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Monthly Archives: September 2012

Sometimes I tell myself I’m being too hard on Nick Clegg, I mean he’s unused to people taking him seriously, he’s not been in the public eye for very long really of course he’s going to cock it up. He probably has policies of his own I’m just not looking hard enough for them. There must be something that differentiates the Lib Dems from a Conservative whipping boy it’s just not very evident.

Then something like this happens.

You remember the GCSE row and the Coalition’s (I refuse to call that shower a ‘government’) brilliant idea to replace them with the English Baccalaureate (EBac). Well this happened in Wales too, obviously, and they have a slightly different regulatory system there. Instead of the ‘independent’ regulator Ofqual, the Welsh minister has regulatory responsibilities, and he’s decided to exercise them and had the papers in question regarded. Unlike their English neighbours.

Clegg as always is fighting the Conservatives’ corner but this time, if the BBC is to be trusted, all cognitive power left him when the urge to endear himself to the Tories struck.

Clegg apparently thinks that the Welsh are ‘”shifting goalposts” for children in Wales’, forgetting that the main problem with these changes to exams was that they happened in the middle of the academic year; so that those children who (if they could) took the exams in January had an easier time of it that their peers who took the exam in the summer. The goalposts have already been shifted, this year was effectively weighted in favour of those who took the exam in January, the goalposts are being movedback.

Saying “I know what they say but I don’t think it’s right for politicians to be interfering in an independent exam system” Clegg seems to have forgotten that the minister is the regulator of the Welsh exam boards and fully within his rights to act as he has done. He also seems determined to ignore the fact that the issue of examination and assessment is already politicised and it would be naïve to think of the exam boards as independent when Gove’s opinions are so obvious, as I have argued previously.

But the most noticeable sore in this sorry body is the characterisation of the re-grading as a unilateral decision, implying that they shouldn’t have taken this step without, I don’t know, asking permission?

Outrageous isn’t it? But ripping out the entire systemand replacing it with theEbacs, that’s a “sensible” decision, an example “for the Welsh government and the Welsh politicians to decide whether they want to follow”.

The only conclusion I can draw is that the Welsh are showing too much independence. The Welsh should just learn their place goddamnit, and do exactly what daddy Cameron tells them.

Just as Clegg does.

This is weird.

So apparently in Germany if you’re religious, that is if you are “officially registered” as a catholic, protestant or Jew, then you have to pay an extra 8% on your income tax. Apparently this was to compensate the churches when religious property was nationalised in the nineteenth century.

What.

Really? The German government assists in collecting a tax for religious organisations. This is ludicrous, how do you possibly justify this level of absurdity? These independent, religious organisations are being funded by taxes. The Catholic Church, one of the richest institutions on the planet, which has more palaces and works of art than it does priests without a criminal record, is funded by a tax, levied by the German government, on its German adherents.

What the fuck.

I really don’t know what to say to this. Aside from a gut reaction against any government being such close bedfellows with religions, why would any of these organisations need this, why would they want this, how are they allowed to get away with this? Was the collection plate not enough? Did some church roofs need fixing, did some awkward families need bribing? What ever happened to “helping the least of my brothers”? Are you expected to fund your journey to heaven personally now?

Well it’s funny you should ask, because the Catholic Church in Germany is apparently denying the sacrament to any Catholic who wants to opt out of this tax, for whatever reason.

Unless they pay the religious tax, Catholics will no longer be allowed receive sacraments, except before death, or work in the church and its schools or hospitals.

Without a “sign of repentance before death, a religious burial can be refused,” the decree states. Opting out of the tax would also bar people from acting as godparents to Catholic children.

Now the sacraments don’t mean very much to me, I prefer my biscuits with a bit more substance to them, and a religious burial would be meaningless (besides I’d rather be cremated), however both to those banning these things and those who are being prohibited from participating in them believe that these ceremonies are important, nay vital, to the state and destiny of their eternal soul. Jeopardising that for the sake of some tax revenue you should have anyway seems rather petty to me.

Indeed the German bishops don’t appear to have read their Bibles very closely at all. I would direct their attention to the story of the moneylenders in the temple (Gospel of Mark, Chapter 11, Verse 15), or the parable of the rich man and the kingdom of heaven (Gospel of Mark, Chapter 10, Verse 25), also did Jesus not say to his disciples “that they should take nothing for their journey… no money in their purse” (Gospel of Mark, Chapter 6, Verse 8)? Wanting to take a commission for salvation is not a very Christian thing to do whichever way you slice it. So why are the German bishops doing this, aside from gibbering insanity of course?

Alarmed by their declining congregations, the bishops were also pushed into action by a case involving a retired professor of church law, Hartmut Zapp, who announced in 2007 that he would no longer pay the tax but intended to remain within the Catholic faith.

“This decree makes clear that one cannot partly leave the Church,” Germany’s bishops’ conference said last week, in a decision endorsed by the Vatican.

Unusually I understand the logic here, it’s completely ludicrous as all religious logic is, but I see what they mean. They worry that those who take issue with the policies of the Church, such as covering up child rape, will stop paying the tax but will continue to take the sacrament as presumably they still believe in the Catholic faith. What the bishops intend, I conjecture, is to intimidate those who would make such a move with the terrible punishment of not having a wafer on Sunday.

It’s blackmail, pure and simple.

And it won’t work. My money says that for every discontented German Catholic that this pacifies there will be at least two who are so disgusted by the actions of these bishops that they leave the Church entirely, not paying any of the Church’s tithes or taxes, since that is what’s so important to the bishops. Only time will tell if I’m right though.

So Nick Clegg has finally apologised for the hike in tuition fees.

No wait, let’s be accurate about this. He hasn’t apologised for raising the fees, he hasn’t apologised for being corrupted by the inkling of power. He hasn’t apologised for breaking, not just a promise, but his key election pledge. He has apologised for making a pledge that could not be kept.

Too little, too late. If this promise couldn’t be kept why did you make it? Does no one in the Lib Dem party own a calculator? Is the mathematics too difficult for you? Were you just cynical, this is what people will vote for and once we’re in they can’t do anything to us for five years? Or were you just that desperate for a little bit of attention, a little bit of importance, that you’d promise us the earth then make hollow apologies when you realised you couldn’t deliver?

The Liberal Democrats are an embarrassment.

They’ve thrown away every policy they were elected for, so desperate were they to get into Downing Street and start tonguing the Tory’s boots. All they are good for, and I use the word advisedly, is as a scapegoat for the Conservatives. A little sock-puppet to present the illusion of a government that actually has a popular mandate.

If the Lib Dems had any integrity they’d leave the coalition, call a general election and desperately try to salvage whatever dignity they can. But who am I kidding, politicians with integrity, silly idea, silly idea.

So it’s finally happened, when it comes to examination Gove’s put his money where his mouth is, and his foot on top of both.

Yes the GCSEs are doomed, at least for maths, science and English, and I don’t expect the plans to extend this new English Baccalaureate to be deterred by anything as sordid as results when there is good old fashioned Tory dogma at stake.

Apparently the Baccalaureate will be assessed by one huge exam at the end of the course, which is two years barring future changes.  According to that spineless mass of gibbering jelly, Nick Clegg, these changes will

“raise standards for all our children”, but he added that it would “not exclude any children”

Well that’s very reassuring, because his record on education is just so reliable isn’t it?

But really, isn’t it the whole point that children are going to be left behind? Isn’t that what Gove and the Tory’s have wanted all along?

I may be delusional here, but I was under the impression that the problem with GCSEs, at least in the government’s eyes was that we had too many children passing and that that was devaluing the whole system. Surely then this is Gove’s aim, to reduce the number of children passing so the academically qualified becomes an elite, filled with people like him who can afford good schools and private tuition if the unqualified teachers provided by the academies aren’t up to scratch.

This is my problem with the Conservative and by extension the Coalition (because-really-what’s-the-fucking-difference) approach to education. It isn’t that they’ve chosen the wrong solution to an evident problem, a la the economy; they’ve invented a problem where none exists.

That isn’t to say that our education system is perfect, it really isn’t, but the problem has always been that there is too much importance given to exams. As I’ve said before, students aren’t taught about the subject, their natural curiosity afire with the drive for knowledge, they are taught how to pass exams. What key points to bring up when discussing those poems you don’t care about to tick the boxes in the checklist the examiner has. Show your working, because that will get you marks, doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you’re doing just do this to these numbers and you’ll at least get half marks. Don’t know what cumulative means? Doesn’t matter. Don’t know why algebra is important? Who cares, just get all the Xs on one side and the Ys on the other because that’s what the examiner is looking for.

Ah those magic words, the answer to every schoolboy question.

“Sir, why should we do it this way?”

“Because that’s what the examiner will look for.”

Education shouldn’t be like that, it should be about awakening a desire for more and better knowledge. Channelled curiosity. But according to the Conservatives it is in fact a market, the economy of grades.

Because you see, your knowledge only has value in the light of other people’s ignorance. To the Tories the fact that most people don’t fail suggests that it is impossible to fail, and if there is no failure then success is meaningless.

Actually this is a pretty good window onto Tory thinking.

For being rich to mean anything others must be penniless.

For being well fed to mean anything others must be starving.

For your nice house to mean anything others must be living under bridges [link].

For your voice to matter others must shut up and do what they’re told.

FUCK THAT!

So I saw a notice in my subscription box saying that the Pope was worried about Latin use. Naive and optimistic as I am I assumed that Ratzinger was concerned that the eternal and universal (for that is what Catholic means) might possibly have stuck to Latin, a two thousand year old dead language of interest only to antiquarians and roman tour guides, for slightly too long. Perhaps it had finally got through to the top the hierarchy, by the well-known trickle-up effect, that bloody no one speaks Latin anymore! It doesn’t surprise me that attendance is falling off if you only tell the pews “same time next week” in gibberish.

Alarmed by a decline in the use of Latin within the Catholic Church,

Oh.

Ah well, maybe expecting the church to become more modern might be rather silly.

Pope Benedict is planning to set up a Vatican academy to breathe new life into the dead language.

This is much more like the church we know and despise, not just suck in the medieval age, but determined to drag the rest of us there with them.

Apparently Pope Palpatine

Vader quote, not Palpatine… Ack!

is alarmed by the fact that Latin use is falling, even in the Church. I mean really, this is outrageous! Priests modernising? Not stuck in the past? We must put a stop to this!

Another thing that sticks in the Pope’s craw is the translation of delocalisation (obviously not a word in Latin) as delocalizatio. Apparently this is too easy to understand though.

it simply makes Italian and English words sound Latin, rather than being more creative with the language

Quite right, it’s not as though the Church is here to help its followers or explain things to them. You would think, with Church attendance the way it is the Pope would be more concerned with making the Church more accessible, rather than cutting it off behind layers of obsolete arcana and dead verbiage.

You might say this isn’t particularly important, and you might be right, but this approach is emblematic of the whole sorry, shambling mess that is the Catholic Church.