Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers?
Update: seemingly not
Update: Oh yeah!
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
"The Gold Standard" of education
Melanie Phillips (who really does raise the bar every single day in terms of terribleness in blogging) trots out one of the most annoying cliches in British journalism - the characterisation of the A-Level exam as "the gold standard" of the British educational system.
The Gold Standard is widely recognised to have been a bad monetary policy system. Specifically, it was abandoned fifty years ago because it was too inflexible and could not cope with a changing economy, and today it is only advocated by isolated cranks. Is this really the analogy that Melanie Phillips et al want to make? Orwell noted that crap metaphors like this are a sure sign of someone who does not care what they're writing about.
In fact, as Matthew Turner proved, the A-Level has seen grade inflation of roughly 2% per annum over the last thirty years, which seems to me to be a perfectly sensible standard, allowing for improving productivity in the education sector and the Flynn effect.
Update: At what point does it become acceptable to call someone a Kahanist? Surely this must be getting close.
Update Note cunning use of "at what point does it become acceptable?" in order to "adumbrate" something which it might be libellous to "say". Obviously one can't judge the entirety of someone's views based on one blog post. What I specifically wanted to draw attention to were the twin views that a) "Israel" is an entity larger than the State of Israel and b) "Israel" so defined is a homeland "of the Jews alone" (a phrase which MP uses twice, but which does not appear at all in the linked document). Greater Israelism was certainly part of the platform that got the Kach party banned, and "of the Jews alone" is at the very least a careless expression in implying an ethnic criterion for Israeli citizenship. I don't think this is harmless stuff at all and am getting increasingly surprised that the Spectator is so keen to publish it.
this item posted by the management 12/19/2007 02:30:00 AM
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