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  • Why do we go to school?

    Neon sign
    The thrill of learning (Photo by Nick Fewings)

    Like most people of peasant stock, I regard education as an incredible privilege — one my forebears never had.

    But what did I actually get?

    Often (not always, but often) it was bored or uninterested peers facing bored or frustrated teachers moving us towards tests with set info. For most people I knew, the last day of school was the best day — a day they dreamed about. I have watched everyone I know who has become a state school teacher in the UK (from my parents to a large amount of my friends) grow more and more disillusioned.

    Most have quit the profession altogether.

    Why is it that students and teachers seem to dislike the school system so much? As I said at the start, education is one of the greatest privileges in life, right? Maybe it’s not that we hate education, but that we hate what is delivered and how it is delivered in our school system? I have a three-year-old child. Do I care about him? Yes. Do I want him to have the privilege of education? Yes.

    Do I want to send him to a British state school? Not really.

    Stormtrooper under a lightbulb
    Stormtroopers have imaginations, too (Photo by James Pond)

    I visited a Steiner Academy Open Day (yes, the fluffy, sandal-wearing schools — in fact, a German system established in the early 20th century that is more holistic in approach than anything in British schooling). While I love much about the concept, I was also struck by their dated insistence of desk-based lessons, in rows, with one-way information processing.

    They were also passionate about rules and obedience (perhaps to impress OFSTED?), and very anti-technology and team sports.

    This bothers me. Just because the state school system isn’t working doesn’t mean that the answer is to shun tech and football in favour of a pseudo-early 20th century schooling system, but with an arts and crafts ethic. Education should be open, disruptive, innovative, not scared of bringing the passion out of children, and not obsessed with standardized testing and factory line production.

    I have worked as a teacher in a Swedish school.

    They achieve one thing Steiner is also good at, namely, letting children become self-confident and engaged, unafraid to talk to an adult as an equal. I was particularly impressed by the fritids concept — late afternoons given over to self-directed learning by the kids. As a teacher, I facilitated them in whatever project they thought up, from building a wormery to creating a handmade comic book.

    But I’m still left with the question: what is school for here in the UK?

    What are my choices? Hmmm…

    While we’re thinking, here are two thought-provoking videos from Seth Godin and Sir Ken Robinson, people who’ve been umming and ahhing themselves.


  • Five-fer

     

    Canoe on river Wye next to reeds
    River Wye at Foy, near Ross-on-Wye (131 ft), June 13

    I completed a 10-mile journey by canoe yesterday (with my companion, Jon) from the village of Hoarwithy in Herefordshire to the town of Ross-on-Wye. It is a free-flowing wild river — undammed and as a result has one of the largest fluctuations in depth of any river in the country. Yesterday, however, it was like a stagnant millpond. With a headwind. Birdlife was profuse — many herons, ducks of all types, moorhens, crows, swifts, a kingfisher and more swans and cygnets than I’ve ever seen on one river. In other news…

    Madagascar’s greatest poet. No, I’d never heard of him either.

    Antananarivo (4199 ft), June 22 1937

    I had never heard of Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo until I was sub-editing a review for an album this week that mentioned him. He is not only regarded as the greatest poet in Madagascar’s history, but one of the greats of all Africa, and yet he only lived into his mid-30s. His death was a striking as his life — his committed suicide by cyanide poisoning, and not only wrote a final poem but also made a final journal entry describing in detail the experience of his suicide. I found this piece of information tragic but also fascinating. It seems he was trying to emulate earlier French poets he admired, and so burned many manuscripts before this last, horrific artistic act.

    Hey, ‘Girlfriend’

    Tune! Dâm-Funk — LA funkster Damon Garrett Riddick — delivers a cheeky funk beat held in check by Christine and the Queens — so chic French cool.

    Galvanized.

    It’s just started raining. Thick, muggy raindrops quite out of the blue. What was a bright June afternoon is now hemmed in. It brings to mind one of the great passages of a great novel — A House for Mr Biswas by V S Naipaul. Even if you have no connection to Trinidad, a small island in the south Caribbean, or to an Indian family, or the feeling of torpor that comes with knowing too much for your station, read this book for its vivid depiction of a life. For all that passes us by, something must happen. In attending to what does happen, Naipaul gets it.

    “After all, Brexit means Brexit”   

    A ‘Eurocrat’ in response to the European Commission’s insistence that contracts for the sensitive Galileo satellite positioning system cannot go to providers outside the EU (British firms have about €1.5 billion worth of contracts). [Courtesy of The Economist]

     


  • Turkey flags crescent moon
    Turkish flags are ubiquitous at election time — and indeed, anytime (Photo by Faruk Melik ÇEVİK on Unsplash)

    When? June 24.

    Again? Yes, following general elections in 2011, June and November 2015, and a referendum only 12 months ago. This is because incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — a man we hear a lot about — called elections some 17 months early.

    Why? Many suggestions: fractured opposition, the nose-diving economy, riding the nationalist war wave. And the small matter of the consolidation of power. If he wins, President Erdogan will have achieved the transfer of the Turkish system from a parliamentary to a strong presidential executive. This is nuanced by the fact that the changes he hopes to enact require that the president’s party is also in control of parliament.

    How does it work? The votes will determine the role of president (decided in a second round run-off on July 8 if no single candidate gets more than 50% of the vote in the first round) and 600 members of parliament.

    Presidential wannabes

    Recep Tayyip Erdogan

    Pitch? The incumbent. Sole candidate for the People’s Alliance, made up of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), plus a smaller nationalist party. A safe pair of hands.

    Chances? Defeat is almost unthinkable.

    Muharrem Ince

    Pitch? The candidate of the opposition, secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP) is as rowdy as Erdogan and almost as pious (his mother and sister wear headscarves), but offers a freer, more liberal and more tech savvy future.

    Chances? Slim unless he can break out of the usual CHP base.

    Meral Aksener

    Pitch? Renegade conservative nationalist from the MHP (after she fell out with their leader over the alliance with Erdogan’s AKP) sells herself as patriotic, pious and dependable without the air of corruption that hangs over the ruling party.

    Chances? A first female president for Turkey? In this neighbourhood? Unlikely.

    Selahattin Demirtas

    Pitch? The charismatic leader of the Kurdish political movement in Turkey languishes behind bars (rather like that other charismatic leader of the Kurdish movement in Turkey, Abdullah Ocalan, whose outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) Demirtas’ party is accused of being a front for). Despite that, he still represents the aspirations of the Kurdish nationalist vote.

    Chances? He is there as a spoiler, and he conceivably could be one.

    Parliamentary blocs

    People’s Alliance

    Who? The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), plus junior nationalist partners the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Great Unity Party (BBP) — initialised party politics can become bewildering in Turkish politics!

    In a nutshell? The ruling Islamist party in cahoots with the hardcore Turkish nationalist parties.

    Nation Alliance

    Who? The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), the newly formed Iyi Party, their sister party the nationalist Democratic Party (DP) and the old school Islamist Felicity Party (SP).

    In a nutshell? A motley crew clubbing together to try and club Erdogan’s AKP, but very much a marriage of convenience.

    Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP)

    Who? An alliance of Turkish left-wingers and Kurdish politicians that offer a more liberal and inclusive alternative that focuses on minority rights — in particular, Kurdish. As a result, they are excluded from the above alliances.

    In a nutshell? Though these parties are always on the verge of being repressed and banned out of existence, someone has to represent the country’s Kurds.


  • The Road to Oxiana

    Robert Byron The Road to Oxiana globe
    Wallowing as a joy-hog in Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana

    Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana is fascinating as a travelogue through 1930s Iran and Afghanistan, at a time when vehicular roads were in their infancy, ancient practices were in flux and the traveller could cross the path of Russian emigres fleeing across the border from Stalin’s Turkestan.

    It can also be enjoyed for its wit and verve. Byron writes as he speaks, albeit he speaks like an educated Imperial Englishman of the old school. It is in the brevity of his prose that the book comes alive.

    “They sell ice instead of snow in the bazaar.”

    That of Khanabad in Afghanistan. No explanation, no elaboration. Just the naked fact that speaks of another land and place.

    Of a night spent on beds next to their lorry in the Hindu Kush, waiting for a snowmelt river to subside:

    “Mosquitoes the size of eagles collected as though to a dinner bell.”

    The description took me straight back to a similar description of the insect life in Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation, when he meet Osama bin Laden one evening in the same mountain range. A warm evening in the Hindu Kush is clearly an opportunity to commune with all nature.

    It is not the only passage that reminds one of the passing of time. Afghanistan’s woes since Byron’s visit are projected on the contemporary reader everywhere. It makes Byron’s assessment of the two giant Bamiyan Buddhas – destroyed by the Taliban – all the more striking:

    “Neither has any artistic value. But one could bear that; it is their negation of sense, the lack of any pride in their monstrous flaccid bulk, that sickens.”

    He is equally damning about Persepolis – perhaps the defining ancient monument of all Iran in most tourist itineraries. It is undeniably refreshing. It is refreshing, because it sits alongside an ardent love of sublime architecture – in this case, Islamic.

    He swoons over monuments the wider world knows little of. The ruins of Gohar Shad Begum’s Musalla in Herat leaves him spellbound over this powerful Islamic queen. A mysterious tower – the Gumbad-i-Kabus – on the far northern frontier with Russian Turkestan, Byron regards as ranking “with the great buildings of the world”.

    And for all his Imperial Britishness, for all that he maintains a belief that certain innovations that had propelled the West to greatness must suffuse the whole globe in time, he has one of the sharpest eyes I have come across for the weakness of another import: nationalism and its attendant fawning mimicry of the West.

    He travelled Iran at a time when Reza Shah Pahlavi was attempting the same kind of repressive, top-down reforms that Kemal Ataturk performed in Turkey. Disdainful not only of Islam, but more broadly of Islamic cultures, these ruler sought civilised modernity in aping the trappings of Western cultures – such everyday edicts as the mandatory wearing of brimmed Western European hats.

    On arrival in Afghanistan, Byron is effusive in his admiration:

    “Hawk-eyed and eagle-beaked, the swarthy loose-knit men swing through the dark bazaar with a devil-may-care self-confidence … They expect the European to conform to their standards, instead of themselves to his, a fact that came home to me this morning when I tried to buy some arak; there is not a drop of alcohol to be had in the whole town [Herat, Afghanistan]. Here at last is Asia without an inferiority complex.”

    He was relieved to have left the faux-West of the Shah’s Persia. What might he make of Iran today, or for that matter, many towns in central and eastern Turkey, where alcohol is equally scarce? To dismiss such descriptions as betraying some sentiment of the Orientalist ‘noble savage’ is to be locked in a mindset that views Westernisation as inherently culturally superior. Byron’s perception can tell us much about the assumptions of the Westerner, the strange twisting of Asian societies that has occurred on contact with the West, and the divisions we still see today.

    Perhaps most important is the sheer wonder he takes away with him – a young man who would die only seven years after this trip. It is a wonder painted in colour throughout the book – “viridian poplars”, “indigo mountains”, “lemon-coloured cornflowers”, and the turquoise, pink, dark red, and dark blue joy of Gohar Shad’s mosque in Mashhad. In Byron’s own words:

    “It was as if someone had switched on another sun.”


  • Unrestricted avian migration

    robin in a holly bush
    Photo by Biel Morro on Unsplash

    In my son’s new book, Robins, Wrens and other British Birds, it reads:

    “In springtime, many of the birds you see will have come from far away. Each year, some birds, like swifts, make an amazing journey to find food and nesting places. This is called ‘migration’.”

    The word struck me at once. This was unrestricted migration.

    Swifts travel to the UK from sub-Saharan Africa, some as much as 3,000 miles in five days. The RSPB reckons the global swift population at 25 million. Thats just one type of bird. The problem is, official figures on the numbers of birds migrating into the UK are extremely hard to come by, since there are no border checks in place. This is not migration to escape persecution, but to obtain food and nesting places.

    Without control of UK borders, how can the country hope to control the numbers of migratory birds? It is acceptable, in fact beneficial, to welcome birds into the UK who can demonstrate that they will fill a need and not be a drain on resources, but at present, any bird can gain entry to the UK, entering and departing as they please.

    It seems only right that systems should be put in place to protect honest, hardworking British birds. A points-based system – similar to the one used in Australia to manage human migration – would seem to be a perfectly reasonable way of managing the flow of migratory birds into the UK from sub-Saharan Africa.

    Through the implementation of a points-based immigration system, birds wishing to migrate to the UK from abroad would first have to establish, in their country of origin, that they had agreed access to a specific food source or nesting place within a UK garden or green space, and the owner of that garden or green space would have to satisfy the UK government that in doing so, they would not be depriving a British bird.

     

     


  • Forget Disneyland. Venice really is the ultimate kids’ destination.

    A Venetian canal after dark
    A 2-year-old who first discovers Venice by night thinks it’s even more amazing. Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

    I arrived in Venice on the weekend that the city’s mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, had planned to put into action his new turnstiles, restricting access to certain main thoroughfares in order to deal with the crush of visitors in the early May weekend that is a bank holiday in the UK. A local residents’ activist group had already torn down turnstiles placed the week before in preparation for the weekend, and whether they were actually used or not, I’ve no idea, since I went nowhere near the main thoroughfares of the city in my week’s stay with my wife and two-year-old son.

     

    I was in Venice — just like Robert Byron in the laconic opening to his The Road to Oxiana— as a ‘joy-hog’. It’s a phrase that perfectly captures the experience of Venice for me, someone who has now visited five times, with different combinations of people, since my first solitary trip at a 25-year-old in 2004. I realised afresh, as I stood aboard a vaporetto bus-boat passing San Marco Square, that Venice is still the most extraordinary idea for a city ever conceived. The very fact that it exists outside imagination makes it constantly revelatory. It is a sensation that doesn’t seem to dull with repetition.

     

    It is also a relief. Time spent away from Venice denudes the memory. You begin to know it in caricature, just as we know anywhere that is so famous and so photographed. You forget, slowly, the real feeling of being present there. You talk to others about how it’s crushed by tourists, badly run, stinks in the summer. Venice is as far as it gets from being a newly discovered getaway — the untouched secret experience that excited veteran travellers can whisper about. It doesn’t avoid the day-trippers and the budget airline weekenders — it gets bombarded by them.

     

    Of course, if you stay in the darker corners of Dorsoduro or Castello, or delve deeper into Venice’s real soul in the housing blocks of Sant’ Elena or La Giudecca, then you won’t feel the tourist crush like a San Marco day-tripper, but you will still hear the eternal paean of the Venetian: no one can live here anymore, the cruise ships are destroying the foundations, the supermarkets are killing the grocers, the place is a theme park. None of what they say is false. It is all painfully true. Yet despite it all, as you ride the vaporetto with the lagoon wind in your face, you feel giddy.

     

    If Venice is now simply a theme park, then it must be the best theme park in the world. The idea stuck me as my vaporetto inched its way into San Zaccaria to dispense the masses into San Marco Square. All these willing tourists — Americans, Japanese, Chinese, Russian — all with camera phones in trigger positions, all waiting for their little moment to record history. If this is a theme park, where else in the world do you get a theme park built on such real, ancient foundations? They’ve tried to build theme park versions of Venice in Disneyland and Las Vegas, but this is a real city. It must bowl the tourists over.

     

    A city for all ages

     

    I could continue to wax lyrical about timeless Venice. It is an easy place to wallow in Lord Byron’s athletic swims, sink into Von Aschenbach’s deckchair on the Lido, or conjure Calvino’s elusive city among the canals. But this was not my focus on this trip. This time Venice was about boats — speedboats, yellow boats, red boats, dustbin boats, taxi boats, bus boats, huge boats, tug boats — wow! It was about gelato — Fior di Latte, Crema di Limone, Stracciatella, Fragola y Anguria! And it was about the beach (Yes, Venice has a beach). My reason? A two-year-old.

     

    Believe it or not (and most of the romancing English couples we met did not), Venice is a fantastic city for kids. Now, on the face of it, that just can’t be true. It’s one of the most tightly compact urban spaces in Europe, hemmed in as it is by lagoon water on all sides. Having been created in the Middle Ages, Venice never really did public space off water until Napoleon knocked down a section of the city to make way for the Public Gardens that are a notable green spot today. Despite there being a lot of squares, there are precious few playgrounds and you’d assume that a boathook would come in handy to fish the toddler out of the brine every five minutes.

     

    Despite these drawbacks, Venice is a kiddie revelation. My son met his first Italian playmate on the public vaporetto from the airport. She was on her way home from a family trip to the mainland and while her parents escorted us across the city from the Fondamente Nove to our flat in Dorsoduro, they both flitting, screaming in unison, down every blind alley they could find. There are a few. It was nighttime. We were crossing a city. Yet two toddlers were able to run, unaccompanied, ahead of us. They could disappear around sharp corners, to return a moment later, faces alight.

     

    This is the first and most obvious charm of Venice — the one everyone, of every age, screams about. No cars! An entire modern city without an automobile in sight. I mused that maybe, just maybe, this is what all cities will feel like in a hundred years? But for now, Venice alone is car-free, and it makes for toddler freedom. Fortunately, my toddler was just old enough to understand that water is water, and he can’t walk on it, quite. He might find lots of interesting things to prod on the edge of it, but he won’t hightail it straight off the nearest fondamente.

     

    With that established, Venice suddenly becomes a huge, adult-sized maze of winding streets and waterways, with gondolas and speedboats endlessly appearing and disappearing. My son was entertained one evening for about half an hour simply by standing on a small bridge and waving to each and every gondola as it came through on what was obviously a well-oared tourist route. The romancing couples sometimes responded. The gondoliers always did. Toddlers might get a lukewarm reception from couples on their big bonding excursion, but Italian men are utterly, totally besotted.

     

    This put the icing on the cake for my little one. Everywhere he went he was hailed, tickled, cajoled and fed by a panoply of actors eager to get a laugh, a smile, a cheeky grin — just something that told them they had his approval. He loved it. He loved the gelato man who gave him massive, discount portions. He loved the cicchettibar where his snack came free, plus free chocolate eggs. Hell, it even began with Luigi, our Easyjet air host, before we even took off from the UK, when he was showered with free stickers and pantomime faces.

     

    Plus, that beach. Okay, so most people don’t come to Venice for the beach anymore. Robert Byron may have dismissed the bathing, on a calm day, as “the worst in Europe”. But a walk down the Granviale Santa Maria Elisabetta on a sunny afternoon is not a chore, a beach is a beach, and when a toddler hits sand, nobody cares whether a digger has had to haul it off a barge onto this thin strip of littoral or not. In fact, we-hey! Look over there! A big yellow digger — digging sand!

     

    In a nutshell, it turns out Venice rocks. It rocks even more than I had thought it did in the first place. It rocks as a real, 21st century city for real 21st century kids who couldn’t give a flying Fragola gelato whether it contained a single museum, grand master, architectural highlight or arts extravaganza. It’s a city with water instead of roads, for Pete’s sake.