John Simkin
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Posts posted by John Simkin
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Raymond Blair from Ground Academy, Nashville, Tennessee, has produced a webquest on the assassination of JFK material.
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A very simple reply. The tests that you took are significantly flawed, for some of the reasons that you have identified. Just because these tests are poorly designed doesn't invalidate ALL standardized tests. Those that are well designed overcome the problems that you identify.
In my view all such factual recall tests are deeply flawed in that all they test is short-term memory. There is nothing wrong in this as such, for example, they are quite useful if you want to go in for pub quizzes when you leave school. However, they have nothing to do with measuring intelligence or preparing people for life outside the classroom.
This is something teachers and politicians find difficult to grasp. Teachers find it particularly different to understand. There are two main reasons for this. Teachers are invariably successful exam candidates. To attack the exam system is to undermine their own achievements.
Secondly, teachers spend most of their time preparing their students to pass exams. To accept that they are not doing something very important would cause them a severe case of cognitive dissonance. After leaving the classroom Rowena can now see clearly just how ridiculous the system is.
It is only teachers who make use of the skills needed to pass factual recall tests in their jobs. In what other occupations do we have to answer a series of questions while being deprived of reference materials?
Our whole exam system is based on testing short-term memory. The only time in my educational life that ceased to be the case was when I did a research degree at Sussex University. When you reach this level the system finds other ways of testing your understanding of the subject. Only three other people were involved in deciding whether I reached the required standard. As they all had research degrees themselves, the system trusted their judgement.
It would of course be possible to devise an exam system similar to the one used by research students. However, that would involve trusting the judgement of teachers. The government would never allow such a system to be devised. Therefore we have to stick to factual recall tests that makes it easy for the government to compare the performances of students, teachers and schools. It keeps as busy but it has nothing to do with education.
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I have in fact started two threads on David Goodhart’s article:
The Future of the Welfare State
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=436
An article by David Goodhart in the February edition of the Prospect Magazine has caused a great deal of controversy in Britain. The article looks at the future of the welfare state in Britain and other European countries. For example, here is a section that deals with Britain, America, Sweden and Denmark.
The diversity, individualism and mobility that characterise developed economies - especially in the era of globalisation - mean that more of our lives is spent among strangers. Ever since the invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago, humans have been used to dealing with people from beyond their own extended kin groups. The difference now in a developed country such as Britain is that we not only live among stranger citizens but we must share with them. We share public services and parts of our income in the welfare state, we share public spaces in towns and cities where we are squashed together on buses, trains and tubes, and we share in a democratic conversation - filtered by the media - about the collective choices we wish to make. All such acts of sharing are more smoothly and generously negotiated if we can take for granted a limited set of common values and assumptions. But as Britain becomes more diverse that common culture is being eroded.
And therein lies one of the central dilemmas of political life in developed societies: sharing and solidarity can conflict with diversity. This is an especially acute dilemma for progressives who want plenty of both solidarity (high social cohesion and generous welfare paid out of a progressive tax system) and diversity (equal respect for a wide range of peoples, values and ways of life). The tension between the two values is a reminder that serious politics is about trade-offs. It also suggests that the left's recent love affair with diversity may come at the expense of the values and even the people that it once championed.
It was the Conservative politician David Willetts who drew my attention to the "progressive dilemma". Speaking at a roundtable on welfare reform, he said: "The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties that they themselves could face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask: 'Why should I pay for them when they are doing things that I wouldn't do?' This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the United States you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity, but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests."
These words alerted me to how the progressive dilemma lurks beneath many aspects of current politics: national tax and redistribution policies; the asylum and immigration debate; development aid budgets; European Union integration and spending on the poorer southern and east European states; and even the tensions between America (built on political ideals and mass immigration) and Europe (based on nation states with core ethnic-linguistic solidarities)…
In their 2001 Harvard Institute of Economic Research paper "Why Doesn't the US Have a European-style Welfare State?", Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote argue that the answer is that too many people at the bottom of the pile in the US are black or Hispanic. Across the US as a whole, 70% of the population are non-Hispanic whites - but of those in poverty only 46% are non-Hispanic whites. So a disproportionate amount of tax income spent on welfare is going to minorities. The paper also finds that US states that are more ethnically fragmented than average spend less on social services. The authors conclude that Americans think of the poor as members of a different group, whereas Europeans still think of the poor as members of the same group. Robert Putnam, the analyst of social capital, has also found a link between high ethnic mix and low trust in the US. There is some British evidence supporting this link, too. Researchers at Mori found that the average level of satisfaction with local authorities declines steeply as the extent of ethnic fragmentation increases. Even allowing for the fact that areas of high ethnic mix tend to be poorer, Mori found that ethnic fractionalisation still had a substantial negative impact on attitudes to local government.
Finally, Sweden and Denmark may provide a social laboratory for the solidarity/diversity trade-off in the coming years. Starting from similar positions as homogeneous countries with high levels of redistribution, they have taken rather different approaches to immigration over the past few years. Although both countries place great stress on integrating outsiders, Sweden has adopted a moderately multicultural outlook. It has also adapted its economy somewhat, reducing job protection for older native males in order to create more low-wage jobs for immigrants in the public sector. About 12% of Swedes are now foreign-born, and it is expected that by 2015 about 25% of under-18s will be either foreign-born or the children of the foreign-born. This is a radical change and Sweden is adapting to it rather well. (The first clips of mourning Swedes after the murder of the foreign minister Anna Lindh were of crying immigrants expressing their sorrow in perfect Swedish.) But not all Swedes are happy about it.
Denmark has a more restrictive and "nativist" approach to immigration. Only 6% of the population is foreign-born, and native Danes enjoy superior welfare benefits to incomers. If the solidarity/diversity trade-off is a real one and current trends continue, then one would expect in, say, 20 years that Sweden will have a less redistributive welfare state than Denmark; or rather that Denmark will have a more developed two-tier welfare state with higher benefits for insiders, while Sweden will have a universal but less generous system.
Immigration and the Economy
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=437
Interesting article by David Goodhart that looks at the economic benefits of immigration. It includes the following:
Supporters of large-scale immigration now focus on the quantifiable economic benefits, appealing to the self-interest rather than the idealism of the host population. While it is true that some immigration is beneficial - neither the NHS nor the building industry could survive without it - many of the claimed benefits of mass immigration are challenged by economists such as Adair Turner and Richard Layard. It is clear, for example, that immigration is no long-term solution to an ageing population for the simple reason that immigrants grow old, too. Keeping the current age structure constant over the next 50 years, and assuming today's birth rate, would require 60m immigrants. Managing an ageing society requires a package of later retirement, rising productivity and limited immigration. Large-scale immigration of unskilled workers does allow native workers to bypass the dirtiest and least rewarding jobs but it also increases inequality, does little for per capita growth, and skews benefits in the host population to employers and the better-off.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,...1154693,00.html
The first thread was ignored but the second threat has created a debate on low-paid workers, immigrants and trade unions.
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An interesting article in today’s Guardian by Paul Oestreicher about the Bombing of Dresden. He writes:
In Coventry, on the 50th anniversary of the attack, the German president Richard von Weizsäcker spoke of his nation's guilt; but when the Queen visited Dresden, she failed to lay a wreath at the cathedral ruins. Her advisers feared tabloid headlines. And, who knows, someone might throw an egg. It was a sad failure of diplomacy. Yet maybe a few have accepted that in war, however just the cause, no one emerges with clean hands. Saying sorry is not a sign of weakness.
As early as the 60s a group of young people went from Coventry to help to rebuild a Dresden hospital destroyed by British bombs; and when, on June 22, a golden cross tops out the rebuilt cathedral - the famous Frauenkirche - it will be a gift of the people of Britain, including, personally, the Queen. The British Dresden Trust commissioned a London goldsmith whose father had flown that terrible night over Dresden.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,...1160568,00.html
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See also this thread for a discussion on the assassination.
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But if Kennedy was assassinated for Cold War reasons what would have been the impact on the Cold War itself. Did his assassination lead to a major shift in policy? I have seen no strong historical argument saying that it did.
According to books written by Robert S. McNamara (Secretary of State for Defence) and Kenneth O'Donnell (Kennedy’s special assistant) Kennedy intended to withdraw from Vietnam after the 1964 presidential election. In his book, Memories of John F. Kennedy, O'Donnell claims that:
“Kennedy told me in the spring of 1963 that he could not pull out of Vietnam until he was re-elected, "So we had better make damned sure I am re-elected." ... At a White House reception on Christmas eve, a month after he succeeded to the presidency, Lyndon Johnson told the Joint Chiefs: "Just get me elected, and then you can have your war."
Kennedy had already upset the hawks by refusing to give adequate military support to the Bay of Pigs invasion. What is worse, Kennedy was involved in secret talks with Castro about a non-aggression treaty with Cuba (a decision that horrified the Mafia who were desperate to get back into Cuba).
Kennedy had also been deeply influenced by the Cuban Missile Crisis. Only he knew how close we came to a nuclear war that would have destroyed the planet. He was determined to bring the Cold War to an end. This did not please the hawks in the CIA or the arms industry.
Johnson changed this policy and the hawks did get their Vietnam War and the increase in military spending to fuel the Cold War. However, Johnson refused to accept the initial FBI report that the Kennedy Assassination had been planned by the governments of Cuba and the Soviet Union. Not that Johnson did not believe the report (although he was probably aware of who was actually behind the assassination) but he was convinced that any invasion of Cuba would result in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Johnson told Hoover to rewrite the report. This time he had to prove that it was a lone-nut who killed Kennedy. This report was then given to the Warren Commission to publish as its own conclusions. (All this information became available in 1994 when Johnson’s telephone conversations with Hoover, Warren, Richard Russell, etc. were published). For a full account of this see Michael R. Beschloss’s book, Taking Charge: The Johnson White House Tapes, 1963-64 (Simon & Schuster, 1997).
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John. This is a topic of great interest in popular history, but I tend to not use it much or use it at all even though it is in the heart of my major course of instruction, Twentieth Century history.
The reason I tend not to look to closely at this is that I find it difficult to argue historical significance of the assassination itself. There is not a clear story line from the assassination to show any group on the historical radar getting great benefit out of JKF's assassination (other than the laws JKF supported that got passed in his name under the Johnson administration.
This is an interesting point and if the event did not have significant political importance I would not have spent so much time developing the website (or expect teachers to use it). For example, recently I have been involved in a debate on the History Forum where I have argued against spending too much time studying the Jack the Ripper case.
http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/forum/index...?showtopic=2125
If JFK was assassinated by a lone nut (as argued by the FBI/Warren Commission) it could not be justified. However, I believe the assassination was carried out for political reasons and therefore is of extreme importance to any study of 20th century American history. As the American government has so much power over all other countries this coup d’état is worth studying in Europe as well.
For example, I believe Kennedy was murdered because of his foreign policy (Cuba, Vietnam, Soviet Union). If this is the case, the assassination of Kennedy had a profound impact on the history of the Cold War.
I have only just started producing the student activities for the material.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKresearch.htm
The plan is to use primary sources to study important aspects of the case. The second part will involve the students using the sources to try and find out who was behind the assassination: Mafia, KGB, the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro, John Birch Society, Texas Oil Industry, Anti-Castro Cubans, CIA or the FBI. In doing so they will be looking at the politics of the 1960s.
Students in Britain are fascinated by the Kennedy Assassination. Personally, I think it is a good idea to use this enthusiasm as a way in to look at the Cold War, a subject that they are usually less interested in.
have forty five minute classes, if I do an exercise on this I will have to confine the activity more than I listed above (although they would work if I was to expect the effort to be homework as well...BTW would the cut and paste stuff violate your terms of usage for the site?????
Please feel free to use the materials as you want. If you want, I could put the activities you create on my website.
The setting of activities obviously reflects the views of the author. I therefore would like to counteract that by inviting others to submit activities. For example, two of the most popular websites on the Assassination of Kennedy are run by John McAdams and Kenneth A. Rahn. Both these men believe strongly in the conclusions of the Warren Commission. I will be inviting them to set activities via my website (using the materials on their websites). I think this could be an interesting development.
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Performance-related pay was heralded by the then education secretary, David Blunkett, in 1998, when he pledged that good teachers would potentially be able to earn up to £35,000 a year under the scheme, which gave them access to five new salary scales on the so-called "upper pay spine" once they had passed an agreed threshold.
Introduced in schools in England in 2000, the initiative prompted immediate accusations of divisiveness from teaching unions amid suggestions that only about half of teachers applying would meet the standards required. Ultimately 97% of applicants were successful, effectively creating a substantial across-the-board pay rise for teachers.
According to a survey carried out by Ted Wragg at Exeter University, the scheme has had virtually no effect on the way they teach in the classroom.
Most teachers surveyed for the analysis of performance-related pay in schools said that after going through the process required to secure a salary rise they were still teaching in exactly the same way, but they had improved their record-keeping to make their next application easier.
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There is an interesting article in today’s Education Guardian about the future of Virtual Teaching. It gives the example of how Elliot School is using video conferencing to deliver A-level Philosophy. The school is in London and the teacher is in Oxford.
Although I can understand the economics of this solution it seems to me a very bad way of using technology. We all know that one of the most ineffective ways of teaching is for a teacher to talk to the class (recent research suggest that the Average Retention Rate is only 5% - the lowest of all methods tested). This approach will be even more ineffective when it is being delivered by video conferencing.
http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/s...1159454,00.html
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Interesting article by George Monbiot in today’s Guardian about modern democracies.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,...1159775,00.html
The formula for making things happen is simple and has never changed. If you wish to alter a policy or depose a prime minister between elections, you must take to the streets. Without the poll tax riots, Mrs Thatcher might have contested the 1992 election. If GM crops hadn't been ripped up, they would be in commercial cultivation in Britain today. In the 1990s, protesters forced the government to cut its road-building budget by 80%. Most of the cities where roads were occupied by Reclaim the Streets have introduced major traffic-calming or traffic-reduction schemes. Gordon Brown stopped increasing fuel tax in response to the truckers' blockades.
Direct action, in other words, works. Not always, of course: our submarines still carry nuclear missiles, our airports are still expanding, the 1994 criminal justice bill became law. But it works more consistently than anything else we do. It does not work in isolation - it must be accompanied by polite campaigns of lobbying and letter-writing - but it works because it ensures that the issue stays in the public eye, and therefore exposes the government to continued questioning.
At length, if the campaign is well-organised and popular, the issue becomes a liability, and politicians seek to protect themselves by dumping either the policy, or the author of the policy. In this case it's too late to dump the policy. If the Labour party wants us to forget what it has done in Iraq, it must dump Blair.
You object that we tried this last year, and failed. If the biggest demonstration in British history couldn't change the way the country was run, what could? And of course it's true that we failed to stop the war with Iraq. (It may also be true that we helped to stop the wars with Iran, North Korea, Syria, Yemen, Somalia and all the other nations the idiotocracy in Washington had lined up for invasion.) But we failed partly because we appeared almost to give up after the march on February 15....
And it's not just because direct action works that we should try it. If Blair goes, it should be our victory, not that of the little grey men. The people must be seen to have done it. Why? Because this is about more than punishing the prime minister for what was almost certainly a war crime. It is about making sure it never happens again.
British politics is still bound by the spell of Gladstone and Churchill. Every prime minister attempts to emulate them. To be a statesman, you need a world stage on which to strut, and if you don't have one, you must borrow it from someone who does. This is why the "special relationship" persists. The establishment might break Blair, but it will not break the spell. Only the people can do that.
If we depose the prime minister through direct action, he will doubtless be succeeded by someone almost as bad, but the political context in which that someone operates will have changed. He will be forced to govern with one eye on the people, and to demonstrate that his policies differ from those of his predecessor. And the issue he would be obliged to address first is Britain's relationship with the rest of the world. Whoever succeeded Blair in these circumstances would tone down our foreign policy until it resembled that of the other northern European states.
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Interesting letter in response to Amy Chua's article.
Chua's analysis is flawed and naive. Almost all the dominant minorities she mentions did not dominate "under market conditions", but rather through a patent lack of free-market mechanisms and a surfeit of discrimination and inequality: the whites in South Africa and Zimbabwe were settler societies that systematically denied the indigenous majorities access to trade, education, free movement of labour etc; the Lebanese and Indians in west and east Africa were a favoured buffer between the colonial authorities and the African majorities; and South African whites have retained their privileges and do not look like losing them. All relied on a majority population of under-educated, oppressed, cheap labour.
None of the areas she discusses exhibited any of the fundamentals of a market economy, and are all societies based on discrimination and various forms of bonded labour. The reason it has all gone so wrong is that deregulation and the rhetoric of democracy (which is not "sudden democratisation") has not only exposed the inequalities, but also enabled the previously oppressed to voice their discontent, with often violent results, of the reasons the privileged minorities acquired their position at their expense.
Tony King
University of the West of England
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Send this message to the Virtual school coordinator Anne Gilleran (anne.gileran@eun.org). I know that you feel frustrated. I’m “head” of History department. Most of the members from History department deserted Community for example to create instead this debate Forum. Largely because the Virtual school project do not function very well.
Is the idea of cooperation of European teachers dead? Or does there exist new forms of cooperation’s based on a new ways of thinking? You have to find out:……
I would have thought that this forum will enable European cooperation to take place. For example, see how European teachers are cooperating with the Aviation Project. This type of cooperation was very difficult to arrange via the community section of the Virtual School.
The real problem concerns the desire to control this communication between European teachers without the technical ability to make it possible. Last week I was invited to spend a weekend in Brussels in order to “build a "safe" online environment for teachers to collaborate". Understandably, after helping to create this forum for the Virtual School I have little desire to spend a weekend reinventing the wheel.
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When comparing war policy of democrat John F. Kennedy, loved by many for bringing the freshness into the politics, with his successor republican Richard Nixon the facts look as follows:
Kennedy despite the war experience (commanding a boat like Kerry!) gave the mankind the invasion of Cuba, the Cuba crises when the world balanced on the brink of nuclear war plus on top of that senseless escalation of the Vietnam conflict which subsequently became the Vietnam War.
Nixon whose war experience is much less glorified than Kennedy’s (a Navy lieutenant commander in Pacific) promised to end the war in Vietnam and actually kept his word and ended it. He stood also behind the detente with China.
To compare war experience of Bush and Kerry is in the retrospective look of no importance at all. But of course if someone is waging a crusade against a person he does not like all kinds of argumentation seem to be permitted.
I can easily imagine the situation which looks like this:
Kerry is challenged by Bush. Bush have war flight merits from Vietnam, Kerry doesn’t. Are the debaters impressed by the merits? Not for a minute! Instead the debate is about:
How many innocent women and children Bush’s bombs killed on the ground?
What kind of targets in Hanoi and Haiphong did he bomb? Wasn’t it after all hospitals, schools and day centres for kids? How much Agent Orange did he spill over the forest of Vietnam?
Am I unjust? No, sadly enough I do not think so.
I am not quite sure about the point you are trying to make here but you are on dodgy group if you are trying to suggest that Nixon had a better record than Kennedy when dealing with international conflict.
It is true Kennedy was in power when Cuba was invaded. This was a plan developed by the CIA under Dwight Eisenhower. Kennedy was very unhappy with the plan and refused to provide American back-up to the Bay of Pigs invasion (the reason why it failed). After the Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy began secret negotiations with Castro in order to sort out this conflict. It is one of the reasons given for Kennedy’s assassination (a combination of anti-Castro Cubans and CIA members sacked and demoted after the Bay of Pigs disaster).
It is also true that in 1961 Kennedy arranged for the South Vietnamese to receive the money necessary to increase the size of their army from 150,000 to 170,000. He also agreed to send another 100 military advisers to Vietnam to help train the South Vietnamese army.
By 1963 Kennedy had serious doubts about his Vietnam policy. He told Kenneth O'Donnell and Mike Mansfield that he intended to get out of Vietnam. In his memoirs, Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defence, agreed that Kennedy would withdraw once he was re-elected. Kennedy told O'Donnell in the spring of 1963 that he could not pull out of Vietnam until he was reelected, "So we had better make damned sure I am reelected."
In his book Deep Politics, Peter Dale Scott, argues that it was this decision that resulted in Kennedy being assassinated. He points out that according to O’Donnell, at a White House reception on Christmas eve, a month after he succeeded to the presidency, Lyndon Johnson told the Joint Chiefs: "Just get me elected, and then you can have your war."
Richard Nixon did not of course promise to accept defeat in Vietnam (although most of his advisers were telling him thad defeat was inevitable). Soon after taking office he introduced his policy of "vietnamization". The plan was to encourage the South Vietnamese to take more responsibility for fighting the war. It was hoped that this policy would eventually enable the United States to withdraw gradually all their soldiers from Vietnam.
Nixon's advisers told him that they feared that the gradual removal of all US troops would eventually result in a National Liberation Front victory. It was therefore agreed that the only way that America could avoid a humiliating defeat was to negotiate a peace agreement in the talks that were taking place in Paris. In an effort to put pressure on North Vietnam in these talks, Nixon developed what has become known as the Madman Theory. Bob Haldeman, one of the US chief negotiators, was told to give the impression that President Nixon was mentally unstable and that his hatred of communism was so fanatical that if the war continued for much longer he was liable to resort to nuclear weapons against North Vietnam.
Another Nixon innovation was the secret Phoenix Program. Vietnamese were trained by the CIA to infiltrate peasant communities and discover the names of NLF sympathisers. When they had been identified, Death Squads were sent in to execute them. Between 1968 and 1971, an estimated 40,974 members of the NLF were killed in this way. It was hoped that the Phoenix Program would result in the destruction of the NLF organisation, but, as on previous occasions, the NLF was able to replace its losses by recruiting from the local population and by arranging for volunteers to be sent from North Vietnam.
Soon after becoming president, Richard Nixon gave permission for the bombing of Cambodia. In an effort to avoid international protest at this action, it was decided to keep information about these bombing raids hidden. Pilots were sworn to secrecy and their 'operational logs' were falsified.
The bombing failed to destroy the NLF bases and so in April, 1970, Nixon decided to send in troops to finish off the job. The invasion of Cambodia provoked a wave of demonstrations in the United States and in one of these, four students were killed when National guardsmen opened fire at Kent State University. In the days that followed, 450 colleges closed in protest against the killings.
The arrival of US marines in Cambodia also created hostility amongst the local population. The Cambodian communist movement, the Khmer Rouge, had received little support from the peasants before the United States invasion. Now they were in a position to appeal to their nationalist sentiments and claimed that Cambodia was about to be taken over by the United States. During 1970 and 1971, membership of the Khmer Rouge grew rapidly.
Laos, another country bordering Vietnam, was also invaded by US troops. As with Cambodia, this action increased the support for the communists (Pathet Lao) and by 1973, they controlled most of the country.
Henry Kissinger was put in charge of peace talks and In October, 1972, he came close to agreeing to a formula to end the war. The plan was that US troops would withdraw from Vietnam in exchange for a cease-fire and the return of 566 American prisoners held in Hanoi. It was also agreed that the governments in North and South Vietnam would remain in power until new elections could be arranged to unite the whole country.
The main problem with this formula was that whereas the US troops would leave the country, the North Vietnamese troops could remain in their positions in the south. In an effort to put pressure on North Vietnam to withdraw its troops. Richard Nixon ordered a new series of air-raids on Hanoi and Haiphong. It was the most intense bombing attack in world history. In eleven days, 100,000 bombs were dropped on the two cities. The destructive power was equivalent to five times that of the atom bomb used on Hiroshima. This bombing campaign was condemned throughout the world. Newspaper headlines included: "Genocide", "Stone-Age Barbarism" and "Savage and Senseless".
The North Vietnamese refused to change the terms of the agreement and so in January, 1973, Nixon agreed to sign the peace plan that had been proposed in October. However, the bombing had proved to be popular with many of the American public as they had the impression that North Vietnam had been "bombed into submission."
Nixon’s role therefore in the Vietnam War was far worse than that of Kennedy. In an attempt to gain the support of the American public he ordered the killing of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. In many ways this worked as there are still people in America who believe they won the Vietnam War.
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Anne Jakins is adapting our material for the less able. So far there is work on Otto Lilienthal, Percy Pilcher and the Wright Brothers.
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I have finished the first draft of my website on the Assassination of President Kennedy. There are biographies of 156 people: Major Figures in the Case (24), Important Witnesses (38), Investigators (46) and Possible Conspirators (48). Other sections include: Organization, Issues and Reports (10) and Primary Sources: Key Issues (6). The website also looks at the possibility that different organizations such as the Mafia, CIA, FBI, Secret Service, KGB and the John Birch Society might have been involved in the planning of the assassination. Other possibilities such as anti-Castro activists, Texas oil millionaires and the Warren Commission's lone-gunman theory are also looked at. I am currently working on the student activities. Would appreciate any suggestions.
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Very interesting article in today’s Guardian by Amy Chua, Professor of Law at Yale University. Chua makes the point that in most undemocratic countries, the economic market is dominated by an ethnic minority. “They are the Chinese in south-east Asia; Indians in east Africa, Fiji and parts of the Caribbean; Lebanese in west Africa; Jews in post-communist Russia; and whites in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Bolivia and Ecuador… “
Chua points out that they introduction of democracy in Indonesia was followed by “looting and torching more than 5,000 ethnic Chinese shops and homes. A hundred and fifty Chinese women were gang-raped and more than 2,000 people died. In the months that followed, anti-Chinese hate-mongering and violence spread throughout Indonesia's cities. The explosion of rage can be traced to an unlikely source: the unrestrained combination of democracy and free markets - the very prescription wealthy democracies have promoted for healing the ills of underdevelopment.”
Chua looks at the situation in Iraq. She points out that “The Sunni minority, particularly the Ba'aths, have a large head start in education, capital and economic expertise. The Shiites, although far from homogeneous, represent a long-oppressed majority of 60-70%, with every reason to exploit their numerical power. Liberation has already unleashed powerful fundamentalist movements which, needless to say, are intensely anti-secular and anti-western.”
Chua ends her article with the following:
"Since 1989, the US has been pressing developing countries (with the glaring exception of the Middle East) to implement immediate elections with universal suffrage. This is not the path to democratisation that any of the western nations took. Further, British and American democracy started locally, not nationally.
Most important, even today democracy in the west means much more than unrestrained majority rule. It includes protection for minorities and property, constitutionalism and human rights. A lot more is needed than just shipping out ballot boxes."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,...1158200,00.html
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An alternative strategy to attacking immigrants is to seek to unionise the immigrant workforce. In the North Irish labour was brought in to undercut the wages of the indigenous workers. Within a generation the Irish workers became the backbone of the trade union movement and the Labour Party (when there was a party of Labour in this country!) In Gateshead the Labour colours (traditionally red) were green as a recognition of this.
Migrant labour is notoriously difficult to organise. But not impossible. The example of the IWW in the united states in the early 20th century shows what is possible....and it is only possible if trade unions are not contaminated with racism.
You are right to suggest that socialists in America at the beginning of the 20th century made strenuous efforts to unionise immigrants working in low paid jobs. This was not actually very difficult to do as these workers came from countries with a long tradition of trade unionism. The main problem for organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World was the persecution they suffered (including the lynching of union organizers). All the early left-wing political parties in America were dominated by European immigrants (Socialist Labor Party, Social Democratic Party, Socialist Party of America, Communist Party of America etc). In fact, the left in America would have hardly existed without immigrants from Russia, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Ireland, etc. (it is interesting that immigrants from England and France played only a very small role in this).
The situation of Britain today is very different. These low-paid workers are often temporary workers and not immigrants as such. Even the immigrants rarely come from countries that have a tradition of trade unionism or democratic institutions. Many come from former communist countries where unions were controlled by the state. They are unlikely to see unions as a means of improving their standard of living. Anyway, if they joined unions they would just price themselves out of a job. They will also be under considerable pressure from their employers not to join unions. This is one of the reasons these employers prefer to employ illegal immigrants than local workers.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAiww.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAsocialistL.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAsocialistD.htm
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In response to John's comments:I am an internationalist who believes that nationalism and patriotism poses a threat to world peace.
Sorry but I think this is claptrap! How do you think the Olympic games, the rugby World Cup and other such international events would fare without some kind of 'patriotic' affiliations? I do not think anyone could say these events are a threat to world peace! Rather events that boost an attitude of healthy competition - a very natural human emotion.
My dictionary tells me that claptrap means “pretentious nonsense, rubbish”. The quote “I am an internationalist who believes that nationalism and patriotism poses a threat to world peace” might well be claptrap but you have not shown that by your comments. Instead of dealing with the words you quote you go onto talk about the merits of international sporting events. That has nothing to do with my original comments about the way political leaders exploit feelings of nationalism. That is the point you have to address if you want to describe my comments as claptrap. Although I would suggest that there are better words to use if we are going to have an intellectual discussion on the merits of nationalism.
I have nothing against sporting events where individuals represent their communities. I think this is basically a healthy situation. However, I do object to the tendency of young people to adopt successful teams rather than ones that do represent their community. But this of course just reflects the desire to support and identify with what they consider to be a “superior” team. This is similar to the emotions involved in identifying with successful military forces in the past.
There can be a problem with nationalism and sport. The BBC showed an excellent documentary the other night on how fascist governments exploited their citizens' passions for football.
The tabloid press also makes strenuous efforts to develop nationalistic feelings during major sporting events. This often involves referring to past events like wars. Not surprisingly, young supporters sometimes act like warriors and end up committing acts of violence against rival fans. As George Orwell points out, on occasions like these, sport mimics warfare.
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I'm not sure that teachers do teach with a national bias any more. Sure, there are text books about that contain overtly patriotic sentiments but todays teaching staff have more about them than to spout jingoistic claptrap to pupils.
In music teaching actually I find teachers tend to shy away from the English musical heritage particularly. Interestingly, Welsh and Scottish music is alive and well in schools but English folk music is much neglected.
I agree that things have definitely improved over the last 20 years. Some subjects have made more progress than others. It is true that music teachers appear to take a more internationalist view than most. Cynics would say that this is mainly due to the lack of British classical composers.
I think that history teachers cause most of the problems. Although the “source approach” has helped, I think that teaching certain areas of the curriculum, for example the two world wars, the British Empire and the industrial revolution, do tend to give British people a unhealthy view of themselves.
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I'm an italian student, I'm abiliting in history teaching and the Course about New Technology requests attention for the dialogue between european teachers. Further the opportunity to know others pedagogical approaches, what kind of benefits can I obtain in your opinion?
See the following thread:
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=440
Forums like this of course is the best way for European teachers and students to collaborate.
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I teach in Portugal, and here we have a peculiar situation. Most parents think that homework should be mandatory at least every week and in all the matters teached! Why? They say it's the only way to make their children study! I don't know whether Portuguese students are particularly lazy and not interested, for instance, in History or Literature. I do know, mandatory homework is not the solution to make them better students.
I agree with the objections to homework made by people such as Andy Walker and Jane Shepherd in this thread.
However, I am aware that most of the best work I have seen as a teacher has been produced outside of the classroom. This is partly due to the kind of open-ended task that can be set for homework. This is especially true of the high ability student who often finds this kind of task very stimulating. It also enables students in classes with an anti-school culture to work without peer group pressure being applied.
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What finally drove me out of teaching was the mission-statement-oriented-new-management-control-freak mentality of the people in charge of my institution and the increasing flood of b*llsh*t emanating from government departments and their agencies.
It's amazing how often I hear that coming from UK-based teachers (my sister has recently broken out of a College of Education for many of the same reasons). When I taught in the UK at the end of the 1970s/beginning of the 1980s, I always thought that the powers-that-be ought to be a lot more concerned about the adverts in the TES from the 'teachers' escape committee', etc! Imagine if a modern industrial concern was faced with that phenomenon - they'd be a bit daft to just ignore it.
I suppose that line manager could have felt "good, another bit of dead wood cut away". It strikes me, though, that the teachers with the kind of experience that Graham and John seem to have are precisely the kind the systems should be trying to retain …
There is no doubt that those teachers trained in the 1960s and 1970s had a great deal of trouble adapting to the education system imposed on the profession since the 1980s. The more idealistic you were, the more problems you had with the reforms. That was also true of the most creative teachers who were attracted to the profession by the freedom that it gave them.
These people may have left the classroom but many remained committed to their belief in the importance of education. Thanks to the internet people like Graham and myself have remained in education. In fact, I would argue that my influence over the educational process is greater now than it was as a classroom teacher or as a successful textbook author. Government agencies even pay me good money to produce subversive teaching materials.
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If ppl do not come to the UK to take up jobs, the jobs can just as easily migrate. Free movement of capital is part of globalisation. The import of people is visible and exercises the far right, the export of capital is less visible but the jobs vanish.
Neither immigration nor immigration controls provide an economic solution to anything. The political consequences of immigration controls on the other hand are quite clear. The government have been panicked by the tabloid hysteria into introducing controls. The right wing can say the government "are not doing enough" because the government has taken its own steps on the road of racism it emboldens the Conservatives and in turn the BNP who are the biggest beneficiaries of this policy.
Derek McMillan
It is true that the far right and the tabloid press are trying to exploit the issues of immigration and asylum seekers. However, I am not convinced by the economics arguments put forward by the left. The sort of jobs that are being done by this people cannot be exported. If they could, they would be. Capitalists know this is impossible so that is why they are currently advocating a system that allows them to import cheap labour.
I was a printer in the 1960s. Our union always controlled the number of printers that could be trained. This enabled the union to control the number of people seeking work and in this way obtained high wages and full employment for its members. The decline in the power and status of print workers dates back to when the union gave away these rights in exchange for a big pay increase.
I am surprised that the left are not concerned by the impact that the importation of foreign labour is having on British low-paid workers. While employers are allowed to import cheap labour unskilled workers will be unable to force up their wages. This is a strategy that capitalists have always adopted to reduce the power of trade unions. This is why the left in America has been traditionally in favour of immigration controls. It might not be very socialistic but it is a policy that favours the working class.
People in skilled jobs, on good wages, living in privately owned houses in middle class areas with very few immigrants might not be too concerned about the numbers entering the country. However, the poor living in run down areas of Britain, have every reason to be concerned by these developments. My fear is that unless the major political parties address their legitimate concerns they will be tempted to vote for the Conservatives/BNP in future elections.
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In May Causeway Press will be publishing a new edition of British Politics in Focus especially written for AS Government and Politics courses. Judging on the quality of the previous editions it should become the standard textbook for the study of British politics at this level. The strengths of the book have always been its accessibility for students and the structured activities and sources. Unfortunately they don't seem to have a website to link to!
That is amazing. How does a modern company exist without a website? Details of the company can be found here:
Humanity contra political realism.
in Political Debates
Posted
This is an interesting point. On the surface it might well appear that political leaders who attempt to achieve democracy bring pain and suffering on their people. For example, Richard Carlile was a famous campaigner for democracy in England during the early part of the 19th century. One of his meetings led to the Peterloo Massacre. Carlile ended up in prison (a place where he spent many years of his life) and the government passed the Six Acts that imposed even more restrictions on the freedom of the people. The sort of democracy that Carlile was asking for was not achieved for another 100 years. In fact, all the things that Carlile fought for, including freedom of the press, the end of child labour, legalised birth control, equality for women, etc. were never achieved in his lifetime. He definitely ruined his career (he had been a successful journalist) and died in poverty. Unlike Dubcek is now a forgotten figure (although I do what I can to promote his memory).
My opinion of Richard Carlile is very similar to the way I see Alexander Dubcek. They caused short-term misery but created long-term good. I believe they both contributed to establishing democracy and the freedom of the press in their countries. Therefore I much prefer people like Dubcek and Ludvik Svoboda (any relation) to Gustav Husak.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRcarlile.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRpeterloo.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/COLDdubcek.htm
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/COLDsvoboda.htm