Tendring Topics…….on line
An Unappreciated ‘Gift horse’
The sage advice, ‘Never look a gift-horse in the mouth’, came
to my mind when I read in the Clacton
Gazette the scathing criticisms of the ‘paltry’
little Christmas Tree that was, in the first instance, installed on ‘Christmas Tree Island’ in Clacton-on-Sea’s town centre this
year. It was only fifteen feet high and there’s no doubt that it did seem very
small in that central position. However
it had been donated to the town by the Federation
of Small Businesses, an organisation that Tendring Council would surely
wish to support, and similar trees had apparently been donated to other towns
where they had been gratefully welcomed.
Fifteen
Feet (over twice the height of even the tallest man!) isn’t such a very small
Christmas Tree in most situations. I’d
have thought that directly it had been received the council should have
realized it was too small for ‘Christmas Tree
Island
I
am glad to learn that the Council raised enough money to obtain the kind of
tree that we would all like to see in the town centre. Here it is; the splendid new tree ready for
the lights to be switched on! Consultants Mott MacDonald who have been
working on the council’s coast protection project donated £785 towards it and
is says much for the spirit of goodwill of the Federation of Small Businesses that they also donated £200.
A
happy ending! It’s easy to be wise
after the event but I can’t help feeling that the Council might have handled
the matter a little more tactfully and the Clacton
Gazette might have refrained from publishing quite so many scathing
comments about the original ‘gift horse’.
*I’ve no idea if that is what the Council
will do with it, but it seems a good idea.
A Maelstrom of Migrants?
On New Year’s
Day 2014 (just over three weeks from the date this blog is published) the
flood-gates will open and migrants from Bulgaria
and Romania will be free to
come to the UK
and seek employment. Will there be, as
some sections of the press and some politicians prophecy (and perhaps secretly
hope!), a flood of them, all seeking our jobs, our homes, our health service
and social benefits?
Why is it, one
wonders, that so many migrants some with traditions and cultures totally
different from ours, seem so eager to travel not just from Europe but from the
four corners of the world, to make their home here in Britain . It certainly isn’t because they know they can
be sure of a warm welcome. Nor, I
think, is it to take advantage of our National Health Service, and it’s certainly not the generous way we treat our unemployed
and make sure that everyone in the UK has a roof over his or her head!
I think that
one of the big attractions of the UK is our English Language. In virtually every country in the world
English (usually, I fear, American
English!) is taught in schools. It
has become an international language.
Young people from every country in the world have learned enough English
at least to communicate with others and read the public notices and the
newspaper headlines. They know that that
will help them find accommodation and work.
Some probably speak fluent and grammatical English, better than at least
some British school-leavers who tend to use text-speak and to be incapable of
composing a sentence without inserting ‘like’ into it and concluding with,’Know what I mean?’ A
young Pole or Indian who speaks correct and clear English is clearly more
likely to get a job in a shop, a restaurant or any business dealing directly
with the public, than a Briton who is semi-literate and inarticulate
I won’t know,
and the news-hounds of the Mail, the
Express, the Sun and the Telegraph
won’t know either for a few weeks whether the English language will have the
same attraction to migrants from Bulgaria and Romania as it has to those from,
for instance, Poland and Pakistan. I am
inclined to think not. Romania is to some extent an anomaly in eastern
Europe – its language derives largely from Latin (no doubt the result of Roman
colonisation two millennia ago!) whereas the languages of its neighbours, Bulgaria , Serbia
and Slovakia
all resemble Russian and have a Slavonic source. There are already many Romanian migrants in
western Europe. They are not living in the UK
but have settled in Italy
and Spain ,
where the languages sound and look familiar and are easier for them to learn. It is at least possible that new Romanian
migrants will do the same.
As for the
Bulgarians, their language not only resembles Russian in its vocabulary and
grammar but is written in the Russian (Cyrillic) script. In Britain they wouldn’t even
understand public signs. Perhaps some of
those who have learned English will come here. I think it likely though that many will try to
settle in another EU country with a Slavonic language like the Czech Republic
or Poland . Public notices, road signs and press
headlines would look different but the words on them would at least sound
familiar and probably have a familiar meaning.
Will language
decide whether that flow of immigrants from Romania
and Bulgaria
in the New Year is a trickle or a deluge?
We’ll all have to wait and see.
‘Education,
Education, Education’
Tony Blair declared
before his successful election in 1997 that those three words spelt out his
three top priorities in government. He
even managed to introduce them into a Russian tv soap opera while on a visit to
that country! An international nation-by-nation
survey of success in three important aspects of
education; literacy, mathematics and sciences has recently revealed that the UK has slipped back. We are no
longer in the ‘top twenty’. It seems
that Tony Blair’s period in office, followed by that of the
Conservative/Lib.Dem. coalition has been far from successful in furthering
those educational priorities. Among
those whose results were better than ours were several far-eastern countries
notably South Korea and, in
Europe, Finland .
Our Education
Secretary, Michael Gove, certainly tries!
Sadly, most of his ideas are met with derision or strong opposition by
the teaching profession. He has been
accused of trying to put the clock back. Surely,
if some aspects of education in the past were better and more successful than
those currently practised, that may well be the best course of action.
+1930s.jpg)
8 and 9 year-olds in Springfield Elementary
School , Ipswich in 1930
I
am the little boy with glasses by the head-master’s right knee!
He would like to replace the assessment of a pupil’s progress by ‘course work’,
by relying – as in the past – on the results of written examinations. I am sure that he is right. I use the Google search engine continuously
to make sure that I spell names correctly, get dates right and that anything
else that I write is as accurate as I can make it. It occurs to me that if, when I was at
school in the early 1930s, we’d had laptops giving access to a such a search
engine I could have used it to get full marks for most of my homework without
actually learning anything whatsoever
as I did so!
+1930s.jpg)
A class photo
from an elementary school in the Forest Gate
area in the early 1930s. Heather Gilbert, my future wife, is the little girl in
the back row, second from the right.
In the ‘bad
old days’ of selective education a child’s future was, so they say, decided by
his or her performance in just one exam, the 11-plus, which decided whether
they went to a grammar school or remained in a secondary modern. In the 1930s it was by no means as simple and
straightforward as that. I have never
understood how it was I found myself transferred from an ‘elementary school’ to
a ‘grammar school’ at the age of ten.
Perhaps someone had made a mistake. It
certainly wasn’t because I was a child prodigy – I wasn’t! Heather Gilbert, my future wife, had a very different
experience. Illness prevented her from taking
the 11-plus (we called it the ‘scholarship exam’, in those days) However it was decided that she was a late
developer and she was transferred from her elementary school to Wanstead County
High School at the age of 13. She soon
caught up with the others. The system
really was flexible. No-one’s future was fixed inexorably at the age of eleven.
That ‘grammar
school education’ that Heather and I both enjoyed was the first step in what is
nowadays called ‘social mobility’. It
made it possible for us to move from the ‘aspiring working class’ to the very
lowest fringes of the ‘lower middle class’.
That was thanks to ‘selective education’. I think that my two sons were at the Clacton County High School
There are of
course still plenty of selective schools – they are the private ones ranging
downwards from such famous institutions as Eton and Harrow . They select their pupils not on the basis of
ability and enthusiasm for learning (though most have a minimum standard – for
which privately-run ‘prep schools’ prepare them)) but on the ability of the
parents to pay the school fees! It isn’t
surprising that they out-perform state comprehensives at preparing students for
universities and ‘white collar jobs’. The
result is that there are even fewer opportunities for social mobility today
than there were from the 1930s to the ‘60s.
Is that really what we want?
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