David Richardson

My own picture is of the man who personified the decline of US power, strangely enough. His administration changed the USA from being the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor, adopting policies which accelerated the trend towards unequal distribution of wealth in the USA at a time when this trend could have been reversed. I remember the arming and training of anti-Soviet guerillas in Afghanistan, one of them Osama bin Laden, and the illegalities connected with the anti-Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. The Cold War ended at the end of Reagan's 'watch' … but I wonder if the subsequent destruction of Russian society could have been avoided if a slightly more competent US administration had been around to help with its transition. Am I being too negative?

Good idea - I was a bit quick of the mark.

I've just read of the death of ex-President Ronald Reagan. I wonder what his place in history will be … My own picture is the man who personified the decline of US power, strangely enough. His administration changed the USA from being the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor, adopting policies which accelerated the trend towards unequal distribution of wealth in the USA at a time when this trend could have been reversed. I remember the arming and training of anti-Soviet guerillas in Afghanistan, one of them Osama bin Laden, and the illegalities connected with the anti-Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. The Cold War ended at the end of Reagan's 'watch' … but I wonder if the subsequent destruction of Russian society could have been avoided if a slightly more competent US administration had been around to help with its transition. Am I being too negative?

I used to go to Peckham Manor Boys' School once a week to help out with a drama lesson when I was a teacher trainee at Goldsmiths'. The class teacher I worked for was in his fourth year of teaching. His first three years had been as a Latin teacher at a posh private school in Sidcup … but he was one of the best teachers I have ever come across. What made him special was that he cared about the kids he taught - despite the fact that an objective observer would have called them ineducable hooligans. (I remember having to search 11 year-olds for weapons before they could go into class - and we always found some). This was in 1976, by the way. You could see that the greatest problem the school, the teachers and the pupils faced was the desperate poverty and inequality of the society in which they existed. It seems to me that Britain has spent the years since then officially denying that this was the case, since acknowledging the problem places some obligation on you to at least try to do something about it. My interpretation of the National Curriculum, league tables, goals, targets, checklists, etc is just that they're all an elaborate attempt to escape from reality … and reality will catch up, sooner or later.

I really like the long-distance music lessons! I'm also a fan of iChatAV - I've used it to talk to classes of students in the USA from Sweden, for example. The quality is much higher than anything else I've seen, and it's such a shame that Windows users don't seem to have anything comparable available (please correct me if I'm wrong …). There are two things that iChat hasn't got that we need sometimes: the ability to do multi-point conferences and the whiteboard. Your experiences reinforce a point I make all the time to my campus-based colleagues: desktop video conferencing is a way of bringing experiences and expertise into a classroom which you wouldn't otherwise have access to.

I'm sure you'll just love this story I read in today's New Scientist about Microsoft managing to *patent* the double-click on PDAs: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99995072

Here's a very specific suggestion about what the European module of such an international curriculum could contain: At the very end of the First World War there were two phenomena which profoundly affected everyone's lives: the epidemic of Spanish flu and the widespread political agitation resulting in such diverse events as tanks in the streets in Glasgow and bread riots in Stockholm. I'm not a historian, but we hardly even touched on these when I did 20th century History at school. I'd like an international history curriculum to look at some of these 'hidden' events and encourage pupils to look at the degree to which you can draw parallels between them and the degree to which you can't … and at the way that events which are apparently unrelated to wider political themes may have effects on them (more people died of Spanish flu in Europe than were killed in the war - how did that affect demographics in the 1920s?).

I've just seen the trailer for Michael Moore's new film, Fahrenheit 911 on the film web site: http://www.fahrenheit911.com/ Now the fact that I haven't seen the film itself inhibits me from having too many opinions about it, but I thought I'd ask the question: what do you think about Michael Moore? Is his film full of half-truths and lies? If so, what are they? Does he tell the truth? And what impact will that have?

Mike's post about keeping alive in Vietnam reminds me of my grandad's experiences as a soldier. He lied about his age and enlisted in the Royal Enniskillen Fusiliers in 1912 to escape from the poverty of northern England and was sent straight out to China to fight the Boxers. By 1914 he was in India, and was shipped to Gallipoli in 1915. After that, his regiment fought in just about every major battle on the Western Front (well … it was an Irish regiment, wasn't it, so it just happened to find itself on the front line all the time). His war ended when he went on leave (he was wounded in the leg) in April 1918, arriving in Folkestone on the next boat in after the mutiny started (not many people are aware that the British Army mutinied in Folkestone after the April 1918 German offensive). The MPs were trying to isolate the mutineers, so they pushed the soldiers arriving from France on to the first available trains. My grandad ended up in Sheffield, and by the time the chaos had settled, the war was almost over, so he was told to stay where he was. My grandad started the war as a private and ended as a sergeant. He hated Earl Haig all his life for the unconscionable loss of life his tactics caused, and refused ever to wear a poppy on Remembrance Day. His own feeling was that World War 1 lasted as long as it did because it took all that time for the stupid officer corps to be wiped out, so that the ordinary soldiers could get on with fighting it properly!

The experience from Sweden certainly tends to back up what you say. As soon as children with Arabic or Somali as a first language began receiving Maths and Science lessons in their first language, their test results improved greatly. However, the problem people here face is the question of which language is to be the first language, Swedish or the native tongue of the parents? Recent research here suggests that children's peers are at least as great an influence on them as their parents. This is why the children I used to teach in Bradford, whose parents had come from India and Pakistan, grew up speaking English with a broad Yorkshire accent (as well as the languages of their parents, although I'm not qualified to say whether they had an 'English' accent in those languages). Perhaps the problem with faith-based schools in the UK is precisely that they run the risk of reducing the diversity of the pupils' experiences. The equivalent in Sweden is the schools in areas where there are very large numbers of children who don't come from a traditional Swedish background. There is a certain amount of evidence that those children end up speaking two 'half-languages', since the amount of linguistic diversity in each of their languages isn't enough for them to develop any of them fully. What I mean by this is that we all learn to speak our native languages from a wide variety of sources (as well as our peers). If you grow up never having heard baby-talk in Swedish, but only 'teacher-talk', then your Swedish will lack something. Similarly, if you've only ever spoken Serbian to people in your home and to other teenagers, you're likely to be missing other dimensions (such as the Serbian you might need in order to apply for a driving licence).

Mike, this is more or less the situation I find myself in when I'm teaching Swedish students about the constitution of the United States. I have to make it very clear that there are underlying strengths in the US system of government, as well as the weaknesses which have manifested themselves since Bush Jr came to power. Part of the problem seems to be that the checks and balances haven't worked very well (since the Supreme Court was too partisan in 2000, Congress failed in its constitutional duty to hold the Executive Branch sufficiently to account, etc). However, this doesn't mean that the whole system is fundamentally and intrinsically flawed - I'm sure that there'll be another period where the balance swings back fairly soon. BTW, I don't think you'll find any *supporters* of Saddam Hussein in the rest of the world - what we opposed was the headlong rush to war, in defiance of international law (on the same grounds that we opposed Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990). Bear in mind too that this happened at the end of a sequence which included the sudden rejection of the Kyoto Agreement and the extreme pressure the USA put on weaker countries to sign unilateral treaties which were designed to neuter the International Criminal Court. There was a surreal situation a couple of years ago when Serbia was being *simultaneously* pressured to extradite Serbians accused of war crimes to the Hague *and* sign a treaty to prevent any American, ever, on any grounds being sent the same way. No wonder we found the Bushies a bit much to take.

I think both Derek and Maggie have hit the nail on the head. I think it depends whether you see schools as being filled with atomised individuals, each of whom has total control over their own behaviour (and can thus be rewarded or punished for individual acts) or whether you see schools as being communities fulfilling a social role, where the individuals within the schools are all contributing to that social role - for better or for worse! And of course these 'individuals' are teachers, parents, ancillary staff, pupils and 'members of the public'. If you have the former point of view, then the way out of bad behaviour is carrots and sticks. If the latter, then you have to start acting as a community to make the community work. For myself, I see plenty of anecdotal evidence for the latter point of view … but the UK has had over two decades of propaganda for the former!

Just to add something from Aftonbladet (the main Swedish Social-Democratic evening tabloid … and also the highest-circulation paper in the country): It now looks as if more people in Sweden are actually going to vote than ever in a European election, which probably means that the anti-EU vote is going to be stronger than ever (though I could be wrong). The turnout will probably still be fairly small, compared with Swedish elections (53% as against 80+%), but there's a stirring of interest. What gets to people here is the perceived right-wing, neo-liberal nature of the European Union. It's taken Sweden a long time to make the transition from the basket-case of Europe (in the early years of the last century, when the country lost 25% of its population to emigration in a generation) to one of the most successful, and it didn't happen by adopting Thatcherite policies. What people also see is that the Swedish economy is performing better than that of Europe as a whole (and has been doing that for some time), and that Sweden stands to lose rather than gain from closer ties to the EU. If there was a general election today, the socialist block would regain power quite easily, if the opinion polls are anything to go by. So … if the EU can't win over a basically internationalist country like Sweden, what long-term hope has it really got?

I was at a conference on Learning Styles addressed by Dr Rita Dunn a couple of years ago. She gave us an account of some on-going research her team was doing with children diagnosed as having ADHD. They didn't start their research until they had enough subjects who had a medical diagnosis of ADHD (mostly via brain scans), and the preliminary results (which was all they had at the time of the conference) were quite interesting. For one thing, the diurnal rhythm of the kids in questions was such that most of them didn't start really functioning until around 4.00 pm. They also needed subdued lighting and a very ordered environment. A couple of years later I listened to a member of a Swedish support team describing the environment they had worked out was best for kids with a severe condition. Their recommendation was a cubicle, where you gave the kid one question/sentence/problem at a time. When the kid was finished with it, you put it on the wall behind the kid, out of his or her line of sight. At the end of the day, he or she would be amazed at how much had been done … but if you gave the same number of problems to the kid on one piece of paper, the result would be total mental paralysis. If this is the way things are, you can see why conventional school systems have such a problem with kids with ADHD. I don't know how far Dr Dunn's team got with their research, but their web site is at: http://www.learningstyles.net/

Thanks for a sample of your experiences. I remember talking to someone who was in the Special Boat Squadron, just before I went to work in Kuwait in 1983. He started talking about the way British forces had repelled the Iraqi invasion of 1961 … and I hadn't even heard that there'd been a war there then! I wonder if the 'answer' for the US in Vietnam was a bit more bombing or a bit more torture of suspects to get information, though. It strikes me that you were up against nationalism, a force which would have resurrected itself no matter what military victories you achieved. At the same time, you were up against the contradiction which, in my opinion, lies at the heart of any intervention into a foreign country in order to impose 'democracy'. Your leaders of the time found themselves in all sorts of entanglements with unsavoury local, regional and international characters, and these entanglements made it impossible for you to counter the appeal to nationalism which was all the North Vietnamese had to make. I can really understand why the Founding Fathers didn't want the fledgling USA to become involve in foreign entanglements! A film I recommended my friends to watch in the run-up to the recent invasion of Iraq was The Three Kings (George Clooney as criminally-minded US soldier after the first war with Iraq). The film itself is a bit of a pot-boiler, in my opinion, but the scenes at the beginnning of the film were really instructive. Three Americans roll into a small Iraqi town just across the border and come across two guys in uniform beating up someone in civilian clothes. The Americans intervene to save the 'victim' … and it turns out that the guys in uniform are the pro-American resistance, and the 'victim' was the local Baathist security chief. Later they come across an Iraqi in western clothes in an underground bunker who speaks fluent American and is really personable. Later on the same Iraqi manages to capture one of the Americans and starts torturing him. He'd learned the techniques from the Americans. Pity the poor bloody footsoldier in a mess like that! But pity perhaps even more the millions of civilians who get caught up in it all!

No, it was Dartford Technical High School for Boys - a survivor from the original three-tier system. I left there in 1980, though, so I'm sure the education system in north-west Kent has been through a few changes since then. I found the area fascinating from the point of view of educational history: it seemed like Kent never abolished anything, but just added whatever new type of school was created to the existing ones. When I worked at Dartford Technical High School, it shared a headmaster and school buildings with Wilmington Comprehensive, for example, which was a very odd arrangement, to say the least.

I remember my first lesson as a teacher in the total futility of corporal punishment in schools just after I qualified. I had a lot of rough lads to teach (at a boys' school in Dartford), and they did the usual thing of trying to wind the new teachers up, so there was quite a lot of noise in my classroom, especially in the first year. One day I sent one of the ringleaders down to the Deputy Head for what I thought would be a talking to. He came back wringing his hand … but having received punishment which was much less severe than his dad meted out to him with his boots and belt almost every night. So … I'd used my 'nuclear weapon' and it turned out to be almost a damp squib. But then I had to co-exist with the class for almost nine more months. To say that I had ruined my chance of any kind of working relationship with the class was an understatement.

It's strange the effect Sweden has on people! People coming from the outside often see the place in quite a different light than people on the inside. One of the things which struck me when I first came here was that many of the issues people had been fighting for for years in countries like the UK, such as universal child care, a properly functioning welfare state, etc, were banalities in Sweden. I.e. they'd been around so long that Swedes didn't even realise that there were countries without them. You'd think that that would mean that Sweden was some kind of utopia, but in my opinion it just meant that the playing field had been levelled somewhat and that we were at the *beginning* of the debate about how society should be run, rather than at the end of it. Look at this thread about the connection between state-sanctioned physical and mental violence in schools and other forms of the abuse of children. The way I see it, the absence of the former is no guarantee for the absence of the latter. However, that absence makes the discussion of the latter much clearer and less fraught with hypocrisy. Child abuse exists in Sweden, of course. The Swedish police arrested 118 people this week for buying child pornography on the Internet. The way the tabloids have handled the story, though, is quite different from the way similar stories are handled in the UK, for example. There's been a lot of discussion of the fact that pedophiles have often been abused themselves as children … and of the connection between power and pedophilia (one of the people arrested was a high-ranking police officer in Stockholm). One of the people arrested committed suicide when he was released 'on bail' and that prompted a discussion of the responsibility the authorities have of treating people arrested for child abuse humanely, and with due regard for their mental state. Nobody, of course, treats child abuse lightly - it's just that when you treat it seriously, you have to start looking at the causes, and a lot of other related factors too, such as the finances of child pornographers (the Swedish suspects had all paid via credit card on the Internet). I would argue that the absence of state-sanctioned child abuse in schools has helped to make this particular debate a little more mature in Sweden.

Nice one, Maggie! I reckon there's a job for you as an advisor next time the wind blows in a different direction and what is now 'in' becomes the new 'out'! Thanks anyway for a very refreshing translation!

Yes, the web site was really interesting. I started teaching as an assistant teacher in Bradford in 1972 and had a shock (of course) at seeing how easy it was to slip in to the behavioural norms of an establishment. In those days you were allowed to (almost encouraged to) give the 5 year olds a slap if they were 'naughty' … and, of course, I found myself slapping the kids as much as any of the other teachers did. After a while, though, I noticed (of course) that the kids were 'naughty' mostly as a result of our failures to plan the way we taught them and organise the activities properly. When we slapped we were just covering up for our own inadequacies. So I can well believe that an environment which permits physical punishment of children can cover up a multitude of other sins. When, however, you find yourself in a situation where physical violence of any sort is totally forbidden, you also find yourself having to take an adult role - which is often much more difficult than resorting to the same kind of behaviour the kids are showing. Of course it makes demands on you, but aren't we teachers supposed to be able to meet demands like that?

I think you're stretching things a bit too far to establish a link between corporal punishment and what happened and is happening in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay. Unfortunately, the famous experiment with the actors and the subjects who thought they were causing the actors pain shows me that you can actually induce nearly everyone to commit unlawful and disgusting acts with a bit of group pressure. I once worked with an ex-Uruguayan on a project in Angola. Raul had been in the Tupamaro guerrillas in Uruguay and was tortured there by the military after the coup in the early 1970s. He was sprung by the Swedish branch of Amnesty International, which is how I came to have the chance to work with him. Uruguay had been a democratic country before the coup, and most of the population lived in the urban centres around Montevideo. So where did the army find the torturers? The commanders were all trained by the Americans, but the foot soldiers came from the rural areas. They were told that the prisoners they were torturing were child rapists and perverts, not left-wing politicos … There are plenty of reasons for being against corporal punishment other than that it could lead to torture. Sweden made it a criminal offence to physically strike or even manhandle children - even by their parents - more than 30 years ago. Guess what - society didn't fall apart! Sweden is a lot more violent now than it was, though, but my conclusion is that that development started when Sweden de-regulated TV transmissions, allowing on to the screens a vast amount of US TV screen violence.

I've been re-reading the inputs in this thread in the light of the events of the last month, and in particular of Bush's speech yesterday and the draft UN resolution. What struck me about Bush's speech and the UN resolution were a continuing unwillingness to face up to the situation on the ground. The coalition forces are mightily unpopular, as is the Iraqi Governing Council … so why should they become popular after 30th June? At the same time, there seems to be a continuing inability to accept that the US has done anything wrong. On the other hand, there has been one major shift in US policy at a local level: the handing over of Falluja to Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard. This seems to have resulted in a quiet month … but the US doesn't seem to have achieved any of its stated goals, such as the handing over of arms, the arrest of resistance fighters, or the power to jointly patrol the streets of Falluja. However, this development has its ominous side too. The Shia and the Kurds are extremely unhappy about the speed with which the US caved in, and it now seems that the 'Falluja solution' is just making it more difficult, rather than less, to identify any pro-American politicians who can take over the whole country after 30th June. At the same time, this ethnic solution will probably make it even more likely that any election in Iraq will result in a split along ethnic lines.

They've been showing the 'fly on the wall' programme about EasyJet here in Sweden recently. It was fascinating seeing how British people react at times of stress (since I haven't lived permanently in the UK since 1989). One reaction I had was that the Brits on the programmes seemed to be incredibly self-centred. There was absolutely no point relying on a sense of social responsibility (e.g. you can't get on the plane because you're so drunk you can't stand and you'd endanger other people), and even physical facts had no effect on many of the passengers (e.g. you didn't turn up on time for your flight, there are no seats on this flight, yet you still want us to bump someone who has turned up on time, so that you can fly). Perhaps this holiday problem is part of the same phenomenon. You're asking parents to put some other values, such as their child's education or minimising disruption to the work of the school, before their immediate gratification of taking a holiday at a time when it's cheaper. I can sympathise with people who're trying to work around the demands of their employers … but surely the only long-term solution is better employment rights, so that employers aren't able to deny people with school-age children the ability to spend time with them when they're free from school?

It isn't common in Sweden. But then again, everyone gets 6 weeks holiday, with the right to take 4 of them in July (which is why Sweden shuts down in July!), so perhaps it isn't so necessary. You can take the kids out of school during school time, but there are some horrendous forms to fill in!

There is a 'saving grace' in educational systems, though. You could call it conservatism, or you could call it inertia. The various 'national curricula' that have come out over the years here have all sounded really nice - it's just that schools have more or less caught up with the one that came out in 1968! The danger comes when states try to micromanage education, as seems to be happening in the UK. However, the micromanagers find that they can't actually achieve their goals - just whatever adaptation and approximation of their goals which teachers are actually prepare to carry out … which leads to new 'initiatives' and 'targets' until the whole process becomes ludicrous. Beneath this, though, there are kids who need to learn things and teachers who teach. Still, it would be nice to be able to teach together with our lords and masters, instead of despite them.