Thursday - June 04, 2009

Let’s be honest, there are losers and winners in this world.

Not only does this lady put things well, she is drop dead beautiful in the few pix I’ve seen of her.
But even if she weren’t that ... she is still a darn good word smith.

Last post for me for the night.
Cheers all.

Cambridge’s decision to let students know about their exam results in private is the latest evidence that we are bent on breeding fragility into the young, says Celia Walden.

By Celia Walden
The Telegraph

The young, it appears, are becoming fragile. For the first time in 300 years, exam results at Cambridge are to be sent privately to students, to curb the “fear” and “humiliation” of finding out from the board outside the university’s senate house that you got a 2:2, while standing next to someone you despised who got a first.

Meanwhile, Sir Ken Robinson, who is advising the Government on education, thinks we should do away with the whole exam thing, and leave children free to daub primitive murals along school walls. He didn’t say that, but he did insist that we have to “develop children’s creativity”, and once the c-word has been mentioned pretty much anything goes

Have you tried saying “creativity” without screwing up your face and affecting a peevish whine? It’s impossible, and it’s a whining, cloying, self-righteous word used by people who appear convinced that rigorous learning and a flourishing imagination are incompatible.

Nothing in history suggests that this is true. Great painters studied the Old Masters to learn their craft: Turner, for one, worked at the Dutch masters as a preliminary to developing his freer, original style.

Those were the days when artists painted pictures rather than “creating art”. Now, trendy educationalists would play down the nasty business of spelling, grammar and academic rigour, leaving us all free to emote. Yet many a parent would welcome some hard academic graft in state schools, when an increasing number of the most successful painters, actors, playwrights, musicians and even pop stars seem to have benefited from a more demanding education in the private sector.

In other areas, we seem bent on breeding emotional fragility into the young, from the egg and spoon race with no winners, to the diplomatic announcement of exam results, to produce a generation of brittle – but oh-so-"creative" - little souls.
The Senate house, where anxious students will no longer have to assemble for their results Photo: PA

AND ON ANOTHER SUBJECT SHE REPORTS ...

* This time last year, women were all at it: planting great big kisses on each other’s mouths at parties and political conferences nationwide. This year, it’s the men who are grasping each other in headlocks, grappling full-frontally like sumo wrestlers – and even kissing on the lips.

At Tuesday night’s Glamour magazine awards, the man-tussle was rife, with presenter James Corden making a grab at every male guest, in a display so primal we needed David Attenborough to do the voice-over. “What’s it all about?” he would wonder. “Women have always had the greet thing to themselves,” Corden tells me. “It feels good to say hi with a big old man-hug – everyone’s doing it now – and actually, it proves how straight you are.”

Formula One driver Jenson Button, who spent the evening deflecting man-tussles, disagrees. “I don’t care if it does prove how straight you are – if it’s man-on-man action I ain’t doing it.”

WALDEN

More, including one NSFQT ( Not Safe For Queasy Tummies )

Posted by peiper     on 06/04/2009 at 11:48 AM   
Filed Under: • Architecture • Education • UK •  
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