The nanny state turns parents into kids
The Guardian – 19 September 2009.
Some people have been so infantilised by our authoritarian state that they can no longer perform basic parenting tasks.
“We only refuse what we notice.” This slogan coined by an absent-minded 12-year-old of my acquaintance, in reference to people stealing his chips, seems an apt one to represent the gradual filching of our freedoms by the state. Absorbed in our own thoughts, when we glance back at our plates we may get a shock at how much has been taken.
The Grim Reader – Education Guardian
Reprinted in The Australian Age, 07/9/09, and the Buffalo News, USA, 03/9/09
Tuesday 1 September 2009
One day recently I heard an unearthly wailing coming from my 11-year-old son’s room. It was like no sound I’d ever heard from him before. He doesn’t normally cry at television or films but, curled up alone in his bed reading, when the fantasy character he identified with met a grim end, vanquished by the forces of darkness, he found it absolutely devastating.
Anne Fine deplores ‘gritty realism’ of modern children’s books
Former Children’s Laureate Anne Fine said that modern stories offered little hope for their protagonists
(Colin Hattersley)
A Midsummer’s NIght Dream by Beijing Film Academy
sensitively using aspects of the venue to create a changing dramatic space. The projections on the back wall did things like colour in the organ and draw attention to some…
The Mull Drier
Don’t use a tumble drier. For a family it can use as much C02 as driving an extra car. Instead get a Mull shieling drier, invented by my friends David and Moira Gracie.
Clearing – Education Guardian
Education Guardian – 3rd August 2009
“When I opened the envelope and saw my results, it was just – disappointment. I felt really, really bad. I threw them on the floor and went to my room in tears.”
Scottish designer’s art for windows
As a child, Sarah Campbell spent her summer holidays on the Isle of Lismore. On walks, she and her artist mother would pick tufts of sheep’s wool from the barbed wire fences and take it home. There they would wash, card and spin it, turn it into fabric on a loom and dye it.
Now working as a designer, Sarah has woven those childhood lessons into the one-off “textile paintings” doubling as window blinds that she creates in her workshop on the tiny island which sits under the mountains of Morvern in the Firth of Lorne for her company Mogwaii Design.
Flawed Interviews 2
An eminent expert witness told Jackie Kemp that paedophile cases in Scotland are being dropped due to flawed interview techniques. This is actually an addition I filed to the piece in the Herald below but it was too late to make the paper.
Albie Sachs Interview
Life sentences – GUARDIAN SOCIETY
The celebrated South African judge is still setting liberal precedents with a ruling that parents should not be sent to jail, because of their children’s rights – which, he tells Jackie Kemp, has important lessons for the UK.
Albie Sachs: ‘Judges are the storytellers of the 21st century’. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
Albie Sachs – lecture transcript
This a slightly abridged text of the lecture given by the ANC veteran and South African constitutional court judge Albie Sachs at the National Gallery of Scotland on June 25 2009 in Edinburgh, transcribed from my shorthand note.
Lighting the Spark: Teaching Awards
The Guardian, June 25 2009
Tobermory’s Tweecher
The Herald June 16 2009
NEW HORIZONS: Social networking and blogging are an increasingly important part of classroom life for both pupils and teachers.
The pen has always been a mighty instrument. But in this internet age, when daily musings are so freely dispensed through Twitter, Facebook and blogs, it is easy to forget the power of the written word. The brightly painted town of Tobermory on the Isle of Mull has recently been reminded of this, after the local paper published a series of messages that had been sent by Lynne Horn, a principal teacher at the local high school, through the social-networking site Twitter.
Teachers banned from Twitter after indiscreet tweet
Council imposes ban after teacher’s comments cause outrage in rural community
from the Guardian Education online
Fellow ‘tweechers’ have responded angrily to the ban
Tweeting teachers in Scotland are incensed by reports that Argyll and Bute council has banned teachers from blogging about their work.
The move came after tweets written by a teacher appeared in the Oban Times.
Comments made by the head of the language department at a local high school, to her friends on Twitter – “Have three Asperger’s boys in S1 class: never a dull moment! Always offer an interesting take on things” – have caused outrage.
Pressure mounts on Scots
Media Guardian
Scotland’s national newspapers are in crisis as readership falls, jobs are cut and London-based titles muscle in.
Scots, once the biggest consumers of newsprint in the world, are losing the habit, with the slump hitting home-grown titles the hardest. The writing could now be on the wall for one or all of the three daily Scotland-wide titles, the Scotsman, the Herald and the Daily Record.
Flawed Interviews Failing Children
The Herald
The Scottish legal system is letting down victims of child sex abuse, according to an international expert based at Abertay University in Dundee.
Kitchen Nightmare on Lismore
Education Guardian
What children put into their mouths at lunchtime has become one of the touchstone political issues of our age and a money-saving plan by Argyll council in Scotland to shut six Hebridean island school kitchens was recently shot down by parental anger.
Mechanical enginering at Dundee
From the Guardian University Guide
The University of Dundee has motored up the mechanical engineering tables, coming from outside the top 20 last year to third place.
This is the first year that students have built a formula student racing car to race in a university competition at Silverstone – a project that the department head, Robert Keatch, says they are hugely enjoying and which is helping their team-working skills.
Cracking cocaine
Most of the pupils at Girvan academy are smartly dressed in school uniform, shirts and ties, and it seems an unlikely place to find juvenile cocaine experts.
But this school in Ayrshire has piloted an anti-drugs programme on cocaine that is to be rolled out across Scotland. Pupils have worked with the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency and Learning Teaching Scotland (LTS), the government-funded body that develops the curriculum, to come up with a programme that focuses not on the health risks of cocaine use but on its environmental and social damage.
Kathleen Marshall Interview
What they long for is people who care’ – Education Guardian
Kathleen Marshall, the first UK children’s commissioner to leave office, tells Jackie Kemp she has never been a fan of playing safe
The ground-floor office a few doors up from the Scottish parliament on Edinburgh’s Holyrood Road has neat venetian blinds and two doors. One is unashamedly dull. The second, smaller door, is shiny, has a bejewelled handle, and is painted with images of mermaids and enchanted forests. Just inside, where other offices have coatstands, is a cardboard wishing tree. Someone has written on one of its paper leaves in a round, firm hand: “I wish I had more one-to-one time with key children.”