I’ve been accumulating news snippets about the as-yet-to-be-formally-scheduled release of Guild Wars 2 for an email newsletter I send out to my friends and acquaintances in the Guild Wars community. Lots of information this week as a result of last week’s Press Day and Fan Day events.
I got a few comments from non-gaming folks that these posts can get too long to scroll past, so it’s now in the extended post below.
An article in the newly launched Dorchester Review discusses the teaching of history:
Here in Canada the preoccupation with victimhood has mostly centred on Japanese Canadians and residential school “survivors.” Peter Seixas in Teaching Canada’s History (pp. 18-21) thinks children should be encouraged to condemn Caucasian writers who used terms like “Eskimo,” “primitive,” and “pagan.” What Seixas, a professor of education, seems not to appreciate is that schoolchildren are too young for this kind of academic pseudo-complexity and that their worldview is warped by pretentious classroom efforts to “heal the wounds.” Indeed what he advocates is what we have already had in many locales for a generation and counting.
[. . .]
In its more recent form, the classical model proposes that various integrated fields from science and math to English and second or classical languages should be covered at three stages (hence “trivium”), each time to a deeper, more systematic and engaging degree. For example, one approach for history could look like this, in four fields: (1) classical antiquity, (2) medieval-renaissance, (3) modern history, and (4) national, regional, and local history. Taught as a trivium, each of these four fields would be covered three times between grades one and twelve. Students today complain about repetition, but that is because they are tortured repetitively with the same introductory material by different uncoordinated teachers — rather than going into the subject more deeply and systematically as they grow older and more capable. As Anna Clark wrote in her 2008 paper on history teaching in Australia and Canada, “There is little point mandating the subject if it does not engage students and teachers.” Textbooks should be used as a guide not a crutch, as classical educators have long maintained.
[. . .]
We all have far to go. First, the evidence suggests that effective historical memory work is haphazard and unsystematic in public and many private schools. Students arrive at senior grades fundamentally culturally deprived and ignorant of facts. Even if narrative history is “compulsory” in Britain to age 14, in practice pupils lack “chronological understanding,” according to Ofsted, the agency that inspects school standards. Teachers have failed “to establish a clear mental map of the past.” Students “knew about particular events, characters and periods but did not have an overview.” In Canada, social studies curricula in the English-speaking provinces reveal a similar prevalence of disconnected, episodic case studies. In England (and presumably elsewhere), as Michael Gove’s critics admit, “The real problem is not with the curriculum, but with the schools’ failure to deliver it.”
Secondly, “critical skills” are introduced too early. “Where ignorance and scepticism meet, a course on British history becomes a course on running Britain down,” remarks one Financial Times writer: “By age 16, students will have as much cynicism and ‘distance’ as any educator could wish.” In Canada, a typical curriculum (Alberta’s) prescribes “historical thinking” in grade nine, “a process whereby students are challenged to rethink assumptions about the past.” But how can students “rethink” something they haven’t learned in the first place?
Regrettably, the British curriculum downgrades history to an elective after age 14, a premature cut-off that sabotages the three-stage process that classical educators promote. It reduces history to an elementary subject. It’s similar in Canada: after children are immersed in relativist “traditions and celebrations” (grade two in Ontario), they jump around in grades three to seven social studies from settlement in Upper Canada backwards to the middle ages; backwards again to antiquity, followed illogically by first nations and explorers and a survey of Canada. After grade seven, as in Britain, history becomes an elective. We have all seen the schoolbus with some banal motto painted on the side such as “On the Journey of Learning.” Most parents may never realize what this really means: “On a Journey to Nowhere in Particular.”
I went to school in the 60s and 70s and I loved history . . . just not the crap that was taught in history classes. It seemed to me that they deliberately tried to make Canadian history as boring as humanly possible. I had a few teachers who really seemed to enjoy teaching the subject, but for most of them it did appear to be just a tedious exercise they had to go through.
Conrad Black, who is now very well-versed in the oddities of American court practices, contrasts them with their Canadian equivalents:
This brings me, most happily, to the subject of Canada Day, 2011. I regret to have to write that I have also discovered in this mundane Odyssey that Canada, too, has its share of obtuse judges. But it does not actively encourage pre-trial media lynchings; requires a plausible test before charges are laid and not just the mockery of the grand jury; has reasonably even and impartial procedural rules; the defence speaks last in trials; acquittals are not immediately reversible for sentencing purposes; few prosecutors revert to the private sector in Canada, and very few become politicians; and most judges are not, as they are in the United States, ex-prosecutors. And in Canada, the prison and prosecution industry is not a Frankenstein Monster that incarcerates 1% of all adults as in the United States (only about one-sixth of that, in Canada), or more African-Americans of university age than there are in university, as in the United States. And in Canada, the number of people with “a record,” (even if for impaired driving 10 years ago, or being disorderly at a fraternity party 30 years ago), is not 15% of the entire population, as it is in the United States (47 million people, none of whom is eligible, for that reason, to enter Canada, even on a family holiday to look at the Calgary Stampede).
Canada is not a prosecutocracy amok in a carceral state, and the United States, no matter how fervently tens of millions of Americans may stand, hand over heart, singing their splendid anthems on Monday, is. Above all other things, if I were in Canada this weekend, and a Canadian citizen, I would celebrate the country’s good fortune in having 33 million relatively well-adjusted people in a mighty treasure house of a country, a steadily more geopolitically enviable condition as the developing world, led by China, India, Indonesia, and Brazil, four of the five most populous countries, with 40% of the world’s population, consistently put up six to 10% annual economic growth rates, and buy Canada’s resources. Canadians can also celebrate their good fortune that there was never an economic justification for slavery in Canada; that its only close neighbour has not been militarily aggressive, and that it has the official languages of two of the world’s very greatest cultures.
Kia Abdullah will think twice before letting her inner sociopath out on Twitter in future:
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, three young British men were killed in a bus crash in Thailand, just days after starting their gap year travels. A deeply tragic case — and one that will have left many British parents sick with worry. Annually about 100,000 young Brits take gap years.
But here’s a Twitter reaction from Kia Abdullah, a Guardian contributor:
Even if you think this sort of thing, sending it out immediately over Facebook or Twitter is just asking for a landslide of public abuse to land on your head. People who work in media have the least excuse for this kind of absent-minded faux pas, as they often pounce on celebrity or politician errors of exactly this sort.
He’s quite right: this has to be the nadir of international sporting debates:
Where do you stand on the controversial issue of a Great Britain football team? Disgusted that the British Olympic Association is threatening the independence and proud traditions of the home football nations? Angered that the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish associations are trying to thwart the Olympic dreams of their young players? Or, like me, do you want to be woken up when The Most Pointless Sporting Argument Ever is over?
If you’re wondering why the proposal for a unified British football team has caused such controversy, let me explain. There has never been a single UK football association. Instead, all four countries — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — have their own football associations. Each country is recognised by FIFA as a separate entity even though they are not sovereign nations. It’s one of the residual privileges enjoyed by the nation that invented the game. Although the Brits have minimal influence within FIFA, as the 2018 World Cup bid and the farcical presidential election demonstrated, all four UK nations are represented on the eight-member International Football Association Board (IFAB), which is the sport’s law-making body. The home nations also retain the right to appoint a FIFA vice-president. Although the English FA is keen on fielding a British team in the 2012 Games, the other national associations fear that their independence and FIFA privileges will be jeopardised as a result.
The debate took a farcical twist this week when the British Olympic Association (BOA) announced that an ‘historic agreement’ had been reached with all the home nations to field a Great Britain team at the Olympics. However, no sooner had the BOA made its announcement than the Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland football associations angrily denied that any agreement had been reached. Oops!
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