Public Art in Sweden

Public art appears to be less subject to any constraints of quality or taste or return on taxpayers money than even in England. The place, the country, is dotted with abysmal creations that I am sure no one has paid for willingly. There are big display cases with pointless, as in having neither purpose nor anything to say, stuff in them, there is a poorly made figure of a pink giant urinating into the river. There was, in a nearby square, a great structure of wires strung with bathroom furniture and other objects in a meaningless parade of tat. Someone is laughing as they take the money. In front of the castle in the river there are three figures of businessmen standing in shopping trolleys. There is at least a touch of humour in this, probably Marxist humour of course.

It turns out that these piles ofuninspiring junk  are part of a festival called OpenArt. The woman in the tourist office encouraged us to do a tour of all the pieces. We shan't be doing that. What we have seen of it captures everything that is wrong with taxpayer-funded artists. It is lazy and dull. There is never more than a single idea, usually trite and poorly executed. There is no attempt at doing real work or conceiving a more complex idea, something worth expressing, and working on the best way to express it. For 'public' artists it is always and only about money. Other people's money. The art itself doesn't matter, as they are not communicating with anyone, not even themselves.

It was a pity to have to navigate all this stuff in order to see the simple beauty of the town.

On the Need, or not, for Public Education, and Other Related Matters (Because I Can't Stick to the Point)

When people say they want public education, what do they mean?

I want good education, as cheaply as possible. I don’t care how it is done. Why would you?

When you talk to people about this, you often find that it is public education, more than good and available education, which is taken as the final end.

(This is not only true of education. The local governments of Madrid and Castilla-La Mancha have recently been trying to privatize the management of some hospitals. This is not, on the face of it, an ideological plan, but one that stems from the desperate need to make the available money go further. Administration costs are recognised as being far too high. Why not attempt something that might allow more money to be spent on looking after sick people? If it doesn’t work, we can go back to the old ways, but surely it is worth trying. Nevertheless there have, predictably, been massive protests, even before anything has been done.

Similarly, Brett Hetherington wrote a while back about a plan to privatise the water supply of a town in Catalonia, which has been rejected by the people of the town. Ok, fair enough, local democracy at work. But it isn’t necessarily the right decision. What is wanted, surely, is a cheap and reliable supply of water. It doesn’t have to be done by politicians.)

It is broadly accepted that everyone should contribute a smaller or greater amount so that all children can have access to education. There are few wealthy people or higher earners who would argue that poor children should be left illiterate and unable to offer anything useful in exchange for a living. They didn’t when education was not fully socialized and I don’t believe this has changed. By ensuring that all children have the opportunity to get education governments are genuinely acting as the agents of the public will.

However, there is no particular reason, as I have said, why they should have exclusive control over every aspect of education, including the education of those who do not need to depend on the government, or who do not want the education it provides?

The schools I worked at in my previous existence as a high school teacher were private. My current teaching avatar receives homage at a ‘concertado’ school, that is, one that was independently created, was strictly private for many years, and is now privately managed but to a certain extent publicly funded, and open to all those who want to go there via a selection process not controlled by the school. It is economically efficient (so I understand, relative to state schools) and academically and humanly successful. It does what it is supposed to do, what people want it to do. Why does it matter that it does some things its own way?

Surely it doesn’t.

Much of what happens at school has the purpose of creating a disciplined, respectful atmosphere. If the place were not full of people who don't want to be there this would not be necessary and time and energy could be properly devoted to helping the people who want to learn, to learn.

Even in this school there is much that must be done according to the government’s rules, and much that is done as it is because, that’s the way you do things, isn’t it? The classes are long and dull, full of quite unnecessary information and skills, a huge amount of the children’s time is wasted, enormous effort is put into creating systems for instilling and enforcing order, discipline and mutual respect. It is a fine system, well conceived and well run, functioning smoothly and without fuss, reacting calmly to push down every nail that attempts to stand out. It makes life better for everyone involved that these systems exist and are very well oiled, but they are only necessary because of the essential nature of education is misconceived. They are a very good solution, but to a problem that should not exist.

In almost every class there are children who do not want to be there, or who should not be there. If they were not forced to be there, and we were not forced to waste time pretending that they will ever learn anything useful, life would be much better for the rest, and their education much more productive.

In any case, if exams are the focus of everything there is no need to bring children together forcibly. There is little point even having classes. Tell them what to study and where to find it and then make yourself available to those who have questions. Surely it really is that simple.

In systems where exams are not the only thing that matters there is still little reason to force children to be in classrooms where they don’t want to be. The idea of education as an advantage and a privilege has been so completely lost that we think it perfectly reasonable to force children to accept that privilege against their will, and the idea that parents might not be able to have their children locked up and guarded 7 hours a day by other people is utterly mystifying to many.

On the Need to Annoy Politicians

It is very important that politicians should not live comfortably. Those who would take our money and our liberty must be constantly reminded that these things are ours, and not theirs. I do not advocate violence, of course, at least not in democracy, but turning up in a group in public places, to annoy them, bother them, discomfit them, remind them that they are supposed to work for us, and that their power is ours, delegated to them for specific purposes, and that they answer to us, is necessary. They must not be allowed to forget it. It doesn't matter whether you agree with whatever the protest is about, or with the exact motivation of those carrying out 'escrache', 'acoso', recently in the name of those who haven't paid their mortgages, but as long as their behaviour remains within certain bounds, we should applaud them, for they are carrying out the vitally important act of making our rulers' lives more uncomfortable.

The same applies, to a certain extent, to civil servants also. I will recognise that there is a considerable difference of degree, since they are, on the whole, simply trying to make a living like the rest of us and happen to have found that particular path. Some of them are even useful to us, rather than to the government.

But having acknowledged these points, they are people who have chosen to work for the government,* which pays them with our money. They do not answer to us, they answer to other people like themselves, and we have almost no power boycott them, as we would a professional or company who hadn’t served us well, or we simply didn’t need. We have nowhere else to go. Whether we want to use them or not, whether they are necessary to the public that pays them or not, whether they are competent at what they do or not, they are paid by us, but they do not serve us. None of them create employment. Very few of them are directly productive. Most do not even contribute, very indirectly, to the growth of the economy. They pay no tax, of course, they are a great financial burden to us and most of those who are useful to us rather to those who make and enforce the rules perform their functions in a very inefficient way because of the structure and regulation of their organizations.

They are different from those of us who produce things, are paid voluntarily by people using their own money, pay tax allow the political employment to exist in the first place. I do not advocate harassment of civil servants, but I see no reason why their anomalous position should not be mentioned from time to time, and kept before the general public and themselves.

*No, I haven’t come over all paranoid. The older I get (the less young, shall we say), the more I realize that politicians are not doing it for me, or for you, or for the country or its people. Therefore they should be encouraged to do as little as possible, and to answer for what they do do. Nothing should be easy or comfortable for them. Everything I do in my work is open to the scrutiny and criticism of my employees and my clients, and they exercise that privilege whenever they think it appropriate to do so. This is, on the whole, a good thing, and I see no reason why those who pay the politicians and the government employees should not exercise the same privilege, with the same benefits for us all.

Government is Not Us

Some of the comments here are quite interesting. But among the usual misunderstandings is a very important one. Government as we understand is something outside society. It is perfectly possible for people to get together to protect their property from robbers. It doesn't have to be done individually. But that group which has pooled its resources and to a certain extent its freedom of action in order to obtain a solution at least acceptable to all members, and cheaper than it would otherwise be, never, however you stretch it and expand it, becomes a government. Even if it included every member of a given society, and did what we think governments do, efficiently and acceptably to its members, it would still be a collection of private individuals, not a government, because 'government' is above and outside the 'people'. This shows clearly that governments in the sense that most people use the word do not have to exist at all. They exist, not because the people need them, but because someone will also be willing and able to take power from others and stand outside the subject group. (Government and the state are the same thing here).

Some things, many things, are better done collectively, co-operatively. This does not mean they are better done by government. We are a social species, we do many things together. More usefully, many of the things that we do are a consequence of our being a social species, thus it is natural that many of the things that are important to us are better done together.

That absolutely does not mean that such things are better done by a group of people outside and above the main group, motivated by different desires, largely unaffected by the restrictions they impose on others, who can take money by force from their subjects, and who have no emotional interest, or social investment in the people they control. Socialism, statism presuppose these things, and collectivism assumes that co-operation will not be corrupted by those who love power over their fellows.

Lit Crit as the New Jazz

I have written before about a group of people who infest the world of literary and cultural appreciation. In University arts departments around the richer and freer world, there are parasites on the world of real understanding and discovery.

People like Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Susan Gubar, Sandra Gilbert, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, K.K. Ruthven, Henry Louis Gates, Judith Butler, and many more, and the ones who started it all- Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida… et al., as well as other, minor figures, some of whom I know personally because they have them in our University here, too.

This is not a phallus

I also know, personally and through their writings, many people whose knowledge and study of literature and other arts genuinely illuminate the works they discuss, clarify the background and context, and seek the deeper meanings and motivations of the writer/artist, adding to our understanding and enjoyment of them. I’m not knocking the arts or those who study them, but those who disseminate their own nasty, ignorant opinions by prostituting the object of study, and ignoring truth entirely.

These academics and soi-disant intellectuals who make their living, and who largely craft their own identity, by producing tendentious, prejudiced, under- or un-researched, barely coherent tracts about literature criticism, post-colonialism, anti-racism, equality theory, feminism or whatever happens to be their gig (any ground sufficiently fertile to allow them to be applauded by their brethren for calling other people names), make the mistake of comparing themselves with scientific researchers, and their opinions with rational truth. Others make the mistake of taking them seriously, which is what they want, of course.*

The people who produce this kind of rubbish have no conception of the gulf that separates them from real thinking, real analysis, real reasoning, real logic, real thought, real results, real truth. They genuinely believe that what they do is comparable to real academic work, and think that the contempt they receive from people who know how to think is due to ignorance or prejudice. They cannot understand the truth, and they could not accept it if they did understand it.

They themselves would not accept what I am about to say, because it detracts from their importance, but it is probably a better way of interpreting the stuff they produce:

It is not truth, in the sense of being a representation of reality. It is an expression of how they perceive something at a particular time, and words, distributed in accordance with the way they feel their idea must be expressed, are their medium. To search for truth or reason in the result is to misunderstand the work.

We do not expect a painted portrait to tell us anything much about human facial anatomy or even precisely what the subject looked like unless we are fairly certain that the painter had both the intention to produce a near-perfect likeness and the technical competence to carry out the intention. Very frequently neither of these things is true, and so we interpret the painting in accordance with other criteria, and are happy to do so. It makes sense to do so. But when we see what looks superficially like a reasoned argument, and is presented as one, supposedly containing premises, facts and logic and arriving at conclusions that may be thus identified in some way as true, we treat it on these terms, and are baffled by the fact that patent nonsense, lacking any form of reason or analysis, is treated as truth. We dismiss it.

We do not see this as a kind of riff on the writer’s feelings, which is what it is. Even so it may well have little or no value, but at least we could understand why it exists. But those who produce this stuff lie to themselves and to us about what it is, because they want to be taken seriously. And so no one knows what’s going on.

Picasso and Lucien Freud, for example, would not insist, in the face of the most manifest evidence, that what you are looking at would be useful to the police in their search if the subject went missing. But that is what lit critters do.

Their disconnected witterings are art. Good art, bad art, every man his own critic, of course. They are a form of self-expression, no more, no less. They satisfy the artist’s urge to say something in a particular manner. They are not a search for truth.

*Anyone who thinks I exaggerate should Google some of those names. Unless you've had to deal with them, as I have, you would not believe such rantings could exist in serious universities. Because these are among the star names, they are not selected outliers. Their business, as you will see, is not truth but indoctrination, the very opposite of what higher education is supposed to be for,

What do Children Need to Learn?

In the end it comes down to this- what do children need to learn and how can they best learn it.

It depends first of all on their parents (yes it does, those who think the state should control the minds of children are wrong). Parents may choose to send them to a school with a particular ethos, philosophy, ideas, whatever, and they are right to do what they think they should for their children and to pay others to do it for them.

Those who can educate their own children will do so. Why should they let ideologues control them? In Spain they are not even allowed to do that, although there are ways, if you are prepared to take risks.

If we start without preconceptions we would never, now, reach the conclusion that they need to be locked into semi-slavery eight hours a day throughout their childhood.

Once you assume they must be together for long periods doing things they don’t want to do you immediately see a need for discipline which means authority, which means rules which means enforcement and punishment and teaching becomes more about force of character and the assumption of authority than the ability to communicate knowledge, or better still, to inspire a thirst for knowledge.

Assume the point of education is to prepare children to take the greatest advantage of the world they will live in as adults. This means economically, psychologically, socially, culturally. It doesn’t mean preparing them to fit into one of a number of pre-ordained niches that our handlers seem to think must exist (most people involved in education would find this rather shocking, but it is my starting point because it seems to be the only legitimate purpose education can have) then certain conclusions can be reached and arguments made.

Reading and writing fluently and naturally are still essential skills and will, I think, continue to be in the future. But this can be achieved comfortably by the age of 6 or 7.

The understanding and manipulation of numbers is also essential to adult life, if only because of money. For this reason, a basic understanding of economics, and of what money is, should be provided at the same time.

IT is essential, but fortunately it’s also quite easy to learn to the basic level most people require, and easy to practice. Because of the speed with which technology is evolving, a very free curriculum is required, and in any case it would be part of a broader area of learning whose aim would be to ‘understand the world and how to function in it, how to obtain and evaluate knowledge’

We are trying to prepare children for the future, to make them useful to themselves and to the rest of us, in some combination, and so far as each is able. We are not trying to make them feel good about themselves.

There is no point studying a foreign language unless it’s done properly. If children aren’t going to become fluent in a useful language before they leave school it’s a waste of time trying to teach it. Half a language is no good to anyone. It is well worth saturating children with a specific foreign language from an early age. All primary schools should be genuinely bilingual, but in which language? For those who already speak the international language, the choice is not clear. The great advantage of knowing a second language is that it makes learning further languages much easier when the need arises, and it also enables the mind to work and think more productively (it provides new analytical tools). But it isn’t obvious that, for native English speakers, it is worth the time involved. Even so, I would, I think, recommend it. Possibly Chinese, just for the hell of it.

It is very important that children understand who they are and their place in the world, by which I mean the history of the world and of their country, the geography of the world in as much detail as is reasonable, the nature of the solar system and indeed the known universe. In short, they need to have the information, sufficiently processed, to have perspective about themselves and the world. It puts wise and stable heads on shoulders and is part of maturity.

They need to be exposed openly to many fields of knowledge and activity. They must find as early as possible what stimulates them, what they enjoy, what they may be good at, what they can themselves add to those fields.

It is a terrible waste of resources to have sport (and to a lesser extent art) taught in schools. It requires dedicated facilities and staff, replicated unnecessarily many times over, and seems to originate, like many of the great failings of state schools, from a misguided or simply lazy desire to imitate public and private schools, which do what they do for entirely different reasons.

Municipal facilities, available to and organised for children, would be far cheaper and much more useful and enjoyable for the children. They could freely choose the activities that interested them, they would not associate such activities with the boredom and authoritarianism of school, and they would have a lot more time to do them. Those children who can, do this anyway, but if there were more facilities and they wasted less time at school more could do it, and much more profitably.

A lot of this comes from a slavish imitation of the practices of the public schools, which have a purpose quite different from that of state education. Such schools take over the formation of most aspects of the child, because the parents want them to. State schools should have no such control.

From here (about 8-10 years, let’s say 10) it becomes largely technical things, and choices have to be made. It may seem very early to make choices about which route to take, about what kind of future to prepare for, what kind of job the child is capable of doing, but the alternative is to waste years learning, or probably not learning, ultimately useless things. A good grounding in the basics, an efficient system for identifying possibilities to work towards, while excluding as little as possible, is what is needed here. Many people are at University learning things they should have learnt years before, or things which will be of no use to them.

All of this assumes that they are there because they want to be. The first and most important thing is to STOP FORCING CHILDREN INTO SCHOOLS. The job of the state, insofar as it has one, is to provide the opportunity for a good education (the fact that the state clearly has no idea what a good education is suggests that it shouldn’t be directly involved in educating at all). Children (or their parents) will decide if, when and how to take advantage of those opportunities. Some of them will make a mess of it, some will realize too late what they have missed. Education is a privilege, one treated with contempt by governments, who are more interested in keeping potentially disruptive young people off the streets than in guaranteeing that potentially successful young people prepare themselves well for the future.

What is the point, I mean really, what the hell is the point, of filling classrooms with people who don’t want to be there, or who can’t benefit from where they are. No form of education, however conceived and structured, is going to work unless each child is somewhere where they can actually learn. Those who don’t want to learn cannot learn. And those who are with them will not be able to. Get rid of them. Those who are not able to learn much or quickly might learn little and slowly. But if they are with those who learn much and quickly one or other group is not going to learn anything like what it could. Once you remove the politics from education this is blindingly obvious.

How many millions of clever children have achieved little because the ideology of education, the ideology of a school or a teacher, or just the stupidity of all of them, was obsessed with trying to get someone else to achieve a little?

There is no need for age groupings, artificial identities or obligations. Offer a large variety of options, open and fluid; choose teachers who understand, communicate and inspire; let children choose where and whether they want to be.

No one will learn less than they otherwise would. Many, most, will learn far more, and will be far better prepared for the world.

It's Just water

I am reminded once again that the latest object of the crazed, obsessive hatred of the ‘Person who knows that anyone who does anything he doesn’t enjoy or understand, however trivial, is evil and must be denounced with great frothing and drumbeats’ is a bottle of water.

I don’t know who Andrew Martin is, but apparently he has a book to sell, so we mustn’t expect too much. Even so, you would have thought that, having been offered a column in the Independent to attach to the advert for his novel, he would take the opportunity to find something intelligent or interesting to say. He sees things differently.

He starts by belittling someone who thoughtfully put a bottle of water beside his place when he was speaking at an event. Maybe he hasn't spoken in public much but there has always been water available to speakers, because they often like to moisten their mouths as they speak. (Personally I prefer whisky, but they you are.)

He goes on to insult entire classes of people who he has never met, whose motives he makes no attempt to understand, whose 'offence' should eb beneath the notice of any intelligent person, and whose behaviour he has, in any case, invented himself for the occasion.

Water is essential to the human body. How much is a matter probably left to the judgement of the individual body, which has ways of making it very clear when it needs more (or less). It is probably better to err on the side of overhydration than dehydration, since the body suffers far fewer ill effects that way. They aren’t so great anyway, the body is good at recovering from most imbalances.

Prolonged exertion in hot weather can cause considerable loss of fluid, which will need to be made up, at least in part. Dehydration can lead to headaches, nerve inflammation, muscle weakness and pain, aging of tissue and damage to organs. Of course, few people need to be told when they should drink water. If you don’t feel thirsty you probably aren’t.

On the other hand, a lot of people have acquired the habit of carrying a bottle of water around with them, and sipping regularly from it. In so doing they have gained the opprobrium of the sort of people who cannot allow anything, anything at all, to escape their criticism and sneering condescension.

Why these critics are prepared to show their pettiness and meanness of spirit in this way I couldn’t say, but they clearly are. And they can refine it further, too. They can criticise the use of bottled water as against tap water, ‘ethical’ versus ‘unethical’ brands, bottle size, mineralization levels, the apparent physical condition of the bottle carrier.

People drink water. They drink when they feel the need or the desire to drink. Sometimes they act for no particular reason. Sometimes they are influenced by the words or actions of others. It really isn’t a big deal. It’s just water.

hrrummph>

Who are the Games About?

I see the chairman of the International Olympic Committee has just arrived in England. It strikes me as odd that the people who matter in all this, the athletes, some of whom (probably a small minority, it’s true) make a genuine living by selling their skill and the spectacle they are able to make of it to people who are prepared to pay to watch them perform, which is why there is any interest in this event in the first place… er, lost the thread. Yes, sorry, the athletes/competitors, the people everyone goes to watch, have to make do with a shared room in a little apartment block in Stratford (no, not that one, but a less-than-inspiring place in East London) while the glorified office boys from the IOC get private jets, Zil lanes, police outriders (if the press is to be believed), and suites at the Hilton. I bet there was spontaneous rejoicing, too.

I imagine all this was agreed before London was offered the Games, as we can’t have the great quangocrats (and the IOC is one of the biggest quangos in the world) troubled by interaction with hoi polloi, the mere rabble who pay, and not willingly, for them to live like kings. Again, if the press is to be believed, the Pope, Kofi Annan or Barack Obama would be embarrassed to demand a reception like that (and I have no doubt he did demand it).

PT Barnum, Kerry Packer, Alan Stanford (is that the name), L’Equipe and many others have taken athletic performers and created a show through which they could all make far more money than they could have done within them, but the president of the IOC is not an entrepreneur, however much he likes to think so. If he were an entrepreneur he would make the Olympics a commercial success or go home. He can’t do that. He is a bureaucrat with delusions of grandeur, living high on the hog off the taxes of people who can ill afford to keep him.

The reason this happens, the reason that the office boy gets the star treatment and the stars are herded like cattle is that the office boys control the money. Other people’s money, of course. It’s just so much easy to spend when you don’t have to worry about where it’s coming from or what the consequences will be.

And wasn’t it finished off with unpaid child labour? Stalin would be proud.