kudi. sose, sose kudi.
on Fantastic Voyage (Nigeria), 13/Dec/2010 21:32, 34 days ago
Caution: this is a lengthy, highly prejudiced, and ill-informed rant. Here’s abetter, though longer, article.Before we came to Nigeria, we watched one episode (no idea why we missed the other two: probably we were drinking somewhere.  Or watching the X Factor) of the BBC’s Welcome to Lagos.  It could have been a horror show: thousands of people living out their lives in enormous tips, spending their days searching for bits of scrap and their nights in tents erected with and on rubbish.  Instead, it was an exciting, inspiring piece of television (it does still sometimes happen!) packed with creative, innovative, incredibly hard working people who found different ways of making money from other people’s waste; who didn’t take much truck of their minimal life expectancies, and who focused on their goals – whether they weAll mobile phones are re providing a birthday party for a beloved daughter or making a record in hope of a hit.  Nigeria, we thought, would be a nation of entrepeneurs: people who see a bull being bled to death and think‘I could sell that blood’.It isn’t.  Lagos may be full of imaginative, thrusting innovators– but the country as a whole is (or seems to me to be) filled with people who have little sense of alternative possibilities, of potential: for them, past and future truly are the metalled ways which stretch, unchanging and straight as a die into infinity.  This is absurdly vague.  Take an example– well worn among volunteers here.  All mobile phones are pay-as-you-go, and there are an extraordina inry number of people who make their living by selling them on the streets.  I’m in a car on the way to Abuja now (playing the magnificent stereotype of abaturiin  a car on his laptop), and I know that, as we draw into the city, there’ll be at different points 20-50 young men who’ll stand holding laminated sheets of the charge cards they have.  One or two might even approach the car in case I want some.  They’re everywhere.  I’m no marketing guru, but if I was selling a product that was universally in demand and universally available, I hope I’d find some way of setting myself apart: going into an office and finding out who needed which ones and being there when they arrived and at lunch time, for instance.  Why don’t people here?  I’m sure there are many explanations, but (as I currently work in education) here’s mine.The Nigerian education system (which is a product of a combination of various factors, including colonialism, highly traditional and authoritative family values, combined with truly staggering levels of selfishness and corruption) doesn’t allow for creative thought, nor does it stimulate it.  There’re no kingfishers catching fire here.  I could give endless tedious and incomprehensible statistic about questions asked and the time spent doing different things in the classroom which feed that impression, but that’s not really my point.  My point is that if you give children an education based on anti-creativity and inflexible thought processes then you create an inflexible, uncreative, economically badly off nation.I think Michael Gove would agree with that, and I’m certain that Lord Browne would, because they’ve made what they call economics (by which they mean ‘the amount of money their friends have spent which the country now needs to pay back’) the sole basis of the education system in the country I come from.  From my highly informed standpoint, I disagree.  My understanding of economics is not that it’s about money, but that it’s about value.  In the recesses of my mind, I define it as a sort of social science, like mass psychology, which looks at what people care about and seeks to place that on some sort of measurable scale.In Nigeria, creativity and individuality is not (currently, as far as I’ve observed it) valued in the education system.  Doing as others do and absolute submission to authority is.  So, what do you get?  No surprises. Gove commissionedBrowne’s report into higher education.  What does it discover?  That the sole value in education is market forces.  That’s right, dear reader: my country no longer finds it important, for instance, to have doctors.  If individuals find it worth their while to stagger under the Herculean (why isn’t that Atlaean?) load of 7 years of debt and universities can be arsed to prove to them by some sort of complex algorithm that they’ll make a long term net gain (which is, of course, purely financial), and they can’t see a quicker and easier way to make cash, then we’ll have trained doctorsby the time these chaps get voted out.  If not, well, their kids won’t die after being smashed down in traffic accidents so no wahalla. Given that there’s no such thing as society, Britain has no intrinsic needs and no intrinsic values – only a bunch of individuals who make choices based on how best to fill their pockets.(This isn’t entirely true; there are actually anti-market things in place when it comes to medicine and sciences.  I use medicine rather than, say, Philosophy or History of Art because it’s less likely to make people say ‘well, we don’t need those things.  The world would be a better place with more banks and fewer libraries and museums.’  Because that isn’t the argument I want to have.  Here, anyway.  I’ll happily have it in a pub.)(Of course, there’s probably something desperately personal hiding at the back of my argument here: I can’t really see how, having read the Browne Report, there will be university departments catering to my subject matter within the next 20 years – apart from those being slowly run down until everyone retires.  It’s true that it is a minority interest: the past which shaped our present; the language which shaped our imagination; the social movement which shaped our economy and politics.  And it’s one that I’m not really in a position to argue about because I’m wildly partisan.)There hasn’t yet been a White Paper on universities.  I can’t wait to read it – given that (in the grand tradition established, I think, by Blair’s government) the report’s conclusions were more or less decided before it was written so it’s essentially a first draft of a White Paper rather than a systematic review of evidence combined with expertrecommendations.  But that’s not been shown just yet, so it wouldn’t be fair to attack Gove for what his independent expert has said.  Yet.However, Gove has published a White Paper on the school education system (that’s right: staying up all night to listen to cricket does give you time to read more), and it’s a complex document, to which I have no intention of giving justice.  If you want an unprejudiced, balanced version of it then you can readthe sodding thingyourself.  It’d be even more tedious than I’m already being to bash on through everything it says – and much of what it says is highly reasonable anyway.  What I object to is what I see as its underlying set of values.  Here’re some of what I think they are:- fear. This government is set to continue in the late Blair image of creating fear, and lots of it.  The current horror film binge is only just beginning, judging by the reasoning behind so much of this document.  If we don’t agree with everything it says, if we don’t start controlling the hateful and destructive children in our midst, if we don’t crack down on the monstrous cackling bad teachers, then we’re all doomed.  Send in the army!- there’s an early extraordinary statement (which is linked with fear, actually, but hey) – the kind of thing that Blair would never have dared say because it sounds too socialist: “Throughout history, most individuals have been the victims of forces beyond their control.”  Wow.  True.  But the picture the paper goes on to paint is one of pitiful peasants with no control over their lives; and wealthy happy folk who’ve become educated enough to make all the right choices.  Sorry chaps, but you’re not there because you made the right calls: you’re there for the same reason they’re there.  Forces beyond your control.- market forces as king (see above), which come through again and again and again, and are linked to inevitable decentralisation.  Clearly, these are powerful and generally a power for progress in the sense that most people understand it in the UK today.  Equally clearly (to me), they can cause immense damage; they’re not terribly stable; they can often be made to serve the interests of powerful interest groups – the very ones the forewords claim to be bringing onto a level with others; they can’t (yet: perhaps future enhanced understanding of economics will change this) be used to shape everything –and education is, for me, well outside their sphere of useful influence.- a direct correlation of‘high quality’ with ‘highly educated’ and (by extension, given their other points and joining up the dots with the Browne report) with ‘wealthy’.  It’s wonderful to have a report that says that the quality of teachers is central – and that focuses so much on interesting training initiatives.  But sentences about high quality teaching are almost invariably followed by statements about‘the most academically able’.  Now, I’m pretty academically able, and I was quite a good teacher.  But I’ve seen several absolutely awesome teachers – way, way stronger than me – who were not academic high fliers.  (And I’ve seen several academic high fliers who couldn’t teach their way out of a teaspoon.)  Lovely, evidence based rhetoric about the importance of teachers is allied to the same old values: them who have, should be in control.  (And as for the notion that former members of the armed forces should be fast-tracked into teaching…well, that’s below criticism really.)- it’s not really fair to complain about this, given that I can’t remember the last government document I read that didn’t do it.  But, while I’m whinging, here goes: why make stupid points just to grab headlines?  I mean, seriously, if this matters so much and we’re all about to die if these changes don’t take place, why include ridiculous things just so the Mail and the Telegraph have something to put in bold?  There are plenty of these– here’s one.  Inserting a bit about teaching synthetic phonics into the QTS (Qualified Teacher Status) standards?  Seriously– I can’t imagine for a second that Michael Gove thinks his secondary school PE and Geography teacher was worse at his job because he didn’t know how to break ‘line-out’ into its phonetic components.(There are, it must be said, a number of good initiatives in the document.  And it’s a lovely, lovely font.  Really lovely.  How can I source it?  Matt?)And then there’s the man’s response to the student protests.  Now, I wasn’t there (I wish I had been: I hope many of you were, because this stuff fucking matters, and those of you complaining about the violence – if you want it to happen different, get out there and take part yourself) but I find it moving and kinda inspiring to see school age students marching for their educations and the future of the country which will be theirs.  And I find it loathly that the apathetic bunch of chewing smoking fornicating little charmers have been hit so hard that they feel the need to do it.  We have– we are still in the process of – not just letting them down, but hurting them.  Our children.  And what does our Education Secretary say?  That he’ll listen to arguments but not to violence.  But you won’t though, will you Govey?  You must have heard some arguments.  Surely you must have done, or perhaps you can’t read?  Or maybe Nick Clegg et al actually are as kow-towing and gooey eyed as the lefty media seems from over here to be making out.  You haven’t listened to arguments, because your values are not our values and you’re powerful and we’re not.  And portraying a massive march of kids and youths as a violent mob because– what? 15, is it? – a few of them went a bit mental at a riot van is childish, crazily defensive, and very very cheap politics.  Haven’t you ever seen an over excited class of 16 year olds?  Oh, sorry, of course you haven’t.  You’re only the Education Secretary: why would you bother?Is this necessary because the financiers lost control of their toy?  Of course it isn’t.  It’s a choice: there were (there still are, actually) other options (many of which I’m sure I’d hate).  As Edmund might well have described it -‘an admirable evasion of whoremaster Tories – to blame their goatish destruction of all I believe in on the charge of a economic crisis’.  Lots of attention will hopefully be called to the tax dodgers– Vodafone and Osborne being top of my current hate list. At least in theory, education is a massive stimulant of economic growth– it’s somewhat more long term and steady and dull than gambling some civil servants’ salaries on a bubble expanding forever, but to be honest I’d take the slow and steady over the utterly utterly shit any day.  And what really upsets me here is the underpinning set of values with which we’re being fed, and which – like it or not, but this is education we’re talking about – will define our country for at least the generation to come.What country will that lead to?  Not Nigeria– I’m not some kind of bandy-legged prophet of doom with deranged hair and mind but buckets of charisma and a colourful turn of phrase: I’m just a deeply, deeply, sad Englishman who fervently hopes and prays thatthistime, at least, we’ll learn the lesson and never ever ever hand power to these abominably selfish and cold (or are they just themselves unimaginative and underexposed to the world outside of their sphere?  To understand is to forgive, after all, and perhaps I should seek to swallow my wrath and focus some empathy at them) people who appear to be utterly incapable of any degree of humility and whose values are so abundantly clearly not mine. By the waters of Leman, I sat down and wept.