Call to ban stressful exams for under 16s rejected
1:37PM Monday June 11, 2007
LONDON - Government ministers on Sunday rejected a call from an influential education watchdog to abolish national exams in England for children under 16 because they cause excessive stress.
The General Teaching Council (GTC) for England urged "a fundamental and urgent review of the testing regime" in a report submitted to the House of Commons education select committee, the Observer reported.
The GTC said teachers were being forced to focus resources on how to pass tests instead of concentrating on a broader education for pupils.
Education Secretary Alan Johnson told BBC television he was aware that many teachers opposed the tests but said they were "profoundly wrong if they are suggesting that the abolition of tests is going to do anything to lift educational standards".
"Our responsibility is to ensure that our children leave school with a good grounding in English, Maths and Science," he added.
Teaching unions have long opposed the government's policy of testing all children in England from the age of seven and then publishing the details in school league tables.
...
Currently, every child in England is tested at the ages of seven, 11 and 14 in what are known as standard assessment tests (Sats). Sats results then feed into school league tables.
- REUTERS
Retrieved from The New Zealand Herald, Monday 11th June.
Are children getting more and more incapable of doing anything as the years go by that now even a small amount of exam stress is too much for our precious next generation? Yes, of course school should not only be about tests and exams, it needs to focus on other aspects of life to produce a well-balanced education. There is nothing wrong with reforming the education and examination system so that more focus is placed onto other skills to prepare children for society.
But the reality of modern society is that it is full of stress, full of competition; in the workplace, in social life, even at home, there will always be stressful situations to deal with. For children, most of the stress comes from tests and exams; that is where they learn how to cope with it, and where they slowly learn to discover their capacity of coping with stress. If we take away all forms of stress before a child reaches sixteen, reality for the child will be distorted as easy, cruisy and carefree, and once they reach sixteen, the harshness of true reality will come down hard. Is it seriously better to delay stress until it is absolutely necessary and then dump it all on them?
At the same time, with the temptations that modern society offers with its luxuries, children are more than willing to procrastinate their learning in favour of their computer games and television. If tests and exams became banned until 16, then children will quite happily procrastinate their learning until they are sixteen, and feel the devastating consequences as they sit their first GCSEs and cannot even multiply two numbers. Although it does seem that the current English system of SATs generates much negative energy in the classroom, the necessary reforms need not be so radical as to completely abolish exams entirely! There should still be provisions allowing teachers to give formative assessment that give children some pressure, without the intense competitive environment that comes with summative assessment; thus, bit by bit, children can learn to cope with more and more stress while still learning their foundations. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work that out.
In fact, the mere stupidity of the suggestion of abolition which has caused me to react also gives me reason to believe to doubt the objectivity of this article itself - it seems to me that abolition was simply the most radical of options discussed in an otherwise rational debate about where England's education and test system should head, and they chose it as a headline to generate attention. In which case, blame my mindless rant on Reuters and the evil manipulation of the press. Not me.
Monday, 11 June 2007
Legal Perspectives on Property
The term 'property' as we have come to know it encompasses the intellectual organisation of the rights and relationships between a person and a thing; hence property rights are not absolute, but change from time to time and place to place. Society being built around property in its everyday functioning necessarily allows it to govern social order to some extent, and so different legal perspectives of viewing property can lead to drastically different outcomes.
In a European context, an important philosophy regarding property originated from 17th Century philosopher John Locke and his theories on property based on natural law. He argued that God gave the land to all men for the maintenance and comfort of their being, so in the beginning no one had property rights over any land. However, God did not intend for it to remain that way, as if property rights were not assigned no one would be able to make any use out of land. His fundamental argument, then, is that each man has a property in his own person, something that no one else can take away from him. Extending it further, one could say that his labour is also his property, and by annexing this property to the land through toil in the land, the fruits of his labour are necessarily his property as well, enclosing it from the commons as long as there is enough left for other men. The problem with Locke's argument as applied to a modern context is that scarcity plays a major role in society, meaning Locke's qualification applies and even those things to which we have annexed our labour no longer necessarily become our property.
Therefore, perhaps a critical legal perspective better explains how property law functions in a modern European context. Critical legal theory sees the law as reinforcing the status quo of those in power under the guise of legitimacy, and this is particularly prevalent in property law, which favours the monied, middle-class white man striving for success in the marketplace; these are the men of property. While previously property was defined by hard labours, now society has that labourers get a contracted wage for producing products, whereas shareholders get the bulk of the money earnt, and the labourers cannot just assume rights over what they produce as that would constitute theft. This not only illustrates that property law reinforces the rights of those with property and oppresses those who have annexed their labour to it, contrary to the natural law argument, but also that hegemonic consciousness infiltrates society, causing it to believe that favouring the propertied is an eternal part of the natural order, when it is simply reinforcing the interests of the dominant elite. An example that illustrates how these values about property, seen as immutable, are actually in flux is the contrast between property law in the 18th and 19th Century. while in the 18th Century, law tended to favour agrarian uses of land over industrial uses, based on the doctrine that a man cannot intrude upon another man's right to the quiet enjoyment of his land, in the 19th Century this doctrine was replaced by the doctrine of reasonable use. Judges now had the opportunity to decide which use of land was most beneficial for social development, and invariably they favoured industrial uses, causing the downfall of agrarian society, illustrating how law tends to favour those in the dominant majority of society at the time. Since agrarian society embodies Locke's theory of annexation of labour to land to create property, its downfall also marks the downfall of that concept and the evolution into modern property law. Hence modern property law ultimately embodies the critical legal belief that law reproduces the oppressive character of politics in society, and is not neutral to all - only those dominant and with property.
Both these European perspectives, however, operate within a European context and may clash with the laws of other cultures in a pluralist society. One example is Tikanga Maori in New Zealand. While natural law theorists following Locke's argument believed that land was only a person's property if labour had been annexed to it, for Maori, there was no concept of land ownership at all. In Tikanga, the Maori people are the people of the land, they come from the land, live harmoniously with the land and has a duty to sustain its life force, then returns back to the land in death; therefore rights over land are traced through whakapapa. This presents a problem when both the British and the Maori assert different property rights over the same land. From the British perspective, since Maori had not cultivated most of the land in New Zealand, even customary land could be considered wasteland as no one 'occupied' it. They thus demanded that all wasteland be vested in the Crown for the use of present and future settlers in order to develop the colony, infuriating the Maori who saw this as a violation of tikanga. All the land of a tribe is sacred to them and cannot be seized or sold; the Maori people are the kaitiaki and have a responsibility over all customary land with a duty to maintain its mauri and this right cannot be taken away by foreigners, even if it seemed like it was not being occupied or cultivated. For Maori, if this kaitiaki role is not fulfilled, they will not only lose their mana, but may incur harm in the whanau. The Crown eventually used its right of pre-emption to purchase all wastelands in New Zealand, but this imposition of Western law on Maori had devastating consequences leading to the breakdown of Maori community. Tribal authority was diminished, and Maori society became a true commons, where people competed to sell their natural resources as quickly as possible before their neighbour did, since if they did not the Crown would take it away anyway. Thus it can be seen that not only does the clash of property law between cultures affect the physical thing concerned, it also has grave consequences for the intellectual organisation of a society, as property is what society is primarily founded upon.
Therefore, while many of us take the concept of property for granted, it is actually subject to many different legal perspectives which can create very different views of how property law functions within society. While originally the ideal was that every man had an equal right to property provided that they annexed their own labour to it, as society has evolved, so has property law, and from critical and pluralist perspectives, it can be seen that property law, like politics, often oppresses those who do not fit the legal person that law favours: the middle-class, European man striving in the marketplace, thus keeping the status quo of the elite in society.
In a European context, an important philosophy regarding property originated from 17th Century philosopher John Locke and his theories on property based on natural law. He argued that God gave the land to all men for the maintenance and comfort of their being, so in the beginning no one had property rights over any land. However, God did not intend for it to remain that way, as if property rights were not assigned no one would be able to make any use out of land. His fundamental argument, then, is that each man has a property in his own person, something that no one else can take away from him. Extending it further, one could say that his labour is also his property, and by annexing this property to the land through toil in the land, the fruits of his labour are necessarily his property as well, enclosing it from the commons as long as there is enough left for other men. The problem with Locke's argument as applied to a modern context is that scarcity plays a major role in society, meaning Locke's qualification applies and even those things to which we have annexed our labour no longer necessarily become our property.
Therefore, perhaps a critical legal perspective better explains how property law functions in a modern European context. Critical legal theory sees the law as reinforcing the status quo of those in power under the guise of legitimacy, and this is particularly prevalent in property law, which favours the monied, middle-class white man striving for success in the marketplace; these are the men of property. While previously property was defined by hard labours, now society has that labourers get a contracted wage for producing products, whereas shareholders get the bulk of the money earnt, and the labourers cannot just assume rights over what they produce as that would constitute theft. This not only illustrates that property law reinforces the rights of those with property and oppresses those who have annexed their labour to it, contrary to the natural law argument, but also that hegemonic consciousness infiltrates society, causing it to believe that favouring the propertied is an eternal part of the natural order, when it is simply reinforcing the interests of the dominant elite. An example that illustrates how these values about property, seen as immutable, are actually in flux is the contrast between property law in the 18th and 19th Century. while in the 18th Century, law tended to favour agrarian uses of land over industrial uses, based on the doctrine that a man cannot intrude upon another man's right to the quiet enjoyment of his land, in the 19th Century this doctrine was replaced by the doctrine of reasonable use. Judges now had the opportunity to decide which use of land was most beneficial for social development, and invariably they favoured industrial uses, causing the downfall of agrarian society, illustrating how law tends to favour those in the dominant majority of society at the time. Since agrarian society embodies Locke's theory of annexation of labour to land to create property, its downfall also marks the downfall of that concept and the evolution into modern property law. Hence modern property law ultimately embodies the critical legal belief that law reproduces the oppressive character of politics in society, and is not neutral to all - only those dominant and with property.
Both these European perspectives, however, operate within a European context and may clash with the laws of other cultures in a pluralist society. One example is Tikanga Maori in New Zealand. While natural law theorists following Locke's argument believed that land was only a person's property if labour had been annexed to it, for Maori, there was no concept of land ownership at all. In Tikanga, the Maori people are the people of the land, they come from the land, live harmoniously with the land and has a duty to sustain its life force, then returns back to the land in death; therefore rights over land are traced through whakapapa. This presents a problem when both the British and the Maori assert different property rights over the same land. From the British perspective, since Maori had not cultivated most of the land in New Zealand, even customary land could be considered wasteland as no one 'occupied' it. They thus demanded that all wasteland be vested in the Crown for the use of present and future settlers in order to develop the colony, infuriating the Maori who saw this as a violation of tikanga. All the land of a tribe is sacred to them and cannot be seized or sold; the Maori people are the kaitiaki and have a responsibility over all customary land with a duty to maintain its mauri and this right cannot be taken away by foreigners, even if it seemed like it was not being occupied or cultivated. For Maori, if this kaitiaki role is not fulfilled, they will not only lose their mana, but may incur harm in the whanau. The Crown eventually used its right of pre-emption to purchase all wastelands in New Zealand, but this imposition of Western law on Maori had devastating consequences leading to the breakdown of Maori community. Tribal authority was diminished, and Maori society became a true commons, where people competed to sell their natural resources as quickly as possible before their neighbour did, since if they did not the Crown would take it away anyway. Thus it can be seen that not only does the clash of property law between cultures affect the physical thing concerned, it also has grave consequences for the intellectual organisation of a society, as property is what society is primarily founded upon.
Therefore, while many of us take the concept of property for granted, it is actually subject to many different legal perspectives which can create very different views of how property law functions within society. While originally the ideal was that every man had an equal right to property provided that they annexed their own labour to it, as society has evolved, so has property law, and from critical and pluralist perspectives, it can be seen that property law, like politics, often oppresses those who do not fit the legal person that law favours: the middle-class, European man striving in the marketplace, thus keeping the status quo of the elite in society.
Monday, 4 June 2007
Perversion of Language
"RSPB bans cocks, tits allowed
3:45PM, Monday June 04, 2007
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has banned the word for male birds from its website, drawing accusations of political correctness gone mad.
Visitors to the website found the word "cock" had been replaced by asterisks, while the species, tit, suffered no such indignity.
Forum user John D, of Yorkshire, told The Sun: "As bird lovers will know, a Parus Major is a great tit and while cocks do not get past the forum censor, tits do not cause offence. I've heard of PC but that is taking things too far."
A worker claimed the word had been replaced because of software filters but an RSPB spokesman said it preferred to describe birds as either male or female.
- REUTERS"
Retrieved from The New Zealand Herald.
It's sad how people perverting the usage of a word can, over time, cause the word to lose its original meaning and take on shameful connotations, so much so that it is involved in the debate of modern political correctness... Is the censure appropriate or will it just generate more immaturity surrounding the word?
3:45PM, Monday June 04, 2007
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has banned the word for male birds from its website, drawing accusations of political correctness gone mad.
Visitors to the website found the word "cock" had been replaced by asterisks, while the species, tit, suffered no such indignity.
Forum user John D, of Yorkshire, told The Sun: "As bird lovers will know, a Parus Major is a great tit and while cocks do not get past the forum censor, tits do not cause offence. I've heard of PC but that is taking things too far."
A worker claimed the word had been replaced because of software filters but an RSPB spokesman said it preferred to describe birds as either male or female.
- REUTERS"
Retrieved from The New Zealand Herald.
It's sad how people perverting the usage of a word can, over time, cause the word to lose its original meaning and take on shameful connotations, so much so that it is involved in the debate of modern political correctness... Is the censure appropriate or will it just generate more immaturity surrounding the word?
The World of Language
Many people tend see language learning as simply about memorising vocabulary and grammatical structures, almost like a nuisance. It therefore seems like the world would be much better had the Tower of Babel not happened at all – then we could all communicate to each other with no trouble whatsoever. What many seem to ignore, then, is the fact that to some extent, languages are very much ingrained into the culture they represent and actually govern, or at the very least, influence ways of thinking about a country’s identity.
On the one hand, it could be seen that language contains an elitist, segregating element, as those who cannot understand the language are effectively left out of the main social group, leading to a mentality of superiority for the most widely spoken languages. Indeed, to simplify, knowing English in today’s world is like belonging to the “popular clique” in high school – everyone else is doing it, so if you don’t, you get left behind. This mentality fuels its popularity even more; therefore in my view it is hard to dethrone English from eventually becoming the language of the world.
On the other hand, we tend to forget that originally language evolved in different nations to suit the specific needs of each country, and to distinguish themselves from the others. There are always going to be concepts in one language that cannot be sufficiently expressed in another language because of different belief systems and worldviews. Seeing the development of language in this way means seeing language as having a symbiotic relationship with culture – the concepts of each nation’s culture allows language to evolve, and the evolution of language then continues to affect and reflect the nation’s way of thinking. Seen in this light, perhaps English being the most popular language in the world is not necessarily beneficial. While effective in communicating basic concepts with its vast vocabulary from all sorts of origins, loses its association with England’s identity more and more. The concepts behind English words, the contextual elements that went into creating certain phrases, are lost or at least subverted as it is spread around the world. People simply learn English as a tool to succeed in a globalised economy, isolating it from the culture it comes from, and thus many idioms lose their nuances.
On the contrary, languages with fewer numbers of speakers or with speakers that are more concentrated in one area tend to retain their place in the nation’s culture more strongly. Given the rich cultural background of these languages, to me the main mistake people make is to consider languages as a barrier to communication – in reality, it is not; it is our own laziness that is the barrier to communication. If we are patient and spend enough time trying to respect and learn other people’s languages instead of expecting them to understand our own, we will find much more is hidden behind the words and structures – there is a whole new cultural world to be discovered.
On the one hand, it could be seen that language contains an elitist, segregating element, as those who cannot understand the language are effectively left out of the main social group, leading to a mentality of superiority for the most widely spoken languages. Indeed, to simplify, knowing English in today’s world is like belonging to the “popular clique” in high school – everyone else is doing it, so if you don’t, you get left behind. This mentality fuels its popularity even more; therefore in my view it is hard to dethrone English from eventually becoming the language of the world.
On the other hand, we tend to forget that originally language evolved in different nations to suit the specific needs of each country, and to distinguish themselves from the others. There are always going to be concepts in one language that cannot be sufficiently expressed in another language because of different belief systems and worldviews. Seeing the development of language in this way means seeing language as having a symbiotic relationship with culture – the concepts of each nation’s culture allows language to evolve, and the evolution of language then continues to affect and reflect the nation’s way of thinking. Seen in this light, perhaps English being the most popular language in the world is not necessarily beneficial. While effective in communicating basic concepts with its vast vocabulary from all sorts of origins, loses its association with England’s identity more and more. The concepts behind English words, the contextual elements that went into creating certain phrases, are lost or at least subverted as it is spread around the world. People simply learn English as a tool to succeed in a globalised economy, isolating it from the culture it comes from, and thus many idioms lose their nuances.
On the contrary, languages with fewer numbers of speakers or with speakers that are more concentrated in one area tend to retain their place in the nation’s culture more strongly. Given the rich cultural background of these languages, to me the main mistake people make is to consider languages as a barrier to communication – in reality, it is not; it is our own laziness that is the barrier to communication. If we are patient and spend enough time trying to respect and learn other people’s languages instead of expecting them to understand our own, we will find much more is hidden behind the words and structures – there is a whole new cultural world to be discovered.
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