A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
Thom Brookes has a brilliant quote from Kant in the Critique of Practical Reason: To invent new words where the language already has no lack of expressions for given concepts is a childish effort to distinguish oneself from the crowd, if not by new and true thoughts yet by new patches on an old garment.
Oh, the applicability of it!
TUAW reports that Transmission 1.0 has been released. I’ve installed it and it’s really sweet - probably the best BitTorrent client for Mac OS X, if not one of the best BitTorrent clients on any platform.
Nigel Warburton has had an article of his republished - on the teaching of philosophy in schools. I still think academic rigour in schools is dying out - not because of “dumbing down”, but because tough courses are being replaced wholesale with ‘practical’ courses - science becomes practical science to avoid having to teach any of that difficult theory or method stuff and just the bits which industrial powers think are relevant. They’ve done that to computing, which has gone from being programming and databases and ended up as Introduction to Excel - because being able to use a computer at a level beyond mere competence isn’t practical for industry. We need worker drones, remember, not philosophers and Lisp programmers. Hence the new Diploma system. The rapid and unthinking vocationalisation of British schools is why I’m not nearly as optimistic as Nigel. Although, that said, the Government have dropped the ‘General Diploma’ thing, which is good to see - everyone already understands what a GCSE is and don’t need a fancy way of saying what we already understand.
On the upside, Latin teaching in schools has doubled in the last seven years, but that hasn’t been reflected in exams yet. I think this is good. I think a classical education is important - and not because I’m a snob. I think when we try to take a curriculum and make it more “relevant”, we are actually screwing the people who we are trying to help. For every education reform that the Government puts forward, there is a very simple question you need to ask - would this curriculum be one which the Prime Minister would subject his own children to? Or, in other words, how many Prime Ministers do you know who eschewed Eton and Oxbridge for an NVQ in Business Studies? Education - in this country - is about power, and we all know it. We just conveniently forget it in order to not sound judgmental.
Sorry, but I don’t think that intelligence falls along class lines. Government trying to make working and middle class kids do “relevant” or “practical” qualifications is a way of keeping their ambitions and horizons low. The government introduce these “practical” curricula on the basis that it’ll provide choice, but all it ends up doing is supplanting the harder, academic courses and, in the process, lower people’s intellectual horizons. Even if this is not the intent, this is the result - and it’s a damn good reason to resist the vocationalisation trend. I think people are smart - I’m actually an optimist, even though people accuse me of being very jaded and cynical - and can achieve great things if they set their minds to it. But I fear that a lot of people will be doing that in spite of their schooling.
