“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
My kids learn English history too. Last term included the Great Fire of London and the Plague.
Not sure what is woke or rewriting history there?
That isn't, but there's an increasing focus in some educational institutions to teach history almost solely through the prism of identity politics, as the post of @AlistairM demonstrates. I also encountered it myself at my daughter's previous school, so I withdrew her.
We shouldn't deny this is a problem.
Also seems to be the case with other subjects. When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists. I'm all for covering a wide variety of different areas but I think there is a real danger of the syllabus being so desperate to be politically correct that it ends up being exclusionary. That is not progress.
Depends on the course, obvs, but why on earth, on the planet where x% of people are from any one particular demographic do you worry about a course on "artists" focusing on a variety of artists from different backgrounds.
Or was the course labelled "white artists in 20th Century Britain"?
That's an impressive missing of the point.
"When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists."
Not much to go on but please do let me know why a Y9 course on "artists" shouldn't include "non-white" artists.
As an aside, PVC-free clingfilm is a wretched and inferior product. I'm unsure if it's due to cost-cutting or environmentalism but whoever came up with the vile stuff should be stuffed into a giant cannon and launched into the heart of the sun.
But PVC clingfilm I believe contains phthalates which, as an oestrogen mimic, feminises you. Perhaps that's one of the reasons for the massive reduction in sperm count?
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
If AI makes most STEM, finance, accountancy, law jobs redundant that will change.
The few jobs left will be the most creative ones machines can't do, which humanities teach
Mate, I wish that were true. I fear it is not
GPT3.5 is already churning out pretty good creative writing - poetry, stories. SDiffusion and DALL-E2 are producing some notable art (which is being used commercially already)
In 2 or 3 iterations (3-5 years?) they will be as good at the best creative stuff as almost any human. In ten years unimaginably better than any human
Tiny arguments on Reddit will rage as to whether these machines are “truly” creative. It won’t matter, because the machines will simply be better, and we will avidly consume their creations
In which case all but the top 1% most creative and innovative and skilled will be out of work in most fields.
We then return to the inevitability of a universal basic income funded by a robot tax the more AI is used across sectors, whether creative arts, manufacturing, professional finance, accountancy and law or basic menial tasks
That's Luddite bullshit.
As jobs are eliminated, new ones are created. People have ingenuity. We do different jobs than the past, but the idea of a jobless age has always been and always will be Dystopian SciFi bullshit.
What new jobs are going to be created then the average IQ person, not especially creative can do which AI can't do? Let alone for those of below average IQ?
There may still be permanent jobs for very high IQ, highly creative people but they are only a small minority
Then why do we have full employment? 🤦♂️
There's 300 years of history showing Luddidm is wrong. You're only limited by your own weak imagination.
People will use their ingenuity to create jobs and opportunities. Just as we always have done.
To a degree and it depends on the timescale.
The Luddites were right - from their own perspective. The Industrial Revolution did lead to a collapse in artisan wages, especially as employers designed factories based around child labour which was cheaper than skilled artisans.
Wages did - eventually - improve and new jobs were created but it took several decades for the effect to come through (eg factories required administration which required clerks etc).
When technological changes come and make people unemployed, there is not an automatic bank of jobs out there. Sure, people can set themselves up (I did) but the idea that people can switch seamlessly into jobs is a fallacy - there are switching costs for a reason.
More accurately - it ended some jobs, like weaving at home.
There were more and often better paid jobs, but this meant changing trades.
Which was Simply Not How Things Work, back then.
There were also places like India where mechanisation ended the old jobs but didn't create new jobs any time soon. You could say that Southern Europe has seen old jobs in low-skilled manufacturing go away in the last three decades without being replaced.
The problem with Southern Europe is that the labour market does not clear because a multinational currency screws up the equilibrium mechanisms.
Yes we are all watching it in this Yorkshire Farmhouse.
It’s just weird. What is it with this unconvincing earnest delivery? He doesn’t sound remotely like a Primeminister or party leader.
I'm not that focussed myself today, but the themes are not strong enough, not forensic enough, after those pledges there is no sense of the meat that lies beneath. Blair could do motherhood and apple pie and you felt he was talking about something. Sunak's Blairite delivery has just descending into word salad for me.
As an aside, PVC-free clingfilm is a wretched and inferior product. I'm unsure if it's due to cost-cutting or environmentalism but whoever came up with the vile stuff should be stuffed into a giant cannon and launched into the heart of the sun.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
How much practical experience of the current state system do you have ?
I went to state sixth form college, my sister went to stste schools throughout her childhood and my nephews both went there.
I am also familiar with the curriculums taught locally. My ex-girlfriend also attended a history lessons during her PCGE course at a Southampton comprehensive entitled "there ain't no black in the union jack".
I am done with denialism and whataboutery on this. IT IS A PROBLEM.
The question is what we do about it so we don't radicalise and indoctrinate future generations.
Yes, it’s a definite problem and it’s a problem in London as much as anywhere
At the age of 15 my eldest was well schooled on every possible significant black figure in British history - I never want to hear the words Mary Seacole again - but she did not know much at all about the Battle of Hastings. She vaguely knew it was important. Didn’t really know who was fighting. Or who won
And she’s smart
Of all people to decry such an education.
You can't on the one hand say out with maths, the arts, you name it because it has no relevance to life today; and on the other hand bemoan the lack of teaching of the Battle of Hastings in favour of teaching about a figure who influences so very many aspects of life today, both for you and your eldest.
I’ve already said on this thread that education is good in and of itself. My argument is that it will become a pleasing skill rather than a necessary qualification for employment
Learning maths will be like learning the clarinet to grade 5. It’s nice that you can do it but will it help you get a job? No not so much
In that scenario it will be awfully hard to motivate a lot of students
There's a different between maths and arithmetic. Even if you only need to follow along with what ChatGPT is telling you, you need to understand mathematical concepts.
People still don't seem to grasp that even if AI does away with 90% of current employment tasks, the 10% that is left plus a bunch of new tasks required to orchestrate the AI, will rapidly become 100% of people's jobs. A good education system would entail figuring out what those things are and teaching that stuff. And I don't believe only 10% of the population is able to learn how to integrate different AIs, and align it with business needs, and to define the scope of work it needs to do etc.
You think 8 billion humans will in future work on “integrating different AIs and aligning them with business needs”?
You should try reading the plentiful fiction on the subject of post-scarcity societies.
I always liked the throwaway line in Vernor Vinge about a chap working in a small business, just before the singularity. His partners are getting bored with manufacturing anti-matter by the tens of thousands of tons. Per second. In close orbit, round the Sun.
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
If AI makes most STEM, finance, accountancy, law jobs redundant that will change.
The few jobs left will be the most creative ones machines can't do, which humanities teach
Mate, I wish that were true. I fear it is not
GPT3.5 is already churning out pretty good creative writing - poetry, stories. SDiffusion and DALL-E2 are producing some notable art (which is being used commercially already)
In 2 or 3 iterations (3-5 years?) they will be as good at the best creative stuff as almost any human. In ten years unimaginably better than any human
Tiny arguments on Reddit will rage as to whether these machines are “truly” creative. It won’t matter, because the machines will simply be better, and we will avidly consume their creations
In which case all but the top 1% most creative and innovative and skilled will be out of work in most fields.
We then return to the inevitability of a universal basic income funded by a robot tax the more AI is used across sectors, whether creative arts, manufacturing, professional finance, accountancy and law or basic menial tasks
That's Luddite bullshit.
As jobs are eliminated, new ones are created. People have ingenuity. We do different jobs than the past, but the idea of a jobless age has always been and always will be Dystopian SciFi bullshit.
What new jobs are going to be created then the average IQ person, not especially creative can do which AI can't do? Let alone for those of below average IQ?
There may still be permanent jobs for very high IQ, highly creative people but they are only a small minority
Then why do we have full employment? 🤦♂️
There's 300 years of history showing Luddidm is wrong. You're only limited by your own weak imagination.
People will use their ingenuity to create jobs and opportunities. Just as we always have done.
To a degree and it depends on the timescale.
The Luddites were right - from their own perspective. The Industrial Revolution did lead to a collapse in artisan wages, especially as employers designed factories based around child labour which was cheaper than skilled artisans.
Wages did - eventually - improve and new jobs were created but it took several decades for the effect to come through (eg factories required administration which required clerks etc).
When technological changes come and make people unemployed, there is not an automatic bank of jobs out there. Sure, people can set themselves up (I did) but the idea that people can switch seamlessly into jobs is a fallacy - there are switching costs for a reason.
More accurately - it ended some jobs, like weaving at home.
There were more and often better paid jobs, but this meant changing trades.
Which was Simply Not How Things Work, back then.
There were also places like India where mechanisation ended the old jobs but didn't create new jobs any time soon. You could say that Southern Europe has seen old jobs in low-skilled manufacturing go away in the last three decades without being replaced.
The problem with Southern Europe is that the labour market does not clear because a multinational currency screws up the equilibrium mechanisms.
I don't think you could characterise those exact mechanisms, though, beyond EU=bad.
It struck me reading the thread that Rishi's ' irrelevant and useless intervention on Maths' amidst the death throes of the NHS has succeeded completely in getting PB talking about nothing else all day...
Certainly the combination of "Argentina win the World Cup" and "Argentina-France final" shouldn't have been allowed at full price. I think the logical thing is to work out what "Argentina beat France in the final" would be and then calculate that as a double with "Messi Golden Ball". I don't buy the part of their defence that "Argentina win" can't be combined with "Messi Golden Ball".
Agree, a few times the leading goal scorer hadn’t made the final such as Gary Lineker.
Mr. B/Mr. Barnesian, quite content to use something without PVC if it can be remotely as good. But this is just a huge step backwards. Except in the annoyance stakes. On that rating, PVC-free clingfilm scores very highly.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
My kids learn English history too. Last term included the Great Fire of London and the Plague.
Not sure what is woke or rewriting history there?
That isn't, but there's an increasing focus in some educational institutions to teach history almost solely through the prism of identity politics, as the post of @AlistairM demonstrates. I also encountered it myself at my daughter's previous school, so I withdrew her.
We shouldn't deny this is a problem.
Also seems to be the case with other subjects. When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists. I'm all for covering a wide variety of different areas but I think there is a real danger of the syllabus being so desperate to be politically correct that it ends up being exclusionary. That is not progress.
Depends on the course, obvs, but why on earth, on the planet where x% of people are from any one particular demographic do you worry about a course on "artists" focusing on a variety of artists from different backgrounds.
Or was the course labelled "white artists in 20th Century Britain"?
That's an impressive missing of the point.
"When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists."
Not much to go on but please do let me know why a Y9 course on "artists" shouldn't include "non-white" artists.
TIA.
Once you understand that that an art course can cover both white and non-white artists (as indeed a history course can cover both Britsh and non-British history) this should resolve your difficulty.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
How much practical experience of the current state system do you have ?
I went to state sixth form college, my sister went to stste schools throughout her childhood and my nephews both went there.
I am also familiar with the curriculums taught locally. My ex-girlfriend also attended a history lessons during her PCGE course at a Southampton comprehensive entitled "there ain't no black in the union jack".
I am done with denialism and whataboutery on this. IT IS A PROBLEM.
The question is what we do about it so we don't radicalise and indoctrinate future generations.
Yes, it’s a definite problem and it’s a problem in London as much as anywhere
At the age of 15 my eldest was well schooled on every possible significant black figure in British history - I never want to hear the words Mary Seacole again - but she did not know much at all about the Battle of Hastings. She vaguely knew it was important. Didn’t really know who was fighting. Or who won
And she’s smart
You neglected her education, then ?
No, I took her to Waltham Abbey and showed her the likely grave of King Harold Godwinson and Edith Swan Neck
Since then we have done multiple educational trips. Florence and Rome last summer
You're right - I should have said "you had neglected her education". Well done for remedying the situation.
He has two daughters - I wonder if the other one got the (ahem) benefit of his educational neglect?
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
My kids learn English history too. Last term included the Great Fire of London and the Plague.
Not sure what is woke or rewriting history there?
That isn't, but there's an increasing focus in some educational institutions to teach history almost solely through the prism of identity politics, as the post of @AlistairM demonstrates. I also encountered it myself at my daughter's previous school, so I withdrew her.
We shouldn't deny this is a problem.
Also seems to be the case with other subjects. When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists. I'm all for covering a wide variety of different areas but I think there is a real danger of the syllabus being so desperate to be politically correct that it ends up being exclusionary. That is not progress.
Depends on the course, obvs, but why on earth, on the planet where x% of people are from any one particular demographic do you worry about a course on "artists" focusing on a variety of artists from different backgrounds.
Or was the course labelled "white artists in 20th Century Britain"?
That's an impressive missing of the point.
"When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists."
Not much to go on but please do let me know why a Y9 course on "artists" shouldn't include "non-white" artists.
TIA.
Once you understand that that an art course can cover both white and non-white artists (as indeed a history course can cover both Britsh and non-British history) this should resolve your difficulty.
You are relying on "entirely focused" but I bet it wasn't. I bet it included a few non-white artists at which point pearls were clutched. If of course the whole thing isn't bullshit.
Yes we are all watching it in this Yorkshire Farmhouse.
It’s just weird. What is it with this unconvincing earnest delivery? He doesn’t sound remotely like a Primeminister or party leader.
I'm not that focussed myself today, but the themes are not strong enough, not forensic enough, after those pledges there is no sense of the meat that lies beneath. Blair could do motherhood and apple pie and you felt he was talking about something. Sunak's Blairite delivery has just descending into word salad for me.
Tbh, he should have run this through ChatGPT.
He says
"The more we innovate, the more we grow," saying "the UK must grow leading sectors such as AI, green technology and life sciences.
All of this can be done by seizing opportunities of Brexit."
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
History is the summation of the whole human story to date - taught in our islands should have a particular focus on British history because that's where we live and it explains our institutions and values and how we got here. It should not be taught solely through the prism of gender, race and sexuality - as the Woke would have it.
One day lesser minds, like yours, will come round to this, but for now it's far easier for you to be a dumb sheep.
If the argument is that schoolchild in the world should learn world history, and end up with relatively similar curricula across countries, then fair enough. It's not a view I agree with, but it's certainly defensible.
However, in practice I suspect that most proponents of teaching "diverse" history in the UK would baulk at the teaching of, say, the Napoleonic Wars in a Nigerian school, as "colonialist".
The point is that teaching it solely through the prism of identity politics introduces a bias into it, in the same way it would to teach it solely through a Whig one or a Marxist one.
It should focus on a factual story of the major events that got us to where we are today, triangulated to the broader context in the wider world, and encourage children to interpret and challenge primary and secondary sources themselves to figure it out.
The heavy focus on the Tudors, as opposed to the Civil War, I find a bit weird - to be honest. We were a republic for nearly 11 years, and then exported the religious puritans to New England, helping to spawn America and how it is today, and that feels just as significant - if not more so.
England's identity as, "definitely not a Catholic country," used to be a lot more important to its sense of self then it is now, and clearly the Tudor period was central to that.
As others have mentioned a lot of the present curriculum is determined by what Minister's parents were taught at school (+WWII for history), and so no-one's really rethought how to teach our history.
I was never taught about the Acts of Union at my English school, which seems a rather remarkable gap. Though we did learn about the US civil rights movement and, unsurprisingly, that was the topic that most interested many of my fellow south London inner suburban classmates. I don't think they'd have been as interested as I would have been to learn more about Alfred the Great.
Where I diverge a little bit, here, is that different races should be taught histories in slightly different ways.
We are all British and I think we all agree (well, most of us do) that race should ultimately become as irrelevant as your hair and eye colour, so, I do want history to be taught in a unifying way.
I agree with you there. I guess what I was trying to say is that, because Britain is a different country now than it was before the post-WWII immigration, then our shared historical story is also different.
I can see why you might think some people have overdone this, but I think that's what people are trying to do with what you criticise as a woke agenda in history.
Ideally, if kids are taught about the Battle of Hastings, the Caribbean sugar plantations and the Indian troops who fought in the WWI trenches, then they'd have a shared understanding of how they all ended up in the same country which enjoys the benefits of the rule of law, democracy, and a reasonably prosperous market economy, while still suffering from the pernicious inheritance of Norman feudalism.
Mr. B/Mr. Barnesian, quite content to use something without PVC if it can be remotely as good. But this is just a huge step backwards. Except in the annoyance stakes. On that rating, PVC-free clingfilm scores very highly.
You just require a modicum of practice to achieve competence in PVC-free clingfilm wrangling. Treat it as a challenge.
Certainly the combination of "Argentina win the World Cup" and "Argentina-France final" shouldn't have been allowed at full price. I think the logical thing is to work out what "Argentina beat France in the final" would be and then calculate that as a double with "Messi Golden Ball". I don't buy the part of their defence that "Argentina win" can't be combined with "Messi Golden Ball".
Agree, a few times the leading goal scorer hadn’t made the final such as Gary Lineker.
If it was Golden Boot they wouldn't have a leg to stand on for this part of the bet. Golden Ball is different - you expect it to be from a finalist - but there's no reason why it has to be. The 2010 winner was from a losing semi-finalist.
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Interesting. And reassuring.
Just to be clear: I don't want to set up a false dichotomy here, although I bet I will be accused of it.
I am not arguing that women's rights, civil rights, slavery etc. should not be covered in history lessons - quite the opposite.
I am arguing that should not be the prism solely through which all history is taught, and it should always be put in the context of the times.
It does seem like the situation varies. It's certainly not something we have come against, the only place I've heard about woke etc is on this site.
My daughters great historical question that was puzzling her which she asked over the Christmas holidays was: Since the Plague was spread by rats, and rats still exist today, how come people today don't get the Plague?
Racial matters too where it comes up I think her school has handled very well for her age group. The school does Nativities and learns about Christian beliefs etc, but also she has learnt more about Eid, Diwali and other faiths etc than we were ever taught at school. That to me seems to be a very good thing and more education there doesn't take anything away from anyone.
The short answer being, of course, that they do (just in much smaller numbers and not around these parts).
It has been a pleasant surprise that our son's CofE primary school has gone big on Diwali etc. Like you, I knew little of these festivals or the religions at a similar age (wasn't really covered until secondary school RE which was, to be fair, very broad and all the more interesting for it).
I can see their argument, but chances are the guy wouldn't have placed the bet if he'd only been offered 66-1, and the question I would have is how many other similar bets did they take (Portugal to win, Ronaldo to be top scorer, Portugal v England final) at similar compound odds, but now not offering to void the bets when they're not willing to stand by the odds offered at the time?
Sometimes they will make mistakes and misprice bets. They shouldn't be able to wiggle away from them only when they lose.
The bookie took the bet, they shouldn't be allowed to scream related contingencies later on.
Assuming a 50:50 chance in the final, the odds would have been 459/1, so still over £4,500 in winnings. Coral should really pay out on that.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
My kids learn English history too. Last term included the Great Fire of London and the Plague.
Not sure what is woke or rewriting history there?
That isn't, but there's an increasing focus in some educational institutions to teach history almost solely through the prism of identity politics, as the post of @AlistairM demonstrates. I also encountered it myself at my daughter's previous school, so I withdrew her.
We shouldn't deny this is a problem.
Also seems to be the case with other subjects. When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists. I'm all for covering a wide variety of different areas but I think there is a real danger of the syllabus being so desperate to be politically correct that it ends up being exclusionary. That is not progress.
Depends on the course, obvs, but why on earth, on the planet where x% of people are from any one particular demographic do you worry about a course on "artists" focusing on a variety of artists from different backgrounds.
Or was the course labelled "white artists in 20th Century Britain"?
That's an impressive missing of the point.
"When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists."
Not much to go on but please do let me know why a Y9 course on "artists" shouldn't include "non-white" artists.
TIA.
Once you understand that that an art course can cover both white and non-white artists (as indeed a history course can cover both Britsh and non-British history) this should resolve your difficulty.
You are relying on "entirely focused" but I bet it wasn't. I bet it included a few non-white artists at which point pearls were clutched. If of course the whole thing isn't bullshit.
Yes we are all watching it in this Yorkshire Farmhouse.
It’s just weird. What is it with this unconvincing earnest delivery? He doesn’t sound remotely like a Primeminister or party leader.
I'm not that focussed myself today, but the themes are not strong enough, not forensic enough, after those pledges there is no sense of the meat that lies beneath. Blair could do motherhood and apple pie and you felt he was talking about something. Sunak's Blairite delivery has just descending into word salad for me.
Tbh, he should have run this through ChatGPT.
He says
"The more we innovate, the more we grow," saying "the UK must grow leading sectors such as AI, green technology and life sciences.
All of this can be done by seizing opportunities of Brexit."
Anyone at this late hour still talking about Brexit opportunities should be sectioned.
“Rishi Sunak says he will halve inflation, grow economy and cut NHS waiting lists – UK politics live
Prime minister makes wide-ranging speech on education, the economy, the NHS and small boats”
I fear that no one is listening, however
Those are at least SMART objectives. They are also ones he knows he will achieve.
Not even the most pessimistic inflation forecasts show it above half its peak by the end of the year. It may be significantly lower than that. So he'll be able to claim that and say job done.
Grow economy is a bit more of a hostage to fortune but fortunately for him there are various different ways to interpret this, and so long as GDP is growing by Q4 (which it should be unless we're in a double dip) he can chalk that one up as a resounding success too.
Cut waiting lists: well at least he's talking about it. One of the more controllable aspects of NHS performance so I assume he's quite confident they can do this. Waits have shot up so far that they could fall by weeks and still be greater than they were only a year ago
Cut small boats arrivals: that's the biggest hostage to fortune. The easiest fix if things aren't going as planned will be to make security at the Eurotunnel terminal more lax. Cut a few holes in the wire fences. Stop checking lorries. Then hey presto people won't be coming by boat anymore.
Mr. B, as we know, morris dancers are the most mild and measured of men.
But if I ever find the cretin who came up with PVC-free clingfilm my wiffle stick will become a cudgel of merciless energy, tenderising the buffoon before they are righteously bethwacked across their mush with an enormo-haddock!
Certainly the combination of "Argentina win the World Cup" and "Argentina-France final" shouldn't have been allowed at full price. I think the logical thing is to work out what "Argentina beat France in the final" would be and then calculate that as a double with "Messi Golden Ball". I don't buy the part of their defence that "Argentina win" can't be combined with "Messi Golden Ball".
Agree, a few times the leading goal scorer hadn’t made the final such as Gary Lineker.
If it was Golden Boot they wouldn't have a leg to stand on for this part of the bet. Golden Ball is different - you expect it to be from a finalist - but there's no reason why it has to be. The 2010 winner was from a losing semi-finalist.
Certainly the combination of "Argentina win the World Cup" and "Argentina-France final" shouldn't have been allowed at full price. I think the logical thing is to work out what "Argentina beat France in the final" would be and then calculate that as a double with "Messi Golden Ball". I don't buy the part of their defence that "Argentina win" can't be combined with "Messi Golden Ball".
Unfortunately the Gambling Commission are so useless that bookies can do what they like
It's a really odd decision though, from a PR point of view.
Pay up: nice stories in the press about the great bet payoff and Coral being the good guys and paying out even though they made a mistake in accepting it (the final and winner are obviously not at all independent).
Don't pay: a good chunk (>£15k?) of bad publicity. Most punters, even casual ones, have multiple local choices (plus internet of course) on where to place their bets.
Mr. B, as we know, morris dancers are the most mild and measured of men.
But if I ever find the cretin who came up with PVC-free clingfilm my wiffle stick will become a cudgel of merciless energy, tenderising the buffoon before they are righteously bethwacked across their mush with an enormo-haddock!
And, with that, I must be off.
PVC free clingfilm is the gluten free flour of food wrapping. Hopefully some clever soul will come up with something a bit better soon.
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
If AI makes most STEM, finance, accountancy, law jobs redundant that will change.
The few jobs left will be the most creative ones machines can't do, which humanities teach
Mate, I wish that were true. I fear it is not
GPT3.5 is already churning out pretty good creative writing - poetry, stories. SDiffusion and DALL-E2 are producing some notable art (which is being used commercially already)
In 2 or 3 iterations (3-5 years?) they will be as good at the best creative stuff as almost any human. In ten years unimaginably better than any human
Tiny arguments on Reddit will rage as to whether these machines are “truly” creative. It won’t matter, because the machines will simply be better, and we will avidly consume their creations
In which case all but the top 1% most creative and innovative and skilled will be out of work in most fields.
We then return to the inevitability of a universal basic income funded by a robot tax the more AI is used across sectors, whether creative arts, manufacturing, professional finance, accountancy and law or basic menial tasks
That's Luddite bullshit.
As jobs are eliminated, new ones are created. People have ingenuity. We do different jobs than the past, but the idea of a jobless age has always been and always will be Dystopian SciFi bullshit.
What new jobs are going to be created then the average IQ person, not especially creative can do which AI can't do? Let alone for those of below average IQ?
There may still be permanent jobs for very high IQ, highly creative people but they are only a small minority
Then why do we have full employment? 🤦♂️
There's 300 years of history showing Luddidm is wrong. You're only limited by your own weak imagination.
People will use their ingenuity to create jobs and opportunities. Just as we always have done.
To a degree and it depends on the timescale.
The Luddites were right - from their own perspective. The Industrial Revolution did lead to a collapse in artisan wages, especially as employers designed factories based around child labour which was cheaper than skilled artisans.
Wages did - eventually - improve and new jobs were created but it took several decades for the effect to come through (eg factories required administration which required clerks etc).
When technological changes come and make people unemployed, there is not an automatic bank of jobs out there. Sure, people can set themselves up (I did) but the idea that people can switch seamlessly into jobs is a fallacy - there are switching costs for a reason.
More accurately - it ended some jobs, like weaving at home.
There were more and often better paid jobs, but this meant changing trades.
Which was Simply Not How Things Work, back then.
There were also places like India where mechanisation ended the old jobs but didn't create new jobs any time soon. You could say that Southern Europe has seen old jobs in low-skilled manufacturing go away in the last three decades without being replaced.
The problem with Southern Europe is that the labour market does not clear because a multinational currency screws up the equilibrium mechanisms.
Perhaps, although it's worth pointing out that the unemployment rate in both Spain and Italy is well below the level it was when they joined the euro.
Certainly the combination of "Argentina win the World Cup" and "Argentina-France final" shouldn't have been allowed at full price. I think the logical thing is to work out what "Argentina beat France in the final" would be and then calculate that as a double with "Messi Golden Ball". I don't buy the part of their defence that "Argentina win" can't be combined with "Messi Golden Ball".
Agree, a few times the leading goal scorer hadn’t made the final such as Gary Lineker.
If it was Golden Boot they wouldn't have a leg to stand on for this part of the bet. Golden Ball is different - you expect it to be from a finalist - but there's no reason why it has to be. The 2010 winner was from a losing semi-finalist.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
My kids learn English history too. Last term included the Great Fire of London and the Plague.
Not sure what is woke or rewriting history there?
That isn't, but there's an increasing focus in some educational institutions to teach history almost solely through the prism of identity politics, as the post of @AlistairM demonstrates. I also encountered it myself at my daughter's previous school, so I withdrew her.
We shouldn't deny this is a problem.
Also seems to be the case with other subjects. When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists. I'm all for covering a wide variety of different areas but I think there is a real danger of the syllabus being so desperate to be politically correct that it ends up being exclusionary. That is not progress.
Depends on the course, obvs, but why on earth, on the planet where x% of people are from any one particular demographic do you worry about a course on "artists" focusing on a variety of artists from different backgrounds.
Or was the course labelled "white artists in 20th Century Britain"?
That's an impressive missing of the point.
"When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists."
Not much to go on but please do let me know why a Y9 course on "artists" shouldn't include "non-white" artists.
TIA.
Once you understand that that an art course can cover both white and non-white artists (as indeed a history course can cover both Britsh and non-British history) this should resolve your difficulty.
You are relying on "entirely focused" but I bet it wasn't. I bet it included a few non-white artists at which point pearls were clutched. If of course the whole thing isn't bullshit.
Ah, so you're assuming a lie.
Let's say it was "entirely focused" (big if). So what? What is important about an artist - their work or their skin colour?
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Jen's schooling is one of the major driving forces pushing us to Ticino or Lugano, I don't trust UK education to not push all of the nonsense onto young impressionable kids and teachers who will try their hardest to convince girls who play with fire engines and bin lorries that they're actually boys.
This is what teaching will be like in about ten years. Remember you read it here first
Teachers will basically be supervisors, no more, no less. Just maintaining discipline and maybe framing the work
Teacher Pointless will stand there and say “OK, English” then screens will rise in front of every child. And a friendly avatar of a human, Miss AI Perfect, will speak directly to each child via translucent EarPods: “good morning Jonny do you remember what you and me were doing yesterday, let’s go over it. I recall you were curious about the sonnets, here’s another one we can analyse”
The education will be perfectly tailored to the needs and skills of each child. No more one speed learning for an entire class. Every child with its own tutor. Magical. There probably won’t be any homework
So there will still be a teacher then? And "just maintaining discipline" and "Pointless" reveals a lack of much experience of a class of 14 year olds. What if Johnny says "English? Fuck off I'm playing Fortnite?"
shock collars.
It'd be a shock if Johnny rebel was wearing a collar for sure.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
My kids learn English history too. Last term included the Great Fire of London and the Plague.
Not sure what is woke or rewriting history there?
That isn't, but there's an increasing focus in some educational institutions to teach history almost solely through the prism of identity politics, as the post of @AlistairM demonstrates. I also encountered it myself at my daughter's previous school, so I withdrew her.
We shouldn't deny this is a problem.
Also seems to be the case with other subjects. When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists. I'm all for covering a wide variety of different areas but I think there is a real danger of the syllabus being so desperate to be politically correct that it ends up being exclusionary. That is not progress.
Depends on the course, obvs, but why on earth, on the planet where x% of people are from any one particular demographic do you worry about a course on "artists" focusing on a variety of artists from different backgrounds.
Or was the course labelled "white artists in 20th Century Britain"?
That's an impressive missing of the point.
"When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists."
Not much to go on but please do let me know why a Y9 course on "artists" shouldn't include "non-white" artists.
TIA.
No one is saying that.
I can't claim I've seen every piece of artwork she has had to do. However, she as a white girl thinks it is a bit odd that she only seems to study certain types of artists. There should be a broad portfolio of artists that they study. At the moment it is excluding artists from a certain background entirely. Discrimination is not being removed, it is being changed to discriminate against others.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
My kids learn English history too. Last term included the Great Fire of London and the Plague.
Not sure what is woke or rewriting history there?
That isn't, but there's an increasing focus in some educational institutions to teach history almost solely through the prism of identity politics, as the post of @AlistairM demonstrates. I also encountered it myself at my daughter's previous school, so I withdrew her.
We shouldn't deny this is a problem.
Also seems to be the case with other subjects. When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists. I'm all for covering a wide variety of different areas but I think there is a real danger of the syllabus being so desperate to be politically correct that it ends up being exclusionary. That is not progress.
Depends on the course, obvs, but why on earth, on the planet where x% of people are from any one particular demographic do you worry about a course on "artists" focusing on a variety of artists from different backgrounds.
Or was the course labelled "white artists in 20th Century Britain"?
That's an impressive missing of the point.
"When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists."
Not much to go on but please do let me know why a Y9 course on "artists" shouldn't include "non-white" artists.
TIA.
Once you understand that that an art course can cover both white and non-white artists (as indeed a history course can cover both Britsh and non-British history) this should resolve your difficulty.
You are relying on "entirely focused" but I bet it wasn't. I bet it included a few non-white artists at which point pearls were clutched. If of course the whole thing isn't bullshit.
Ah, so you're assuming a lie.
Let's say it was "entirely focused" (big if). So what? What is important about an artist - their work or their skin colour?
Their work.
Which is why a course entirely focused on either white or non-white artists is likely to be undesirable.
Mr. B/Mr. Barnesian, quite content to use something without PVC if it can be remotely as good. But this is just a huge step backwards. Except in the annoyance stakes. On that rating, PVC-free clingfilm scores very highly.
You just require a modicum of practice to achieve competence in PVC-free clingfilm wrangling. Treat it as a challenge.
Surely we're all using natural beeswax-impregnated cotton food wrap*, rather than single use plastics, aren't we? Aren't we?
*We do have one of these (received as a gift) and it works fine. Still find tupperware better/more convenient for most things, though. I'll admit neither is a good subsitute for the old cling film over the toilet pan trick...
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Jen's schooling is one of the major driving forces pushing us to Ticino or Lugano, I don't trust UK education to not push all of the nonsense onto young impressionable kids and teachers who will try their hardest to convince girls who play with fire engines and bin lorries that they're actually boys.
One of my friends recently announced on Facebook that their son wants to be referred to as "they", despite there being only one Andrew. It was noticeable that this post got a lot fewer reactions than usual - people presumably being too polite to hit the "Haha" response.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
My kids learn English history too. Last term included the Great Fire of London and the Plague.
Not sure what is woke or rewriting history there?
That isn't, but there's an increasing focus in some educational institutions to teach history almost solely through the prism of identity politics, as the post of @AlistairM demonstrates. I also encountered it myself at my daughter's previous school, so I withdrew her.
We shouldn't deny this is a problem.
Also seems to be the case with other subjects. When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists. I'm all for covering a wide variety of different areas but I think there is a real danger of the syllabus being so desperate to be politically correct that it ends up being exclusionary. That is not progress.
Depends on the course, obvs, but why on earth, on the planet where x% of people are from any one particular demographic do you worry about a course on "artists" focusing on a variety of artists from different backgrounds.
Or was the course labelled "white artists in 20th Century Britain"?
That's an impressive missing of the point.
"When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists."
Not much to go on but please do let me know why a Y9 course on "artists" shouldn't include "non-white" artists.
TIA.
No one is saying that.
I can't claim I've seen every piece of artwork she has had to do. However, she as a white girl thinks it is a bit odd that she only seems to study certain types of artists. There should be a broad portfolio of artists that they study. At the moment it is excluding artists from a certain background entirely. Discrimination is not being removed, it is being changed to discriminate against others.
"she as a white girl thinks it is a bit odd that she only seems to study certain types of artist"?
interesting comment.
What is the name of the course if you don't mind me asking. And again without wishing to see the syllabus (I'd love to) what artists do you think are being excluded?
There's some emerging evidence that early induction is bad for longer term child outcomes (or, indeed, any early delivery, even by 2-3 weeks, but apart from the induced, that's not generally something that can be avoided). Elective c-sections are tending a bit later, nearer due date, as result, at least locally.
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Interesting. And reassuring.
Just to be clear: I don't want to set up a false dichotomy here, although I bet I will be accused of it.
I am not arguing that women's rights, civil rights, slavery etc. should not be covered in history lessons - quite the opposite.
I am arguing that should not be the prism solely through which all history is taught, and it should always be put in the context of the times.
It does seem like the situation varies. It's certainly not something we have come against, the only place I've heard about woke etc is on this site.
My daughters great historical question that was puzzling her which she asked over the Christmas holidays was: Since the Plague was spread by rats, and rats still exist today, how come people today don't get the Plague?
Racial matters too where it comes up I think her school has handled very well for her age group. The school does Nativities and learns about Christian beliefs etc, but also she has learnt more about Eid, Diwali and other faiths etc than we were ever taught at school. That to me seems to be a very good thing and more education there doesn't take anything away from anyone.
I thought that current thinking was that the Plague was spread by human fleas, and not rats?
Improved hygiene did for it, not the elimination of small furry mammals.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
History is the summation of the whole human story to date - taught in our islands should have a particular focus on British history because that's where we live and it explains our institutions and values and how we got here. It should not be taught solely through the prism of gender, race and sexuality - as the Woke would have it.
One day lesser minds, like yours, will come round to this, but for now it's far easier for you to be a dumb sheep.
One does expect a British angle on things discussed by Britons in Britain. Hence why our colonialism (big and recent and OURS) shouldn't be contextualized away with "it's complicated" and "we were no worse than others" and "what about the Romans?" etc etc. Yet this what many try to do. Happens every single time we get into it.
With respect, you have a strong view on colonialism and it only leans one-way.
I have no issue with the facts being taught. I do have an issue with those facts being highly selective and placed outwith the context of the times.
We are able to teach a balanced history of the Roman empire. It shouldn't be hard to do the same for the British.
Do we teach a balanced history of the Roman Empire?
I'd say that one curiosity of English history is that all of the invasions are taught as a good, or at least neutral, thing. None of them were particularly oppressive conquests that the locals bravely fought against.
This is especially the case for the Roman conquest where it's taught we were jolly lucky to become part of the Empire, and it was a sad day when the Roman army was withdrawn.
Given that in some respects the British Empire was seen as a modern version of the Roman Empire, this can't help but colour the way we see it and see the reactions of those Britons of earlier generations conquered.
Everything that's wrong with the teaching of the Roman and British Empires in British schools can be summarised in the Monty Python, "What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?" scene in The Life Of Brian.
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Jen's schooling is one of the major driving forces pushing us to Ticino or Lugano, I don't trust UK education to not push all of the nonsense onto young impressionable kids and teachers who will try their hardest to convince girls who play with fire engines and bin lorries that they're actually boys.
One of my friends recently announced on Facebook that their son wants to be referred to as "they", despite there being only one Andrew. It was noticeable that this post got a lot fewer reactions than usual - people presumably being too polite to hit the "Haha" response.
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Jen's schooling is one of the major driving forces pushing us to Ticino or Lugano, I don't trust UK education to not push all of the nonsense onto young impressionable kids and teachers who will try their hardest to convince girls who play with fire engines and bin lorries that they're actually boys.
Aren’t there many good private schools in North London?
As an aside, PVC-free clingfilm is a wretched and inferior product. I'm unsure if it's due to cost-cutting or environmentalism but whoever came up with the vile stuff should be stuffed into a giant cannon and launched into the heart of the sun.
Certainly the combination of "Argentina win the World Cup" and "Argentina-France final" shouldn't have been allowed at full price. I think the logical thing is to work out what "Argentina beat France in the final" would be and then calculate that as a double with "Messi Golden Ball". I don't buy the part of their defence that "Argentina win" can't be combined with "Messi Golden Ball".
Unfortunately the Gambling Commission are so useless that bookies can do what they like
It's a really odd decision though, from a PR point of view.
Pay up: nice stories in the press about the great bet payoff and Coral being the good guys and paying out even though they made a mistake in accepting it (the final and winner are obviously not at all independent).
Don't pay: a good chunk (>£15k?) of bad publicity. Most punters, even casual ones, have multiple local choices (plus internet of course) on where to place their bets.
Bookies are not interested in good press anymore, when was the last time you saw someone with a massive cheque from a bookie, with the bookies rep celebrating with them.
They are only interested in encouraging people to play their rigged casinos and banning anyone else for daring to back a winner.
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
If AI makes most STEM, finance, accountancy, law jobs redundant that will change.
The few jobs left will be the most creative ones machines can't do, which humanities teach
Mate, I wish that were true. I fear it is not
GPT3.5 is already churning out pretty good creative writing - poetry, stories. SDiffusion and DALL-E2 are producing some notable art (which is being used commercially already)
In 2 or 3 iterations (3-5 years?) they will be as good at the best creative stuff as almost any human. In ten years unimaginably better than any human
Tiny arguments on Reddit will rage as to whether these machines are “truly” creative. It won’t matter, because the machines will simply be better, and we will avidly consume their creations
In which case all but the top 1% most creative and innovative and skilled will be out of work in most fields.
We then return to the inevitability of a universal basic income funded by a robot tax the more AI is used across sectors, whether creative arts, manufacturing, professional finance, accountancy and law or basic menial tasks
That's Luddite bullshit.
As jobs are eliminated, new ones are created. People have ingenuity. We do different jobs than the past, but the idea of a jobless age has always been and always will be Dystopian SciFi bullshit.
What new jobs are going to be created then the average IQ person, not especially creative can do which AI can't do? Let alone for those of below average IQ?
There may still be permanent jobs for very high IQ, highly creative people but they are only a small minority
Then why do we have full employment? 🤦♂️
There's 300 years of history showing Luddidm is wrong. You're only limited by your own weak imagination.
People will use their ingenuity to create jobs and opportunities. Just as we always have done.
It might help your argument if you could provide examples of these new jobs
That is an unreasonable request of @BartholomewRoberts. I mean nobody could have imagined call centre operators before the telephone was invented. In fact nobody imagined them for over century after it had been invented. Similarly all the computer based work, etc, etc. The idea of a computer on your desk was scoffed at when first suggested. The list is near endless of stuff we didn't know would provide work for people.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
My kids learn English history too. Last term included the Great Fire of London and the Plague.
Not sure what is woke or rewriting history there?
That isn't, but there's an increasing focus in some educational institutions to teach history almost solely through the prism of identity politics, as the post of @AlistairM demonstrates. I also encountered it myself at my daughter's previous school, so I withdrew her.
We shouldn't deny this is a problem.
Also seems to be the case with other subjects. When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists. I'm all for covering a wide variety of different areas but I think there is a real danger of the syllabus being so desperate to be politically correct that it ends up being exclusionary. That is not progress.
How many artists in Y9 are there, at least ones that are worth studying?
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
History is the summation of the whole human story to date - taught in our islands should have a particular focus on British history because that's where we live and it explains our institutions and values and how we got here. It should not be taught solely through the prism of gender, race and sexuality - as the Woke would have it.
One day lesser minds, like yours, will come round to this, but for now it's far easier for you to be a dumb sheep.
One does expect a British angle on things discussed by Britons in Britain. Hence why our colonialism (big and recent and OURS) shouldn't be contextualized away with "it's complicated" and "we were no worse than others" and "what about the Romans?" etc etc. Yet this what many try to do. Happens every single time we get into it.
With respect, you have a strong view on colonialism and it only leans one-way.
I have no issue with the facts being taught. I do have an issue with those facts being highly selective and placed outwith the context of the times.
We are able to teach a balanced history of the Roman empire. It shouldn't be hard to do the same for the British.
Do we teach a balanced history of the Roman Empire?
I'd say that one curiosity of English history is that all of the invasions are taught as a good, or at least neutral, thing. None of them were particularly oppressive conquests that the locals bravely fought against.
This is especially the case for the Roman conquest where it's taught we were jolly lucky to become part of the Empire, and it was a sad day when the Roman army was withdrawn.
Given that in some respects the British Empire was seen as a modern version of the Roman Empire, this can't help but colour the way we see it and see the reactions of those Britons of earlier generations conquered.
Everything that's wrong with the teaching of the Roman and British Empires in British schools can be summarised in the Monty Python, "What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?" scene in The Life Of Brian.
I think the popular conception that invaders are always worse the plucky natives is itself a bias. Just look at how much stuff in popular culture paints the Gaelic Highlanders as these noble defenders of chivalry vs the barbaric King's men. In reality they were patriarchal clans, ridden with blood feuds, religious superstition and a belief in the autocratic divine right of the Stewarts, and, at least in the 18th Century, the people fighting against them were the supporters of Enlightenment, constitutional rule, and limits on royal power.
The Hill - Gaetz sends letter to Architect of the Capitol asking why McCarthy is occupying Speaker’s office
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) sent a letter to the Architect of the Capitol on Tuesday questioning why House Speaker candidate Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was already inhabiting the Speaker’s office amid an intraparty battle over the House’s top leadership position.
“I write to inform you that the Speaker of the House Office located in the U.S. Capitol Building is currently occupied by Rep. Kevin McCarthy,” Gaetz said in the letter.
“As of this morning, the 117th Congress adjourned sine die, and a Speaker from the 118th Congress has not been elected,” he continued. “After three undeciding votes, no member can lay claim to this office.”
McCarthy failed to secure a majority for his Speakership bid in three consecutive votes on Tuesday, leading Republican leaders to adjourn for the day. A group of 19 GOP lawmakers, including Gaetz, consistently opposed McCarthy on all three rounds, with Rep.-elect Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) joining the anti-McCarthy group in the final vote of the day.
McCarthy on Tuesday criticized Gaetz for reportedly saying he did not care if House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) was elected in place of McCarthy as a result of the group’s tactics.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
History is the summation of the whole human story to date - taught in our islands should have a particular focus on British history because that's where we live and it explains our institutions and values and how we got here. It should not be taught solely through the prism of gender, race and sexuality - as the Woke would have it.
One day lesser minds, like yours, will come round to this, but for now it's far easier for you to be a dumb sheep.
One does expect a British angle on things discussed by Britons in Britain. Hence why our colonialism (big and recent and OURS) shouldn't be contextualized away with "it's complicated" and "we were no worse than others" and "what about the Romans?" etc etc. Yet this what many try to do. Happens every single time we get into it.
With respect, you have a strong view on colonialism and it only leans one-way.
I have no issue with the facts being taught. I do have an issue with those facts being highly selective and placed outwith the context of the times.
We are able to teach a balanced history of the Roman empire. It shouldn't be hard to do the same for the British.
Do we teach a balanced history of the Roman Empire?
I'd say that one curiosity of English history is that all of the invasions are taught as a good, or at least neutral, thing. None of them were particularly oppressive conquests that the locals bravely fought against.
This is especially the case for the Roman conquest where it's taught we were jolly lucky to become part of the Empire, and it was a sad day when the Roman army was withdrawn.
Given that in some respects the British Empire was seen as a modern version of the Roman Empire, this can't help but colour the way we see it and see the reactions of those Britons of earlier generations conquered.
Everything that's wrong with the teaching of the Roman and British Empires in British schools can be summarised in the Monty Python, "What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?" scene in The Life Of Brian.
I think the popular conception that invaders are always worse the plucky natives is itself a bias. Just look at how much stuff in popular culture paints the Gaelic Highlanders as these noble defenders of chivalry vs the barbaric King's men. In reality they were patriarchal clans, ridden with blood feuds, religious superstition and a belief in the autocratic divine right of the Stewarts, and, at least in the 18th Century, the people fighting against them were the supporters of Enlightenment, constitutional rule, and limits on royal power.
All that may be so, but for the peasants at ground level it's safe to say that being invaded - even by enlightened liberals - is the worst thing that can happen to them.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
History is the summation of the whole human story to date - taught in our islands should have a particular focus on British history because that's where we live and it explains our institutions and values and how we got here. It should not be taught solely through the prism of gender, race and sexuality - as the Woke would have it.
One day lesser minds, like yours, will come round to this, but for now it's far easier for you to be a dumb sheep.
One does expect a British angle on things discussed by Britons in Britain. Hence why our colonialism (big and recent and OURS) shouldn't be contextualized away with "it's complicated" and "we were no worse than others" and "what about the Romans?" etc etc. Yet this what many try to do. Happens every single time we get into it.
With respect, you have a strong view on colonialism and it only leans one-way.
I have no issue with the facts being taught. I do have an issue with those facts being highly selective and placed outwith the context of the times.
We are able to teach a balanced history of the Roman empire. It shouldn't be hard to do the same for the British.
Do we teach a balanced history of the Roman Empire?
I'd say that one curiosity of English history is that all of the invasions are taught as a good, or at least neutral, thing. None of them were particularly oppressive conquests that the locals bravely fought against.
This is especially the case for the Roman conquest where it's taught we were jolly lucky to become part of the Empire, and it was a sad day when the Roman army was withdrawn.
Given that in some respects the British Empire was seen as a modern version of the Roman Empire, this can't help but colour the way we see it and see the reactions of those Britons of earlier generations conquered.
Everything that's wrong with the teaching of the Roman and British Empires in British schools can be summarised in the Monty Python, "What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?" scene in The Life Of Brian.
Consider the Rio Tinto mines. A few guestimates of how many slaves were sent there to be worked to death - it was literally used as a death camp for otherwise unuasable slaves. Multiply by the years in operation.
Someone with vague intelligence links told me last night that the British were behind the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage.
I’m only offering it here because this particular source does occasionally uncover genuine intel.
'The British' do nothing without American say so. So, as I said at the time when the Russians accused us, it's basically America getting their lackey to do something so they have clean hands. And it wouldn't susprise me at all. Boris (or was it Truss?) would have been pissing themselves with excitement to be asked.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
And, we keep being told that such Woke agendas in education don't exist and that such agendas are totally fabricated; a fantasy in the minds of "reactionaries".
It's almost as if they don't want us to challenge it.
It's just not my experience, that's all. Our kids learn about the Tudors and 20th century European history, mainly. The school has started to teach about West African kingdoms, too, which I think is a good thing, a teacher at the school helped to develop the curriculum so it is very well taught and sounds extremely interesting. My son was really engaged by it.
My kids learn English history too. Last term included the Great Fire of London and the Plague.
Not sure what is woke or rewriting history there?
That isn't, but there's an increasing focus in some educational institutions to teach history almost solely through the prism of identity politics, as the post of @AlistairM demonstrates. I also encountered it myself at my daughter's previous school, so I withdrew her.
We shouldn't deny this is a problem.
Also seems to be the case with other subjects. When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists. I'm all for covering a wide variety of different areas but I think there is a real danger of the syllabus being so desperate to be politically correct that it ends up being exclusionary. That is not progress.
Depends on the course, obvs, but why on earth, on the planet where x% of people are from any one particular demographic do you worry about a course on "artists" focusing on a variety of artists from different backgrounds.
Or was the course labelled "white artists in 20th Century Britain"?
That's an impressive missing of the point.
"When studying artists in Y9 it has been entirely focused on diverse (i.e. non-white) artists."
Not much to go on but please do let me know why a Y9 course on "artists" shouldn't include "non-white" artists.
TIA.
It is all bollox , an artist is an artist there should be feck all reference or care of their skin colour.
I was taught history pretty much as a timeline narrative right up to O level. Nevertheless, I don't remember the Civil War being properly covered. Perhaps it's just still too controversial and touchy a subject? As well as being extremely complex.
Someone with vague intelligence links told me last night that the British were behind the Nord Stream pipeline sabotage.
I’m only offering it here because this particular source does occasionally uncover genuine intel.
'The British' do nothing without American say so. So, as I said at the time when the Russians accused us, it's basically America getting their lackey to do something so they have clean hands. And it wouldn't susprise me at all. Boris (or was it Truss?) would have been pissing themselves with excitement to be asked.
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Jen's schooling is one of the major driving forces pushing us to Ticino or Lugano, I don't trust UK education to not push all of the nonsense onto young impressionable kids and teachers who will try their hardest to convince girls who play with fire engines and bin lorries that they're actually boys.
One of my friends recently announced on Facebook that their son wants to be referred to as "they", despite there being only one Andrew. It was noticeable that this post got a lot fewer reactions than usual - people presumably being too polite to hit the "Haha" response.
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
If AI makes most STEM, finance, accountancy, law jobs redundant that will change.
The few jobs left will be the most creative ones machines can't do, which humanities teach
Mate, I wish that were true. I fear it is not
GPT3.5 is already churning out pretty good creative writing - poetry, stories. SDiffusion and DALL-E2 are producing some notable art (which is being used commercially already)
In 2 or 3 iterations (3-5 years?) they will be as good at the best creative stuff as almost any human. In ten years unimaginably better than any human
Tiny arguments on Reddit will rage as to whether these machines are “truly” creative. It won’t matter, because the machines will simply be better, and we will avidly consume their creations
In which case all but the top 1% most creative and innovative and skilled will be out of work in most fields.
We then return to the inevitability of a universal basic income funded by a robot tax the more AI is used across sectors, whether creative arts, manufacturing, professional finance, accountancy and law or basic menial tasks
That's Luddite bullshit.
As jobs are eliminated, new ones are created. People have ingenuity. We do different jobs than the past, but the idea of a jobless age has always been and always will be Dystopian SciFi bullshit.
What new jobs are going to be created then the average IQ person, not especially creative can do which AI can't do? Let alone for those of below average IQ?
There may still be permanent jobs for very high IQ, highly creative people but they are only a small minority
Then why do we have full employment? 🤦♂️
There's 300 years of history showing Luddidm is wrong. You're only limited by your own weak imagination.
People will use their ingenuity to create jobs and opportunities. Just as we always have done.
It might help your argument if you could provide examples of these new jobs
That is an unreasonable request of @BartholomewRoberts. I mean nobody could have imagined call centre operators before the telephone was invented. In fact nobody imagined them for over century after it had been invented. Similarly all the computer based work, etc, etc. The idea of a computer on your desk was scoffed at when first suggested. The list is near endless of stuff we didn't know would provide work for people.
Yep. You only have to read some of the futurist predictions of yesteryear that technology would deliver us a world where we enjoyed a life mostly of leisure while computers and machines and robots did all the work. And compare it to the reality where most office workers do longer hours than ever and even when they get home are still checking work emails. Leon is being naive (as ever) in assuming that technology will somehow abolish work.
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Interesting. And reassuring.
Just to be clear: I don't want to set up a false dichotomy here, although I bet I will be accused of it.
I am not arguing that women's rights, civil rights, slavery etc. should not be covered in history lessons - quite the opposite.
I am arguing that should not be the prism solely through which all history is taught, and it should always be put in the context of the times.
It does seem like the situation varies. It's certainly not something we have come against, the only place I've heard about woke etc is on this site.
My daughters great historical question that was puzzling her which she asked over the Christmas holidays was: Since the Plague was spread by rats, and rats still exist today, how come people today don't get the Plague?
Racial matters too where it comes up I think her school has handled very well for her age group. The school does Nativities and learns about Christian beliefs etc, but also she has learnt more about Eid, Diwali and other faiths etc than we were ever taught at school. That to me seems to be a very good thing and more education there doesn't take anything away from anyone.
I thought that current thinking was that the Plague was spread by human fleas, and not rats?
Improved hygiene did for it, not the elimination of small furry mammals.
Rats, fleas and humans are vectors, so it's quite difficult to parse exactly what happened centuries ago. The Black Death was possibly a bit like Covid - a new variant of a pathogen encountering an immune naive population ?
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Jen's schooling is one of the major driving forces pushing us to Ticino or Lugano, I don't trust UK education to not push all of the nonsense onto young impressionable kids and teachers who will try their hardest to convince girls who play with fire engines and bin lorries that they're actually boys.
One of my friends recently announced on Facebook that their son wants to be referred to as "they", despite there being only one Andrew. It was noticeable that this post got a lot fewer reactions than usual - people presumably being too polite to hit the "Haha" response.
What a tosser.
You, that is, not your friend's child.
I don't in any way criticise Andrew.
I do. They should have rebadged themselves as something epicene like Andi.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
History is the summation of the whole human story to date - taught in our islands should have a particular focus on British history because that's where we live and it explains our institutions and values and how we got here. It should not be taught solely through the prism of gender, race and sexuality - as the Woke would have it.
One day lesser minds, like yours, will come round to this, but for now it's far easier for you to be a dumb sheep.
One does expect a British angle on things discussed by Britons in Britain. Hence why our colonialism (big and recent and OURS) shouldn't be contextualized away with "it's complicated" and "we were no worse than others" and "what about the Romans?" etc etc. Yet this what many try to do. Happens every single time we get into it.
With respect, you have a strong view on colonialism and it only leans one-way.
I have no issue with the facts being taught. I do have an issue with those facts being highly selective and placed outwith the context of the times.
We are able to teach a balanced history of the Roman empire. It shouldn't be hard to do the same for the British.
Do we teach a balanced history of the Roman Empire?
I'd say that one curiosity of English history is that all of the invasions are taught as a good, or at least neutral, thing. None of them were particularly oppressive conquests that the locals bravely fought against.
This is especially the case for the Roman conquest where it's taught we were jolly lucky to become part of the Empire, and it was a sad day when the Roman army was withdrawn.
Given that in some respects the British Empire was seen as a modern version of the Roman Empire, this can't help but colour the way we see it and see the reactions of those Britons of earlier generations conquered.
Everything that's wrong with the teaching of the Roman and British Empires in British schools can be summarised in the Monty Python, "What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?" scene in The Life Of Brian.
I think the popular conception that invaders are always worse the plucky natives is itself a bias. Just look at how much stuff in popular culture paints the Gaelic Highlanders as these noble defenders of chivalry vs the barbaric King's men. In reality they were patriarchal clans, ridden with blood feuds, religious superstition and a belief in the autocratic divine right of the Stewarts, and, at least in the 18th Century, the people fighting against them were the supporters of Enlightenment, constitutional rule, and limits on royal power.
Gee, I wonder cui bono from the Nordstream explosion
No noticeable rise since then though. US LNG exports have been on a rapid growth path since they lifted export restrictions on oil and gas in 2016. Before then they were banned for national security reasons.
There were discussions earlier in the year of them reintroducing a ban this winter to protect US business, but that didn’t go ahead as it would have made a mockery of NATO solidarity.
The US has not historically been interested in maximising exports for its natural resources because the benefit is outweighed by the competitive cost benefit to domestic manufacturing of keeping cheaper raw materials at home.
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Jen's schooling is one of the major driving forces pushing us to Ticino or Lugano, I don't trust UK education to not push all of the nonsense onto young impressionable kids and teachers who will try their hardest to convince girls who play with fire engines and bin lorries that they're actually boys.
One of my friends recently announced on Facebook that their son wants to be referred to as "they", despite there being only one Andrew. It was noticeable that this post got a lot fewer reactions than usual - people presumably being too polite to hit the "Haha" response.
What a tosser.
You, that is, not your friend's child.
I don't in any way criticise Andrew.
But you laugh and only some form of I don't know what prevented you from laughing in their face. No idea the age of the child but they probably don't need one of their parent's friends wanting to ridicule them (and doing so on another internet forum) at what is evidently a sensitive and challenging time for the whole family.
Sunak's optimistic and cheerful demeanour is exactly what we need right now.
Who are "we"? Nurses, Driving Examiners, Paramedics.
This is the most disingenuous speech he has made to date. A Johnsonian bulls*****r.
Where you are wrong is that Boris could do Johnsonian bulls***** but Sunak can’t. Johnson would genuinely get people queuing to listen to him, he had charisma, he was good at speeches. this from Sunak is more like when campaign paid people to sit through a Jeb Bush speech.
Fake optimism and cheerful has struck all the wrong notes with voters today I think. Have we ever seen Sunak deliver a proper speech properly yet?
One interesting thing is that he's set a very clear target on inflation - halved this year, so to 5% ish.
On the one hand that's a lot lower than now, but on the other it would have been seen as high inflation for the last couple of decades.
It will be interesting to see if the target anchors people's inflation expectations and so affects things like pay deals.
The other thing that strikes me is that he's aiming for contradictory things. He wants healthcare staff to work more flexibly - presumably evenings and weekends - as part of reforms to the health service. At the same time he says that, "family runs through his vision of a better future."
Well, which is it? Bluntly, people can't be in two places at once. If a parent is working evening and weekend shifts to provide a better healthcare service then they're not at home for their family.
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
If AI makes most STEM, finance, accountancy, law jobs redundant that will change.
The few jobs left will be the most creative ones machines can't do, which humanities teach
Mate, I wish that were true. I fear it is not
GPT3.5 is already churning out pretty good creative writing - poetry, stories. SDiffusion and DALL-E2 are producing some notable art (which is being used commercially already)
In 2 or 3 iterations (3-5 years?) they will be as good at the best creative stuff as almost any human. In ten years unimaginably better than any human
Tiny arguments on Reddit will rage as to whether these machines are “truly” creative. It won’t matter, because the machines will simply be better, and we will avidly consume their creations
In which case all but the top 1% most creative and innovative and skilled will be out of work in most fields.
We then return to the inevitability of a universal basic income funded by a robot tax the more AI is used across sectors, whether creative arts, manufacturing, professional finance, accountancy and law or basic menial tasks
That's Luddite bullshit.
As jobs are eliminated, new ones are created. People have ingenuity. We do different jobs than the past, but the idea of a jobless age has always been and always will be Dystopian SciFi bullshit.
What new jobs are going to be created then the average IQ person, not especially creative can do which AI can't do? Let alone for those of below average IQ?
There may still be permanent jobs for very high IQ, highly creative people but they are only a small minority
Then why do we have full employment? 🤦♂️
There's 300 years of history showing Luddidm is wrong. You're only limited by your own weak imagination.
People will use their ingenuity to create jobs and opportunities. Just as we always have done.
To a degree and it depends on the timescale.
The Luddites were right - from their own perspective. The Industrial Revolution did lead to a collapse in artisan wages, especially as employers designed factories based around child labour which was cheaper than skilled artisans.
Wages did - eventually - improve and new jobs were created but it took several decades for the effect to come through (eg factories required administration which required clerks etc).
When technological changes come and make people unemployed, there is not an automatic bank of jobs out there. Sure, people can set themselves up (I did) but the idea that people can switch seamlessly into jobs is a fallacy - there are switching costs for a reason.
More accurately - it ended some jobs, like weaving at home.
There were more and often better paid jobs, but this meant changing trades.
Which was Simply Not How Things Work, back then.
There were also places like India where mechanisation ended the old jobs but didn't create new jobs any time soon. You could say that Southern Europe has seen old jobs in low-skilled manufacturing go away in the last three decades without being replaced.
The problem with Southern Europe is that the labour market does not clear because a multinational currency screws up the equilibrium mechanisms.
I don't think you could characterise those exact mechanisms, though, beyond EU=bad.
Of course I can:
1) The lack of currency devaluation maintains a relative high price for exports, preventing them becoming more competitive with other countries
2) The lack of independent interest rates prevents monetary stimulation of business loans and consumer spending
3) Fiscal constraints imposed by the ECB limit the ability of Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policy
4) Corporate debt has an additional risk premium attached, due to the knowledge that the above support will not be available in a country-specific downturn
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Jen's schooling is one of the major driving forces pushing us to Ticino or Lugano, I don't trust UK education to not push all of the nonsense onto young impressionable kids and teachers who will try their hardest to convince girls who play with fire engines and bin lorries that they're actually boys.
One of my friends recently announced on Facebook that their son wants to be referred to as "they", despite there being only one Andrew. It was noticeable that this post got a lot fewer reactions than usual - people presumably being too polite to hit the "Haha" response.
What a tosser.
You, that is, not your friend's child.
I don't in any way criticise Andrew.
But you laugh and only some form of I don't know what prevented you from laughing in their face. No idea the age of the child but they probably don't need one of their parent's friends wanting to ridicule them (and doing so on another internet forum) for what is evidently a sensitive and challenging time for the whole family.
No, I didn't laugh, you completely made that up. I just concluded the lack of responses compared with usual was other people being too polite (or scared) to laugh.
You're doing a lot of missing the point today, aren't you?
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
History is the summation of the whole human story to date - taught in our islands should have a particular focus on British history because that's where we live and it explains our institutions and values and how we got here. It should not be taught solely through the prism of gender, race and sexuality - as the Woke would have it.
One day lesser minds, like yours, will come round to this, but for now it's far easier for you to be a dumb sheep.
One does expect a British angle on things discussed by Britons in Britain. Hence why our colonialism (big and recent and OURS) shouldn't be contextualized away with "it's complicated" and "we were no worse than others" and "what about the Romans?" etc etc. Yet this what many try to do. Happens every single time we get into it.
With respect, you have a strong view on colonialism and it only leans one-way.
I have no issue with the facts being taught. I do have an issue with those facts being highly selective and placed outwith the context of the times.
We are able to teach a balanced history of the Roman empire. It shouldn't be hard to do the same for the British.
Do we teach a balanced history of the Roman Empire?
I'd say that one curiosity of English history is that all of the invasions are taught as a good, or at least neutral, thing. None of them were particularly oppressive conquests that the locals bravely fought against.
This is especially the case for the Roman conquest where it's taught we were jolly lucky to become part of the Empire, and it was a sad day when the Roman army was withdrawn.
Given that in some respects the British Empire was seen as a modern version of the Roman Empire, this can't help but colour the way we see it and see the reactions of those Britons of earlier generations conquered.
Everything that's wrong with the teaching of the Roman and British Empires in British schools can be summarised in the Monty Python, "What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?" scene in The Life Of Brian.
There's surely a point where something ceases to be 'good' or bad' but rather something which happened. The history of man is history of conquest and war. It's so nebulous that it's pointless for the modern day.
Note I'm separating that from concepts like slavery, or human sacrifice which on any modern level are evil.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
History is the summation of the whole human story to date - taught in our islands should have a particular focus on British history because that's where we live and it explains our institutions and values and how we got here. It should not be taught solely through the prism of gender, race and sexuality - as the Woke would have it.
One day lesser minds, like yours, will come round to this, but for now it's far easier for you to be a dumb sheep.
One does expect a British angle on things discussed by Britons in Britain. Hence why our colonialism (big and recent and OURS) shouldn't be contextualized away with "it's complicated" and "we were no worse than others" and "what about the Romans?" etc etc. Yet this what many try to do. Happens every single time we get into it.
With respect, you have a strong view on colonialism and it only leans one-way.
I have no issue with the facts being taught. I do have an issue with those facts being highly selective and placed outwith the context of the times.
We are able to teach a balanced history of the Roman empire. It shouldn't be hard to do the same for the British.
Do we teach a balanced history of the Roman Empire?
I'd say that one curiosity of English history is that all of the invasions are taught as a good, or at least neutral, thing. None of them were particularly oppressive conquests that the locals bravely fought against.
This is especially the case for the Roman conquest where it's taught we were jolly lucky to become part of the Empire, and it was a sad day when the Roman army was withdrawn.
Given that in some respects the British Empire was seen as a modern version of the Roman Empire, this can't help but colour the way we see it and see the reactions of those Britons of earlier generations conquered.
Everything that's wrong with the teaching of the Roman and British Empires in British schools can be summarised in the Monty Python, "What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?" scene in The Life Of Brian.
I think the popular conception that invaders are always worse the plucky natives is itself a bias. Just look at how much stuff in popular culture paints the Gaelic Highlanders as these noble defenders of chivalry vs the barbaric King's men. In reality they were patriarchal clans, ridden with blood feuds, religious superstition and a belief in the autocratic divine right of the Stewarts, and, at least in the 18th Century, the people fighting against them were the supporters of Enlightenment, constitutional rule, and limits on royal power.
All that may be so, but for the peasants at ground level it's safe to say that being invaded - even by enlightened liberals - is the worst thing that can happen to them.
Was it the invasion or was it the rebellious uprisings that started the war?
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
History is the summation of the whole human story to date - taught in our islands should have a particular focus on British history because that's where we live and it explains our institutions and values and how we got here. It should not be taught solely through the prism of gender, race and sexuality - as the Woke would have it.
One day lesser minds, like yours, will come round to this, but for now it's far easier for you to be a dumb sheep.
If the argument is that schoolchild in the world should learn world history, and end up with relatively similar curricula across countries, then fair enough. It's not a view I agree with, but it's certainly defensible.
However, in practice I suspect that most proponents of teaching "diverse" history in the UK would baulk at the teaching of, say, the Napoleonic Wars in a Nigerian school, as "colonialist".
The point is that teaching it solely through the prism of identity politics introduces a bias into it, in the same way it would to teach it solely through a Whig one or a Marxist one.
It should focus on a factual story of the major events that got us to where we are today, triangulated to the broader context in the wider world, and encourage children to interpret and challenge primary and secondary sources themselves to figure it out.
The heavy focus on the Tudors, as opposed to the Civil War, I find a bit weird - to be honest. We were a republic for nearly 11 years, and then exported the religious puritans to New England, helping to spawn America and how it is today, and that feels just as significant - if not more so.
England's identity as, "definitely not a Catholic country," used to be a lot more important to its sense of self then it is now, and clearly the Tudor period was central to that.
As others have mentioned a lot of the present curriculum is determined by what Minister's parents were taught at school (+WWII for history), and so no-one's really rethought how to teach our history.
I was never taught about the Acts of Union at my English school, which seems a rather remarkable gap. Though we did learn about the US civil rights movement and, unsurprisingly, that was the topic that most interested many of my fellow south London inner suburban classmates. I don't think they'd have been as interested as I would have been to learn more about Alfred the Great.
Where I diverge a little bit, here, is that different races should be taught histories in slightly different ways.
We are all British and I think we all agree (well, most of us do) that race should ultimately become as irrelevant as your hair and eye colour, so, I do want history to be taught in a unifying way.
I agree with you there. I guess what I was trying to say is that, because Britain is a different country now than it was before the post-WWII immigration, then our shared historical story is also different.
I can see why you might think some people have overdone this, but I think that's what people are trying to do with what you criticise as a woke agenda in history.
Ideally, if kids are taught about the Battle of Hastings, the Caribbean sugar plantations and the Indian troops who fought in the WWI trenches, then they'd have a shared understanding of how they all ended up in the same country which enjoys the benefits of the rule of law, democracy, and a reasonably prosperous market economy, while still suffering from the pernicious inheritance of Norman feudalism.
Whatever our disagreements, I think we can all find common ground that our problems are the legacy fault of the French.
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Jen's schooling is one of the major driving forces pushing us to Ticino or Lugano, I don't trust UK education to not push all of the nonsense onto young impressionable kids and teachers who will try their hardest to convince girls who play with fire engines and bin lorries that they're actually boys.
One of my friends recently announced on Facebook that their son wants to be referred to as "they", despite there being only one Andrew. It was noticeable that this post got a lot fewer reactions than usual - people presumably being too polite to hit the "Haha" response.
What a tosser.
You, that is, not your friend's child.
I don't in any way criticise Andrew.
But you laugh and only some form of I don't know what prevented you from laughing in their face. No idea the age of the child but they probably don't need one of their parent's friends wanting to ridicule them (and doing so on another internet forum) for what is evidently a sensitive and challenging time for the whole family.
No, I didn't laugh, you completely made that up. I just concluded the lack of responses compared with usual was other people being too polite (or scared) to laugh.
You're doing a lot of missing the point today, aren't you?
Yeah and I think you should read over your post again.
You presumed that people would want to hit the "haha" response.
Why did you presume that?
You also decided on their child's behalf what they "should" be ("Andrew", then mocking "them", etc).
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
If AI makes most STEM, finance, accountancy, law jobs redundant that will change.
The few jobs left will be the most creative ones machines can't do, which humanities teach
Mate, I wish that were true. I fear it is not
GPT3.5 is already churning out pretty good creative writing - poetry, stories. SDiffusion and DALL-E2 are producing some notable art (which is being used commercially already)
In 2 or 3 iterations (3-5 years?) they will be as good at the best creative stuff as almost any human. In ten years unimaginably better than any human
Tiny arguments on Reddit will rage as to whether these machines are “truly” creative. It won’t matter, because the machines will simply be better, and we will avidly consume their creations
In which case all but the top 1% most creative and innovative and skilled will be out of work in most fields.
We then return to the inevitability of a universal basic income funded by a robot tax the more AI is used across sectors, whether creative arts, manufacturing, professional finance, accountancy and law or basic menial tasks
That's Luddite bullshit.
As jobs are eliminated, new ones are created. People have ingenuity. We do different jobs than the past, but the idea of a jobless age has always been and always will be Dystopian SciFi bullshit.
What new jobs are going to be created then the average IQ person, not especially creative can do which AI can't do? Let alone for those of below average IQ?
There may still be permanent jobs for very high IQ, highly creative people but they are only a small minority
Then why do we have full employment? 🤦♂️
There's 300 years of history showing Luddidm is wrong. You're only limited by your own weak imagination.
People will use their ingenuity to create jobs and opportunities. Just as we always have done.
It might help your argument if you could provide examples of these new jobs
That is an unreasonable request of @BartholomewRoberts. I mean nobody could have imagined call centre operators before the telephone was invented. In fact nobody imagined them for over century after it had been invented. Similarly all the computer based work, etc, etc. The idea of a computer on your desk was scoffed at when first suggested. The list is near endless of stuff we didn't know would provide work for people.
Yep. You only have to read some of the futurist predictions of yesteryear that technology would deliver us a world where we enjoyed a life mostly of leisure while computers and machines and robots did all the work. And compare it to the reality where most office workers do longer hours than ever and even when they get home are still checking work emails. Leon is being naive (as ever) in assuming that technology will somehow abolish work.
"Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure which, and not labour, is the aim of man - or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work."
“Rishi Sunak says he will halve inflation, grow economy and cut NHS waiting lists – UK politics live
Prime minister makes wide-ranging speech on education, the economy, the NHS and small boats”
I fear that no one is listening, however
Those are at least SMART objectives. They are also ones he knows he will achieve.
Not even the most pessimistic inflation forecasts show it above half its peak by the end of the year. It may be significantly lower than that. So he'll be able to claim that and say job done.
Grow economy is a bit more of a hostage to fortune but fortunately for him there are various different ways to interpret this, and so long as GDP is growing by Q4 (which it should be unless we're in a double dip) he can chalk that one up as a resounding success too.
Cut waiting lists: well at least he's talking about it. One of the more controllable aspects of NHS performance so I assume he's quite confident they can do this. Waits have shot up so far that they could fall by weeks and still be greater than they were only a year ago
Cut small boats arrivals: that's the biggest hostage to fortune. The easiest fix if things aren't going as planned will be to make security at the Eurotunnel terminal more lax. Cut a few holes in the wire fences. Stop checking lorries. Then hey presto people won't be coming by boat anymore.
Good analysis. I think the "halve inflation" one is quite clever - as you say, everyone expects this to happen even if he does nothing to achieve it, but it will sound relevant to voters, unlike the trailed "more maths" emphasis. Actually, all the objectives come under the heading of "we'll make things less awful than at the peak which my predecessors created", which is better than nothing.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
History is the summation of the whole human story to date - taught in our islands should have a particular focus on British history because that's where we live and it explains our institutions and values and how we got here. It should not be taught solely through the prism of gender, race and sexuality - as the Woke would have it.
One day lesser minds, like yours, will come round to this, but for now it's far easier for you to be a dumb sheep.
One does expect a British angle on things discussed by Britons in Britain. Hence why our colonialism (big and recent and OURS) shouldn't be contextualized away with "it's complicated" and "we were no worse than others" and "what about the Romans?" etc etc. Yet this what many try to do. Happens every single time we get into it.
With respect, you have a strong view on colonialism and it only leans one-way.
I have no issue with the facts being taught. I do have an issue with those facts being highly selective and placed outwith the context of the times.
We are able to teach a balanced history of the Roman empire. It shouldn't be hard to do the same for the British.
Do we teach a balanced history of the Roman Empire?
I'd say that one curiosity of English history is that all of the invasions are taught as a good, or at least neutral, thing. None of them were particularly oppressive conquests that the locals bravely fought against.
This is especially the case for the Roman conquest where it's taught we were jolly lucky to become part of the Empire, and it was a sad day when the Roman army was withdrawn.
Given that in some respects the British Empire was seen as a modern version of the Roman Empire, this can't help but colour the way we see it and see the reactions of those Britons of earlier generations conquered.
Everything that's wrong with the teaching of the Roman and British Empires in British schools can be summarised in the Monty Python, "What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?" scene in The Life Of Brian.
I think the popular conception that invaders are always worse the plucky natives is itself a bias. Just look at how much stuff in popular culture paints the Gaelic Highlanders as these noble defenders of chivalry vs the barbaric King's men. In reality they were patriarchal clans, ridden with blood feuds, religious superstition and a belief in the autocratic divine right of the Stewarts, and, at least in the 18th Century, the people fighting against them were the supporters of Enlightenment, constitutional rule, and limits on royal power.
All that may be so, but for the peasants at ground level it's safe to say that being invaded - even by enlightened liberals - is the worst thing that can happen to them.
Was it the invasion or was it the rebellious uprisings that started the war?
During the latter stages of the Napoleonic Wars, when Wellington was advancing in France, apparently the locals often preferred his arrival to the that of the French Army.
This was due to the British Army Quartermasters paying in cash (gold) for everything, as opposed to theft/giving people a bill on the government, to be redeemed at far less than face value. And also to harsh discipline - even minor transgressions against the locals were punished by hanging.
I know it’s a niche topic to most of you, but now is an ideal time for some good old radical Lib Dem policy ideas.
They’ve struggled in the last year since the T&H by-election because the big new policy ideas they proposed were co-opted by Labour: the energy price cap and windfall taxes.
If it’s policy season in journalism this month then get some eye catching ideas out there, ideally ones that Starmer wouldn’t automatically go for. Labour did their big devolution and constitutional reform thing with Brown last year so I don’t expect much from them for a while.
A few ideas:
- Some reform ideas for NHS and social care: everyone’s listening at the moment - Environment: nothing in Rishi’s speech. Make the space your own. Focus on domestic stuff, not just renewables and insulation but pollution / sewage - education: something more root and branch as well as repeating some previous pledges for catch up funding - EU: remind people in blue wall Remainia why they might want to vote Lib Dem with a comprehensive roadmap to a better post-Brexit deal, including EFTA
A reminder: Only 15% of the population have an IQ level of 115 or above. An IQ above 115 is considered to be a 'High IQ'
For 85% of people advanced maths is simply pointless. They can’t do it and, besides, they have a tiny brilliant machine that can solve all practical daily maths questions, anyway
Soon they will have a new machine which they won’t even require numbers. You’ll just ask it the query “what is a third of a third”
For 85% of people reading A Portrait of the Artist is pointless but it's still worth equipping as many people as possible with the tools to do so in a civilised society.
I don’t disagree at all. The problem is going to be persuading the kids to learn when it becomes evermore pointless and doesn’t help them get work, as all knowledge work is automated
Kids are already fleeing the Humanities for this exact reason: these degrees don’t lead to jobs
If AI makes most STEM, finance, accountancy, law jobs redundant that will change.
The few jobs left will be the most creative ones machines can't do, which humanities teach
Mate, I wish that were true. I fear it is not
GPT3.5 is already churning out pretty good creative writing - poetry, stories. SDiffusion and DALL-E2 are producing some notable art (which is being used commercially already)
In 2 or 3 iterations (3-5 years?) they will be as good at the best creative stuff as almost any human. In ten years unimaginably better than any human
Tiny arguments on Reddit will rage as to whether these machines are “truly” creative. It won’t matter, because the machines will simply be better, and we will avidly consume their creations
In which case all but the top 1% most creative and innovative and skilled will be out of work in most fields.
We then return to the inevitability of a universal basic income funded by a robot tax the more AI is used across sectors, whether creative arts, manufacturing, professional finance, accountancy and law or basic menial tasks
That's Luddite bullshit.
As jobs are eliminated, new ones are created. People have ingenuity. We do different jobs than the past, but the idea of a jobless age has always been and always will be Dystopian SciFi bullshit.
What new jobs are going to be created then the average IQ person, not especially creative can do which AI can't do? Let alone for those of below average IQ?
There may still be permanent jobs for very high IQ, highly creative people but they are only a small minority
Then why do we have full employment? 🤦♂️
There's 300 years of history showing Luddidm is wrong. You're only limited by your own weak imagination.
People will use their ingenuity to create jobs and opportunities. Just as we always have done.
It might help your argument if you could provide examples of these new jobs
That is an unreasonable request of @BartholomewRoberts. I mean nobody could have imagined call centre operators before the telephone was invented. In fact nobody imagined them for over century after it had been invented. Similarly all the computer based work, etc, etc. The idea of a computer on your desk was scoffed at when first suggested. The list is near endless of stuff we didn't know would provide work for people.
Yep. You only have to read some of the futurist predictions of yesteryear that technology would deliver us a world where we enjoyed a life mostly of leisure while computers and machines and robots did all the work. And compare it to the reality where most office workers do longer hours than ever and even when they get home are still checking work emails. Leon is being naive (as ever) in assuming that technology will somehow abolish work.
"Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure which, and not labour, is the aim of man - or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work."
Oscar Wilde The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891
not there yet
A metaphor for our future under AI overlords.
Just learned that Dutch scientists left a hamster wheel outside in 2014 and saw that tons of wild mice used it just for fun as well as frogs and slugs? All the creatures of the forest wanted a turn?? Absolutely phenomenal https://twitter.com/MegaDarren/status/1610351322082975744
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Interesting. And reassuring.
Just to be clear: I don't want to set up a false dichotomy here, although I bet I will be accused of it.
I am not arguing that women's rights, civil rights, slavery etc. should not be covered in history lessons - quite the opposite.
I am arguing that should not be the prism solely through which all history is taught, and it should always be put in the context of the times.
It does seem like the situation varies. It's certainly not something we have come against, the only place I've heard about woke etc is on this site.
My daughters great historical question that was puzzling her which she asked over the Christmas holidays was: Since the Plague was spread by rats, and rats still exist today, how come people today don't get the Plague?
Racial matters too where it comes up I think her school has handled very well for her age group. The school does Nativities and learns about Christian beliefs etc, but also she has learnt more about Eid, Diwali and other faiths etc than we were ever taught at school. That to me seems to be a very good thing and more education there doesn't take anything away from anyone.
I thought that current thinking was that the Plague was spread by human fleas, and not rats?
Improved hygiene did for it, not the elimination of small furry mammals.
Rats, fleas and humans are vectors, so it's quite difficult to parse exactly what happened centuries ago. The Black Death was possibly a bit like Covid - a new variant of a pathogen encountering an immune naive population ?
Could well have been. Maybe it evolved so that it could spread via different flea species?
There was/is no doubt a reservoir in rats but it seems unlikely they would be able to spread it country-wide.
It still causes trouble in some parts of the world, of course. I believe Madagascar is worst affected.
“Forget year in review: lets talk about how technology transformed education in the last MONTH thanks to ChatGPT 💥How to use it to educate: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/how-to-use-a… 👨🏫Automating my job as a professor: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-mechanic… 🤖How my students are using it: oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/the-street-f…
A few weeks ago my 13yo daughter was struggling on the conclusion for her history homework. It was about the civil rights movement in the US. She'd done some Googling but hadn't made much progress. I decided to fire up Chat GPT and decided to ask it the question that she'd been asked to answer and prompted for an A4 page response (the length she was expected to give). The response it gave was very plausible. We kept all the work that she'd used up to then but used its conclusion to help her write her own final paragraph. I suspect we could have copied and pasted the entire response and the teacher would never have known.
As an aside she is taught almost exclusively about "diverse" history and knows very little of British or European history. I find it very sad that children seem to know only small amounts of history on the island which they live.
I would have thought that intercontinental interactions are what shape and explain our world. Narrow focus UK and Europe history boil down to a bunch of repetitive parochial spats between posh rich whiteys using the poor as pawns. Looked at from far enough out.
Yup, such nonsense very neatly describes the utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history.
And what utter bollocks it is.
I will send my children to schools that teach it properly or otherwise privately tutor them myself.
Sure, but your world picture has to explain the "utter idiocy of the marxist Left on history" if that is a major facet of our modern world to you (and it clearly is).
A spectre is haunting casinoRoyaleville; the spectre of Woke. Is Woke itself better explained by various facets of intercontinental trade and war, or by whether Philip of Anjou edged it on penalties over Charles of Austria?
History is the summation of the whole human story to date - taught in our islands should have a particular focus on British history because that's where we live and it explains our institutions and values and how we got here. It should not be taught solely through the prism of gender, race and sexuality - as the Woke would have it.
One day lesser minds, like yours, will come round to this, but for now it's far easier for you to be a dumb sheep.
One does expect a British angle on things discussed by Britons in Britain. Hence why our colonialism (big and recent and OURS) shouldn't be contextualized away with "it's complicated" and "we were no worse than others" and "what about the Romans?" etc etc. Yet this what many try to do. Happens every single time we get into it.
With respect, you have a strong view on colonialism and it only leans one-way.
I have no issue with the facts being taught. I do have an issue with those facts being highly selective and placed outwith the context of the times.
We are able to teach a balanced history of the Roman empire. It shouldn't be hard to do the same for the British.
Do we teach a balanced history of the Roman Empire?
I'd say that one curiosity of English history is that all of the invasions are taught as a good, or at least neutral, thing. None of them were particularly oppressive conquests that the locals bravely fought against.
This is especially the case for the Roman conquest where it's taught we were jolly lucky to become part of the Empire, and it was a sad day when the Roman army was withdrawn.
Given that in some respects the British Empire was seen as a modern version of the Roman Empire, this can't help but colour the way we see it and see the reactions of those Britons of earlier generations conquered.
Everything that's wrong with the teaching of the Roman and British Empires in British schools can be summarised in the Monty Python, "What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?" scene in The Life Of Brian.
I think the popular conception that invaders are always worse the plucky natives is itself a bias. Just look at how much stuff in popular culture paints the Gaelic Highlanders as these noble defenders of chivalry vs the barbaric King's men. In reality they were patriarchal clans, ridden with blood feuds, religious superstition and a belief in the autocratic divine right of the Stewarts, and, at least in the 18th Century, the people fighting against them were the supporters of Enlightenment, constitutional rule, and limits on royal power.
All that may be so, but for the peasants at ground level it's safe to say that being invaded - even by enlightened liberals - is the worst thing that can happen to them.
Was it the invasion or was it the rebellious uprisings that started the war?
The uprising was the Earl of Mar, not spontaneous outbreaks in wee bit hills and glens. Posho on posho.
Shelagh Fogerty just summed up Sunak's speech in terms of a Miss World candidate statement: "I believe in World peace, and I want to work for the children and animals".
It strikes me that even if Sunak achieves each of his five pledges (halving inflation, debt falling, economy growing, waiting lists down, fewer small boats) it's highly likely that all five measures will still be significantly worse than they were a few years back; so not much to get excited about.
My kids’ school in New York appears to draw parents trying to escape the woke invasion of private schools here.
The place is blissfully normal, and nobody cares about critical race theory. Having said that, the nativity play did feature some kind of Kwanza interlude.
Jen's schooling is one of the major driving forces pushing us to Ticino or Lugano, I don't trust UK education to not push all of the nonsense onto young impressionable kids and teachers who will try their hardest to convince girls who play with fire engines and bin lorries that they're actually boys.
One of my friends recently announced on Facebook that their son wants to be referred to as "they", despite there being only one Andrew. It was noticeable that this post got a lot fewer reactions than usual - people presumably being too polite to hit the "Haha" response.
What a tosser.
You, that is, not your friend's child.
I don't in any way criticise Andrew.
But you laugh and only some form of I don't know what prevented you from laughing in their face. No idea the age of the child but they probably don't need one of their parent's friends wanting to ridicule them (and doing so on another internet forum) for what is evidently a sensitive and challenging time for the whole family.
No, I didn't laugh, you completely made that up. I just concluded the lack of responses compared with usual was other people being too polite (or scared) to laugh.
You're doing a lot of missing the point today, aren't you?
Yeah and I think you should read over your post again.
You presumed that people would want to hit the "haha" response.
Why did you presume that?
You also decided on their child's behalf what they "should" be ("Andrew", then mocking "them", etc).
It was a nasty post. Own it.
I presumed that becuase it was noticeable that there were many fewer responses than usual - so I was theorising about a possible reason. In the same way that gayness was generally accepted by society long before bisexuality was (certainly for men), I think that trans is more accepted than non-binary - "you think you're actually a girl/woman" is easier for people to understand than "you think you're neither a girl/woman nor a boy/man".
These 5 pledges are spectacularly unambitious. Only one is a SMART target (as extensively discussed the other day, good move). That's the one which is so achievable as to be the equivalent of me pledging to turn up for work on Monday and not commit a serious criminal offence.
These 5 pledges are spectacularly unambitious. Only one is a SMART target (as extensively discussed the other day, good move). That's the one which is so achievable as to be the equivalent of me pledging to turn up for work on Monday and not commit a serious criminal offence.
FWIW, the plague hasn't been completely eliminated in the US. There are infected rodents in the Western US that carry the disease -- and occasionally transmit it to humans. An average of 7 cases a year, says the CDC: source: https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps/index.html
"Plague is a very serious illness, but is treatable with commonly available antibiotics. The earlier a patient seeks medical care and receives treatment that is appropriate for plague, the better their chances are of a full recovery."
Comments
Not much to go on but please do let me know why a Y9 course on "artists" shouldn't include "non-white" artists.
TIA.
Tbh, he should have run this through ChatGPT.
Yes I’m talking about Kill All The Lawyers.
I always liked the throwaway line in Vernor Vinge about a chap working in a small business, just before the singularity. His partners are getting bored with manufacturing anti-matter by the tens of thousands of tons. Per second. In close orbit, round the Sun.
"The more we innovate, the more we grow," saying "the UK must grow leading sectors such as AI, green technology and life sciences.
All of this can be done by seizing opportunities of Brexit."
I can see why you might think some people have overdone this, but I think that's what people are trying to do with what you criticise as a woke agenda in history.
Ideally, if kids are taught about the Battle of Hastings, the Caribbean sugar plantations and the Indian troops who fought in the WWI trenches, then they'd have a shared understanding of how they all ended up in the same country which enjoys the benefits of the rule of law, democracy, and a reasonably prosperous market economy, while still suffering from the pernicious inheritance of Norman feudalism.
It has been a pleasant surprise that our son's CofE primary school has gone big on Diwali etc. Like you, I knew little of these festivals or the religions at a similar age (wasn't really covered until secondary school RE which was, to be fair, very broad and all the more interesting for it).
Assuming a 50:50 chance in the final, the odds would have been 459/1, so still over £4,500 in winnings. Coral should really pay out on that.
Not even the most pessimistic inflation forecasts show it above half its peak by the end of the year. It may be significantly lower than that. So he'll be able to claim that and say job done.
Grow economy is a bit more of a hostage to fortune but fortunately for him there are various different ways to interpret this, and so long as GDP is growing by Q4 (which it should be unless we're in a double dip) he can chalk that one up as a resounding success too.
Cut waiting lists: well at least he's talking about it. One of the more controllable aspects of NHS performance so I assume he's quite confident they can do this. Waits have shot up so far that they could fall by weeks and still be greater than they were only a year ago
Cut small boats arrivals: that's the biggest hostage to fortune. The easiest fix if things aren't going as planned will be to make security at the Eurotunnel terminal more lax. Cut a few holes in the wire fences. Stop checking lorries. Then hey presto people won't be coming by boat anymore.
But if I ever find the cretin who came up with PVC-free clingfilm my wiffle stick will become a cudgel of merciless energy, tenderising the buffoon before they are righteously bethwacked across their mush with an enormo-haddock!
And, with that, I must be off.
Pay up: nice stories in the press about the great bet payoff and Coral being the good guys and paying out even though they made a mistake in accepting it (the final and winner are obviously not at all independent).
Don't pay: a good chunk (>£15k?) of bad publicity. Most punters, even casual ones, have multiple local choices (plus internet of course) on where to place their bets.
I can't claim I've seen every piece of artwork she has had to do. However, she as a white girl thinks it is a bit odd that she only seems to study certain types of artists. There should be a broad portfolio of artists that they study. At the moment it is excluding artists from a certain background entirely. Discrimination is not being removed, it is being changed to discriminate against others.
EXCLUSIVE: Arizona is inducing the labor of pregnant prisoners against their will — sometimes as early as three weeks before their due date...
https://twitter.com/JimmyJenkins/status/1609898137107451904
Which is why a course entirely focused on either white or non-white artists is likely to be undesirable.
*We do have one of these (received as a gift) and it works fine. Still find tupperware better/more convenient for most things, though. I'll admit neither is a good subsitute for the old cling film over the toilet pan trick...
interesting comment.
What is the name of the course if you don't mind me asking. And again without wishing to see the syllabus (I'd love to) what artists do you think are being excluded?
ETA: That in addition to the general WTAFness.
Improved hygiene did for it, not the elimination of small furry mammals.
I'd say that one curiosity of English history is that all of the invasions are taught as a good, or at least neutral, thing. None of them were particularly oppressive conquests that the locals bravely fought against.
This is especially the case for the Roman conquest where it's taught we were jolly lucky to become part of the Empire, and it was a sad day when the Roman army was withdrawn.
Given that in some respects the British Empire was seen as a modern version of the Roman Empire, this can't help but colour the way we see it and see the reactions of those Britons of earlier generations conquered.
Everything that's wrong with the teaching of the Roman and British Empires in British schools can be summarised in the Monty Python, "What Did The Romans Ever Do For Us?" scene in The Life Of Brian.
https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1610640364091629568
Full data available here:
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/NG_MOVE_EXPC_S1_M.htm
You, that is, not your friend's child.
They are only interested in encouraging people to play their rigged casinos and banning anyone else for daring to back a winner.
This is the most disingenuous speech he has made to date. A Johnsonian bulls*****r.
Good question from bad querist:
The Hill - Gaetz sends letter to Architect of the Capitol asking why McCarthy is occupying Speaker’s office
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) sent a letter to the Architect of the Capitol on Tuesday questioning why House Speaker candidate Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was already inhabiting the Speaker’s office amid an intraparty battle over the House’s top leadership position.
“I write to inform you that the Speaker of the House Office located in the U.S. Capitol Building is currently occupied by Rep. Kevin McCarthy,” Gaetz said in the letter.
“As of this morning, the 117th Congress adjourned sine die, and a Speaker from the 118th Congress has not been elected,” he continued. “After three undeciding votes, no member can lay claim to this office.”
McCarthy failed to secure a majority for his Speakership bid in three consecutive votes on Tuesday, leading Republican leaders to adjourn for the day. A group of 19 GOP lawmakers, including Gaetz, consistently opposed McCarthy on all three rounds, with Rep.-elect Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) joining the anti-McCarthy group in the final vote of the day.
McCarthy on Tuesday criticized Gaetz for reportedly saying he did not care if House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.) was elected in place of McCarthy as a result of the group’s tactics.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3797668-gaetz-sends-letter-to-architect-of-the-capitol-asking-why-mccarthy-is-occupying-speakers-office/
Yes, indeed.
Nevertheless, I don't remember the Civil War being properly covered. Perhaps it's just still too controversial and touchy a subject?
As well as being extremely complex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis
Rats, fleas and humans are vectors, so it's quite difficult to parse exactly what happened centuries ago.
The Black Death was possibly a bit like Covid - a new variant of a pathogen encountering an immune naive population ?
There were discussions earlier in the year of them reintroducing a ban this winter to protect US business, but that didn’t go ahead as it would have made a mockery of NATO solidarity.
The US has not historically been interested in maximising exports for its natural resources because the benefit is outweighed by the competitive cost benefit to domestic manufacturing of keeping cheaper raw materials at home.
This is end of New Labour all over again, GE now.
Fake optimism and cheerful has struck all the wrong notes with voters today I think. Have we ever seen Sunak deliver a proper speech properly yet?
On the one hand that's a lot lower than now, but on the other it would have been seen as high inflation for the last couple of decades.
It will be interesting to see if the target anchors people's inflation expectations and so affects things like pay deals.
The other thing that strikes me is that he's aiming for contradictory things. He wants healthcare staff to work more flexibly - presumably evenings and weekends - as part of reforms to the health service. At the same time he says that, "family runs through his vision of a better future."
Well, which is it? Bluntly, people can't be in two places at once. If a parent is working evening and weekend shifts to provide a better healthcare service then they're not at home for their family.
1) The lack of currency devaluation maintains a relative high price for exports, preventing them becoming more competitive with other countries
2) The lack of independent interest rates prevents monetary stimulation of business loans and consumer spending
3) Fiscal constraints imposed by the ECB limit the ability of Keynesian countercyclical fiscal policy
4) Corporate debt has an additional risk premium attached, due to the knowledge that the above support will not be available in a country-specific downturn
The Daily Mail will be furious.
You're doing a lot of missing the point today, aren't you?
Note I'm separating that from concepts like slavery, or human sacrifice which on any modern level are evil.
https://twitter.com/UKinJerusalem/status/1610568496714321923?s=20&t=F5wL2TNT6EfUKezhNokFTg
You presumed that people would want to hit the "haha" response.
Why did you presume that?
You also decided on their child's behalf what they "should" be ("Andrew", then mocking "them", etc).
It was a nasty post. Own it.
Oscar Wilde The Soul of Man Under Socialism, 1891
not there yet
This was due to the British Army Quartermasters paying in cash (gold) for everything, as opposed to theft/giving people a bill on the government, to be redeemed at far less than face value. And also to harsh discipline - even minor transgressions against the locals were punished by hanging.
They’ve struggled in the last year since the T&H by-election because the big new policy ideas they proposed were co-opted by Labour: the energy price cap and windfall taxes.
If it’s policy season in journalism this month then get some eye catching ideas out there, ideally ones that Starmer wouldn’t automatically go for. Labour did their big devolution and constitutional reform thing with Brown last year so I don’t expect much from them for a while.
A few ideas:
- Some reform ideas for NHS and social care: everyone’s listening at the moment
- Environment: nothing in Rishi’s speech. Make the space your own. Focus on domestic stuff, not just renewables and insulation but pollution / sewage
- education: something more root and branch as well as repeating some previous pledges for catch up funding
- EU: remind people in blue wall Remainia why they might want to vote Lib Dem with a comprehensive roadmap to a better post-Brexit deal, including EFTA
Just learned that Dutch scientists left a hamster wheel outside in 2014 and saw that tons of wild mice used it just for fun as well as frogs and slugs? All the creatures of the forest wanted a turn?? Absolutely phenomenal
https://twitter.com/MegaDarren/status/1610351322082975744
There was/is no doubt a reservoir in rats but it seems unlikely they would be able to spread it country-wide.
It still causes trouble in some parts of the world, of course. I believe Madagascar is worst affected.
A paucity of ambition, I think.
Using someone's name is not mocking them, either.
Only one is a SMART target (as extensively discussed the other day, good move). That's the one which is so achievable as to be the equivalent of me pledging to turn up for work on Monday and not commit a serious criminal offence.
source: https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps/index.html
"Plague is a very serious illness, but is treatable with commonly available antibiotics. The earlier a patient seeks medical care and receives treatment that is appropriate for plague, the better their chances are of a full recovery."
'A councillor who said on Twitter that it was "more likely" a rape victim was a prostitute whose "punter... didn't pay" is under investigation.
Shaun Slator's remark was made under a post about a news report on a rape inquiry in Plumstead in the south-east London borough of Greenwich.
Mr Slator is a Conservative councillor in neighbouring Bromley.'