9 years ago this month, the labour party
conference heard the famous promise that a new labour government would
prioritise "education education education." Two weeks ago,
Ofsted, the government inspectorate of schools,
reported that its latest round of inspections had shown "almost two thirds of
schools inspected in the first week are good or better." The report went on:
"Of the 86 schools inspected, 8% were awarded a grade 1 for outstanding overall
effectiveness of the school, 56% were awarded a grade 2 for good overall
effectiveness of the school and 28% were satisfactory with a grade 3. Only 8%
of schools were judged to be inadequate. Of these, six were issued with a
Notice to Improve and one went into Special Measures."
Shortly after the Ofsted statement, a massive
earthquake centred on Muzaffarabad in Pakistan
killed tens of thousands of people. In the days following, as the western aid
effort gained publicity, the Independent (UK) asserted that, "this is no time for
compassion fatigue." The front page continued, "This will be remembered as the
year in which nature made clear its indifference to the fate of mankind. First
came the tsunami, which wiped out 225,000 lives. In Niger, famine engulfed the
country. Then came Hurricane Katrina, and now the Kashmir earthquake."
The connection between these events? While the
government, through its inspectorate, congratulates itself on the 'improved'
education of its young citizens, a group of highly educated individuals
demonstrates the utterly destructive potential of a 'good' education by
producing a national newspaper which describes a 21st century famine as a
'natural disaster.' Niger's catastrophe has little to do with the
'indifference' of nature and everything to do with the indifference of man.
Other countries in the same latitude and in the same climate band - Saudi
Arabia, United Arab Emirates - haven't suffered famine and, as things stand,
aren't likely to. Indeed, neighbouring countries such as Chad and Mali, while
in the grip of ongoing poverty, haven't suffered a famine which, bizarrely for
an act of nature, seems confined to national borders.
According to a
UN report, 842 million people in the world were
going hungry in 2003, not because of a lack of food but because of "the absence
of a real political will." While the report recommends entirely the wrong
solution (free trade), it's initial description of the facts remains correct:
hunger and famine are man-made and political. This, to any objective and humane
person would seem so elementary as to be beyond statement. And yet, it is an
understanding beyond the comprehension or perhaps beyond the acknowledgement
not only of newspaper editors but of the people who continue to buy their
product.
Is it beyond observation that adverse natural
events such as floods, droughts and earthquakes have a disproportionately worse
outcome for the world's poor who live in far more vulnerable conditions?
Compare for example the 7.2 magnitude earthquake which claimed 5100 lives in a
dense city population of 1.5million in
Kobe, Japan in 1995 and 2 recent Iranian
earthquakes: the
first in 1990, which reached 7.3 on the Richter
scale, killed 40 000 people; the second, 6.6 in magnitude, killed 43 000 in 2003.
Japanese incomes, 4 times higher than those in
Iran, buy sturdier homes and workplaces, better emergency services and warning
systems. When there is such a clear link between income and death rate, how is
it possible to claim these disasters are a result of nature alone? If Kobe was
a 'disaster' it is perhaps time to find a new word for the more lethal events
which take place in poorer parts of the world. Vast difference in the scale of
destruction suffered from similar sized events makes use of the same
descriptive word totally inadequate.
As schools in the UK supposedly get better and
better, you have to wonder how any kids are ever going to come to any
understanding of the world in which they live unless it is entirely by
accident. While the planet melts and almost a billion starve unnecessarily, the
Geography syllabus at Key Stage 2 (age 7-11) makes no mention of this. There is
however plenty of talk of hotel building, tourism, transport, industry, leisure
complexes and building new houses. If kids get good marks in this stuff,
without understanding the consequences of western industrial practice, then
what kind of an education have they had?
It is an education which actively cultivates
ignorance for the sake of ideological pragmatism - not necessary
pragmatism, because things don't have to be this way, but ideological because
the country prefers profitable ignorance to anything else. Just as the media
promotes ignorance, the public knowingly and happily digests that ignorance to
preserve its lifestyle benefits. As the editors at the Independent demonstrate
so well, a good education can earn you lots of money, get you a prestige job
and qualify you to talk rubbish to hundreds of thousands of like-educated,
like-minded people with apparently no adverse personal consequence. And so the
national deception-delusion rolls on. Willed ignorance is our
culture.
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