Cameron: Is calling people a 'bunch' beneath him, or just him?


Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian has suggested that Cameron calling Calais a 'bunch of migrants' is 'beneath him'. I don't think so. I think it IS him.

It comes from his milieu. There's an 'us' who are normal, right and good. There are people who are loyal to 'us' and they are normal, right and good. They might be inferior but they're good. Then there are the 'other'. The 'other' are suspect, dangerous, surplus to requirements, and a possible or probably threat to the order that 'we' rule and run.

That's why it's a 'bunch of migrants'. If this country were bombed or invaded, Cameron might find his family were a 'bunch of migrants'. But only very rarely in history do the Camerons become the 'other'. It happens - but rarely. For now, and for the rest of his life, he'll be OK, I'm sure. He'll go on 'bunching' the 'other'.
Posted by MichaelRosen at 14:42
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Labels: bunch of migrants, Cameron, Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, othering, the other
Sharing picture books is child's play. But much more than what 'child's play' usually means.


I've often thought about, talked about and written about something that happens very easily when you sit with a very young child and read them a book.


As you read, a child with sight and hearing will hear the words you're reading and look at the pictures. These are never the 'same' story. Pictures don't really 'illustrate' the words. They tell a story or stories that are related in many different ways to the words that the child is hearing. But the child will be reading or trying to read the pictures while hearing and trying to interpret the words.


This means that complicated triangles and lines are being set up between interpreting words, interpreting pictures, interpreting how words are relating to pictures, how pictures are relating to words.


And it's never static.


What you get on one page, is different from what you get on another. What you get on one double page 'spread' is different from what you get on the next. And, if it's a story - fiction or non-fiction, there are all sorts of links and references and 'ties' between the page you're looking at and what precedes it. If you read the book more than once, the links and references stretch forwards as well as backwards because you know what's coming next.


What's more, artists and designers, vary the pages, creating expectations and upsetting them with variations in rhythm of words, rhythm of pictures, where pictures are placed on the page, how many, what change in colours and so on. Characters, features, landscapes may appear or disappear, change once, several or many times with no explicit mention in the text.


All this has to be made coherent by the child. That's to say, the child, in 'getting' the book, getting to like it, understand it, enjoy it, has to find how these things relate in ways that the child can make sense of. This involves the rest of their lives. That's to say, it all has to link with the world and the language(s) they're encountering in everyday life. It will probably link into and hook up with other books, and other 'texts' from TV, film, videos and so on. The act of interpreting will be made by the child using his or her experience of all these things. Running to and for between the 'dead' (inanimate) pages of the book, memories of life and language, and comparing them to 'live' things around them. More interpretation and reflection.


Some children get to do a huge amount of this. Some children get to do very little.


There are important social and political reasons for this. Enormous effort goes into putting people off doing these things: libraries close, early years work in schools focusses more and more on 'decoding' and less and less on frequent reading and re-reading of books which enables this kind of 'work' (or 'pleasure') to happen, the multi-billion dollar front-running media of the day - TV, tablets and videos - say, 'Watch-me!', 24 hours a day, and though I'm not one to say that this is all crap or meaningless or bad, some of this complex interaction that I'm describing that takes place with book-sharing is less prominent, less necessary.


People wonder how it is exactly that some children arrive in school aged 4 or 5 and seem 'school-ready'. One way to look at this is in a very reductive way, and see it in terms of being able to hold a knife and fork and do phonics. There's another way of looking at it in terms of being able to access school-knowledge and higher, more abstract ways of thinking - whether that's in maths, science, humanities or back with literature and language.


Sharing picture books may seem like a far cry from the abstract thinking needed to understand these subjects. What I'm suggesting is that in fact, it isn't. In order to do the 'work' (pleasure) of interpreting sound and image of the picture book in the circumstances I've described, a child has to use and develop a range of interpretation and reflection strategies. These are powerful capabilities, (call them 'transferrable skills', if you like) that you can use and develop through the rest of your life, long after you think you've put them behind you.


All this is extremely hard to explain to people in charge of education. And even harder to convince them of the need for it.
Posted by MichaelRosen at 13:29
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Labels: illustration, interpretation, listening, looking, phonics, picture books, play, pleasure, reading, reflection
What about...er....books? And...er....libraries?


I saw a shrink-wrapped Dorling Kindersley three-volume series: 'How to help your kids with Science', 'How to help your kids with Maths', 'How to help your kids with spelling and grammar'.

Hmmm....

Are these equivalents? Is doing 'science' or 'maths', similar to 'spelling and grammar'. Shouldn't that third one be 'writing' or 'reading and writing'? Something encompassing the whole area of using language? Perhaps the old one 'talking, listening, reading and writing'? (OK, that's too much for the title).


And I thought of a parent spending a tidy little sum on these three books, hoping that this would help their child through SATs, which in turn are devised to 'help' (?) children become literate, to read and write better etc...


Really? How many children given this shrink-wrapped package are really going to read their way through a volume called 'spelling and grammar'?


Now, let me see if I can think of anything else that might help a child to read and write well? er....what's it called...? er.....a book!!! That's it. A book that the child chose to read. That's it! And there's loads of them in a place where you can get them for free. What's that called...? er....oh yes, a library!
Posted by MichaelRosen at 07:00
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Labels: books, grammar, listening, parents, reading, spelling, talking, writing
Sunday, 24 January 2016
My written evidence to HofC Holocaust Education sub-committee of Education Committee (report out this weekend)





Written evidence submitted by Professor Michael Rosen, Professor of Children’s Literature, Goldsmith University of London



1. I have been involved in Holocaust education in a variety of ways: making radio programmes, in many schools reading poems that are about members of my family, doing presentations to older school students about my family. I have also observed my own children’s perceptions of what they have been taught.


2. There is a difficulty about distinguishing between the Holocaust and other genocides. That’s to say, the issue is not simply one of numbers but of intention. So, as far as victims are concerned, it could be said it makes no difference: a death is a death. However, politically it is important to distinguish between brutal mass murder of people and the scientifically engineered attempt to eliminate a people from European history. This is a hard point to make to young children - perhaps impossible. It is one that can be discussed with older school students.


3. Holocaust denial is alive and well. I have faced it in colleges. Clearly, documents are circulating, things are being said that ‘the Jews’ invented the Holocaust. My own view is that it is vital that the story of the Holocaust is disentangled from the story of Israel. That is another discussion to be had. The Holocaust is a story that took place between 1933 and 1945, quite independently of the story of Israel. Intertwining it, either by the Zionist narrative or by the ‘denial narrative’ is counter-productive.


4. In order to counter denial it is vital - more than vital - essential that we get every minute fact is correct and corroborated. I see books of all kinds circulating around the world of education with glaring errors e.g. Belsen described as an ‘extermination’ camp, 6 million Jews were gassed in Auschwitz and so on. It is also vital that teachers are directed to up-to-date sources where testimonies can be verified e.g. Nizkor.


5. Personal testimony is vital. I’m not sure that there is enough video of personal testimony used in schools, as teachers feel under pressure to tell the whole story. There are several key films, - ‘Shoah’, ‘Le Chagrin et le Pitié’ and the BBC films of Lawrence Rees. Likewise, the testimonies that came through the courts.


6. We have to accept that from now on, it is becoming less and less possible to invite survivors into schools. We should be thinking in terms of the children or relatives of survivors where the family has documents and recordings of their relatives.


7. The UK was involved in the Holocaust in several ways. People came out of Poland and Germany with stories, the authorities here reacted to this. This has been documented. Antisemitism prior to the Holocaust has a long history, the UK played a role in both sustaining and combating it. The story of Guernsey reminds us of what could have happened if the Nazis had been successful in invading. In order to bring the story home, these aspects can be told.


8. There is fruitful discussion to be had around the subject of ‘What could have been done?’ The German state in 1930 was as democratic a state as any in Europe. How was it possible to dismantle this by January/February 1933 - that is, prior to the laws passed specifically against Jews? I see very little discussion around the so-called ‘Reichstag decree’ and the ‘Enabling Acts’ of that time. Democratically elected governments are capable of passing anti-democratic laws and instituting terror. I am of the strong opinion that we need to keep distinguishing between ‘the Nazis’ and ‘the Germans’. Most students have not lived under a regime of terror. We do not know what it is like to be coerced on a daily basis, whilst being subjected to daily propaganda.

9. There is fruitful discussion to be had around the subject of what do we do now? This applies to a) the rise of racist groups b) countries that appear to be on the verge of practising genocide c) refugees.


10. There is now a substantial body of fiction, poetry, cinema and TV which can be used thematically with any of this. It is not a sufficient condition for ‘Holocaust Education’ but I would argue that it is a necessary one.


None of this should be used to claim that one victim is more hard done by than another. A death is a death. A mass murder is a mass murder. As I stated at the outset, much of this is as much about ‘intention’ as ‘outcome’. This doesn’t make what happened worse. It affects how we view politics.









Posted by MichaelRosen at 14:31
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Labels: genocide, holocaust, Holocaust Education, house of commons holocaust education sub-committee
Saturday, 23 January 2016
My reply to Martin Kettle's thoughts on communism and his parents.


I commented on the thread following Martin Kettle's article in Guardian which I've linked to below:

"One sure way to get a hearing in the press at the moment is to write about one's commie parents as being totally wrong about politics and then to use that to slate Corbyn. It's a neat little package. Martin doesn't have the time (or perhaps it's the inclination) to write a sentence or two on why or how his parents ended up in the CP or why and how they did hang on. Mine joined in 1936 when they were 16 because they found that it was only the Communists who were prepared to confront the fascists on the streets of East London who were attacking them. They then found an ideology which appeared to answer some of the big problems around them and internationally: fascism in Spain and Germany, oncoming war, and (as they saw it) a 'solution' to the poverty of all people's, not a programme of 'national' this or 'national' that. They studied Marx and Marxism and liked it. They left the CP in 1957.

Scoot forwards 10 years, and a new Left has emerged drawing together ex-CP-ers, anarchists, young trade unionists, students and 'third worlders' as they were sometimes called, anti-colonial movements all over the world. The US is carrying out the longest most deadly bombing campaign in history and it's on a non-industrial country.

At this moment, I meet Martin Kettle and Christopher Hitchens. Martin is dyed in the wool CP. Hitchens is with 'IS' - the International Socialists. They're friends. Every move that anyone makes in the student movement, Martin appears to stand to one side. He adopts the CP line on student revolt as laid down by the party's expert Monty Johnstone. If Martin wants to talk about 'religion' he should perhaps spend less time scrutinising his parents behaviour and turn some of his attention on his own. Martin's journey from CP supporter in his late teens and early 20s (I lost sight of him after university, until he popped up as a lead columnist on the Guardian) to being a 'centre' or 'rightwing' Labour supporter is just as much worthy of attention as going over why the generation affected so deeply by the poverty and cruelty of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. Let's hear it. At what moment and why did Martin's Soviet-British CP version of socialism stop making sense and centre-right Labourism seem the right way? Is this a discontinuity - as he always maintains - or a continuity. Is there indeed some kind of 'centre-right Labour' politics that sits quite nicely with Soviet-British CP politics? And his attempt to make Corbyn+ followers the true inheritors of Stalin might possibly be an empty smear.

And let's look at the record of Labour centre-rightists. They were in power only recently with a massive mandate to alter the Thatcher record. How did they handle the basic questions of welfare for all? How did it handle the social provision of services for all? How did it handle foreign policy? On all the former policies, it continued the Thatcherite policies of privatisation, calling it 'contestability' as if this was a guarantee of provision and/or fairness. It introduced PFI which has been a milk-cow for the rich beyond their dreams, and it slavishly followed extreme rightwing US policy (acting in its own interests) in the Middle East.

This of course is not a 'religion' says Kettle though anyone anywhere near the Blairites witnessed an extraordinary cult-like behaviour of newly be-suited ideologues, spouting managerial cock, inserting believers into constituencies and places of power (as they saw it) flicking open their samsonites and talking targets. People like Kettle could be relied on to provide some columns in this paper and elsewhere in support. They acted as cheerleaders for another massive bombing exercise on a largely un-industrialised country - led by someone, who, guess what, did some of it for deeply held religious reasons. Really religious. And really crackpot - it's called Christian Zionism. Of course Martin brought rationality to the matter: there are WMDs there. Yeah right.

Ye, there is a 'centre-right' critique of the SU and we've heard it many times and part of its purpose is to buttress the centre-right view of politics. There is also a left critique of the Soviet Union. Part of the job of the centre-right is to do what it can to keep that off the pages of newspapers of the centre right. To take one e.g.: at several key moments in the SU persecuted its own supporters: wiping out Bolsheviks in the 1920s and 30s, wiping out Communists and socialists in eastern Europe. Why would the Soviets have wiped out people like my and Martin's parents? Because it wasn't 'communist'. So what was the regime that Martin (never mind his parents) supported so keenly when he was in his 20s? What happens if you take the tools of left and marxist thought to the matter?

The problem for Martin is this approach might curve back and look at what his version of good politics did for us even as it plots how to disenfranchise the Labour membership and get back to the good old days of Blair and Mandelson."

How did my communist family get it so wrong? Because politics was their religion | Martin Kettle
Marxism gave my parents faith to last a lifetime and helped them deny reality. The left today looks as if it’s also developing into a church
THEGUARDIAN.COM|BY MARTIN KETTLE

Posted by MichaelRosen at 12:08
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Labels: Communism, Communist Party, David Aaronovitch, Martin Kettle, marxism, parents, red diaper babies, Soviet Union
SATs homework booklet 'Reading' gets poetry wrong


Loving SATs-type homework booklet on 'Reading' which asks things about the 'writer' in poems.

Hello: the 'I' of a poem is not 'the writer'.

The 'I' of a poem is the 'I' of a poem. It's the 'I' the writer has created and all we know about 'I' is what the poem shows the 'I' to be doing.

Pathetic SATs homework booklets asks how the 'writer keeps warm'. But it's 'I' keeping warm.That 'I' could be anyone.

Poetry is ventriloquism.

Even as SATs homework booklet thinks it's teaching children how to 'understand' poems, it's in fact getting it wrong.

It's also laughable crap.
Posted by MichaelRosen at 12:02
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Labels: booklet on Reading, comprehension, persona, poems, poetry, SATs
Bad things, good things, un-asked or un-answered questions
I'm beginning to feel like a crank.

For the last week or so I've been asking on Facebook and twitter if anyone has the figures for losses sustained by the UK's banks and financial houses during and as a result of the crash of 2008. For the moment, I haven't got an answer, though Paul Mason very kindly says that he's looking it up. I will come back to you on this.

Why am I asking?

We are being given several explanations for why people are badly off or why they could be better off. The main ones are:

1. The EU is a bad thing.
2. The EU is a good thing but it could be better if we stop 'immigrants' getting benefits.
3. Immigration is a bad thing.
4. Capitalism is great and it'll get better if the government can stop spending so much money.

Most of these arguments are taking place in the shadow of what happened in 2008. But what did happen?

As I understand it, banks and financial houses mainly but not entirely in the UK and US lent money that they never got back. (I won't go into how they lent money and how they lent each other money.)

Some questions: whose money did they lend? These were 'funds' or 'investments' but did they 'belong' to anyone? I'm not absolutely sure that they did. They were funds at the disposal of these banks and financial houses but some of it (i'm not sure how much) was actually created by them.

So, perhaps when I ask the question, how much did those banks etc 'lose', technically, they weren't necessarily 'losing' anything. Perhaps I'll get clarification on that one from Paul Mason.

But, if nothing was lost, how come many parts of the world 'went into recession'? And how come as a consequence of the crash, many governments have said that they have had to make cuts in wages, cuts in welfare and cuts in social services?

Part of their answer is that it's because they (the governments - which is us) had to prop up these banks and financial houses because if they didn't, we would all be on the streets with no food and nowhere to live.

So, straight off, there was a price to pay by us. We paid for these 'losses'. That sum can be calculated. It's in the government statistics. What is harder to calculate is what kind of combined aggregated loss did working people suffer as a result. But it's a loss all the same.

Even so, back with the banks and finance houses - was there any kind of loss from their combined coffers? Some of them went bust. Some of them were propped up. Some of them lost money and have been trying to recoup it ever since through 'cutting costs' (lay offs, sloughing off unprofitable chunks of their business, bank charges, keeping their employees' wages down, trying to find profitable investments in other parts of the economies of the world...etc).

And, if there were true losses, whose money was lost? Investors' money?

If that's right, then one version says that 'investors' money' is theirs. Another version says that these great chunks of money come from 'exploitation' - that is through 'rent, profit, or interest': the exploitation of other people's work, exploitation of property (that's rent) or through investment in profitable enterprises which are themselves profitable because they successfully exploit people's work.

So if investors lost money, they in effect lost the outcome or fruits of other people's work.

Now, when we go back to the list of 4 competing claims for how we might be better off, I don't see on that list anything that says we might be better off if we could get hold of any of these great slabs of money and distribute them more fairly. Nor any way in which we could have a system of production and finance which didn't involve people competing with each other to find things to invest in, no matter how risky or useless.

That argument is not put or hardly put in the mainstream media.

If, tomorrow I decided that I would back any of those four 'solutions' in a slightly jokey, aggressive way, and that I repented my socialist views and withdrew any of the kinds of questions I'm asking here, that I recanted, then I'm pretty sure I'd get a good hearing in the mainstream media for the rest of my life. Especially if I could include something about Jeremy Corbyn being a danger to health.


Posted by MichaelRosen at 09:31

Typical of the left-wing elite to pounce on such a minor issue.

Meanwhile back at the farm, gangs of 1000 refugees are raping women in Germany, and aid workers are being stabbed to death in Sweden.

Truly, the dark side of me agrees. That is my point.

We are manipulated to take sides and your side is the right side. Self preservation.I too enjoy the wealth of the West and the freedoms it provides. 
"Can't have your cake and eat it."

Last words to me by my first wife.

She was right.

No - the Muslim savages that have refused to take the opportunity to live as the majority of peaceful Muslims do, have brought this to a head.

We cannot accet our women being sexually molested and intimidated in the street.

We cannot accept our women being ordered back to the stone age.

We cannot accept the imposition of Sharia law. 

So while you're tryng to be a smart-ass bandying words around, have a word with these savages and see if they'll consider quitting trying to subjectify our women.

And try intergrating into our society, living peacefully, as mandated by Islam.