into private company PFI initiatives.

THAT is where your investment came from.

We (the tax payers & future generations) will rent what was ours back for billions without end.

well at least we have an end to boom and bust... we only have bust.

[dave_mc]

hehe, true.

just to add to what i said about the universities: my problem was this line- "in reality, the people who really need the help in paying for fees still get it.  " I'm not sure you can assume that, because people always fall through the cracks. And it's based on the parents' income, and some people's parents are just, to be blunt, dicks. it doesn't necessarily follow that if someone's parents are rich that they'll get tons of money handed to them. I know i got money out of my parents far handier than plenty of other kids who had richer parents. My parents weren't poor or anything (teachers), but yeah. it's certainly a valid point.

[Elliot]

My view on the testing ethos in secondary education is that it is probably a good thing.  After all, endless testing and preparation was what distinguished public school kids from state school kids when it came to exams in the good old days.  When I was at a state school with a mix of disadvantaged (I won't say working class, as their parents largely did not work) and lower middle class kids, it was noticeable that the teachers focused all their extra energies on getting 2 or 3 nice well spoken kids into Oxbridge and ignored the rest - at least uniform and perpetual testing means teachers can't systematically prejudice the majority of students anymore (well in theory, anyway).  It also means that students who are failing can't slip through the net until its too late (again, in theory).

As to this idea that it takes a year to knock the secondary school education out of people, I am slightly skeptical  that this is a new thing.  I used to teach at Cambridge University in the late 90s and this stuff was said in tutors' meetings then, so it has always been a factor in higher education.  A levels as a format do not encourage intellectual risk taking, or anything other than a bland formulaic approach to a problem - in most subjects at University this sort of methodology condemns you at best to a lower 2:1.  I remember it normally took students at least a term of being challenged one-to-one in the supervision system to get over that way of thinking.  As most University's do not have that system it probably takes longer to get it out of them.

[dave_mc]

i don't have a problem with tests, i just have a problem with grade inflation, and poor quality testing. There's something wrong when you can get the marks as long as you've put in the correct key word, even if you've actually got the answer wrong! For example (and this is an obvious simplification/exaggeration), say in history, if the key words wanted were "reichstag" and "communists", if the person doing the marking were not a specialist, they might give the marks to an answer saying, "the reichstag burned down, but hitler did not blame it on the communists". :lol:

No joke, our teachers used to tell us stuff like that (and that was maybe 10 years ago, so on your timescale, elliot), where you got more marks for knowing the key words than actually proving that you understood the subject.

you also often would lose marks if you had a higher level of knowledge than the exam required, which is a bit dodgy when several gcses (thinking about chemistry here) were actually telling you stuff at gcse which wasn't quite right. and by that, i mean flat-out wrong.

[Ratrod]

I wonder if the UK really is worse than other countries in this respect?

In a way, it would be comforting to think we're no worse than anywhere else.... although that would mean the whole world is $%&#ed.

If there are other countries who are "getting it right", we really need to do whatever we can to learn from them.



Edit:  Actually, I'd like to ask Ratrod:  I know your comment wasn't aimed at Dmoney personally, but is there a perception in Holland that British kids are particularly ignorant and/or badly educated? 

I'm not trying to be confrontational or inflammatory, just curious.

No it wasn't aimed a Dmoney.

I just read an article that said a certain percentage of British kids thought that Adolf Hitler was a football coach and Joseph Goebels was someone who wrote a diary. It's funny and sad at the same time.

Dutch edjumacation ain't all that either. Most kids can hardly write a flawless sentence , do maths and are very ignorant about history and current events. The decay of Dutch education has been going on since the seventies.

Maybe some of the news we get from the UK is a tad exadurated but I do think the UK is in the worst state of all western European countries.

And what's this thing I read somewhere? That it's forbidden in certain streets to have a decorative piggy bank on your window-sill because it might offend someone?

[choucas09]

One problem here is that if you anything resembling a deep interest you're labelled as a geek, nerd or an anorak. Knowledge, outside of buzz subjects, seems to be unfashionable.

[HTH AMPS]

Nothing has changed since bailing out the banks...

agreed, Labour couldn't have handled this worse.  the banks should have been nationalised and be done with it.  it would have been interesting to see exactly what the other parties would have done though.

oh, and this third stimulus has the added condition of 'only people earning under £39k' will be eligible for bonuses  :roll:  maybe Gordy might have thought of putting conditions on the previous stimulus' instead of the banking sector saying 'ooh, thank-you, we can all have our bonuses now and big fat retirement payoffs'.  what a joke!  :x

[Philly Q]

And what's this thing I read somewhere? That it's forbidden in certain streets to have a decorative piggy bank on your window-sill because it might offend someone?

I've never heard that one before, but in Brown's Britain anything is possible.  :lol:

[Ratrod]

Found it.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/10/toy-pig-ban-climbdown.html

and

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7204635.stm

[Philly Q]

Found it.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2005/10/toy-pig-ban-climbdown.html

and

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7204635.stm

Actually, it's not funny at all when you read it.  Idiots.   :|