The Education Vector

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 17

The Education Vector¶

July 1995

Editor Ian Clark

This Education Vector has been reprinted from VECTOR Vol.12 No.1. VECTOR is the Quarterly Journal of the British APL Association. For more information about the British APL Association, please contact: Anthony Camacho, [address and telephone number omitted].

Contents¶

Ian Clark
IAC/Human Interfaces,
[address, telephone number and e-mail address omitted]

Editorial¶

I had a dream last night...

No, no, hang on... this really happened. Or at least it didn’t really happen, but it did, if you see what I mean. I was overtaken in the street by a total stranger, except that I recognised him straight away. It was of course the British Prime Minister, John Major, and he begged a tremendous favour of me. It seemed that the following day he was going to be out of office. He’d picked on me because nobody looks more ordinary than me and he was facing up to the prospect of becoming just an ordinary person himself. A prospect he didn’t relish because he didn’t actually know any ordinary people. He anticipated being dreadfully isolated before he managed to make up socially for all those years in office and he wondered if I might consider taking him down the local pub and introduce him to a few of my friends, just to get him started.

Now some of my best friends are teachers, most of them in fact, or rather ex-teachers (not being able to stand the politically motivated hassle of the last few years). Just as I thought I had a handle on this thing I got a phone call from a BBC reporter I know called Chris. Now Chris has a nose for trouble. He once turned up with an entire camera crew on the off-chance of filming me getting beaten up by angry quarrymen at a protest meeting I was addressing. He was proposing to do the same that evening, since he was covering the story of how John Major managed his first day as an ordinary person. I was going to have to stage a casual introduction, in front of television cameras (and boy! — don’t they take over a place when they arrive) along the lines of:

“Chris, this is — er — John.”

I woke up sweating. Not that the dream was all that nightmarish, but it struck me how much worse it could have been. Just imagine:

“Chris, this is — er — Margaret.”

Lady Thatcher went on record recently (at the time of writing) for castigating the present government for being too lily-livered. Among other things she prescribed wholesale diversion of resources away from the social services to the police.

People like that used to get themselves slung out of the Gestapo for cruelty. There was a time (before the National Health Service, and healthy eating) when it used to be said “Save on food — pay out on the doctor.” To paraphrase it in the present context: “Save on teachers and social workers — pay out on prisons and the police.” Yet Lady Thatcher, if I’m not misrepresenting the darling, seemed to be promoting this as Right and Proper.

One thing I have always admired the Tory Party for is managing to get rid of its leaders just in the nick of time. But I hope it doesn’t get into the habit of putting the skids under its ministers whenever the press say “jump”. Especially when the volatile fraction seem to be treating an apparent desire at the top to correct the excesses of the last 12 years as weakness of leadership.

Cynics will say that there’s no desire to do this at all. Just a general election on the horizon. But I’ve also heard it said, since Harold Wilson’s day, that the British electorate can be bought for the equivalent of two weeks’ salary. This is surely no less true than it ever was. It’s marvellous what you can buy these days. Far more than you ever could under socialism.

So why, if there’s really no problem about getting re-elected, are the government leaning over backwards to give the impression they care about the state of public services, in particular schools? Might they be priming us for something? Might it just be that any fool can see that the taxpayers are going to have to cough up for some good replacements for our wasting educational resources in the not too distant future? After all, like our nuclear power heritage, it would be hard to find a buyer for the schools system in its present state.

Recent Articles in Vector¶

Regular readers of Education Vector might like to know that Vector 11.4 carried a series of articles featuring J, in particular:

There was also a thorough review of J 2.05 for Windows by David Ziemann.

Back numbers of Vector are available from Gill Smith, Brook House, Gilling East, YORK YO6 4JJ, Tel: 01439-788385. The cost is normally £10 per complete volume, but in this case we would be happy to offer individual copies at £2.50 each.