All in a Don's Day

by Mary Beard

  JULIAN GALL

  Julian: When you sign off your soul to Mephistopheles, he wins. He′s got the enforcers on his side. He puts the food on your table. Nothing ′meek′ about this – Faust wasn′t meek. He just signed the wrong contract. And back in the ‘50s and ‘60s university life (in Britain) had academic freedom, tenure, optimism and excitement. Helen of Troy with a brain (girls – find your own equivalent:-)

  XJY

  I′ve said this before, but I can′t see what′s wrong with having to describe the content and purpose of your pedagogy. People who sell fried chicken can do this – tell you what it is they are purveying and why you might want to buy it. Why is this apparently beneath the dignity of self-proclaimed ′intelligent′ people?

  SW FOSKA

  The one advantage of being Jewish in occupied France was that one did not have the option of collaboration.

  HOGWEED

  I suppose when comparing a system that is average for ten students, or brilliant for nine students and appalling and unfair for the tenth, the second system is going to seem better. Unless you were the tenth student …

  KEIR FINLOW-BATES

  And the prize for the worst manifesto goes to …

  15 April 2010

  I spent a rather gloomy day yesterday reading the various party election manifestos. I admit that this was not in the cause of my own political development, but because I was due on the Today programme this morning to sound off about them, and about the ‘Great Debate’ between the party leaders coming up on television.

  Honestly, I thought that there was not much to choose between the three main parties in this respect, though Labour and Tory were worse than Lib Dems by a short head. It wasn’t just the graphics – though quite where both of the big two had found their left-over Eastern bloc propagandists, heaven knows. The Tory ‘people power’ illustration really did have the tractor factory feel to it – and the fact that it was indeed an advert for the Tory party is just one hint at the ideological emptiness that you will find if you read these documents.

  As I blurted on the radio, the worst thing about these documents is their oozing platitudes. Whoever has written them has not grasped the point that political messages only count as interesting and engaging and worth bothering with if the opposite point of view could conceivably be held – if, that is, there is something to argue about. The mainstream parties give us almost nothing that most of the human race could possibly object to. ‘A future fair for all’ (Labour)? Sure, but the country isn’t actually teeming with people who are demanding a less fair future. ‘Children should be allowed to grow up at their own pace’ (Tories)? Is anyone seriously advocating the opposite? ‘As Conservatives, we trust people’? Unlike who … ?

  Often different parties actually come out with almost exactly the same platitudes. ‘Get better politics for less’ (Lib Dem) or ‘Good government costs less with the Conservatives’ – in this case not only vacuous but untrue as well.

  Partly, you get the impression that they are all so keen not to offend anyone that they resort to anything bland. Partly it’s the simple absence of ideology again. (Another nice example, the Labour Manifesto includes enthusiastic words on ‘Creating a shareholding society’ – admittedly on the John Lewis model.) Oh – and don’t mention the war. There is plenty of stuff about military equipment and hospitals, and a couple of pics of soldiers fraternising with natives (in the Tory manifesto, with a football). But not a word about whether we should be in Afghanistan or not. As the husband remarked, ‘People Power’ clearly doesn’t extend to the ‘people’ of Afghanistan.

  It is perhaps predictable that those furthest from any possibility of being in government (or even winning a seat) had the freshest approaches. After the blandness of the big three, it was a positive relief to turn to the Communist Party. The policies are probably barking, but I loved the front cover, which blazons ‘Britain for the People not the Bankers. Make the Fat Cats Pay’ (The ‘people’ may smack of the Tories, but ‘Fat Cats’ gives it away.) Some ideology at last.

  So, which was the very worst? Well, in a very close race, between the big three, it has to be the Labour version. Two particular sins make it slightly worse than the others. I can’t stand the ‘I love Britain’ line from Gordon Brown in his introduction (as if everyone else didn’t …?). But worse, just before a paean of praise to the DNA database, we read ‘We are proud of our record on civil liberties’. Now either that is a whoppa – or it is self-delusion. Either way, it wins them the wooden spoon.

  But anyway, I got my come-uppance for self-promotion and a few minutes of fame on the radio. One of my lines on the TV debate (about how the poor guys must have been up all night having their eyebrows plucked and learning their spontaneous jokes) was taken on to a BBC ‘quotes of the day’. But sadly I wasn’t. It said Mary Beard is an ‘American historian and women’s rights campaigner’. Shit – the wrong Mary Beard. The more famous one died in 1958, when I was three.

  Comments

  I am comforted by the lack of ideology. The idea that one party might impose its vision of society on all of us, including the many who disagree, or might even seek to do so, horrifies me. The real honesty challenge for politicians who lack ideology is to say so.

  RICHARD BARON

  One thing I like spotting in manifestos is the redundant guarantee, named for those manufacturers’ guarantees that make a great fuss about granting you, as a favour, rights which are already enshrined in law. (′We will replace faulty parts free of charge for up to a year!′)

  My sitting MP (Tory) has a line on his manifesto which boasts to me that this leaflet has been delivered by volunteers ′at no cost to the taxpayer! A claim which I sincerely trust is true, because if he has attempted to charge the taxpayer for his campaign expenses, he is in big trouble.

  ANNA

  If you want ideology, you could try the Labour Education spokesman′s doctrinaire asseveration that learning Latin is a Bad Thing.

  OLIVER NICHOLSON

  Wasn′t it Quintus Cicero who told his brother to never promise anything concrete and never commit to a strong idea when on electoral campaign?

  Although I′m sure most politicians today won′t have read the Commentariolum Petitionis (none in my country), they seem to follow some of its advice quite closely.

  Gl

  Ten dotty (well-meaning?) ideas from the party election manifestos

  29 April 2010

  After a serious study of the main party manifestos, let me reveal some of the dottier ideas that have got by the party committees and into their official promises. How on earth, one wonders, do these things get the nod … ? Have you noticed them?

  1. Establish a new prize for engineering.

  This is a Tory idea (to ‘make Britain the leading hi-tech exporter in Europe’) … may not be so bad an idea, but in the manifesto?. (No prize for Classics, I note!)

  2. Create a specialist Mandarin teacher training qualification, so that many more primary schools have access to a qualified primary teacher able to teach Mandarin.

  So offers the Labour party. A worthy aim … but when we can’t teach French effectively? And where are these Mandarin teachers coming from?

  3. Control bullying, including homophobic bullying.

  Another virtuous aim (this time from the Lib Dems), but is this an appropriate manifesto commitment? I mean, how are they going to do this?

  4. Launch an annual Big Society Day.

  Another holiday, on which ‘to celebrate the work of neighbourhood groups’ … and, presumably the work of the middle-class mums and dads who plan to set up their own schools. A Tory idea, needless to say.

  5. The right to cancer test results within one week.

  A Labour PR move. Well, who could not want speedy cancer tests? But another target? And how easy is it for the pushy middle class to manipulate? Next time I think I need an X-ray for my stiff knee, I guess I persuade my GP to say ‘suspected carcinoma’.

  6. Establi
sh a free on-line database of exam papers and marking schemes – for GCSE and A/AS.

  A Tory bright idea, but so far as I know, you can get this information free already.

  7. Make Network Rail refund a third of your ticket price if you have to take a rail replacement bus service.

  Nice idea. Whatever Lib Dem thought this up must have lived in Cambridge, where Network Rail regularly works on both lines to London simultaneously. But for a party trying to cut red tape etc. What do they think the cost of this will be?

  8. Ensure that the 2013 Rugby League and 2015 Rugby Union World Cups are successful.

  Ensure that we win? Or what do the Tories actually mean on this one?

  9. All relevant agencies – not just neighbourhood police teams – will hold monthly public meetings to hear people’s concerns (on Anti Social Behaviour – or ASB, as the Labour party now calls it).

  Well it could be useful. But as a Labour manifesto commitment??

  10. Tackle the gender gap at all levels of scientific study and research to help increase the supply of scientists.

  Well I’m all for this one, Lib Dems … but many of us have been working on it for years. So exactly how are they going to tackle it?

  There’s plenty more where they came from.

  Comments

  I am curious as to why everyone has suddenly got obsessed with Mandarin, and how if only it was available we could turn out millions of happy Mandarin speakers. Have they any idea how hard Mandarin is to learn? (I tried when I was living in China, and I didn′t get very far.) And, of course, this will be all about learning to speak to Chinese businessmen, and there will be no conception of enabling people to read Romance of the Three Kingdoms in the original.

  TONY KEEN

  I find it hard to treat the phrase ′coming from′ seriously, because of its use in sentences like ′I know where you′re coming from′ There′s a great story that some young American actor in the same play as Sir John Gielgud, wanting to pick the great man′s brains, asked him, ′Sir Gielgud, in this scene, where am I coming from exactly?′ Sir John replied, ′From the wings, dear boy, the wings.′

  MICHAEL BULLEY

  My partner learned Mandarin in primary school. The sole residue of that particular piece of education is that he can sing a rather sweet children′s song about numbers and suddenly spotting a friend. Somehow, I don′t see this ability as making a strong contribution to the UK′s economic output.

  LIZ

  Do we need bad teachers?

  12 July 2010

  The retiring Chair of Ofsted (the ‘Office for Standards in Education’), Zenna Atkins, has got herself into trouble (and no doubt been misquoted) in saying that it might be good for kids to learn to cope with the occasional bad teacher. Even if she is misquoted, I am with her. The idea that public services can be free from human frailty is surely bonkers. We all need to learn how to recognise and deal with a teacher/policeman/ tax-inspector/doctor we don’t entirely trust – just as we learn how to deal with a private business that does not give us what we asked for. The appalling encroachment of (illusory) tick-box competence is something we need to resist; we are always going to have to deal with people who are below par (that’s the definition of ‘par’, after all).

  But the big question is not ‘What do you do with bad teachers?’ but ‘How do you know who a bad teacher is?’

  When I was an undergraduate, I was very fierce about what I considered bad lectures. In fact, a good friend of mine on one occasion went up to the then Professor of Greek (one Professor K***) and told him publicly that his lectures were a disgrace to the university. The truth is that they both were and weren’t, but my friend’s fully frontal confrontation was a much more effective way of raising the issue than pouring her heart out in an anonymous questionnaire.

  But when I was a student activist in the 1970s, I got a shock.

  We activists decided to run the first ever (I think) Classics Faculty lecture questionnaire, hoping to out the malefactors, the dull, the unconscientious (the Professor of Greek among them). The result was not what we had expected. Sure, our view on who the best and worst were got broad confirmation, but there wasn’t one lecturer who was not rated tops by somebody. Unless you took the view that minority tastes were not to be catered for, then you could really not pillory anyone at all (although you might want to nudge a few of them in a slightly more popular direction).

  Having done the lecturing game myself now for 30 years or more, I think that there is an even bigger problem. It is how and when you judge whether teaching has been a success. It is all well and good to correlate people’s lectures and supervisions with final degree results. But that can’t be the be-all and end-all. Because getting a first or a 2.1 isn’t in the end what really matters; it’s what you do with the degree next – 5, 10, 20, 30 years down the road. And of course some of our most impressive citizens got 2.2s years ago, and they have been inspired no doubt in the long term by what might have seemed at the time to be, at best, inefficient teaching.

  The trouble about assessing bad teaching is that some of what you think is bad aged 21 turns out to be the most influential and inspirational when you look back aged 41 – even Professor K***’s.

  Comments

  No, a bad teacher is a bad teacher and time does not alter the fact. Over the decades there is no way I can warm to the school teacher who dictated incomprehensible notes on Palmerston and Gladstone to be learned by heart, or to the Cambridge law lecturer who just read out sections of the recommended text book (Buckland) in the most dreary voice imaginable. We coped with the history teacher by playing his game or going through the motions, and with the law lecturer by simply staying away, so we did learn something about adaptation and survival … and how not to be bad teachers ourselves.

  BOB

  Mary′s witty bit on the meaning of par is what idiomatic, spontaneous English is all about, even for those who dislike golf. As to lectures, many people must have been encouraged by Leavis′s remark that if students wanted what they got from most lectures, they could go to the books it came from.

  PETER WOOD

  I′m going to have to confess that I don′t see what ′Mary′s witty bit on the meaning of par′ is. Can you explain? I hope there′s not a confusion here between par and average, as that′s the sort of tangle Ofsted itself has often got caught up in.

  MICHAEL BULLEY

  Anthony Powell said that in learning to be a writer he profited more from bad authors, whose vices he could recognise and learn to avoid, than from good ones, whose virtues were often inimitable. Might there be some application of this via negativa to the teacher question?

  PL

  Civilian casualties, leaks and the ancient view

  26 July 2010

  By and large, Greek and Roman military command had it relatively easy when it came to leaks, civilian casualties and the PR side of warfare. To put it at its crudest, the imperial Roman legions would go off to conquer some bit of foreign territory, they would do it any way they could and come back home and boast about it. Not many people in Rome knew or cared about war crimes. It was winning that mattered. Of course, it looked different from the barbarian point of view, but the barbarians got very little chance to put their point of view at Rome.

  But even in the ancient world, it wasn’t quite so simple. Many modern observers of the column of Marcus Aurelius (the ‘other’, less famous column still standing in the centre of the city) have wondered just how ‘subversive’ were the scenes of Roman violence depicted. The theme is Marcus Aurelius’ campaigns against the Germans. There is much more here than on Trajan’s column of (for example) women and children getting abducted or slaughtered. Was this all celebratory? Or was there at least a strand here of displaying (even if not directly questioning) the very nasty side of Roman conquest?

  And as for leaks, the problems of communication in the ancient world meant that there were leaks and rumours aplenty. This is one of the things that struck me most w
hen I was researching my book The Roman Triumph. I discovered that the senate often said to a general returning home and wanting a triumphal procession that they would wait and interview some of the (Roman) eye-witnesses before deciding on whether the victory deserved such an honour. The most extraordinary rumour I came across concerned a victory scored by Cassius Longinus (who went on to be one of the assassins of Julius Caesar). He claimed to have repelled an invasion of Parthians into Syria. Had he? One rumour circulating in Rome was that they weren’t Parthians at all but Arabs dressed up as Parthians. (A bit like us saying that they weren’t the Taliban but a load of Kurds dressed up as Taliban.)

  And civilian losses could be controversial too.

  Of course, what counted as ‘civilians’ could have been rather different in antiquity. In a sense, given the nature of ancient military service, all adult males counted as soldiers – so civilians were the women and children. Which of these, and exactly how many, should be a casualty of war was famously debated by the Athenians in the middle of the Peloponnesian War. After they had put down a revolt in the city of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, they at first decided to kill all the male citizens and enslave all the women and children. But the next day they debated the question again and took a different view (admittedly on grounds of expediency rather than compassion) and decided to execute only the ringleaders of the revolt.

  All the same, the ancient military machine didn’t have to face leaks on the scale we have just seen about Afghanistan. And a depressing set of documents it seems to be. Never mind the big things that will come out of this new material; most of us who have ever raised issues about civilian casualties and read all those blanket denials will feel pretty angry to discover that at least some of those denials appear to have been lies. And in this country, whenever you question the behaviour of the NATO troops in Afghanistan, you get the ‘Wootton Bassett’ card thrown at you … the ‘How could you insult our boys?’