David Richardson

This is exactly why much of the rest of the world has been so horrified at the Bush Administration's casual trashing of the Geneva Conventions. I've been working with peace-keepers and peace-enforcers from the Swedish Army this week, and I'm always impressed by the incredibly complicated nature of their task, and the professionalism with which they carry it out. It's taken us a lot of hard work to rein in the bloodier aspects of human nature to the extent that we have managed so far … and then come the neo-cons, sitting safely in Washington, making everyone's life a lot harder. Candide ought to be compulsory reading for neo-cons - the descriptions of atrocities during the wars in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries are amongst the impulses which caused us to try to create some rules of war.

Yes, that's right. The on-line newspapers my students read refer to 'red states' and 'blue states', and the terminology seems to have made it into the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, etc. It's really confusing for Europeans - as is the idea that 'liberals' are on the left, since, as I wrote, 'liberal' is a right-wing party in many European countries. In Denmark, for example, the party called Venstre (which is the Danish for Left) is a right-wing party (the left-right division comes from the places the different groups sat in the pre-French Revolution 'parliament' in France). Venstre was originally one of the 'free speech', 'universal right to vote' parties in the 19th century, when there weren't any trades unions or socialist parties. As soon as that niche was taken, though, Venstre joined the people of the same social class as them on the right. The left-wing version of Venstre is called Radikale Venstre …

Apropos US and European political spectra, I wrote this input for a blog we've been running for two groups of students on each side of the Atlantic: The 'red shift' in US Politics I'm writing this partly for the benefit of my students, who might not understand what I see as one of the fundamental differences between US and European politics, and partly to see what the Americans reading this blog think about the point of view I'm about to expound! In astronomy, the red shift is the way that the light from stars appears to shift towards the red end of the spectrum as it is received by astronomers on Earth (enabling them to see how far away the star is). In US politics, 'red' equals 'right' and 'blue' equals 'left' … which is the exact opposite of political colours in the rest of the world, where 'red' equals socialist or communist, and 'blue' equals conservative. 'Liberal' is also a word which confuses Europeans. In Europe there are lots of Liberal parties - but they're all to the right of centre. In general, they were founded in the 19th century, before working people had the vote, nearly always with the aim of achieving freedom of speech in societies which were either monarchies or authoritarian states (or both, like Prussia). When the working class formed their own trades unions and political parties, the Liberal parties moved right. The political term in Europe which most nearly corresponds to the US 'neo-conservative' is 'neo-liberal' (called 'nyliberal' in Swedish). In European terms, if you're not on the right, then you'll be a socialist, a social-democrat or a communist. If you're a liberal, then you're on the right. And in many ways the US Democratic Party looks and feels like a party of the right, rather than a party of the left, despite the fact that European political leaders who run left-wing parties will invite the Democrats in and say nice things about them. So … when even a leader who is as right-wing as Tony Blair is talking about his vision of society, he's starting from a position a long way to the left of even the most left-wing US politician. The United States used to have parties and political movements on the left - even in European terms. Eugene Debs received 4 million votes once as the candidate to the Socialist Party of the USA (you can find out more at http://www.eugenevdebs.com/). The reason why demonstrators outside the White House have to walk around in circles, rather than standing still originates from the actions of the IWW and Joel Hillström, from Gävle in Sweden (better known in the USA as Joe Hill) - their website is at http://www.iww.org/. A general from Laclede, MO, John Pershing, played a large role in crushing the left - by commanding the US Army to shoot strikers in the early 1920s. The Pinkertons were also crucial (see an account of the strike at Homestead Mill at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carnegie/sfeature/mh_blue.html). And then there was Joe McCarthy … So … one way to look at an election in Europe is that voters get to choose between left and right. A way to look at an election in the USA is that voters get to choose between right and further right! Is this how you Americans see it? Could you envisage a time when the winner of a US Presidential election is an African-American divorced woman who doesn't go to church, had an abortion at the age of 18 and an illegitimate baby at the age of 20, and who advocates a Canadian style of socialised medical care? If not, why not?

I'm sure that this is true … but I'm also sure that there's a very marked tendency to pretend that the evils of imperialism didn't actually happen. And the problem with not learning from the past is that you're condemned to repeat it. The fact that the Spanish haven't discovered what was wrong with their imperialism and with the Inquisition yet isn't much of an argument against condemnation of the barbarities committed by the Spanish in Latin America. The use of poison gas by the British against Kurdish tribesmen in Iraq in the 1920s was what I would call a war crime. For me, that has first to be acknowledged and apologised for. After that, we can start comparing what the British did with, say, what Saddam Hussein did in Halabja, if we feel that comparison is important. What happens all too often, though, is that we see the mote in our neighbour's eye, whilst being blind to the beam in our own.

Can we nip this line of argument in the bud, please, before the level of argument degenerates to that on, say, the BBC Have Your Say site? Tom, criticising actions or policies of the United States of America is not "America bashing/loathing". If you think that someone has made unjustifiable claims, why don't you identify the claims and try to refute them? We were lucky in 1944 that the interests of the USA happened to coincide with ours, but that hasn't always been the case. What's clear is that if you had to single out *one* Allied effort over all the others, then it was the Soviet Union that won the war. They had the superior fighting forces, the superior weaponry and the superior tactics and strategy (once Stalin had stopped interfering). However, without US food, shipped to Murmansk on largely British shipping, which kept the Soviet war machine working, the German forces in the East would have been much more difficult to defeat.

Some more information about a Marratech meeting we're holding about podcasting, amongst other things. The title is: "Old Wine in New Bottles: A conversation between Dr Bryan Carter, Central Missouri State University, and David Richardson, Högskolan i Kalmar, about introducing some of the new technologies available on existing courses, focussing particularly on blogs, audioblogs, podcasting and Internet radio." We'll be looking at some of the things we've done so far, and what our plans are for the future in a very practical way. The practicality is not so much in how to make podcasts work technically, but more in how you make them a pedagogically-justified part of a course. It takes place on Wednesday, 1st June at 16.00 CET (one hour ahead of UK summer time). Get in touch, either on this forum, or via e-mail to get the exact details of how to take part.

I've been working with the Swedish Army once or twice a year for ten years now. During that time, it's gone from a definitely conscript army to one which is in a bit of a limbo. 10 years ago, a very large proportion of young men served either in the armed forces, or in some kind of civilian equivalent. Nowadays the country doesn't have the money for it, so there's a lottery, and about 30-40% of young men get called up. This causes problems for people wanting to join the police force, but who don't get called up (since completed military service is usually a condition of employment for the police). There are nuclear shelters all over the place, and a large number of people have 'reserve occupations'. In many places (such as Kalmar), the air-raid sirens are tested at 3 pm on the first Monday of the month. The only permanently-employed soldiers are all officers. There are no experienced NCOs, for example. All the NCOs and lower ranks are conscripts, which means that officers have to have very good 'people skills' - they're the ones who have to make sure that the difficult jobs get done. The reason for this situation is that the social-democrats were determined never again to be in the hands of a professional officer corps, who could make threats against the state without any check from ordinary people. In other words, if you want a 'people's army', you have to have most of the people in it. It's exceptionally difficult to use this kind of army for the kind of aggressive, imperialistic campaigns both the Brits and the Americans have been involved in. However, whenever it's been tested in action, the Swedish Army has acquitted itself very well indeed. One major consequence of this policy is that Swedish Army officers are very well trained, and very aware of the world they live in. They also tend to be very versatile, and there's a requirement on everyone, from privates to generals, to make any problems known to their superiors … and to go above their superiors' heads if they don't listen. Several of my acquaintances have been pressed to join the Americans in Iraq by foreign recruiters … but not one has had the slightest interest.

The UN troops weren't Swedes, by the way, but Fijians and Indians. What happened to the SLA troops was that the UN troops came out of their base and negotiated their disarming and custody with Hezbollah. When the two sides finally started talking to each other (the SLA had ruled over the Israeli-controlled zone for a long time, and had demonized Hezbollah), it became clear that Hezbollah had no thought of revenge. The SLA soldiers who had committed crimes (such as theft) were tried in civil courts and the ones who hadn't were released after questioning. This happens a lot more frequently than you'd expect … but even so, there are very stringent rules governing what UN troops are and aren't allowed to do. The basic division is between peace-enforcing (PE) and peace-keeping (PK). There has to be an agreement between the belligerent parties for a PK force to be put in place, and part of that agreement stipulates what weaponry the PK force may possess (no armour, light weapons only), and another part stipulates what relationship the force is allowed to have with belligerents and civilians. Before a peace treaty has been signed, for example, the force isn't allowed to clear any mines, except for ones which hinder the force in its work (i.e they can't clear mines, or even mark where they are, to help civilians). If they did, they'd be intervening against the party which laid the mines in the first place, and thus couldn't be a neutral force. Peace-keeping is a really hard job … and is made much harder and more dangerous by irresponsible actions by peace-enforcers (such as US forces using NGO aid agency activity as rewards in Afghanistan). Incidentally, the neutral armies, such as the Swedish Army and the Irish Army are often much better at their jobs than the armies such as the US Army and the British Army. The ability to use lots of firepower indiscriminately, and from a distance (which are actually breaches of the Geneva Conventions most of the time) seems to make you into a 'lazier' force.

I had a very moving experience a couple of years ago at the Swedish Army base I sometimes work at. They'd invited over the Brigadier-General in charge of the UN forces in South Lebanon on the day the Israelis were forced to withdraw. He instructed the Swedish junior officers in peace-keeping by presenting a continuing account of the day to them. It went like this: "It's 0600 and you're the lieutenant in charge of 10 peace-keepers at the border post, who're armed with rifles and sidearms. You report that there are 60 men, women and children who say that they're going to march across no-man's-land and reclaim their homes at 0800. What do you do?" The answer here was contact force HQ who contact UN HQ in New York. They didn't respond immediately, since they obviously needed to contact the US State Dept, NATO and the Israelis. "Now it's 0700. The crowd has swelled to about 100, and the women and children have been placed at the front, ready to leave. What do you do?" Contact force HQ again who tell you that the UN's orders are to shoot the civilians if they pass into no-man's-land. Force HQ, however, are commanded by a soldier from a non-NATO country, who immediately sends out an order that soldiers do not open fire on civilians under any circumstances. The lieutenant is instructed to try to persuade the crowd to wait until the UN can come up with better orders! "Now it's 0800, and you've persuaded the crowd to give you another 30 minutes." "No orders come from New York, it's 0830 and the crowd move into no-man's-land." What happened next is that the Israelis dropped 155 mm artillery shells on either side of the road, just in front of the crowd, partly to intimidate them to turn back and partly as a range-finding exercise. When that didn't work, they started firing heavy machine-guns as close to the front of the crowd as possible. When that didn't work, they abandoned their posts and retreated into Israel, leaving behind their puppet South Lebanese Army (SLA) to face the wrath of the crowd. "Now it's 1200 and there's a group of 12 SLA soldiers hammering on the gates of your command post, demanding that you let them in for their own protection. What do you do?" The answer is that you must refuse to let them in - a peace-keeping force cannot take sides. ---------- The part of this story which really took my breath away was the casual way in which the Americans ordered the UN to shoot unarmed civilians … and the immense professionalism and personal courage of the Force Commander who refused the order. The Israelis have committed so many war crimes that their behaviour was less shocking … although it's interesting to see that their people on the ground couldn't quite bring themselves to fire into a crowd of civilians. I see this as a potential war crime that was narrowly averted.

Good intentions just don't cut it for me when it comes to war crimes. It's so easy for any state to claim that their intention in acting the way they did was to make things better. I'm sure, for example, that dedicated Nazis genuinely felt that they were doing Jews a favour by exterminating them, since they saw being Jewish as such a bad thing. The Soviet Union liberated the countries of eastern Europe. The Americans went into Iraq with the intention of bringing peace and democracy … and the good intentions of the British in bringing enlightenment to the uncivilised parts of the world are well known. Generally speaking, when we catch people doing things that are bad, we take their intentions into account only when we decide on their sentence. You don't become innocent of a crime by having a good intention. The only crimes I can think of which are changed slightly by considering intention are the murder-manslaughter pair. But just because the lack of an intention changes murder into manslaughter, it doesn't mean that manslaughter isn't a crime.

Concentration camps were first developed as a tactic during the Boer War. The idea was basically the same as the US 'strategic hamlets' strategy in the Vietnam War: concentrate the civilian population into controlled areas and the guerrilla army will lose its main resource which enables it to keep on fighting. I don't think that genocide was an aim - but it was certainly a consequence. The Nazi concentration camps were opened very early on in their period of rule (1934?) and the internees were social democrats, communists, homosexuals and gypsies. The idea of killing the camp inmates systematically didn't arise until after the Wannsee conference in January 1942. However, thousands of people died in the various camps (British and others) simply because the facilities in the camps encouraged the spread of disease (often due to malnutrition). The heavy death toll in the Boer War camps helped to increase the hatred felt by the Boers towards the British (arguably fuelling the development of the apartheid ideology, since it was something the British were very much against). The British may not have intended so many people to die, but, as the power in control, they were certainly responsible for their deaths, in my book at least.

Just a note about left-wing anti-Communism from a European perspective. At the time at which Weyl was gaining his formative experiences about socialism and communism (probably from European emigrants heavily influenced by the ideas about socialism and anarchism swirling about in the late 19th-century) there was a life-and-death struggle going on between Socialists and Communists for control of the ideology. The Russian Revolution was very much a case of the minority Communists staging a coup against the majority Socialists, and then systematically rooting their opponents out. In Sweden and many other European countries, the years after World War 1 were marked by bitter struggles between social-democrats and communists for supremacy in the labour movement, which struggles the social-democrats generally won (in non-totalitarian societies). Then, after World War 2, the Soviets systematically imprisoned and killed social-democrats in the countries they liberated (from the Nazis). The Czechs, for example, had had a very strong social-democratic movement, but this was eliminated after the Soviet takeover. The result of this was that social-democrats tended to be very strong anti-communists. Sweden's social democrats, for example, who designed one of the most 'liberal' (in US terms) societies in the world, collaborated actively with NATO and the Americans in the 1940s and 1950s (carrying out spying missions for them, for example). Olof Palme (who was as progressive as you get in most other contexts) helped in the setting up of IB - a special bureau whose task was to identify Communist sympathisers in the trade unions and out in working life and put them under surveillance (wire-tapping, mail opening, etc). Many hundreds of people were sacked from their jobs with no explanations, and many of these are now receiving damages for loss of livelihood, etc. It was a routine procedure to submit any job applications for jobs in state-run organisations to IB. One of the most notorious cases was a carpenter who couldn't work at the Karlskrona Maritime Museum because he'd been a Communist in his youth. When pressed, the Social Democrats actively defended their actions - they claimed that it was absolutely essential for military intelligence to know who the Communists were, so that they could be interned in case of invasion from the East. So … being a liberal and being an anti-communist at the same time is, I would say, the rule, rather than the exception, at least in Europe.

I've just read that Colonel David Hackworth has just died of cancer. I have a lot of time for the views he's published about the futility of the Vietnam War. However, I've only really read his journalism … so perhaps I've got the wrong end of the stick.

Funny you should mention this, Graham. We're in the active stages of planning the use of podcasts on one of our courses in the autumn. I'm also participating in a Marratech meeting about podcasting and related phenomena on 1st June at 4.00 pm CET (in English). If anyone else wants to join, get in touch and I'll let you know what you have to do. I've been cooperating with Dr Bryan Carter from Central Missouri State University for a while now. Last spring we started a Composition Course partnership scheme for students of his in USA and students of mine here in Sweden (interesting seeing what problems native speakers have expressing themselves in writing). This spring we've been running a team blog on the subject of Race, Gender and Culture in the USA … and now we're moving on to audio. Podcasting, by the way, is a sort of 'broadcasting on the web', where you use some free software to identify and download the latest .mp3 file which the podcaster has placed on the podcasting server. There basically isn't any limit on size - most of the ones I listen to are around 30 minutes. When you've downloaded the .mp3 file, you can either listen to it directly on your computer or transfer it to your .mp3 player (or iPod … hence 'podcasting') and listen to it at your leisure. Then there's audioblogging, which is like a text-based blog (web log, or collection of shorter or longer thoughts on the web), except that the inputs are in the form of speech, rather than writing. Audioblog inputs can be uploaded as sound files, recorded directly onto the audioblog's host server using their software tool, or phoned in (at the moment to a number in USA) from an ordinary telephone. They're limited to a maximum of 5 minutes. Finally, there's Internet radio, which involves making more sophisticated programmes available over the web, which can be listened to directly from a web browser (rather than downloaded and played on iTunes or Windows Media Player). The logistical problem with podcasting is storage. Ordinary speech uses about 1Mb per minute, but the size of the files jumps dramatically as soon as you have music involved. (There are lots of potential copyright problems with music too …). Actually producing the sound files is fairly easy (I've got both Sound Studio and Apple's Garage Band, on which I can record high-quality spoken sound files even using the built-in microphone on my Mac). The pedagogical questions for me are all about what kinds of sounds do you want to make available, when, why and how. What we're looking at in the autumn is a podcast called "The Bryan and David Academic Writing Course", which will be a series of 10 mini-lectures about how to organise your ideas and then get them down on paper. We could, of course, just record them all in advance and circulate them on CD … but would the students actually listen to them? We think that you can introduce a much better sense of dynamism if the students get a new 'programme' each week. We're going to suggest that the students themselves should use audioblogging for making their own inputs, and Internet radio for the more ambitious projects. Bryan's thinking of using the production of Internet radio programmes part of the assessment for his students on one of the courses we collaborate on in the autumn. One of the things we think we'll gain from podcasting is ease of distribution. At the moment, the distribution of sound files (such as recorded lectures, conversations about books, etc) is a pain. We've got a networked of extremely well-equipped study centres in Sweden, so they provide us with a technical threshold - i.e. the students don't need to be masters of the medium, because the study centre technicians are. Active student participation is going to be more and more important. However, we've already got a lot of tools at our disposal (Marratech, studio video conferences … and the humble telephone). One of the key issues in student production is the integrity of the person making the sound inputs. You put yourself in an exposed position when you dare to speak a foreign language in front of your peers, so we still think that it's better that student production should by default take place in a more controlled environment (i.e. one where there can be fairly instant feedback and support). However, this situation changes the more cohesive the group becomes and the more confident the group members become. We're in the process of setting up a podcasting server here in Kalmar, which will be restricted to fairly simple sound files from the start (Bryan's full of ideas for a Quicktime server … but I think we need to walk before we can run). There'll also probably be an article in it somewhere (Bryan works in a system where you have to keep publishing in order to keep your job). If anyone's got any hints and tips, or would like to take a closer look at what we're up to, then feel free to get in touch directly. I'll be monitoring this thread too … and you're welcome to take part on 1st June.

Two days ago, Swedish TV did a report on the situation in Uzbekhistan, one of the new client states of the USA in central Asia. The photos of the corpses of people who'd spoken out against the regime were sickening - the favoured method of torture there is to pull out all the finger nails and then immerse the victim up to his chest in boiling water, and keep him there till he dies. The former British ambassador spoke out against these practices … and was disciplined and dismissed by the British government. The US government have kept almost total silence about the situation (Uzbekhistan allowed the Americans to open a huge airbase there, and the country is one of the ones to which people are sent to be tortured). The former British ambassador did visit and interview one of the only dissidents brave enough to speak openly to foreigners. As the ambassador left, the corpse of the grandson of the dissident was found on the doorstep. He'd been horribly tortured to death. One of the reasons for the moral collapse of the USA, at least as seen by people outside the country is that countries like Uzbekhistan are favoured allies of the USA. Until they put their own house in order, no-one is going to take American assurances of being the good guys as anything other than lies.

I like Kurt Vonnegut's idea from Slaughterhouse Five. The aliens travel back in time to the time of the Crucifixion in order to try to understand how a message of love ended up justifying so much killing. They worked out what was wrong. The mob had killed this rather ordinary man, and then afterwards they'd found out that he was really the Son of God. 'Crucified the wrong man there, didn't you' was the message. However, this message has a friend: if we killed the wrong man this time, there must be plenty of 'right men' to crucify, so we just have to be more careful who we pick next time. The aliens suggested that men change the story a little. In the revised version the mob crucified a bum … and then God told them that, from now on, he'd decided to see this bum as his Son. And that you'd better watch out - any time you turn on a bum, I might make him my Son too, so don't crucify the weak and helpless! --------- I've read a few bits of the Koran in my time (I've lived in several Muslim countries), and a lot of the statements of the prophet Mohammed (PBUH) read this way to me. "You must pay the labourer before the sweat on his brow has dried", for example. Why have a commandment like that if people were already doing it? A lot of the dietary requirements make sense, if you look at the context of the Red Sea region, too - just about everything local that Muslims are not allowed to eat happens to be poisonous, like just about all the amphibians along the coast of the Hejaz (the region the Two Holy Mosques are in).

I studied a comparative course in US and Soviet politics and society at university in the 1970s. The fascinating aspect for me were all the points of similarity between the USA and Soviet Union (I think mainly because of their size) - we already knew about the points of difference! On a parallel course in political theory, one of our lecturers used Watership Down's General Woundwort as an illustration. Woundwort refused to expand the size of his warren, because he knew that the greater the geographical area you have responsibility for, the harder it is for you to control it. In my view, this was exactly where the Soviet Union was. Every invasion of Russia since the Mongols had come from the West, and Russia had been obsessed with creating a buffer zone between the aggressive European powers and the heartland of Russia. The statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg says it all - he's got his fist raised towards the West and his foot firmly on the body of the Swedish snake! (You might not be aware that St Petersburg was actually a Swedish fortress, built as a forward base to keep Russia under control …) But look how hard it was to keep even a supine satellite like East Germany under control. The idea that the Soviets were just panting to add to their problems by invading Germany and Holland just lacks credibility for me. I think that one problem was the relative ignorance of geography and history among a lot of Americans. I remember seeing a 'proof' of Finland's secret alliance with the Soviet Union produced by one of Nixon's hawks. It showed the railway system of Finland, which was supposed to have been designed to facilitate the transit of Soviet troops. There were just two problems: 1) the only East-West line had been built by the German Army to facilitate the invasion of Russia (!) - all the rest ran, as you'd expect, to the capital city, Helsinki, which is in south-east Finland; and 2) the Soviets tried twice to subjugate Finland by force, and failed because of the stiff resistance of the Finns. Nuclear weapons don't work so well on countries which don't have lots of major centres of population. As in Europe … so in Asia.

I'm a great believer in the cock-up theory of history. I wonder what would have happened if it hadn't been an understrength unit of the British Indian Army which arrived to receive the Japanese surrender in Vietnam in 1945. The British, perhaps understandably, didn't want to hand over control of a colony to the colonial subjects, led by the Viet Minh, which was led by a certain Ho Chi Minh, a client of the OSS (later CIA). It would have set a terribly undesirable precedent in all the other colonies (a lot of which were British). Re-arming the Japanese, though, was bound to play badly in Vietnam. I witnessed the aftermath of what I see as a very similar situation when I was in Angola in 1985. When the Portuguese dictatorship suddenly collapsed in 1974, the Portuguese colonies in Africa suddenly became independent. Angola was, and is, an incredibly rich country, but, rather typically, the USA had been backing a playboy, Holden Roberto, who was suddenly faced with the choice between giving up the high life in Europe (funded by US dollars, provided he made the occasional obligatory statement about anti-Communism) and returning to rough it out in a very backward former colony. (The departing Portuguese had done everything they could to sabotage the country when they left - to the extent of unscrewing the lightbulbs and breaking them.) Unfortunately, in 1975, Gerald Ford was President. The South Africans immediately invaded the country to support their clients, UNITA, and were advancing rapidly up from what is now Namibia. The MPLA, who had been the main force fighting against the Portuguese, turned desperately to the Americans for help … but when Ford asked the CIA, they said that their guy was called Roberto. Castro was the only leader who responded, and the combination of the MPLA and Castro's personal guards (who arrived in Angola with only as much equipment as would fit in transport planes) managed to hold the South Africans 50 kms from Luanda, the capital. When the first ship-borne Cuban units arrived, the Angolans and Cubans together 'whipped the South Africans' asses' all the way back to Namibia. When I was there, the Cubans were finally withdrawing from the country. If you read the newspapers in Europe or the USA, you'd think that they were horrible oppressors, who the Angolans would be glad to see the back of. They were actually heroes to the Angolans. I was living in a small village outside Luanda, and I remember a Cuban convoy coming through and all the local people breaking into singing and dancing - without any involvement of party cadres. I had dark hair and a moustache then, and whenever I went out, I'd be surrounded by adults and children wanting to shake my hand, and calling my 'Camarado Cubano', and shouting 'Primo' (the Cuban military term for 'buddy' - which the Angolans had heard time and again on the battlefield). The only thing anyone ever begged from me was empty cans - and it was the children who wanted to make them into fantastic toys to play with. Angola became a military dictatorship backed by the Communists only because everyone else turned their backs on the country. They really didn't like the Communists either. The Russians in Angola hated Swedish involvement because Sweden was teaching the Angolans about fisheries protection, whilst it suited the Soviet Union that Angola had no knowledge of marine biology and no patrol vessels, because the Angolans were being made to pay for military supplies with fish. If you can't tell whether there are 50 or 500 Russian trawlers over the horizon, you've got no way of knowing whether your comrades are screwing you. This is more or less what I think happened to Vietnam too …

The key period for me was 1979-1980, when the bottom was removed from the British economy by Mrs Thatcher's incoming government. When jobs were so scarce that you'd routinely get hundreds of applicants for each post, you could no longer, as a teacher, run the argument "keep your nose clean and you'll pass your exams and get a job". Getting a job was something that occurred because of random factors outside your control. At the same time, "there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and their families" was the government's official line in just about everything. And then there was the explicit assault on teachers. Now I know teaching's a funny business - everyone's been to school, so everyone knows how to do it properly. Lots of people have at least one unpleasant memory from their time at school (with so many ex-pupils and so many teachers, it'd be strange if it were otherwise). However, my experience from the time was that the general grousing about teachers was raised to the level of an orchestrated government campaign. My take on this was that education represents a large slice of the national economy of any country. It's also a very visible slice. You don't see the tank that costs as much as a secondary school everyday (defence is another very large slice), but lots of people are in regular contact with schools (even people without school-age children have friends, grandchildren, acquaintances, etc who are in contact with schools). Thatcher was looking for a diversion from the attention being paid to the fact that the economic prescription which the Tories had been pushing for decades had been an instant and near-total disaster. It's easy to forget that the Tories were mightily unpopular in 1980-1983, so thank you General Galtieri for invading the Falklands and getting them off the hook. And when you look at the charts of the 'Tory success story', nearly all of them use 1981 as their starting point, rather than 1979 (because nearly a quarter of the British economy went needlessly down the drain between 1979-1981). In those circumstances, it was natural to turn on the teachers. The fact that the Tories had to seriously undermine what had been a reasonably good educational system in the process was just … politics. I'm sure, for example, that there might have been good reasons for introducing the national curriculum, league tables, testing, etc, etc, but the justification from the time that I remember was the absolute necessity of 'controlling' teachers, and wresting the right to make statements about the 'quality' of the education system out of the hands of the universities (who set the GCSE exam papers). This is why the later years of the Thatcher-Major governments regularly featured the August follies, when the Junior Minister would be in one briefing room telling journalists about yet another success in increasing GCSE pass rates, whilst the Minister was in the one next door telling another set of journalists about how the A level boards were diluting standards yet again … to make it look as if more people were getting better grades. And then there was 'Loadsamoney'. You've shafted manufacturing industry and removed the quality controls on private industry one after the other. You haven't got many economic sectors left which are going to give you the illusion of a functioning economy. Loadsamoney was a plumber, if I remember right, and one of the first things Thatcher's first government did was to cripple industrial training and the apprentice system. At the same time, council houses were privatised, but the need for maintenance still existed. I don't know what the situation in the UK is like now, but one of the major problems for householders in the early 1980s was just finding someone who knew how to repair the roof, or fix the pipes. You could earn much more than a teacher earned by setting up as an entrepreneurial fixer, and there was such demand for the service that you didn't actually need to know much about what you were doing. So why waste your time getting an education or training? So … my bottom line is that you can't blame teachers or pupils for the disregard so many pupils and their parents have for schools and education. The problem now is knowing what to do about it. My oldest daughter is 13 now, and is the kind of kid who does well at school (she's inherited my ability to remember meaningless factual information!). I'm so glad, though, that we made the decision not to return to the UK when she was 5. She's just taken the first of the (advisory) tests in core subjects at school … and those are the only tests she'll take, apart from the ones teachers set her. I'm so glad she didn't have to go through the testing regime that exists in schools in England.

One thing I've noticed about what people in Britain seem to know about history is that they seem to be very focussed on the UK itself, without paying much attention to how British history has been affected by the history of other countries. For example, I've just read a biography of Charles X of Sweden (famous here for the Treaty of Roskilde which wrested a lot of what is modern Sweden from the rule of the Danes). Now I didn't know that Oliver Cromwell sent a fleet to aid in the siege of Copenhagen by the Swedes, but which refused to take part on the grounds that Cromwell only wanted to fight Catholics, not fellow Protestants (like both of the belligerent parties). Imagine how different the recent history of the UK would have been if Atlee and later Churchill had decided to support the development of what was to become the Common Market right from the start, instead of trying to create a spurious 'special relationship' with the Americans.

Det var ett intressant möte med 17 deltagare från olika håll i Sverige. Indien är tydligen en expansiv marknad för högre utbildning, och det är fler där som vill ha kontakt med Sverige. Hör av er till mig om ni vill ha en längre referat av mötet. Nästa möte blir på 13/5 då Johnny Widén från Luleå tekniska universitetet pratar om synkrona nätbaserade möten (han har nyss varit inblandad i en stor enkät/undersökning om ämnet).

This is an extract from a recent report on net-based examination (the extract isby David Hamilton of Umeå University), and I think it has some relevance to the over-tested UK school system: "A new horizon in examinations began to take shape in the 1980s, when a researcher in the USA, Samuel Messick, drew [attention] to the consequences of examination practices. In economics this is known as Goodhart’s law – that every measure which becomes the focus of attention becomes a bad measure. This idea is widely understood in the human, social and medical sciences – that all research on humans beings has social side-effects which may be counter-productive. "One international consequence of Messick's work has been a tendency to separate assessment as a social and ethical practice from testing as a measurement practice. This divergence can be seen in Umeå university where Pedagogiska mätningar [pedagogical measurement] - a unit in Pedagogik [pedagogics] - has now been transformed into beteendevetenskapliga mätningar [behavioural science measurement]. "Another divergence between these two views is that measurement is seen as an objective process where, as it were, the investigator stands back from the subject who, in turn, is put under the microscope. Assessment, on the other hand, is a close-up practice, something where the investigator interferes in the measurement activity, with the conscious goal of changing the outcomes. "One of the current problems in higher education is that test developers start out ‘with the intention of making the important measurable’, but end up ‘making the measurable important’ (Wiliam, 2000, p. 1). Or, as another commentator, Laura Hamilton has pointed out, current practices may cloud teachers’ ability to ‘distinguish between ethical and unethical practices’ (Hamilton, 2003, p. 36). And Lorrie Shepard, a former President of the American Educational Research Association, identified this problem by revising an acronym widely used in ICT: ‘WYTIWYG’, she suggests, means ‘What You Test Is What You Get’ (Shepard, 2001, p. 1082). "Not surprisingly, teachers are confused. What are they supposed to be doing? My own [research is] suggesting is that they are struggling with the difference between the new learning and the old learning. The new learning is learning whose outcomes, processes and methods are deemed appropriate to the learning/information society and whose practices are endorsed by contemporary psychological and educational theory. The old learning was much more influenced by the concerns that marked testing in the early part of the 1900s. That is, it was based on a quantitative model of learning. Thus the difference between an ‘A-kurs’ [first term] and a ‘B-kurs’ [second term] is that students have more knowledge that can be quantified. The new learning is more of a qualitative model, where the difference between and ‘A-kurs’ and a ‘B-kurs’ is that students learn differently." -------- In my experience, you're bound for trouble in education whenever you "make the measurable important".

I also trained in rough schools in South-East London (did my teacher training at Goldsmiths' in 1976-1977). I remember having to search 11-year olds for weapons - and always finding some. When I started teaching as a qualified teacher it was at Dartford Technical High School for Boys. In my opinion, and at that time, the management of the school was chaotic. A weak headmaster had basically allowed the senior teachers to 'run' the school … but their contribution was largely to create a draconian set of school rules, and then sit around in the staffroom bemoaning the fact that they weren't kept to. My first year was a trial … but there were enough colleagues who gave me informal back-up that I stuck with it. By the end of my third year, tricks like starting my first year of teaching's 'First Formers' (11 year olds) getting used being called by the first names, rather than their surnames, had seen to it that my classes generally behaved themselves, so that I could teach them. However, that was in the days before the National Curriculum and before the micro-control of teachers' hours. We were basically expected to do what was necessary to create a good learning environment, so we put in the hours to run clubs, put on school plays, take the kids on outings, make sure that the sports events worked well, etc, without either having to account for them or being paid for them! There was, of course, a national curriculum, as there is now - it was called the CSE and O and A level syllabus! However, the fact that I had fairly free hands to get my pupils to where they needed to go meant that I had a great deal of flexibility, which I don't think I'd have now. And, although I put in lots of hours organising extra-curricular activities, the bureaucracy I had to deal with during working hours consisted of marking the register … writing a report on each kid at the end of the school year (a couple of sentences each) … er, and that was about it. I had, of course, lessons to plan and tests to set and mark, but I also had the freedom to make those activities part of the pedagogical development of the kids and of myself. I remember once, as a form teacher, having to deal with a situation where my 15 year-olds had been giving one of the science teachers a hard time. He had been a wonderful teacher in his day, but now he was old, and had a heart condition. This being Kent he received no help from the county, so he'd come back to school at the beginning of each term, try to work for three weeks and then be signed off sick until the beginning of the next term. His brother had just died of a heart attack and he had three years to go before he could retire. What struck me there was that if you create an atmosphere of compulsion (for example by making a legal requirement for 15 year olds to attend school every day), then the only people with any real power to improve the working situation are the teachers (and their managers), since they're the ones with the power to actually change the working environment actively. What I told my class was that they had plenty of power to screw things up, but that that was a pretty pointless activity for them, even in the short run. However, the only way we could actively make their science lessons better was for the teacher to lead the changes … and that he couldn't do. And I didn't have the heart to try to make him do it. I remember attending union meetings where the more conservative members would try to push the line that teachers should be 'professionals' (i.e. not complain about the cuts that Maggie was already making). I heartily agreed with them, and asked them what the professional behaviour of a surgeon should be if she were asked to operate in an unhygienic theatre with an unsterilised kitchen knife instead of a scalpel as a routine - to carry on, or to refuse? So why did we teachers carry on in a situation where our lords and masters were asking us to go against our professional judgement every working day?

Det blir imorgon, 29/4, kl. 13-14! Om någon vill vara med, så maila till mig direkt, och jag beskriver hur. Jag fick även den här sammanfattningen från Per W.: Summary: India with a population of just over one billion spread over a large continent made up of 28 states is in very great need of higher education for its future development. From the time of its declaration of independence in 1947, India has seen its higher education grow at a rapid rate. During 2004 approximately eleven million students were participating in the higher education system and about 20 per cent of these are distance students. India has had long experience of distance education, which is now at a high competence level. Distance education is an important tool for providing education to many at a low cost. Thanks to the efforts put into distance education in India, it has been possible to recruit new groups to participate in higher education. India has the largest university in the world, the Indira Gandhi Open University (IGNOU) with 1.2 million students (2004). This university has been an important motor and coordinating power for the development of distance education in India. IGNOU produces educational material for its own courses and study programmes, but other universities also use this material. Wide-band expansion is very limited. The percentage of Indian households that either have computers or access to computers is very low. These two factors have a limiting effect and because of this the major part of distance education is in the form of modern correspondence courses where the material is distributed to the students via letters, CD-ROM and such like. There is an expanded network of study centres that are equipped with computers and videoconference equipment. Lectures, training programmes and study guidance are also given at these study centres. Many lectures are broadcast to study centres via wide band from various studios in India. Because of the poor expansion of wide band, lectures are also mediated with the help of satellite transmission. The Indian universities and companies engaged in the educational sector, which we visited, are extremely interested in establishing educational activities in Europe, including the Nordic countries. They are also very open for collaboration with European universities. Powerfully developed is the cooperation between the Indian universities, research institutes and industry. Companies participate in various educational programmes with qualifi ed experts, trainee posts, assistance with degree preparations, etc. Many Indian universities provide extensive skills development for industry. There are also examples of companies given the opportunity to open a university. If Sweden is to work for increasing the number of foreign students, there must be a comprehensively improved marketing of the education and research provided by Swedish universities and university colleges. To attract high performance students from abroad, Swedish institutes of higher education must be seen to be international. Our view is that the Swedish universities and university colleges need support and assistance in order to be able to successfully market and sell higher education courses on the global educational market. Such a support would be to have strategic alliances with either foreign universities or major educational companies who are already in this market. Throughout our journey in India, we met both universities and educational companies who have been successful actors for many years on the international market and who are very interested in a cooperation.

The key piece for me in Roger Graef's article is: Sylvia and others see the deadening of teaching itself as a central cause. They cite centrally prescribed lesson plans and formatted classes, curriculum and content as so restrictive that the excitement of learning and following threads is eradicated - along with the teacher's authority and sense of value. Is that what education has come to? That just about sums up why I wouldn't go back to teaching in the UK. I've just been doing an in-service training day for teachers in Sweden called "Is teaching and art or a science?" My thesis is that teachers and learners are much more like artists than scientists, and that learning empirically has to come before reasoning about what has been learned rationally. However, I prefaced my remarks by saying that this wasn't a comparison between Britain and Sweden - in my view Britain abandoned trying to get pupils to learn empirically when the National Curriculum was introduced.