oursin | Entries tagged with education

Not so much re-inventing the wheel, as having to point out something that is already known and has been for a long time (it was not really news when my primary-school teacher was making the point): Children’s reading should prioritise pleasure over learning, says laureate. Sigh.

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Also on perhaps a similar theme that the obvious straight road is not actually the way there: science is not simply a sequence of tasks that can be optimized:

It advances through a process analogous to Darwinian evolution: variation across many independent efforts; selection through critique, replication, and competition; and retention of robust results. This distributed structure is what allows science to correct itself and to generate novelty. Independence is not incidental; it is the mechanism that produces both reliability and discovery.
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The scientific system thrives on inefficiency: redundant efforts, failed attempts, and divergent paths. These are not costs to be eliminated but sources of discovery. By contrast, optimization pressures drive convergence—faster iteration within a constrained search space. The result may be more output but less exploration of the unexpected.

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I stumbled across a remarkable collection of photographs:

There are several images in the collection of relevance to queer history, not least in those that record varieties of touch between men that would later become discouraged. In one, we see four young men sitting together on a bench in a garden: two of them hold hands. In another, a man takes another man on his lap, posing as lovers in a pose that mimics the popular visual culture of the day.
But the collection is arguably of most interest to LGBTQ+ history, specifically trans history, for the kinds of gender play it records. Several images in the collection illustrate traditions of gender crossing in British culture. Some show pantomime dames and another perhaps shows the role of a boy character taken up by a woman.

?Normal for Norfolk???

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An extraordinary story of people who appear to be the 'good guys' (Liberal representing the anti-slavery interest in Lyme Regis) absolutely knee-deep in electoral corruption. Bonus appearance of Mary Anning!

What is most striking about Pinney’s career as an MP is not just the willingness of a fairly advanced Liberal to engage in wholesale electoral corruption, but his own attitude to slavery given his family background. As early as 1832 he had called on the hustings for its complete abolition and in 1838 he willingly voted for the Whig government’s apprenticeship reforms.

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This is fascinating: The Plotland Houses of Britain: How a 20th century working-class housing movement was stifled, but I'd like to see some consideration of how the post-WWII prefab housing developments and attitudes thereto would fit onto what's described here.

(Also resonates with account in Houlbrook's Songs of Seven Dials about what well-intentioned progressive town-planners wanted to do to those traditional parts of inner London, but in the event, didn't.)

Dept rus in urbe: A prickle of hedgehogs and an armada of newts: wildlife settles in at London’s new Queen Elizabeth garden

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Dept of, why not work with creating opportunities for the mute inglorious already there....? (sigh): Creating Baby Geniuses to Thwart the AI Threat? (Yes, Really.) Honestly, these people.

Possibly relevant here....: State school kids do better at uni

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The Rise and Fall of Jukeboxes: where are the grooves of yesteryear?

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Women artists in the Georgian era: a constant, delicate calibration to keep the balance between personal reputation, artistic success and the need to earn a living.

And I'm not at all sure it's culture-neutral, hmmmm?

Okay, I had parents who had books in the house and read to me and once I could read took me to the local library to get tickets for the children's department.

No children's museums that I recall but visiting the rather dull local one attached to the public library, and visits to local sites of historical interest.

My primary school was not, I think, particularly distinguished - suspect that the year there were a whole four of us passed the 11+ was Memorable - but there were some good teachers.

I don't know how one calibrates into all this my mother knowing the teacher of Infants 1 and asking her about whether I could go to school once I had turned 5 (having an autumn birthday) and her saying, oh, send her along, on account of my mother thinking I was entirely ready.

And then the Head saying I should do the 11+ technically a year early - (which was not a given, people did get kept back)

Going to a fairly academically-intense girls' grammar school, where I did get the odd spot of class-hassle, I realise in retrospect (including from horrid Mrs B of the really weird ideas about sex), where I was marked out as university material and my parents exhorted to keep me on the sixth form -

Which they were entirely happy to do.

So yes, I was I suppose supported on my academic journey. But some of that was external factors, like the existence of that extinct phoenix, full student grants.

Honestly, we thought better of the Finns, being told how amazing a society they have: How would you feel if your therapist’s notes – your darkest thoughts and deepest feelings – were exposed to the world? For 33,000 Finnish people, that became a terrifying reality While the guy involved seems to have been an absolute horror from a young age in terms of hacking exploits, doxxing and swatting people, etc, we also note that there was actually criminal negligence brought against the company holding the patient data, which sounds a bit grim in terms of regulatory procedures and oversight.

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This is very peculiar, because you see 'catfishing' and you think it's about monetary fraud, but that didn't seem to be at stake here: How a friend request led a beauty queen to uncover Scotland's most prolific catfish:

[T]hey were all left wondering why she did it. "All of us were pretty much left with no answers whatsoever," Abbie says.

I was wondering about whether there was something similar in play to some of the prolific poison-pen letter-writers in that Penning Poison book I read last year: not all of them were 'women with nature turned sour in the veins and sometimes terrorising whole communities for years with their spite' but that was one category.

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Now, this is creepy: Manager of women’s football club banned for 12 years after bombarding players with indecent images:

Hamilton denied 24 FA charges of improper conduct, all relating to his time in charge of the club, but an independent regulatory commission concluded that 23 of the 24 were proven. The FA received evidence from four players and a staff member, all of whom detailed examples of Hamilton trying to elicit sexual activity between May 2022 and November 2024.
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The commission also noted “with sadness” that one of the victims appeared to blame herself, and that more broadly the complainants “feared the consequences of complaining and that it would impact on their chances of being selected”, adding: “Worst of all, some of them somehow felt that it might be their fault.”

He sounds absolutely terrible quite apart from that: “verbally aggressive and bullying management style”.

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Dining across the divide - this week it's the Grand Canyon - not yet online - because one of the parties is a Yaxley-Lennon fanboy.

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And this is just a minor thing that agitated the niggles and peeves when it crossed my line of sight earlier today, but if you are writing a historical novel about the first women at the University of Oxford I really don't expect it to be set in the 1920s. That was when they were first, finally, awarded degrees. They'd been studying there much longer, over 40 years.

I must admit, I was going, 'And today's Mandy Rice Davies' Well, He Would, Wouldn't He, Award, Goes to Him': Thrillers should be on UK school curriculum to boost reading, says Lee Child.

NB I'm not entirely sure Mr Child is up to date with what is currently on school syllabi and in school libraries, in particular on the basis of that Carol Atherton book, Reading Lessons I was reading recently....(on which I commented, 'how the teaching of EngLit has changed since My Day....'

Does he really think schoolkids get plonked down with David Copperfield in their tiny hands at an early age?

(I think I was, what, 13 and in the top stream at a grammar school when we first got it, and that was back in the Upper Neolithic when we had to read it chiselled on granite slabs. I suspect things have moved on since then.)

And my dr rdrz know me and that I am all for reading should be pleasurable and people should read what they like and children's reading should not be gatekept - hat-tip here to Mr Fischer at my primary school who was all 'Comics are not the devil, comics can be a good thing' which was pretty progressive for 1950 something.

But maybe I'm most in particular raising my eyebrows when A Particular Genre is being touted, and moreover, one that is, shall we say, bloke-coded?

I think he's making a lot of assumptions there about what kids will read and want to read, but what do I know, I was hyper-lexical from an early age.

London Pride has been handed down to us:

Busiest Thoroughfare of the Metropolis of the World - review of book on the history of The Strand.

Over 250,000 images of London from the collections at The London Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery

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Heritage endangered:

On an old cobbled street in a market town, residents say hundreds of years of history are disappearing before their eyes as thieves keep stealing large slabs of Yorkshire stone.

The Royal Society of Medicine is putting some of its rarest books and photographs up for sale at Christie’s this month. Is this a case of medical negligence? Screaming. The GMC should strike them off.

Rare piece of Australia's Indigenous history captured on camera in the desert

According to a local anthropologist in Broome, the photos were taken by a nurse who was volunteering at the La Grange mission.
In his opinion, the images are extraordinary — one of the rare moments of "first contact" on the Australian continent to be captured on camera.
The originals were donated to a Catholic Church archive, which is not accessible to the public.
But it turns out there are copies. On a dusty CD buried in the boxes of an elderly author.

I have a lot of questions here about disinterring the original - I have very cynical thoughts about the church 'archive', as probably a storeroom in a basement somewhere - and in general things which are literally hidden in the (unprocessed, uncared for) archives of some institution.

And at this I can only fall on the floor, weeping and going 'the horror, the horror': [S]ome AI chatbots (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Bard and others) may generate incorrect or fabricated archival references.

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Gender and learning:

The Real Way Schools are Failing Boys - though possibly, just de-emphasise competition, for starters???

Estrogen levels predict enhanced learning (at least in rats....)

What I read

Finished Love at All Ages - think I said most of what I felt moved to say last week, but there was also a certain amount of Mrs Morland whingeing and bitching about the Burdens of Being a Popular Writer (when she wasn't being Amazingly Dotty), whoa, Ange, biting the hand or what?

Sarah Brooks, The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands (2024), which I picked up some while ago on promotion and then I think I saw someone writing something about it. I liked the idea but somehow wasn't overwhelmingly enthused?

Read the latest Literary Review.

Since there is a forthcoming online discussion, dug out my 1974 mass market paperback edition of Joanna Russ, The Female Man - I think this was even before excursions to Dark They Were and Golden-Eyed, somehow I had learnt of Fantast, a mailorder operation with duplicated catalogues every few months that purveyed an odd selection of US books. It's quite hard to recall the original impact. Possibly I now prefer her essays?

Carol Atherton, Reading Lessons: The Books We Read at School, the Conversations They Spark, and Why They Matter (2024) - EngLit teacher meditates over books that she had taught, her own reading of them, their impact in the classroom, general issues around teaching Lit, etc - this came up in my Recommended for You in Kobo + on promotion. Quite interesting but how the teaching of EngLit has changed since My Day....

Lee Child, The Hard Way (Jack Reacher, #10) (2006) - every so often I read an interview with or something about Lee Child who sounds very much a Good Guy so I thought I might try one of these and this one was currently on promotion. It's less action and more twisty following intricate plot than I anticipated with lots of sudden reversal, and lots and lots of details. I don't think I'm going to go away and devour all the Reacher books but I can think of circumstances where they might be a preferable option given limited reading materials available.

On the go

I literally just finished that so there is nothing on the go, except one or two things I suppose I am technically still reading.

Up next

Dunno.

In June 1868 the University of London's Senate had voted to admit women to sit the 'General Examination', so becoming the first British university to accept female candidates:

Women's higher education in London dates from the late 1840s, with the foundation of Bedford College by the Unitarian benefactor, Elisabeth Jesser Reid. Bedford was initially a teaching institution independent of the University of London, which was itself an examining institution, established in 1836. Over the next three decades, London University examinations were available only to male students.
Demands for women to sit examinations (and receive degrees) increased in the 1860s. After initial resistance a compromise was reached.
In August 1868 the University announced that female students aged 17 or over would be admitted to the University to sit a new kind of assessment: the 'General Examination for Women'.

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Sexism in science: 7 women whose trailblazing work shattered stereotypes. Yeah, we note that this was over 100 years since the ladies sitting the University of London exams, and passing.

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A couple of recent contributions from Campop about employment issues in the past:

Who was self-employed in the past?:

It is often assumed that industrial Britain, with its large factories and mines employing thousands of people, left little space for individuals running their own businesses. But not everyone was employed as a worker for others. Some exercised a level of agency operating on their own as business proprietors, even if they were also often very constrained.
Over most of the second half of the 19th century as industrialisation accelerated, the self-employed remained a significant proportion of the population – about 15 percent of the total economically active. It was only in the mid-20th century that the proportion plummeted to around eight percent.

and

Home Duties in the 1921 Census:

What women in ‘home duties’ were precisely engaged in still remains a mystery, reflecting the regular obstruction of women’s everyday activity from the record across history. For some, surely ‘home duties’ reflected hard physical labour (particularly in washing), as well as hours of childcare exceeding the length of the factory day. For others, particularly the aspirational bourgeois, the activities of “home duties” involved little actual housework. 5.1 percent of wives in home duties had servants to assist them, a rate which doubled for clerks’ wives to 11.7 percent. For them, household “work” involved little physical action. Though this may have given some of these women the opportunity to spend their hours in cultural activities or socialising, for others it possibly reflected crushing boredom.

Though I wonder to what extent these women were doing something, more informally, that would be invisible to the census and formal measures generally that contributed to the household economy - I'm thinking of the neighbour in my childhood who cut hair at home - ads in interwar women's mags for various money-making home-based schemes - writers one has heard whose sales were a significant factor in the overall family income - etc

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And on informal contributions, Beyond Formal and Informal: Giving Back Political Agency to Female Diplomats in Early Nineteenth Century Europe:

[H]istorians such as Jeroen Duindam show that there were never explicitly separate spheres for men and women when working for the state in the early nineteenth-century. Drawing a line separating ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ diplomats in the early nineteenth-century, simply based on their gender alone, does not do these women justice.

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And I am very happy to see this receiving recognition, though how far has something which got reprinted after 30 years be considered languishing in obscurity, huh? as opposed to having created a persistent fanbase: A Matter of Oaths – Helen Wright.

For lo, I have beheld a deviation into sense, or at least, non-ponceyness, by Peter Bradshaw, film critic of The Guardian:

Wei Shujun’s new film, adapted from a novella by Yu Hua, is a deadpan existential riddle presenting as noir crime....
I can’t however rid myself of the suspicion that a noir that does in fact have a conventionally structured plot can offer just as much commentary on the human condition, while also providing the pleasures of an ingenious thriller.

I was reminded of Ann Billson's similar apercu anent horror:

The trouble with these upmarket film-makers is that they act as though they're the first people ever to spot the symbolic and metaphorical content that has always formed a large part of horror's subliminal appeal. But, once they've spotted it, they're determined to share it with us, again and again. God forbid that anyone should suspect [them] of simply wanting to tell a story that will give us a good scare.

And indeed, one's general rather cynical reaction when Some Literary or Cineastic Type decides that they will Do Genre but in an elevated and SRS fashion.

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You know, I think I have been passing by local manifestations of a 'forest school', on reading this? Every so often, during school term-time (at least, I think it was still term-time) during my perambulations in a local park I would come across groups of kids with 2-3 adults, the kids in coloured t-shirts, engaged in some kind of what looked like purposeful/meaningful activity. As this was taking place during what I presume to be school hours I assumed it was not the local Woodcraft Folk doing their thing.

But this icon comes from Hannah Woolley's The accomplish'd ladies delight, in preserving, physick, beautifying, and cookery. : Containing I. The art of preserving and candying fruits and flowers; and the making of all sorts of conserves, syrups, and jellies. II. The physical cabinet: or, excellent receipts in physick and chirurgery; together with some beautifying waters, to adorn and add loveliness to the face and body: and also some new and excellent receipts relating to the female sex: and for the general good of families, is added the true receipt for making that famous cordial drink Daffy's elixir salutis. III. The compleat cook's guide: or, directions for dressing all sorts of flesh, fowl and fish, both in the English and French mode; with all sorts of sauces and sallets: and the making pyes, pasties, tarts, and custards, with the forms and shapes of many of them..

She also wrote The queen-like closet: or, Rich cabinet : stored with all manner of rare receipts for preserving, candying and cookery. Very pleasant and beneficial to all ingenious persons of the female sex. To which is added, A supplement, presented to all ingenious ladies, and gentlewomen. By Hannah Woolley.;
The compleat servant-maid: or, The young maidens tutor : Directing them how they may fit, and qualifie themselves for any of these employments. Viz. Waiting-woman, house-keeper, chamber-maid, cook-maid, under-cook-maid, nursery-maid, dairy-maid, laundry-maid, house-maid, scullery-maid. Whereunto is added a suppiiment [sic] containing the choicest receipts and rarest secrets in physick and chyrurgery; also for salting and drying English ham equal to Westphalia. The compleat market-man and market-woman, in buying fowl, fish, flesh, &c. and to know their goodness or badness in every respect, to prevent being cheated.
The gentlewomans companion, or, A guide to the female sex : containing directions of behaviour in all places, companies, relations and conditions, from their childhood down to old age ... with letters and discourses upon all occasions : where unto is added, A guide for cook-maids, dairy-maids, chamber-maids, and all others that go to service, the whole being an exact rule for the female sex in general;
and The cook's guide: or, Rare receipts for cookery : Published and set forth particularly for ladies and gentlwomen; being very beneficial for all those that desire the true way of dressing of all sorts of flesh, fowles, and fish; the best directions for all manner of kickshaws, and the most ho-good sawces: whereby noble persons and others in their hospitalities may be gratified in their gusto's.

What a way with a title that lets you know exactly what you're getting, eh?.

She also, I discovered (or perhaps was reminded, it's a while since I had occasion to think about her), may have taught at a pioneer girls' school at Sutton House in Hackney, where

Rare examples of 17th-century decorative paper-cutting found amid debris at a historic house in east London that was part of what was known as “the ladies’ university” are to go on display. Eight examples of the art form have been identified, including a hen embellished with coloured silk and a tiny folded star. They were discovered on a lintel where they are assumed to have settled after falling between floorboards about 350 years ago.

(We note that this 'woke' establishment besides ladylike decorative arts taught 'reading, writing, arithmetic, French, housekeeping, music and dancing').

Reading top entry in this Ask A Manager post: 'Coworker keeps prying into my romantic life':

I’m in my mid 20s, and a coworker who has to be in at least her 60s is constantly making remarks about me having/getting a boyfriend. In one instance that happened today, I was typing something on my phone and when she saw this, asked if I was “texting my boyfriend.”

Of course this may be generalised nosiness, of which we ourselves have had experience in our earlier working life, but we also wonder if Older Coworker has a younger male relative or acquaintance whom she would like to fix up with apparently eligible young colleague?

This is not at all the same thing as certain persons at My Former Workplace who were given to exhorting those of us who were known to be in Unsanctified Relationships to Get Wed, so that there could be a Workplace Jolly. This was in the days when it was any excuse for a Workplace Jolly, we had already come to the days of nostalgic sighing over those epic times by the era when I retired.

(And of course once couples were wed, I have no doubt there would be exhortations to be fruitful and multiply Before It Was Too Late....)

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Dept of nitpickery: this is pretty tangential to the topic of actual article How England’s top private schools came to own 38,000 acres of land, but I will never not be irked by this sort of generalisation: 'As Victorian women they were not rich in their own right (the Married Women’s Property Act would not come into force for another 10 years)': Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts would like a word.

Also, re the Forest School thing, is this really some new thing inherited from Scandinavia, because it resonates with stuff I have looked at in the interwar period.

This is very very creepy and spooky and proves that just being an atheist doesn't mean you can't also be a horrendous cultist: America’s premier pronatalists on having ‘tons of kids’ to save the world. (And homeschooling them.)

So much wrong there one hardly knows where to begin, but these people are not heating their house - with small children in it, though their child-rearing practices are pretty horrendous, we find - and allegedly 'give everything they can spare to charity (their charities)' - heating the house in winter is apparently 'pointless indulgence'.

Readers of Victorian novels will already be ticking boxes 'Reverend Brocklehurst' and 'Mrs Jellaby', no?

I really, really wanted to know exactly WHAT their charities were, because they are probably some woowoo Effective Altruism futuristic crap that does no good to anybody. Wot, me, cynical?

Also, as a historian of eugenics, I so do not give them a get-out on what they're doing not really being eugenics, because it was not 'state-sponsored selective breeding to influence the dominance of certain genes', it was totally this mindset, except, actually, I am now feeling positively benign towards all those early C20th proponents who thought maybe they themselves shouldn't be contributing to the gene-pool because of their myopia or some minor problem somewhere in the family tree.

I am also thinking, why not put the effort and dosh into improving the lot of the struggling?

Do we want the 'civilisation' that these people are saving....

And talking of cults and who gets to define 'civilisation': was I the last boy to be flogged at Eton? (in 1984, there records are not entirely clear on the subject....)

What I read

Had a touch of the reading blahs and re-read 2 Agatha Christies which it turned out I had re-read fairly recently, and then Murder Is Easy (1939), which I had read before but not for a while, but I did remember The Plot Twist, and honestly, not among the top Dame Agathas.

Daisy Dunn, Not Far From Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars (2022), with was a deal on Kobo and looked vaguely interesting. Well, sort of, except I think the invocation of Brideshead was a bit misleading - there's a bit about posh houses and Society types but less than one might anticipate - and even the 'Oxford between the Wars' is actually 'mostly about 3 classicists (one of whom spent a significant tranche of his career in Reading and Birmingham) and their circles and relationships' plus infodumps about various other people who cropped up. Stuff of interest but I felt was a bit that thing where it got dumped on the page without much coherence? Plus, if you are going to make a Thing about one individual's homosexuality and how that may or may not have influenced his chances at a particular distinction, I really, really think you need to Have Done The Reading on a) homosexuality in England between the wars (the exact legal position, because honestly, he could not just have been arrested For Being Gay did that come out: Turing was not really a useful analogue to invoke, 1950s were a different context) and b) specifically in Oxbridge (there is work that had been done! I do rather suspect that in his position, providing he wasn't cottaging actually in Oxford or taking rough trade back to his College set, he could get away with quite a lot) and generally in those circles. And various other nigglesomenesses.

Rosemary Tonks, The Way Out Of Berkeley Square (1971): not quite as enjoyable as Businessmen as Lovers, between the horrible exploitative father and her brother getting polio in Pakistan.

Took a notion to re-read Diana Wynne-Jones, A Sudden Wild Magic (1992) - has its moments, but not really one of the top ones.

On the go

Have decided to declare The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle and White Teeth as definitely given up, and Biographical Misrepresentations of British Women Writers as browsing.

Picked up Heather Lewis, The Second Suspect (1998) as I see there is something else by her out, but I am not sure this is where my head is at at present.

Pulled off the shelf where it has been sitting for many a moon, Winifred Peck, A Little Learning Or A Victorian Childhood (1952) - she was the sister of the Knox Brothers written up by Penelope Fitzgerald and I have essayed a couple of her crime novels (B- at best) and Bewildering Cares (1940), which in spite of the blurb did not recall EM Delafield's Provincial Lady. However a memoir which purports to be about changes in female education over her lifetime may be more interesting?

Up next

No idea: what do Tiggers eat?

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*But one of the radiators has been discovered to have sprung a leak and will have to be replaced.

Dept of, human/animal commensality, of a somewhat unexpected kind: The hyenas of Harar: how a city fell in love with its bone-crunching carnivores:

As human-wildlife conflict increases and habitats shrink, the question of how communities can live in coexistence with large predators becomes increasingly pressing. In Harar, the animals act as the city’s garbage-disposal system, entering at night through a series of “hyena doors” built into the walls and eating entrails dumped in the streets. Abbas is a longtime human ally, one of the “hyena men” of the city. He learned his trade from his father, Yusuf, who started tossing scraps to hyenas while feeding his dogs decades ago.
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In Harari folklore, hyenas also act as mediums that can communicate with the town’s dead saints and transmit messages from the townspeople. This is reflected in the local word for hyena: waraba, or “newsman”.

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Dept of, do you really mean 'EVERY author'????: Every author wants to write a book like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Query: might this be a generational thing? Even so.

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Dept of, paging EM Forster perhaps?: The Head of English at a Lincolnshire secondary school discusses the crisis in education and her mission to make literature live for a new generation:

In her experience, teenagers can be switched off by the notion that they need to love books. “Let’s think about loving stories instead, the discussion of individuals’ experiences of the world, and the way that different people experience their reality.”

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Dept of, O Tim Dowling (and his missus) nevairr evairr change:

I like having the piano in the kitchen because it takes up a lot of space in my shed, and also because I can serenade my wife during cocktail hour. I think she would enjoy this more if I could play the piano.

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Dept of, wot, not paging Mad William and 'Jerusalem'? Another England by Caroline Lucas review – seeing green. I mean, I am entirely on board for somebody pointing out the alternative visions of England (but only going back to the Chartists? the Diggers and Levellers would like a word....). And I do like that she seems to be onto the nostalgic appeal of 'idyllic rural landscapes full of birdsong and blacksmiths toiling at their anvils, rather than the four-fifths of the population who actually live in cities and towns', though I think we can also point a finger at e.g. William Morris and Edward Carpenter for this. In fact the whole English pastoral nature-worship thing is (it can be argued) a product of urbanisation.... But I guess that's outwith her remit in this book.

He quit heading the Pentagon’s UFO office. Now a report of his has shaken up ufology:

Kirkpatrick... says the evidence against Grusch’s claims is conclusive. “There’s no evidence to support any of the allegations or any extraterrestrial reverse engineering or ‘human biologics’ or whatever you want to call it,” he says. “You see this story crop up every couple of decades, and it’s pretty much the same story.”

This pretty much conforms to the evidence (not) in the files released by the Ministry of Defence in the UK some while ago. But I guess it's like Flat Earth Theory, though I'm not sure Flat Earthers go so far as to hang out outside Terrestrial Globalists' houses....

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These are rather grim stories:

Boarding school matrons and the ‘abuse that is hardly ever spoken of’. I certainly came across occasional instances of boys abused by women in early C20th correspondence, but mostly in domestic context (servants, governesses).

Scotland apologised in 2023 for historic forced adoptions – but this happened throughout the UK - there was actually a change from 'motherhood will be redemptive and she should be encouraged to keep the child' after WW1 to a different dynamic after WW2 (see Thane and Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? : unmarried motherhood in twentieth-century England)

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Not sure it's entirely down to the medieval Church, I suspect it's a recurrent and more pervasive thing: Medieval Christian misogyny shapes how we judge women today, says scholar. Cambridge talk claims early male writers introduced idea real beauty is within to control how women dressed.

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This is a really odd and pretty retro selection of Five of the best books about the Victorians, especially from someone I'd normally consider a fairly sound historian of the period. There are much better books on Victsex than Marcus and his freudyweudy theories*, and as for The French Lieutenant's Woman, so blokeywokey, yuck. (Cheerleading over here for The Crimson Petal and the White....)

*Though admittedly there has been So Much Work on So Many Aspects I'm not sure I could or would pick Just One.

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I think of Gertrude Jekyll stomping around in gumboots gardening, but here is a blog about her travels in her earlier life with a friend to Greece and Turkey.

World Book Day finds children are put off reading for pleasure:

Annual event to encourage young readers has revealed research finding that significant numbers feel discouraged from following their own tastes.

What I'm wondering here is, are they put off, or have they never actually discovered?

This doesn't sound altogether different from The Way Things UsterBee back in the Upper Palaeolithic when I were a young thing spelling out my horn book...

new research showing that more than a third of children cannot choose what they want to read, and one in five feel judged for what they do read. “Children have told us that they think that reading choices are judged by the adults around them,” said Cassie Chadderton, CEO of World Book Day. “It discourages them, it puts them off reading for pleasure and by choice”.
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More than a quarter of respondents said that they would enjoy reading more if it was made more fun (30%) and if there was less nagging from grownups to do it (28%). One in four children said they are encouraged to read books that they do not want to read.

Have we not been here before? Failure to meet the young reader where they're at, I can remember primary schoolteacher of mine suggesting that maybe comics, not such a bad thing?

I can see that some of this may be down to targets in school classes (I wouldn't know) and designated things they're meant to read.

Even I, who would read pretty much anything, including back of cereal packet if nothing else, got subjected to reading-policing of 'not that, read something else or read differently' (including 'reading too fast') but I had sufficient of the habit that I was unlikely to be put off.

Maybe this is cynical, but when I see an author touting their book as if it was The First Ever Book on a significant C19th woman, and I already have a solid biography of her on my shelves, and a few years ago the same author was touting their book on a subject that a mate of mine had written a perhaps more drily academic work on (no, I don't think so, she writes very accessibly), I do wonder about their research methodology and citation practices. (Have a feeling they may have written something else that was treading in existing tracks.)

***

Banging my head in archivist whose own palaeography skills are getting a bit rusty, somebody on social media going WOEZ WOEZ that cursive is no longer taught and therefore people will no longer be able to read Old Documents, even family records.

Cynical larfter, thinking that family members may have had idiosyncratic and awful handwriting and having learnt a certain method oneself is no guarantee that one can read it, plus historians and archivists train to be able to decipher older hands. (And bless the invention of the typewriter....).

***

Further to a discussion elsewhere about those classic works that get to be set as texts for literature classes in schools, and admit that I am not up to date on this, and very likely it has changed since my day, though one hears a lot of rather heartsinky stuff about current SKILLZ that are supposed to be measured in reading and writing, which rip the heart out of any enjoyment.

I'm not sure the pleasures of reading were terrifically in the foreground of English classes at school (thinking of secondary school here), even once we'd progressed from the 'reading round the class' approach (aaaarrrgh). I am not sure 'we are here to enjoy this book' was the agenda, but being able to say What It Was About and increasingly apply critical concepts.

I.e. I was, from an early age, an omnivorous reader, but set texts? bleargh.

Will concede that of the A-level set texts quite enjoyed bits of Humphrey Clinker, and Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury (I suppose points there for choosing a mid-C20th verse play that was not by TS Eliot or Christopher Fry) put me on to Charles Williams, and the C20th poets gave me my abiding love for Edward Thomas, but suspect that was an entire happenstance.

(Thinking about those set texts: apart from Ye Unexpurgated Chaucer selection - the Pardoner prologue and tale as well as the general Prologue, as I recollect - the Smollett novel, which is what one might anticipate of C18th epistolary fiction pre the rise of the circulating library's demands, and Marlowe's Edward II - quite racy stuff for a girl's grammar school in the late 60s? Not sure much emphasis was laid on the homoerotics of Edward/Gaveston/Despenser?)

Have no idea what principles govern or governed the selection of texts - the fact that schools already had a sufficent number of copies and would not need to invest in more? fossilisation of an approved canon? in my day for A-levels at least length cannot have been too much of a consideration.

What I read

Finished Fallen, remained rather meh.

Re-read KJ Charles, Subtle Blood (The Will Darling Adventures, #3) in the wake of having read the freebie coda.

Frances B Singh, Scandal and Survival in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: The Life of Jane Cumming (2020) - Jane Cumming was the mixed-race schoolgirl at the centre of the Woods-Pirie vs Cumming-Graham 'Scotch Verdict' defamation case, and this looks at her (rather than at Woods & Pirie and were they/weren't they sapphistic) and also what happened afterwards. I gave this a lot of points for looking at context, and wider issues of how illegitimate and mixed-race offspring in families were dealt with at the period in Scotland (All More Complicated than ideology suggests), not entirely sure about the use of some of the modern psych lit. Felt more could have been interrogated about the grandmother (against whom the suit was brought), Dame Helen Cumming-Graham, given to hasty acts, also, it sounds like, making gestures that she then didn't follow through on or expected other people to carry out. Surprised the author did not know about Clemence Dane's Regiment of Women and therefore missed an allusion (I suspect) in one of the C20th discussions of the case (ripped off by Lilian Hellmann....).

Gillian Sutherland, In Search of the New Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Britain 1870–1914 (2015) - a lot of this was looking at gaps in existing historiography - e.g. why so much on women going to Oxbridge when far more went to London and provincial unis at that period? and made very useful points about looking for real social changes not so much among the elite but among the aspirant women from lower social classes moving into white-collar jobs (mostly teaching). However, v surprised no reference to Ellen Jordan's work on women's employment and the campaign for women's rights more generally in later C19th WOT. (So really, not much about Post Office ladies or lady pharmacists.) Good on class and ladies vs women and social expectations.

Jacob Bloomfield, Drag: A British History (2023). This is great - shows how almost mainstream male cross-dressing was in popular entertainment from late C19th to c. 1970, not just in panto dame trad but also glamour drag - and not necessarily subversive. Uses a case study model and does very good nuanced work, solid research, ambivalence of e.g. censorship (far more conflicts between different parties than I'd quite realised. the Lord Chamberlain did not have it all his own way).

Re-read of Alexis Hall, Something Spectacular (Something Fabulous, #2).

On the go

Rosemary Tonks, The Halt During the Chase (1972, recently reissued). Rather loving this so far.

Up next

Well, something to keep me going until the new Barbara Hambly Benjamin January arrives next week (if it does): maybe Diane Purkiss on English Food?

Able to go to university or other forms of higher ed because grants were available, if they didn't do that in late adolescence the Open University came along or there was e.g. Birkbeck (the latter going back to early C19th). It was an era of opportunity even without that.

The talent is already there. You're talking about future multi-Mozarts, while there are ads going 'Wolfgang Amadeus' next job may be in cyber'....

(I ask myself, do people who invoke Mozart in this context ever attend one of his operas, can they recognise anything by him, do they spontaneously whistle any tunes of his? or is he just an empty marker for some kind of Kultural Kred?)

You're dissing on the humanities and thinking talent somehow spontaneously generates if you breed enough individuals.

And it's always the obvious biggie names that are invoked - not John Clare or the numerous 'daughters of educated men' who succeeded in making some kind of mark (and 'Anonymous was a woman'). (Where do they stand on the Stratfordian debate, eh?)

This - who counts as being The Cultural Figures they think should be cloned, because that is what it sounds like - made me think of those posts where somebody goes WO! over pictures of Grate Rtystik Achievements of Teh Past, that the present is a Sad Come-Down From.

And I wonder, do they actually like Old Marble Statues of Classical Myffs, and OTT Baroque Cathedrals, and Mad King Ludwig's entirely erstatz Medeevle Castles, or do they just think that these are Approved Art? Do they feel the Housmanian hairs rising on back of neck, chill down spine, never mind experiencing full-on Stendahlian swoon? Do they go to museums or cultural sites?

Records reveal hidden history of female astronomers at Yerkes Observatory (Okay, am murmuring in archivist: 'That's what records do, when you look into them'.)

***

Aspen House Open Air School, Lambeth: doing ‘the world of good’: while one is not entirely sure about the gospel of lovely fresh air (in London between the wars, what?), but there do seem to have been some benign ideas generally about education in the mix.

***

And on education, the very All More Complicated Question of what constitutes literacy, The Rabble that Can Write: Rethinking Literacy in Rural England, 1550-1700, and the range of reading and writing skills that served the populace's purposes.

***

Historian of Ye Heinous Sinne of Onan is just a tad miffed that does not get cited anywhere here, whereas (bad) Big Book by Big Name does: No Fap: A Cultural History of Anti-Masturbation. (There is some evidence that this is a deleterious practice, or maybe it is more about the kind of person it appeals to: Violence on Reddit Support Forums Unique to r/NoFap).

***

I found this Paris Review interview with the late AS Byatt (2001) perhaps illustrative of my ambivalences over her - things at which I was going 'yes, yes! so true!' and things that made me wince if not cringe.

***

VIEWPOINT: MAGAZINE OF THE BRITISH SOCIETY FOR THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE no 119, Jun 2019: Queering the Museum: Exploring LGBTQ+ lives and issues in the history of science, technology and medicine (yes, I am acquainted with several of the authors there!).

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It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog

Entries tagged with education

Rather miscellaneous

Rounding up stuff

That educational privilege meme thing

There's something nasty in these woodsheds all right

Just a tad narrowing the recommendation there, Lee, dude?

Tidying up some tabs

Wednesday went for a walk in the rain

Vaguely connected things

Is the moon blue, maybe?

This is not actually a culinary post -

Maybe there's another agenda in play....

Hives of scum and villainy

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Errrrr - is this Awful New Phenomenon, or, More Like, Same Old, Same Old

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Wednesday there was no chance of a walk that day

I saw the best minds of my generation....

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