Vacuum. Education issue. No.19

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STUDENT RADICALISM THE IVORY TOWER THE MODERN SCHOOL CORPORATE INFLUENCE IN SCHOOLS SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS TEACHING ART RELIGIOUS EDUCATION AND MUCH MORE...

education

the vacuum

the vacuum

the vacuum

by colin graham

THE

IVORY TOWER N

o one really knows why universities are described as ‘ivory towers’.

Expensive, aloof, out of touch is what it means these days, of course, and as a reaction universities play the game of being in touch with communities. What this usually means is touching the rich in the ‘community’ for sponsorship, feeding the upper echelons of the economy, in the belief that it benefits everyone. It also means that universities are running in fear of being caught on the wrong side of government policy and ideology. The ‘ivory tower’ image used to be an embarrassment to universities. In these times the sound of the phrase ‘ivory tower’ is the death knell for universities, who have decided that they should replace intellectual curiosity with entrepreneurialism and thinking with skills. In other words, in ‘ivory towers’ nothing useful is done. In today’s universities everything has to be useful, or at least has to look useful. In a cerebral world, where work is increasingly carried out by electronic imitations of the human brain, there is, curiously, an ethos of utilitarianism which fits more with a manual, labouring economy. The decline of the ivory tower is in direct proportion to the rise of a new version of the Protestant e-work ethic.

The ‘Ivory tower’ wasn’t always a bad thing. Ivory and towers get mixed up in praise of the beauty of the woman loved in Song of Solomon. Then Sainte-Beuve, remembering his Bible, used the term ‘tour d’ivoire’ to describe the writer Alfred Victor de Vigny, and implicitly Victor Hugo. Sainte-Beuve, however, used the term positively because what he praised in de Vigny and Hugo was an attitude which placed them above the corruption and partisanship of everyday life; so ivory signified purity because of its whiteness, while the tower was a shelter which allowed for protection against the pressures of the political world. The ‘ivory tower’ was a place where an ethical view of society could be worked out, where right and wrong could be seen, or at least imagined.

The ivory tower was a reminder that a society needs someone to be able to talk about it as if from the outside. A society needs its critics. And that the term was used by a writer about other writers is a reminder that literature and the arts in general are the most vulnerable disciplines in our age’s universities, which are definitely not ivory towers. Those arts do nothing useful, make nothing, and are economically dubious.

There is something stubbornly archaic and likeable about the idea of the ‘ivory tower’. It is a mistaken amalgam of two things that were never meant to go together.

It is impossibly luxurious as a mental image, suggesting the carnage of herds of elephants for no real purpose other than pure ostentation.

Even considered at its worst, as up in the air unreality, it at least resists the pathos of immediacy which rules the zeitgeist. To do something useless is now a rarity. Imagine wasting time on an idea that doesn’t work out, but is worth thinking about. An idea that has no point, no application to anything, no market, no likelihood of funding. What could be more genuinely useful in a world full of pretend usefulness?

When universities shy away in terror at the possibility that they might be thought of as ‘ivory towers’ they have given in to a shorttermist, philistine and particular vision of society

which is niggardly, impatient, and resentful.

The decline of the ivory tower tells us not that our society has become more egalitarian, which is what most universities assume (climb down from your ivory tower and join the real world).

What it really reveals is the collapsing of time in our lives. The university as a place where time can be stretched to allow thought to happen is what is really under attack. Time has been parcelled more tightly and more exactly by the economic revolution of the computer age. The knowledge economy needs knowledge that can be labelled, branded, packaged, sent off to the right market, and all this before its sell-by date expires. It’s a form of knowledge characterised by breathless immediacy and urgency, a genetically modified knowledge that is a little better, fitter, riper, sleeker than yesterday’s knowledge, while allowing room for a new ‘innovative’ knowledge to replace it tomorrow.

When universities shy away in terror at the possibility that they might be thought of as ‘ivory towers’ they have given in to a short-termist, philistine and particular vision of society which is niggardly, impatient, and resentful.

The ‘ivory tower’ takes time to ascend, and suggests time spent up there without time being limited. There is no immediacy, no product, no now in the ivory tower.

We all need to believe in the possibility of an ivory tower, a place apart where uselessness lives and thrives, if only because useful things wear themselves out very quickly. It’s centuries since universities have actually been ivory towers in any way.

But ditching the idea, even the possibility of the idea of the ivory tower, is a disaster.

And to try to make universities part of the community as a policy decision is a pitiful misunderstanding of the role of universities as civic entities, and a misunderstanding that betrays a lack of real civic empathy. Because most cities have innately understood that their ivory towers have grown with them and that they are part of the city without having to make it so by statement or self-conscious action, by the patronisation, usually of the old working classes, by the cynical-well-meaning-smile of the ivory-tower class with a guilt complex and a fear that they’ll be punished if they don’t show the common touch. The ivory tower is being demolished by false and odious pseudorevolutionaries, playing at being egalitarian and so corrupting communality, and utterly unable to comprehend the ethical value of a society full of useless knowledge.

spellcheck

the vacuum

BAD STUDENT ESSAYS

BY LEONTIA F

B

ad student essays, in my very brief experience, can be bad in an almost limitless variety of ways. As observed in the weirdly popular book 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves', the apostrophe is in free-fall, with “the greengrocer’s apostrophe” (as in “bad student essay’s”) pretty much standard. Spellcheck might have eliminated many spelling mistakes from assessed essays, but that only makes it more shocking when they resurface under exam conditions, with basic words like “writers” spelt wrong (“writters”?). But this is small potatoes; and if your own spelling and punctuation are rubbish, you might even argue that it’s just evidence of the language evolving.

Equally common, and much more entertaining, are those glaring factual errors actually made about the material being discussed. Among English Lit. undergraduates, this can, and does, include: getting/ spelling the author’s name wrong; getting/ spelling the title of the poem/ play/ novel wrong; getting the name of a novel’s protagonist wrong (“Stuart” Dedalus?), and/ or getting the names of all the characters and/or basic facts of plot completely wrong.

Staggering insight rarely follows.

A variation on the Total-Lack-ofFamiliarity-with-the-Book bad student essay, is the Very-Close Familiarity-with-the-First-TwoChapters-of-the-Book bad student essay. Here refreshingly detailed textual analysis is carried out on the early part of the text, without quite making up for the student’s obvious failure to finish it. In turn, this leads to the essay (more likely to turn up in exams, and which everyone’s probably written at some stage) in which there is clear evidence of the struggle to stretch the word count. Privately, I think of this as the “Ralph, I like him a lot” essay, after a girl in my school who, as part of the comprehension exercise in her GCSE English exam, had to write 80 words “on the character of Ralph”. In keeping with GCSE English’s tendency to gravitate towards stories about adolescent boys and dying animals (The Red Pony, The Yearling), Ralph was a farmer out de-maggoting sick sheep (or something). Having managed 74 words about his strength and compassion and then ground to a halt, only concluding with “Ralph, I like him a lot” brought the student’s word count up to 80 words – since “I like Ralph”, say, or “I think Ralph is nice” weighed in at 79.

If you have to mark essays, though, mistakes which are unequivocal and easy to spot are forgivable because they take up less of your time. This includes most of the above, and, in more extreme cases, exam essays which peter out after a paragraph, to be followed by an elaborate doodle of stars, flowers or spirals. The best Obvious Error to encounter in an English essay – and one which is fairly understandable in students moving from the

classroom to freakish and unnatural tutorials – is when a student quotes you, their tutor. This is even better if they quote something you made up on the spur of the moment (“Virginia Woolf wasn’t that talented”), or when they unwittingly refer to you as “Dr.”, of even “Professor”, despite your complete lack of qualifications.

However, the same failure to understand essay procedure evidenced in essays which quote the tutor may also lead to the most perplexing and difficult-to-process English essays. These are, more or less, the Failure-to-Grasp-theEntire-Concept-of-an-Essay essays, which, in the worst scenarios are plagiarised essays.

Apparently now often available from sites like www.plagiariseanessay.com (which students will protest they only consulted to take notes) what makes plagiarised essays so awful isn’t the cynicism in downloading an entire essay, or cutting and pasting lengthy passages from one, but the misguided notion that anything so general, and non-specific, and written without reference to the question, would ever fool anyone. It’s this same mistaken conviction that English essays are just a collection of facts or words which leads to the phenomenon of lecture notes disguised as essays. These can be the most confusing essays to mark: you know that some of the ideas are accurate, but equally that neither the book nor the question has been read or understood. They tend to be so banal that they actually repel your mind with an almost physical force.

Perhaps the most annoying of all bad student essays, while not the most reprehensible, is the Bad Essay by the Talented Student. In exam conditions, this will appear in the psychotic handwriting which the young person sees as a badge of his or her genius.

It will be peppered with personal anecdotes and/or quotes from texts not on the course, demonstrating that literature, for this student, has broken its academic banks and connected with his/her life – worse still, that the student cares. These are the essays in which a literary ambition, on the part of the essay-writer, is clearer than their level-headed appraisal of the writers under discussion. There will be weird rhetorical flourishes, puns, jokes and parenthetical remarks. Unfortunately, given the present-day opportunities to stay in education until advanced age, the writers of these essays will go on to do postgraduate work, during which time no one will be able to figure out what they’re so angry about. This mystery will remain unsolved until the student starts teaching and marking essays him/herself.

At this point, the real danger of prolonged education becomes clear: eventually studentteachers are confronted by the fact that not everyone thinks the same way they do.

Marking essays disrupts the necessary

A variation on the Total-LackofFamiliaritywith-the-Book bad student essay, is the Very-Close Familiarity-witht h e - F i r s t - Tw o Chapters-of-theBook bad student essay.

autism with angry students construct all readers in their own image as the exemplary reader/ writer, and with which they massively inflate the value of their own project. For not only do others hold contrary opinions, they don’t care.

There’s just two or three weirdly angry people in the class ready to start the process all over again. In fact what you really learn is that you can’t really teach anyone at all: some teach themselves, the rest just ignore you.

the vacuum

by chris arthur AVOIDING CATASTROPHIC

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION H.

G. Wells once said that human history had become a race between education and catastrophe. That the outcome of this race will be influenced by religion must be obvious to anyone who listens to the news. Almost without exception, the world’s flashpoints are characterised by a religious dimension.

The three things I hate most about RE threaten to make it a liability rather than an asset in the race which Wells identified. They are: -The dire assumptions shackled to it.

-The way it masquerades as something unimportant.

-Its refusal to condemn pernicious varieties of religion.

Let me explain.

If there’s a verbal equivalent to a sexually transmitted disease, religious education is massively infected. Whisper its name, even its initials, and you can see listeners catch an instant dose of RE-clap. Their eyes glaze over and they stifle yawns as they go into the automatic pilot of negative and out-of-date assumptions. They recall scripture lessons of indescribable tedium from decades ago, or think of the fatuous rote learning once (still?) favoured in Sunday school, or of some pathetic wee man or woman trying to persuade a roomful of restive adolescents of the correctness of parochial pieties utterly remote from their hormone-coloured outlook.

RE is generally held in such low esteem that it's viewed as marginal, optional, unimportant.

It’s a kind of non-subject whose place on the timetable is won only through special pleading, not because of any educational merit. The usual view asks: why waste time and resources on RE when they could be spent on something useful (computer science, English, maths)?

As for its refusal to condemn pernicious forms of religion, religious education often asserts as one of its core values the inculcation of tolerance, empathy, respect for the views of others. This is, naturally, important. In our pluralistic world we need to learn to live with all manner of different outlooks without wanting to slaughter those who happen to believe different things than we do. But this admirable attitude overlooks the fact that there are some varieties of religion that deserve rejection rather than respect. English teaches us when we’ve made a grammatical error, maths corrects us if we get our sums wrong, science explains what counts as evidence and when opinions aren't supported by it. Music distinguishes between harmony and discord. Why does RE not make a distinction between benign and destructive forms of faith?

As someone who loves the subject, and who has spent much of their professional life engaged in it, I often wonder how these three hates might be remedied so that RE becomes fleet of foot in the race between education and catastrophe that is being run all around us every day.

I suspect the first is the most intractable.

Perhaps the negative associations carried by RE will only change when the subject is granted the importance it warrants and when it stops pussy-footing around the important business of condemning forms of religion that blight rather than bless humanity. (By which I mean those fundamentalisms – alas now flourishing within all the great faiths - characterised by a cast of mind that seeks to rule by the assertion

Perhaps the negative associations carried

by RE will only change when the subject is granted the importance it warrants and when it stops pussyfooting around the important business of condemning forms of religion that blight rather than bless humanity. of barbarism that dominate the news yet which often seem distant from our lives. Education suffers a setback every time prejudice triumphs over open-minded inquiry, every time ignorance rather than insight is allowed to shape an opinion, every time a fundamentalist outlook prevails. These are all setbacks that can be remedied by effective RE teaching. That such teaching is still rare is educationally scandalous and should be a matter for our urgent concern and correction.

of authority rather than by individual assent arrived at through the independent operation of informed intelligence).

If the importance of RE is to be properly established it needs to be stressed that it has to do with education about religions, not with trying to promote any particular faith.

Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism (to name the six usual suspects) are systems of value and belief that have played, and continue to play, a hugely formative role in millions of lives. That simple fact is what gives RE its powerful mandate to be

taken seriously. Education is about trying to understand ourselves. No attempt to understand homo sapiens can succeed if it ignores religion.

In the wake of 9/11, the war in Iraq, terrorism, poverty, AIDS, environmental crisis, genocide, it can easily seem that catastrophe is miles ahead.

It’s important, though, not to equate what’s spectacular with what’s significant. Anyone who has ever taught will be cheered by the massive reserves of human potential evident in any classroom. At the same time, though, we need to remember that there are less obviously catastrophic things than the eye-catching upshots

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our future in their hands WHATEVER HAPPENED TO STUDENT RADICALISM?

By Stephen Baker

I

f students ever had a reputation for being radical, they buried it at the University of Ulster in 1995. A students union general meeting approved the outlawing of any club or society on campus that was affiliated to a political party or organisation. It was an unprecedented example of students voting to curtail their own rights, made all the more astonishing by its timing. In the wake of loyalist and republican ceasefires, and at the beginning of a faltering peace process, students simply walked away from politics.

A students’ union representative explained to me at the time that they didn’t want political parties on campus raising the sectarian temperature among students. A fair enough point you might think but then why wasn’t the decision taken during the troubles rather than in the new dispensation?

What ever the dubious reasons for the ‘no politics’ clause, the fact was that the students’ union was tilting at windmills.

Political clubs and societies at the University of Ulster had witnessed a shocking decline in membership throughout the 90s and many had fallen into disuse. Students had simply turned their back on politics long before the Students’ Union decided to kick the remaining life out of organisations that were already on the critical list.

What was the reason for such student disinterest? No doubt some were just sick of Northern Ireland’s sectarian politics and had come to university to escape the troubles.

Others perhaps assumed that a degree would secure them a place among the comfortable, cosseted middle class. Possibly they had come from middle class homes where mummy and daddy had already set them a good example in political cowardice. Or perhaps they just didn’t give a damn. There was probably a myriad of superficial reasons to explain student apathy but nothing could excuse their abdication of an historic role at the cutting edge of politics.

History testifies to how crucial students have been in radical political movements in the past. In the United States throughout the 1950s and 60s, schools and colleges were a key site in the struggle for black civil rights. On the 17th May 1954 the Supreme Court ruled on the landmark case Brown v. s Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, unanimously agreeing that the segregate of black and white students in public schools was unconstitutional. That ruling paved the way for large-scale desegregation in schools.

Discrimination in the US wasn’t confined to schools. In Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960, four black students from the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College began a sitin at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter where they were refused service. The event

would trigger similar protests throughout the Southern States of the US, in parks, swimming pools, theatres, libraries, and other public facilities.

In Paris, May 1968, students of the Sorbonne University demanding education reforms took over their campus and declared it a ‘peoples university’.

The students action was part of wider industrial action that brought France to the brink of revolution. In Mexico, later that year, thousands of students gathered for a meeting organised by the National Strike Council in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco demanding democratic reform, social justice and an end to the military occupation of the National Polytechnic Institute. They were fired upon and massacred by the military who feared that the protestor's might threatened to disrupt the Olympic Games that were due to start in Mexico City.

Northern Ireland wasn’t immune to the upsurge in student radicalism during the 60s. Many were prominent in the civil rights movement. One of the best-known figures of the period, Bernadette Devlin, was a final year psychology student from Queen’s University, Belfast, when she won a Westminster by-election in Mid-Ulster in 1969. She took her seat on her 22nd birthday to become the youngest woman ever returned as an MP. Taking on racism, demanding education reform and democratic reform, social justice and standing for election in the name of civil rights - all this is a far cry from the miserable decision of students at the University of Ulster to pull out of politics at a time when their involvement was needed most. But in truth the banning of political societies only confirmed what had been obvious for some time. Students were trading in their citizenship for vacuous consumer sovereignty.

As a consequence they were beginning to show all the signs of the sort of myopia and complacency that sees everything as a lifestyle choice.

At one time Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko gave their name to students union bars and concert halls, now blackness and ghetto style are something that middle-class white kids can dabble in without ever experiencing or contemplating racial discrimination. You can even buy designer Che Guevara t-shirts, probably manufactured in some Third World sweatshop and utterly emptied of political significance.

Not only is politics being chased of campus, the corporations were being welcomed with open arms. Today at any Fresher’s Fair, the political stalls are withering away or hounded to the fringes, and in their place are the high street banks and mobile phone companies vying for a stake in the lucrative student and graduate market. Their philosophy is simple – relieve them of their loans today, secure their salaries and wages tomorrow.

They may be renowned for struggling with debt but students have become an attractive market, ripe for exploitation. There is even a company dedicated to helping brands and marketing managers target student consumers.

They may be renowned for struggling with debt but students have become an attractive market, ripe for exploitation. There is even a company dedicated to helping brands and marketing managers target student consumers.

As the Campus Marketing Company points out to its prospective clients, ‘despite the fact that students live on a restricted budget their spending power is estimated at £10bn pounds per year in the UK alone’. No wonder they can boast among their clientele Barclaycard, BP, McDonalds and O2.

Campus Marketing believes it has the alchemists touch with regards selling stuff to students.

Without any sense of irony it boasts of its ‘revolutionary’ approach to product promotion in universities. It looks for ‘enthusiastic students’ to act as ‘ambassadors’ for specific brands on campus. Their job is to look for opportunities to promote brand names among their peers; to keep their employers abreast of student preferences and behaviour; and to get in with the movers and shakers on campus that might be able to influence student spending. These are the new consumer activists, a bit like the old political activists, only more unscrupulous, better paid and with something they can put on their CV that won’t frighten prospective emplo yers.

When you think of the problems that students face today with debt and poor housing, you can’t help but think that there is something slightly perverse about their transformation into consumers, and something slightly sick

about free market parasites looking for ways in which to take further advantage of them.

But if this is what students want, well, who would deny them it?

Maybe a revolution has taken place and its time to kick over the statues, or at least rename the students union bar after Richard Branson. Maybe when the last political society has finally folded, in its place will grow clubs full of consumer activists, dedicated to carrying forward the Campus Marketing revolution.

It’s a depressing scenario but the message from today’s students to their predecessors in Greensboro, Sorbonne and Mexico seems to be, have a Coke and a smile.

the vacuum

all my paintings are confused

TEACHING ART

BY MICK WILSON

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach art.

Those who can’t teach art, bitch in the canteen and drop the hand in the bar.

The idea that art is in some sense ‘unteachable’ is a well-worn cliché bequeathed us by an earlier romantic cultural moment. However, in its first emergence, the term ‘art’ already entailed that which was governed by a set of rules and therefore eminently teachable. Of course, currently, the ‘unteachable’ aspect of art, is generally deemed to be (that most celebrated humanist category) creativity. This ‘creativity’ is now much-loved of the new-age, organic back-tobasic (i.e. porridge-facials and healing-crystals) sensibility that blights the cultural horizon with the spectre of authentic human-beings in touch with themselves and conducting journeys of ever-more dizzying self-discovery. In short, personal creativity is the fetish of the age of the globalised commodity: and you can’t possibly teach that, surely?

Having authored an awful lot of bad art in my own day, both as a student and as a graduate, I am loathe to blame my own teachers. Furthermore, having been responsible for teaching some students, who in their own turn have inflicted some god-awful artworks on an unsuspecting and ill-prepared world, I am loathe to be blamed in turn. It thus seems comforting to think that well ‘they just didn’t have it, that spark, that...je ne sais quoi.’ But, it’s often dangerous to settle for comfort in matters of bad art. (There are some tremendously hideous and unnerving granite unicorns and limestone livestock littering the bypasses of Ireland, to warn against thinking bad art will ever be a source of comfort.)

What is it that art students or artists think they want to learn? What is it that art educators think they want to teach? At this point, the pious crypto-Jesuit in me wants to say something touchy-feely about ‘facilitation’ and ‘enabling’ and ‘non-directive’ tuition: what the scientologists refer to as ‘doing a number on someone.’ This cant about helping individual expression to emerge and find its ‘own voice,’ is classic disciplinarity: the confessional manuals of an earlier age that instilled a discipline of self-inspection and subject-formation may be compared with the disciplining of the student artist who is encouraged to internalise a process of interrogating intentions, questioning values, querying meanings and so forth. This is to say that the student artist is inducted into a mode of subjectivity by this process that pretends to elicit the pre-existing actual authentic self into activity, expression and creativity.

But, we can dispense with the pretence that art school is not a disciplinary process, and still retain a notion of its value and importance. The challenge presented to a student is to come through a process (of initiating a

project, bringing it to a conclusion, evaluating it, and redeploying the insights thus gained into a subsequent undertaking) and thus take charge of their own practice. Art school offers an experiment in autonomy: by no means an unproblematic experiment, by no means an innocent experiment, and of course by no means a successful one either. But, still, it is in just this experiment in claiming autonomy (in the degree that one chooses what to work with, how to work, what to seek in the work and so forth) that the value of art education exists. It doesn’t matter that the artwork produced may be god-awful in my eyes, if the student has taken upon themselves the risk of autonomy.

How do you teach someone to be autonomous?

You try to achieve it in your own actions and dialogue with her. Why is this all still pious and crypto-Jesuitical?

The presumption that betrays the teacher here, is the belief that the teacher is in some way so transparent and self-clear that she can interact with all-comers in this responsible, unprejudiced, patient, ethical way and operate no hidden agendas. But perhaps we can get past this, by looking to the dialogue of the teacher-student interaction, wherein the teacher is also called to account: disciplinarity disciplines everyone. Students will regularly challenge the teachers as to their agendas whether it is a matter of personal tastes, or preferential treatment of the golden-boy in the neighbouring studio, or indeed of simply not being interested enough to notice what’s going on. Doubtless, some teachers are sometimes bullies, incompetent, drunk, sexuallymotivated, prejudicial or overly-involved in provincial English sub-moderne crap (it’s the landscape idiot) as indeed some students are sometimes treacherous, dishonest, whingeing, broken people also. Dialogue is not guaranteed, and challenging dialogue is usually uncomfortable and intensely demanding on participants.

Nonetheless, the possibility of dialogue, the possibility of conversation between and across the allotted professional roles of teacher and student (as well as between student and student and between teacher and teacher) is the value at work here: this is not without problems, not without the simple risk of inducting people into cosy familiar well-worn clichés. But every conversation carries this risk, as indeed all conversations carry all those other risks of bullying or over-indulgence and so on.

There is also a deep complicity with the dominant ethos of the moment, when work is casualised, where workers are asked to selfmanage and self-capitalise, and life itself is rendered as a project, a goal-oriented task to

I remember being accosted in a nightclub by former students, who told me I was an awful bollox, and had pretty much turned them off art for life, by making them feel stupid, or marginalising their particular concerns. Yes, they were probably right. be undertaken and administrated as good little bureaucrat would do. The ‘project’ model of artworking, of cultural work in general, resonates with the drive to cast the world as a set of tasks to be negotiated: work on yourself, make yourself work for you, and so on... But, the dream, the hope is that a conversation can even call these, the ‘given understandings’ which underpin the conversation, into question. Do we dare to believe that one of our institutions could even aspire to play at democracy, criticism and open enquiry in this way? Do we dare suppose that the most conservative of occupations, that of education, can really be a place of

open and frank enquiry?

I remember being accosted in a nightclub by former students, who told me I was an awful bollox, and had pretty much turned them off art for life, by making them feel stupid, or marginalising their particular concerns. Yes, they were probably right. I have done some terrible teaching, between bouts of making bad art, and bitching about the arts council or some other whingey preoccupation. But, as I said to them at the time, gathering what little drunken sense I had left (it was a nightclub, remember, not classroom or studio) I said: why do you feel so sure that you are allowed to tell me these things, to criticise me? I meant not to try and deny permission, but to underline that they already knew, already took it as given, that I should be faulted to my face and asked to explain myself. This is not as self-congratulatory as it may appear, precisely because it had to be a nightclub, and not a classroom or studio where the question was angrily posed: some day artschool might achieve the condition of this nightclub, and I might be a DJ, or some other pleasant kind of control freak.

For my sins, I will refrain from making art, and gently ask the student ‘have you considered putting more blue in the sky?’ or perhaps I’ll reskill and sell classes in Oirish art and viscerated culture to North Americans with more money than sense.

long live the escuela THE MODERN SCHOOL B

y the end of the nineteenth century Spain was still a country under the almost total stranglehold of the Catholic Church. Laws of a civil, social, and even economic and political nature were directly and indirectly made to fit within the framework of the ethical and social principles sponsored by the Church, and a relentless battle was waged against Liberalism.

Indeed, democratic principles were brushed aside with the assertion that as the masses could not wield the power which derives only from God, it was wrong of them to claim self-government. Subservient to this aggressively brandished dogma, the State busied itself enacting various repressive pieces of legislation, while the police effectively curtailed the violent tendencies of Anarchist revolutionaries. Meanwhile, in schools children were politely informed that they would burn in Hell (with a bloody big capital H) for all eternity if they associated with Liberals.

It was against this backdrop that Francisco Ferrer, a self-professed “philosophical Anarchist” (but not a man of violence), set up the Modern School (Escuela Moderna). To understand the remarkable advance scored by the Modern School, one must see it against the background of the Spanish educational system as a whole.

At the time, nearly 70 percent of the Spanish population was illiterate. Teachers were grossly underpaid, and rural schools (where there were any) were often little more than shacks in which barefooted, ill-nourished children were given only the most rudimentary instruction.

Although Spain had a universal education law, the majority of schools were (surprise!) run by clerics, who used brutal teaching methods and emphasized mechanical instruction in Catholic dogma. Parents often complained that the children passed half their class hours in saying the Rosary and absorbing sacred history, and never learned to read. Coeducation, tolerated in the countryside only for want of school space, was rigorously prohibited in the cities.

In September 1901, the first Modern School of Ferrer’s was opened in Barcelona with an original class of twelve girls and eighteen boys.

He admitted both males and females, both rich and poor. The school books had religion removed from them and he taught a fully secular education based on natural sciences and moral rationalism. Within ten months, the number of students had more than doubled, and in the next few years fifty schools based on the principles of the Modern School were established in Spain, mainly in Catalonia. In addition, Ferrer funded the publication and distribution of small, easily understandable books on scientific and cultural subjects, directly or indirectly affecting thousands of people who would otherwise have never had the opportunity to aquire such knowledge.

The growth of the Escuela Moderna and the wide distribution of its booklets infuriated the clergy. But for years there was little they could do beyond denouncing the school and pouring vituperation on Ferrer’s personal life.

The opportunity to restrict Ferrer’s work finally came in 1906 when Mateo Morral, a member of Ferrer’s staff, threw a bomb at the royal couple of Spain. The assassination attempt was unsuccessful, and Morral committed suicide. Ferrer and the Modern School were held responsible and the schools were closed down. Such was the state of Spanish justice at the time that Ferrer

by jason mills

cross-examination by the defense circumscribed to a shocking extent, even by Spanish standards of the day. One witness claimed that Ferrer had participated in the burning of convents in a community where none in fact had been burned at all.

On the morning of October 13, 1909, Ferrer was executed by a firing squad in Montjuich prison. As the men were aiming their weapons at him, he cried out: “Look well, my children! I am innocent. Long live the Escuela Moderna!”.

In the end, his execution turned out to be an act of gross political stupidity, inspiring protests throughout Europe and directly contributing to the fall of Maura’s ministry. Ferrer is still revered amongst many today as a true revolutionary and innovator who stood firm in his convictions in the face of powerful forces which were working against him.

was held in jail for an entire year while police professed to be accumulating evidence of his complicity in the Morral attempt. A review of the case by the civil courts established his innocence, and he was released and opened most of his schools back up.

However, in the coming years Spain descended into chaos. 1909, the Spanish government began drafting soldiers from its general population to help keep control of Morocco and suffice its imperialistic desires. Thousands of men and women went to the docks and rail depots to go to the war. However, the Spanish government’s plans were interrupted. Women began blocking the railways and the Committee for a General Strike called thousands of workers to strike in the Barcelona factories, and eventually protestors started becoming violent with their needs. What followed was referred to as ‘Tragic Week’, during which time churches were burned down, railroads were blown up, barracks were attacked, and workers put up barricades that prevented soldiers from entering the city.

To worsen matters, many of the soldiers in the Spanish army became mutinous and refused to fire upon the open crowds. One clergyman declared, “The partisans of the godless schools must be suppressed if peace is to be reestablished and Spain returned to God.” Artillery and Spanish reinforcements eventually took over the city of Barcelona, killing over six hundred workers.

No sooner was the revolt over when court martial's were established to punish the revolutionaries, although the selection of victims was largely arbitrary. Accordingly, Francisco Ferrer (who had been abroad during Tragic Week) was tried for his life by a military court that had arrived at its verdict well in advance.

The proceedings lasted only one day. The prosecution was allowed liberties that scandalized world opinion: anonymous affidavits and hearsay accounts were admitted into evidence against the defendant; prisoners who were faced with serious punishment for their own offenses were evidently given the opportunity to trade heavy sentences for testimony against Ferrer.

Evidence in Ferrer’s favor was suppressed, and

TEACHING NORTH AND SOUTH

the vacuum

the vacuum

by stuart dent THE IKEA OF A UNIVERSITY A

preponderance of a consumer-based ethos within a society can be an extraordinary menace, but at least it affords people the opportunity to complain about things.

The whole process of finding yourself dissatisfied with goods which you have exchanged your hard earned pennies for is tremendously important. This is consumer society’s only real mechanism for facilitating progress (and you didn’t think it had one!) assuming, that is, you make a point of demanding a better deal.

See here: http://www.dti.gov.uk/ccp/topics1/ guide/unsatisfactory.htm for what to do in a consumer emergency, read it and be prepared, read it and BE PROGRESSIVE! This is really the ultimate test of a society’s metal, as you only get as good as you DEMAND. Sadly, we seem only too happy to put up with an extraordinarily sub-standard range of goods and services. Northern Ireland is rife with all manner of consumer absurdities, and nestled within this stool of iniquities is the ‘tuition fee’ system of one of our local universities.

AN UNPLEASANT EXPERIENCE This brings me to recount an unpleasant experience which I suffered at the hands of some of the good people who work for Queen’s university. Some time back I submitted an application form to Queen’s in which I begged their permission to be allowed to study for a higher degree. Said university replied saying that they would love to have me come and study but that the university would, most regretfully, have to charge me ‘tuition fees’. The mention of fees was disconcerting but still, I thought, what an opportunity! So began a rather novel relationship in which I would periodically pay the university not inconsiderable sums of money in return for which they would demand that I sign many bits of paper and solemnly promise to have ‘certain things done’ by ‘such-and-such a date’.

SMALL PRINT Quite naively, I had assumed that the amount of money I was shelling out would be directly accountable for in that which the university was actually providing me with, and was not, in actual fact, a completely arbitrary and over-blown figure cooked up by a bunch of academics-turned-managers inhabiting plush offices with wall-to-wall panelling and large windows overlooking University Road. Hell no.

So what exactly was I paying for? Having access to a ‘well-stocked’ library is of course essential to study, but anyone who is a graduate of Queen’s (such as myself) can procure an associate membership card for the library at an annual cost of £35.00. Then of course there are the computing facilities provided by the university, presumably these resources also laid claim to some portion of the fees as well. The only problem here was that I never actually used these resources – a fact which, incidentally, would have been easily verifiable via the otherwise needlessly invasive measure of requiring

students to log on and off with their allotted username and password when they wished to partake of these facilities.

Of course the money in question is earmarked as ‘tuition fees’. At the time, my own research involved me gathering lots of data in the form of interviews, the upshot of which was that I had very little need to consult with my allotted supervisor – so surely this should have been reflected in reduced tuition fees for this period? Hmmm?

Well this was clearly a consumer emergency of the highest order. I felt it incumbent upon me to take this matter up with those in authority at the university, not just in the hope that they might perhaps see their way clear to shaving a few pounds off the bill, but because it was THE RIGHT THING TO DO. Thus emboldened I picked up the phone and began to dial.

ALMA BATTERED Having negotiated my way through the labyrinth of telephonic bureaucracy to someone who was ‘qualified’ to comment on my seemingly unprecedented query – in this instance a grand Duchess of the upper administrative echelons – I began to carefully lay out my well reasoned and heartfelt argument. I laid particular emphasis on what I felt to be the absence of any real connection between the amount I was being charged and that which the university was providing me with. Was there, I enquired, any possibility that my fees could be recalculated in such a manner as to reflect the degree to which I was actually partaking of university resources? ‘Oh’ she snorted incredulously ‘if we did that for you, then we’d have to do it for everybody!’

The most striking thing about the attitude of this person was that she was apparently blissfully unaware of the kind of relationship which properly pertains between a person who is PAYING FOR SOMETHING and the one who is providing that something. Showing outright contempt for the customer is not good for business. This in spite of the fact that she had clearly been given responsibility with regard to such matters. Indeed, in a shock twist of fate it would later transpire that it was I who had not been SUFFICIENTLY DEFERENTIAL towards her!

Even the worst trainee assistant manager in the worst branch of McDonalds would have treated me with infinitely greater respect than the excellent people of Queen’s. Whatever the shortcomings of high street retailers they are at least awake to the fact that they are in the business of selling things to people and that there is a limit to just how much crap you can expect the customer to tolerate.

So much for customer service, so much for the price of education.

EDUCATION Selected Moments of the 20th Century

1938 Archambault Report proposes that prisons focus on rehabilitation, not punishment.

1942 Harvard Trade Union Program, first university program for developing labour leadership in North America.

1943 Jehovah’sWitnesses not obliged to salute the flag (West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette) 1944 British Education Act reshapes the educational system of England and Wales 1946 Emmi Pickler opens Loczy Institute for Orphans in Budapest.

Edited by Daniel Schugurensky (http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~daniel_ schugurensky/assignment1/) 1901 Anarchist teacher Francisco Ferrer opens Modern School in Barcelona.

1901 Rabindranath Tagore starts school combining Western and Indian philosophies.

1946 Ellen Wilkinson persuades UK parliament to pass free milk act.

1950 UNESCO Program to provide education to Palestinian refugees begins.

1954 Colombian soldiers shoot at peaceful demonstration of university students; thirteen killed.

1955 The Blackboard Jungle, first Hollywood movie on school violence.

1901 Henry Dunant, a school dropout, is awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize.

1957 Little Rock Nine come to school.

1902 Nonconformists jailed for opposing Education Act and refusing to pay school taxes.

1957 Launching of Sputnik I in Soviet Union generates education reform in the United States.

1903 Mother Jones leads demonstration, says working children belong in schools.

1961 Cuba launches massive literacy campaign.

1904 Helen Keller becomes the first blinddeaf person to graduate from college.

1961 McDonald’s starts first corporate university.

1905 After over twenty years of existence, the‘Flying University’of Poland is legalised.

1966 Chinese cultural revolution brings about massive educational change

1905 Tsarist government closes universities in Russia.

1967 Experimental World Literacy Program (EWLP).

1908 Robert Baden-Powell starts world scouting movement.

1969 First broadcast of Sesame Street.

1909 Ella Flagg Young, first female superintendent of a major city school system.

1910 The Institutionalization of Industrial Education in Black Rural Schools.

1911 In The Child and the State, Margaret McMillan argues that schools discriminate against working class children.

1912 Norman Bethune goes to Frontier College as a literacy teacher and a lumberjack.

1912 LouisW. Stern develops the concept of IQ (intelligence quotient).

1919 Rudolph Steiner talks to prospective parents of the first Waldorf School.

1926 Eduard Lindeman publishes The Meaning of Adult Education.

1933 In ‘The Mis-education of the Negro’, Carter Woodson outlines the basis for Afrocentric education.

1933 Nazi regime introduces “racial science’” in the school curriculum.

1971 U.K. Open University opens its doors.

1975 PL94-142: free appropriate public education for all handicapped children.

1981 Palestinian and Jewish students and teachers learn together in‘School for Peace’.

1987 Raging Grannies, an innovative popular education group, is born 1989 Chinese students killed inTiananmen Square.

1990 News and advertisements in schools: First broadcast of Channel One. 1992 First Adult Learners’ Week is held in the U.K. 1996Taliban regime denies access to education to Afghan girls and women.

1999 Massacre by sudents at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado.

the vacuum

by paul moore

O

ne of the great debates in relation to contemporary education is how the informal and formal sectors can be brought together and harnessed for the good of the child. It is puzzling that this debate is never preceded by one which attempts to identify what exactly ‘informal’ education actually is.

Most definitions refer to activities which take place outside the structured confines of the school curriculum and which revolve around youth clubs, community centres or performance arts clubs.

As someone who had to suffer these alternative learning environments I would suggest that in many circumstances they are more formal than the school and are inhabited by adults who, given their propensity for misguided disciplinary procedures, should not be allowed within a cane's length of any school gate. To paraphrase a well known cliché: those that can, do; those that can't, teach; and those who can't teach end up giving themselves misplaced authority in an informal educational establishment.

So if the school curriculum is limited and the informal sector is falling over itself, and into the carefully set trap of being more organised than the real school in order to gain credibility, what is the alternative for young men and women yearning knowledge of the world?

The simple answer is, of course, the world itself. However, let us not go down the road here of reminiscing about the so-called ‘school of hard knocks’ but let us merely suggest that in some cases the street is where interesting lessons are learnt. Citing the street immediately places this learning in an urban context and as someone who grew up in an urban setting I will admit I have no idea what the rural equivalent is. No doubt it involves link boxes, Massey Ferguson hardware, Young Farmers’ outings and detailed conversations about the merits of artificial insemination. Such things, however, mean nothing to city learners.

City learners discover early, for example, that all things interesting are to be found ‘up the entry’. For the uninitiated ‘the entry’ is a small dark passage between two terraced houses.

This makes it perfect for the pastime of ‘up the entry’, a loosely convened game which involves young men and women in a round of dares relating to a visit up the said dark passage.

Being afraid of the dark I personally never got to undertake such a daring venture but I am assured that much can be learnt from the period of quiet exploration that begins ‘I’ll show you if you show me!’

I did, however, make sure that I was present when the exploits of others who made such journeys were recounted. It would never have occurred to me that any of these young men were lying just as it would not have occurred to me to ask for clarification when I heard words or phrases that I did not understand. To this day I have a range of linguistic constructions that defy any etymological interrogation and which have hence become imbued with exotic and erotic force which they undoubtedly do not

Street Talking

deserve. And needless to say it would certainly never have occurred to me that the females who had accompanied these lying titans up the entry were having the same conversation in the scullery of another house two doors up.

One way to ensure popularity in the ‘up the entry’ stakes is to have money. And money means having a part-time job. The perfect parttime employment is that which allows you to meet loads of people but doesn’t involve the expending of too much energy. Helping to deliver milk is a prime example of such a job but anything that allows you the opportunity to cruise the street is a good option. In all cases part-time jobs bring educational insight, even if it is only hearing your work-weary colleagues sending you for a ‘long stand’, a bucket of striped paint or steam or, in my case, a top water hose for a Volkswagen car. The real education here, of course, is learning how to be laughed at even when the prank is transparently infantile, isn’t funny and hasn’t caught anyone out since the first time it was executed when Noah was painting the Ark. Ultimately, surviving a street education can be accomplished only if one has developed the capacity for banter. Paul Willis in his seminal study of why working class children fail at school, ‘Learning to Labour’, discovered that the children who survived the toughest settings were those whose verbal dexterity could sidestep the worst excesses of physical abuse. The fact is that sticks and stones can break your bones but words inflict wounds that, if delivered properly, leave weeping scars that throb deep into adulthood.

Recent research would suggest that with the advent of computer culture, satellite broadcasting and internalised leisure pastimes many young men have abandoned the street in favour of their bedrooms. The spaces they are deserting are, it seems, being appropriated by young women tired of listening to Take That, dreaming of white weddings or waiting for text messages. And if the authorities are concerned that young women continually outperform young men in formal educational settings how much more worried should adolescent males be that in future the informed voices articulating the wisdom of the streets are likely to be female.

Helping to deliver milk is a prime example of such a job but anything that allows you the opportunity to cruise the street is a good option.

the vacuum

TEACHING HISTORY

By Alison Kitson Teaching history in divided societies is not easy.

In Northern Ireland, teaching about Irish and British history inevitably means teaching about events and personalities that mean different things to different communities. The way a class full of Protestant children will respond to lessons on, say, the Battle of the Boyne and Partition, will be different from their Catholic counterparts. What is more, many children will already be familiar with a ‘version’ of such events before they step foot in the classroom.

The National Curriculum makes it clear that one of the roles of history teachers is ‘to question and challenge prejudice and stereotypes’. They are told to explore different perspectives and interpretations with their pupils and enable them to understand the present by reference to the past. The current curriculum review – likely to be implemented from next September – goes even further and states that young people should have opportunities to ‘investigate how history has been used by individuals and groups to create stereotypical perceptions and to justify views and actions.’

My research, based largely on inter-

alien beef views with history teachers across a range of different types of schools in Northern Ireland, suggests that they do a remarkable job of avoiding the kind of biased, one-sided history that once dogged the history classroom. All the teachers I interviewed were committed to as ‘balanced’ a version of the past as can ever be possible. Their understanding of their subject was sophisticated and thoughtful and their desire to enthuse and engage pupils palpable.

These were practitioners whose professionalism and dedication I came to admire.

They did, however, hold diverse views about their role. Some believed passionately that their role was to challenge pupils’ attachment to particular ‘versions’ of the past and to find ways of encouraging pupils to engage in and empathise with other perspectives. This does not mean emphasising one perspective to the detriment of another, but addressing headon the fact that the two main communities in Northern Ireland do interpret the past differently for very particular reasons. These teachers – whom one might describe as ‘risk-takers’ – might, for example, ask pupils to assume the role of someone from ‘the other side’ in discussions as a way of empathising with and understanding why different perspectives exist. They might also want to explore quite overtly how fact and fiction have at times become blurred in popular interpretations of the past, becoming more myth than reality. Another feature of the ‘risk-taking’ teacher is a commitment to linking the past with the present. Indeed, some might start with the present consequences of

MY BEEF

BY TANYA HÄCEÇT Nine things that would irritate an alien most (If any end up in Northern Ireland) 1/ Armoured cars and police stations in Belfast.

Coming from a place where riding tanks is a kind of national sport; I can say that armoured police landrovers here look quite humble (at least, to me). They give an impression that those inside are scared and want to be protected more than to protect. The police stations look more like prisons than places to go to in times of distress. Of course, the criminals have to be isolated, but the looks of the stations bring an idea into my mind that police officers want to run away as much as criminals do and the barbed wire is there to keep them at work.

2/ Fishermen in ties I don’t mean a professional angler on the occasion of his wedding but somebody who fishes for fun in the evenings. Fishing is considered to be a wee gulp of freedom and country life for those who are stuck in offices in their tight-collared shirts, suits and, of course, ties.

The first fisherman in a tie I saw in my life was by a lake in Dromara. That was a steady looking man in his 50s, whose appearance could be described as “wee Irish gentleman”.

In Glenarm, I saw more men in ties having a rest and chatting on a bench after dinner.

Hardly any of them were younger than 40, but so what? Ain’t you guys realize that a tie is a symbol of office slavery, anti-freedom, anti-rest

and anti-holiday?

3/ Tesco trolley locks To get a Tesco trolley from the park on Woodstock Road I inserted a pound coin. It did not work. I tried consistently 50p, 10p, 20p, 2p, a euro, a Russian rouble and a Danish coin with a wee hole in the middle. Nothing worked. I took a basket and shopped, damning the weight. Actually, I bought less than planned because I couldn’t get the cart, so Tesco lost on its customer here. On the way out –what did I see? “Insert £1 and get a trolley”. I did – with a different trolley this time. It still didn’t work.

I think Tesco trolleys have a built-in digital sensor that recognizes foreigners and refuses to serve them.

4/ Best coffee shops close early They queue to have coffee in Starbucks, a newly opened American coffee shop in Belfast.

In fact, this coffee shop doesn’t even get proper armchairs – big, soft, yellow leather ones that every respectable coffee shop should have.

Places like Clements do the proper coffee shop atmosphere. But alas – they are closed at 5.30 in the centre of the city. No way for coffee maniacs to have a good evening. Instead, we have to go to pubs and drink ourselves to death.

5/ Sadness and Freud in Irish legends What strikes me most about Irish legends is that they all have sad endings. In “Irish legends for children”, by Yvonne Caroll, the story

past events before delving into the past to find answers to the question ‘how did we get here?’

Others are less comfortable with these kinds of approaches. They still provide their pupils with a range of perspectives, but they will not actively encourage pupils to explore and empathise with them. They may make passing reference to more recent events but they are less likely to make the present a central feature of a lesson. There may be certain events in Ireland’s more recent past that they refuse to mention at all. Consequently, they are likely to heed the official decision to end the compulsory study of Ireland history in 1922 and at GCSE, they may well opt to study the inter-war period rather than the more modern one. Their pupils may go through school never talking about Irish history beyond the early part of the twentieth century. The ‘risk-takers’ would regard this as a missed opportunity.

What might explain the difference?

Location, ability of pupils and levels of integration appeared to be the main factors. The ‘risktakers’ were most likely to work away from conflict ‘hot-spots’ and obvious para-military activity. They were also more likely to teach in grammar schools (a finding that is not entirely consistent with anecdotal evidence) or non-selective schools. Finally, they were more likely to teach pupils drawn from across both communities. If nothing else, these findings are therefore supportive of moves towards less selection and more integration. Furthermore, they suggest that history teachers – who do a difficult job in often difficult conditions – need more support if

they are to meet the more ambitious aims of the history curriculum. At the very least, they need the time, the training, the resources and the opportunities to work collaboratively in order to formulate new ways of addressing difficult and potentially divisive issues in the classroom.

You may well question what good a bit of history teaching can do in the face of Northern Ireland’s problems. I am not arguing that history teaching can change the world, but it can challenge prejudice and misconceptions and promote empathy and understanding in a way few other subjects can. Perhaps the history classroom is one of the few places left where some very difficult and divisive issues can be openly discussed. It would be a great pity if this was not celebrated and nurtured.

called “Deirdre of The Sorrows” is about a girl who can’t escape bringing troubles to Ulster even if she doesn’t want to. In the “Children of Lir”, the kids can’t break the spell and have to live in swan’s bodies until they grow old. In “Setanta”, the son of a King kills a blacksmith’s wolfhound in order to get to the feast (the guy must be really hungry). As an apology, he offers to guard house of the blacksmith and accepts a dog’s name. Is this an example of a proper career move for a king’s son?

The most successful story of the book is “Salmon of Knowledge”. A young lad, while cooking the magic salmon got the wisdom of all ages just by breaking the blister that rose on the side of the fish. The guy sucked his burned thumb and despite being strictly forbidden to taste the Salmon of Knowledge - tasted fish accidentally.

“From then on”, says the story, “wherever he had a problem, all he had to do was to put his thumb in his mouth and he had an answer at once”. What a Freudian passage, and a bad way to tell children that thumb sucking is a bad habit.

I have only one explanation to all this. The book was created by somebody who wants children to grow up to be thumb-sucking pessimists with no career ambitions and who pass their lives waiting for a sad end. I looked at the last page and what did I see? “Created and produced in England”.

Another side of it – barbed wire along the Causeway tow path. The path itself is so narrow that two people can’t go there hand in hand, but if one of them will stumble and fall – he or she will fall on the barbed wire. It is much more dangerous than sheep on the way of walkers, you know.

And well, kids will tresspass into those barbed wired places anyway. Don’t you guys remember how easy it is to cut a barbed wire?

6/ Gentlemen’s apartments ads.

It is not an apartment for just a woman. Or for just a couple. In fact, women are not meant to live there. No way! Not allowed. It is advertized as “Gentleman’s apartment”, which brings to mind a very Victorian male who smokes his pipe, sits in front of his fireplace with his Encyclopedia Britannica, volume 2, and spanks his wife every other Saturday. It was fun to approach this advertisment with stealth, climb on the wall and spray “Male chauvinist” in deep red. The ad disappeared next morning.

7/ Barbed wire in the forest They say, barbed wire everywhere prevents sheep from getting into the forest. But then why is there a narrow road in Glendun with barbed wire on both sides and a forest behind?

I bet it is to prevent the smart sheep from jumping over barbed wire line and cross the road without being killed by a car.

Alison Kitson, Lecturer in History Education, Institute of Education, University of Warwick.

8/ Spiritual adverts The church is becoming modern; so does it’s slogans for God. The strangest message I ever saw was in East Belfast - (HERE PUT THE TEXT MESSAGE). The most weird and, at the same time, beautiful one was “Eternity... Maybe today?”. - seen on the road to Carrickfergus.

Without a doubt it was a piece of art of advertizing – all my copywriting friends whom I sent this to were totally agree. One of our famous writers had already formed a slogan “A Solid God for solid people”. Its’ just... what about us?

9/ No sex books in the library As a writer, I had to prerape an article on how it feels living without sex for a long time. For one of the glossy magazines, you know. I had certain difficulties writing it, so decided to gather extra material in the library – some books on celibacy maybe, or memoirs of a girl who never allowed men to have sex with her before being wed. In spite that sort of memoirs would form a bestseller, I found nothing alike in the local libraries, nor in the Central one: there was no sexual books at all. Not even a “Pocket Kamasutra” or “How to make love for the first time” which would obviously attract teenagers into libraries much more than internet access does so far. I asked if they had “Sex for Dummies” at least and the answer was it can be avialable in 2 weeks after I order it. I realized sex theory isn’t popular in this country.

It’s all pure practice here.

10/ Lack of reasons for irritation The Vacuum editor told me to wrirte down 10 beefs. I have a problem here. I mean, there’s not too many irritating things in this country.

After all you guys are really nice. So I leave the reason #10 empty. If you promise to take off the barbed wire – at least half of it.

the vacuum

mad for it

what is it

TOUCHED

the vacuum issue 19

BY GENIUS

Published by Factotum A Litterete.

ADDRESS:

BY HELEN SHARP

112-114 Donegall Street Belfast BT1 2GX 028 90330893 [e] info@factotum.org.uk www.factotum.org.uk

Tiny Big Moments I have Known And Loved (A hey hey hey) Sgoil Lionacleit was my second secondary school in the Outer Hebrides. The first only went up to O’Level. If you were any more intelligent than that you were shipped off two islands up so as not to upset things, the island equilibrium or something. There were two routes to school and they depended on the weather. One was a tenminute flight in the Loganair (pass the barley sugar round, mind the crate of chickens and of course its safe to land on the beach) sixteenseater propeller plane. The other route was so very different; it was the Caledonian McBrayne ferry with connecting mini bus.

The ferry journey was longer and as it was our winter route was generally a much rougher affair - but it had its advantages. The main one being it docked into my island at 6:30am after a six and a half hour crossing of the Minch (the strip of water between civilisation and us). The advantageousness of this was that islanders generally/literally rolled off the ferry on arrival leaving copious amounts of half finished drinks in the lounge bar. Cue ten eager sixteen year olds of a Monday morning ready and willing to finish them off, Famous Grouse the breakfast of Champions. In addition the jukebox was always left on, this was 1990 and MADCHESTER had hit the Western Isles, it said so on my mate’s t-shirt.

The Happy Mondays, The Inspiral Carpets, Northside and if you’d got it slightly wrong The Lilac Time were all emblazoned across our chests. No band was worn with greater respect or frequency though than the Pollockesque Stone Roses t-shirt, preferably with matching sun hat, flared jeans, Kickers and if you were a boy - floppy fringe. Those were the days when the flop of a boy’s fringe could cause teenage girls to scratch each other’s eyes out - or in my case throw Cheryl McKenzie’s new shoes over the school wall without her knowing…

We always arrived drunk from the two-hour ferry crossing and travelled on the mini-bus avec carryout to the school hostel. The hostel was where the kids from more isolated islands boarded; girls upstairs, boys downstairs and a pool table somewhere in the middle. Always too ill for school on Monday, Tuesday was our first day back after the Christmas holidays.

This particular Tuesday at after dinner o’clock my friends and I were outside round the far end of the school having a smoke. It was already dark, there was a gale brewing and the rain was enough to make us huddle breathing in each other’s nicotine and hormones. Talk was of Celtic and Rangers, of Sarah McNeil’s tits in PE and of how shit George MacKay Brown’s Greenvoe was as the English exam novel. (Note to teachers; kids growing up on an island don’t want to read about life on an island. They want to read about New York and nightclubs and road trips and big massive gaping adventures with big skies.)

Anyway, it was amid the discussion that we heard voices in the distance and saw four bodies striding towards us. They were wearing bright yellow sou’westers and ponchos and more importantly to us were carrying tins of lager. This was a perfect opportunity to tap

Editors & Design Stephen Hackett Richard West Reviews Editor Eugene MacNamee Illustrations Duncan Ross Cover pictures Duncan Ross Web editor Stephen Hull

Outer Hebrides some tourists for a couple of drinks in exchange for some local (inevitably fictitious) history. The strangers approached and we ambled casually over to the school fence to greet them. We could see it was four men and as they came closer time was suspended and our minds melted as we saw Ian Brown, John Squire, Reni and Mani stride our way.

Here is where I have to tell truths. I would love to be able to recount stories of partying with The Roses until the wee small hours or tell you of the long conversations we shared about the state of the music scene. I could make something up and you’d be non the wiser but in this instance the truth is better.

The Stone Roses stopped and came over; amid the clash of Manchester ‘a’ rights’ and Hebridean ‘hallos’ a bunch of kids met their idols in the middle of what was a nowhere place for us and a somewhere place for them.

Yeah, they gave us some beer and yeah, we got them to sign our fag packets and told them how bored we all were and how much we loved their music. Yeah that was pretty much it, they walked on and we told our mates all about it the next day at school. Of course no one believed us, but we knew it was true and we now got the feeling that life was maybe going to be as remarkable as we’d hoped.

Its kind of magical and stupid too how important that meeting was to us. To this day I take solace in knowing that on a mantelpiece in an apartment in Manhattan my friend Boris still has a packet of Regal-Kingsize with John, Ian, Mani and Reni scribbled across it.

Did I tell you about the time I met The Krankees?

Stone Roses

Distribution Manager Jo Fursman Advertising Stephen Hackett To advertise in the Vacuum or receive information about our advertising rates call 028 90330893 or email info@factotum.org.uk print run: 15,000 distribution: Greater Belfast and Dublin The Vacuum welcomes and encourages correspondance. Write to the above address or email letters@factotum.org.uk All copyright remains with the authors.

Printer: Bangor Spectator Factotum says good-bye and good luck to Jo Fursman (our distribution manager and spiritual adviser) she's off learning to be a teacher in Manchester. If anyone wants to be Factotum's spiritual advisor (and distribution manager) please give us a call.

the vacuum

lovely camel gift to the world

THE FACTOTUM MUSEUM

A beige coloured Fuzzy felt material camel in the seated position. It has two saddlebags which are used for housing trinkets (we presume). The Camels humps (Two) are decorated with gold tassles.

The Factotum Museum was founded in April 2000. It holds in trust for the nation and the world a collection of objects from ancient and living cultures. As a social enterprise the Factotum Museum has exceptional reach. It creates a context in which cultures can be seen, experienced and studied in depth or compared and contrasted across time and space to inspire and delight. The Museum engages with the public to advance understanding of the collections and cultures they represent.

To improve public awareness of the collection we have decided to publish reports on new items as they enter the collection.

Curator’s Report: This object is from Kazakstan, produced by the "ALKA" corporation. A small booklet attached to its neck goes some way to explaining the product: "Souvenir 'Young Camel' was in the spase like representative of Kazakstan in honour of 30th anniversary of the first human space flight of J.Gagarin in Aril 1991 is talisman of international competition "Voice olf Asia" Souvenirs are given like a gift to delegations and officals of the world". The booklet goes on to tell us that it 'serfity originality of firm product'. We can find nothing to contradict this statement. The camel's expression is bemused as is true of the real thing. It is assumed the object depicts a camel at rest, seated. It appears to have no legs however.

Collection Report: September 2004

A SOUVENIR "YOUNG CAMEL" Accession No. 271522A The Brown Bequest 15cm x 10cm

If you would like to nominate an object for possible inclusion into the museum please contact: myfactotum@btconnect. com, phone 028 90330893 or write to us at Factotum, Unit 20, North Street Arcade Belfast. BT1 1PB. Remember, giving us something valuable could mean you pay less tax.

tweed jacket hell I WAS A SUBSTITUTE TEACHER

By Sean Kelly

Tommy Vance, the legendary Metal DJ once claimed that the proudest moment of his career was 50,000 people at Knebworth Festival chanting in unison ‘Tommy is a Wanker’. I’ve walked some way in Tommy’s shoes.

My first car was a 1972 Mini Cooper, a model made famous in recent years by Rowan Atkinson’s character Mr Bean. As a startlingly ineffective substitute teacher, this was my transport and led to me once walking across a quadrangle in a Belfast Secondary school to the sound of 400 boys chanting ‘Bean, Bean, Bean’.

Pride, humiliations, fear, were all present in that moment.

Many graduates tend to hit a drift in their twenties, struggling to find a role between student living and some semblance of a career.

Teaching can seem to offer a way through. Semidecent money, short working days and probably the two best reasons of all, July & August. Time and the means, therefore, to indulge a previously acquired drinking habit and maybe do a bit of writing. All cloaked under the veneer of respectability still sometimes afforded the local teacher.

So it was that I entered the twilight world of the substitute teacher. Substitute teaching differs from the real thing in that ‘the Sub’ lacks much of the authority of the regular teacher; they will also lack a rapport with the pupils, a room to call one’s own, a knowledge of the power dynamics of the school, paid holidays and so forth.

On the up side, when the phone call comes at 8.30am on a winter morning and the will to face the day ahead isn’t there – the Sub always has that truly great gift - the choice to ignore the phone, there’ll always be work the next day.

For the most part the role of the Sub is a fairly straight forward one. Find the class, settle the class, hold order of sorts for six or seven periods a day. If nothing you or your classes have done alerts the attention of the school (or civil) authorities, everyone is generally happy and a sum of money is deposited into your bank account at the end of the month.

The substitute teacher may initially aspire to impart knowledge. Role models to choose from include such gems as Goodbye Mr Chips, Concrete Jungle, and, erm, Dead Poets Society.

Who can deny the allure of the inspirational Teacher-Hero, jerking their thumb at the pettiness of the school system and taking their charges on a journey of knowledge and wonder?

For the lowly Sub, however, the class generally have other ideas.

Faced with, say, a recalcitrant GSCE Technical Drawing class, no work left by the teacher and a tenuous grasp of the subject at hand, the Sub may choose to employ a mix of strategies; a bit of bluster and intimidation, wild improvisation ‘ Today class, I want you to design a new model of microwave’ or the old stand-by favoured by many – the WordSearch, photocopied in their hundreds from cheap puzzle books sold at bus and train stations everywhere.

Ultimately, the constant challenges to ones authority, the casual affronts to ones dignity, the mindless playacting eventually take their toll.

And that’s just the staffroom.

Ideas about a bit of writing fall by the wayside in the face of sheer physical and psychological exhaustion. Drinking becomes a necessary escape and not a lifestyle choice. The rupture of one’s high minded educational ideals creates

Mr. Kevin ZiroliSchool substitute teacher. a philosophical and spiritual void that can’t be filled. It’s time to get out.

Hoking through some boxes a while ago I came across an old tweed jacket, purchased in the hope of attaining that teacherly look. As I stared at it a sound came back to me, echoing across a West Belfast schoolyard and down through the years. ‘Bean’ it said, ‘Bean, Bean, Bean.’

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PRAVDA

BY NEAL ALEXANDER

Policing with the Community: Police Service of Northern Ireland 2003-2004 Report of the Chief Constable.

By Neal Alexander Other readers of PSNI Chief Constable Hugh Orde’s Report for 2003-2004 may also have been struck, as I was, with the question: what sort of a document is this? Perhaps erroneously, I retain an image of such broadly ‘governmental’ reports as austere dossiers or chunky typed manuscripts bristling with statistical information and dry technical interpretations of such data. Not so in the case of Policing with the Community, which, by its very title, implies a much friendlier, more openly accessible and comprehensible approach. With its full-colour photographs of smiling, helpful officers, easy-to-read pie-charts, and short, informative ‘articles’, this slender A4 publication bears a superficial resemblance to local news sheets, but is perhaps closer in style and format to the corporate ‘reports’ issued by large companies and circulated within the business world, combining as it does the functions of conveying information and projecting an affirmative image and ethos. Indeed, it is

surprising how often the jargon of business management intrudes upon the prose of this document, whether in the form of repeated references to “problem-solving” and “proactive measures” or through the explication of NIM, the National Intelligence Model, which “is simply a business process that assists police in determining priorities, and a process for deciding what resources are needed to tackle them”. In the PSNI’s new organisational structure for 2004-2005 Sinead McSweeney, Head of Media & Public Relations, and David Mercier, Head of Legal Services, rank higher than the force’s six Assistant Chief Constables, while the briefs of these latter officers include “Corporate Diversity”, “Outsourcing”, “Analysis Centre”, “Ideas in Action” and “Change Management” – the latter of which is apparently not a terse directive for future action, although I’m still waiting for confirmation from the Analysis Centre. As with business ‘reports’ there is also a fair amount of discreet self-congratulation, with Chief Constable Orde announcing a significant reduction in crime figures and appearing in numerous photographs next to prize-winning colleagues, wearing an expression of varying bemusement or irritation as befits the occasion.

So much for the format, what about the message, and particularly the affirmative image

projected here? The crux of the matter, as the report’s title has already made clear, is what is referred to as the PSNI’s “policing with the community philosophy”, which, through “professional, progressive policing”, aims to make Northern Ireland “safer for everyone”: “To us community policing is not simply a term, it is a practice, part and parcel of what we do- day in, day out”. Gone are the bad old days of the RUC were often part and parcel of a dangerous complex of socio-political problems, rather than an agent for their solution; under the benign direction of Chief Constable Orde, the Patten-patented PSNI offer an image of policing as amiable cooperation, an outsourcing of local knowledge and hands-on experience through a network of District Policing Partnerships, each serving a determinate ‘community’. In this respect, the ‘philosophy’ espoused by the PSNI is heavily dependent upon the overwhelmingly positive gloss that has typically been given to the word ‘community’ in the English language since the late nineteenth century; that is, as Gemeinschaft, the experience of “intimate, private, and exclusive living together” which the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies contrasts with the exposed, public life of Gessellschaft (society). Yet, in the context of sectarianism, and also in relation to issues of class, race, gender, sexuality etc., this warmly persuasive word can also be seen to conceal a somewhat vicious underlying aspect, whereby the promise of inclusivity becomes a demand and a threat. For many in Northern Ireland who choose volitional commitments over those which they inherit by the accident of their birth, ‘community’ can often function as a shorthand for constriction and small-mindedness. The PSNI have already begun to formally recognise Northern Ireland’s increasingly various alternative ‘communities of interest’ through its programme of “Cultural Awareness”. But it is worth asking whether it is more important, in the context of an embryonic ‘multicultural’ city already beset with a sharp increase in race hate crimes and Combat 18-style activity, to achieve

Chief Constable Orde’s “goal of a safer society”, or to try to rethink our own tainted concept of community by striving for a society in which we might each, both as individuals and collectively, take more risks through exposure to the discordant elements within ourselves and others. This may, of course, be a little too much to ask of our Chief Constable in his annual report … but there’s always next year.

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marys outstreched hand OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE

BY SINEAD MORRISSEY

I

don’t have many ornaments in my house. I live in the grip, most days, of a semi-pathological need for clear surfaces and lack of clutter of any kind. A bowl of shells and stones by the fireplace is just about the only thing I own that isn’t used for something, though my niece does pour water over the stones occasionally to watch them change colour. I have rarely craved objects. I know how disappointing consummation can be. For my fifth birthday, I wanted a pretend jewellery set and every day for a month I would call into the sweet shop on my way home from school and stare at it through the glass. I ran to the shop on my birthday to buy it, and I watched the man lift it up in its dusty case and hand it down to me, and at that moment my memory of it ceases completely.

When I was ten, we moved to the Antrim Road and the girl next door took me on a forbidden tour of St. Patrick’s Secondary School one morning during the summer holidays. I’d never been in the grounds of a Catholic school

before. She took me to a courtyard where the statue of a woman in lurid white and blue was standing with her head to one side, and she explained to me that this was the Virgin Mary.

She told me that the mound the woman was standing on was the earth, and that the snake under her foot was the devil, and that the stars around her head were her crown in heaven.

All of which I found difficult to credit. Then the girl took hold of Mary’s outstretched hand (with part of the thumb missing) and shook it, like she was closing a business deal, and on we went to the garden where an Alsatian had been crucified, to practice taking our shoes off and throwing them as far as we could.

It’s odd, then, that one of the few useless, ding-an-sich objects I’ve craved in my life so far is a Madonna. I saw her in Switzerland, in a place called Binn, where I was working as a waitress. I was twenty. A friend from college had endured the summer alongside me, being threatened with knives from the cook and

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ducking to avoid the trays of apple strudel he sent flying during his frequent rages. She secured a flight home a week earlier than I did and left me stranded, up in the Alps, with the September rains coming. And I knew I wanted the wages for that last unbearable week to manifest in an object I could carry home with me and keep, like a scar, or a gallstone. So I blew the lot on a Madonna.

I noticed her in the village gift-shop. Like the woman in the school, this one was also Jesusless. Otherwise I had trouble recognising her as the same Queen of Heaven. This Madonna was more like a Mucha woman, afloat on the cloud of herself, aflow in her Renaissance robes. She was carved from a single piece of wood the colour of the Cruiser butterfly. I desired her intensely, and carried her home at the bottom of my rucksack, wrapped in a towel, the most expensive useless object I’ve ever paid for— the symbol of seven extra days spent amongst people with eyes that looked in different directions and a predilection for groping. She stands on the windowsill over my stairs. Part of her thumb is missing.

It’s odd, then, that one of the few useless, ding-an-sich objects I’ve craved in my life so far is a Madonna. I saw her in Switzerland, in a place called Binn, where I was working as a waitress.

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mobil pencil pizza hut text book

CORPORATE INVOLVEMENT IN SCHOOLS

associated with each category between 1990 and 1999-2000, follow: 1.Sponsorship of Programs and Activities— Corporations paying for or subsidizing school events and/or one-time activities, including contests, in return for the right to associate their name with the events and activities.

Example: The Duracell/NSTA Invention Challenge for grades 6-12 invites schoolchildren to “design and build working devices powered by Duracell batteries.”

Percent increase in citations between 1990 and 1999-2000: + 248%

By Alex Molnar

T

he desirability of corporate involvement in the schools has been a fundamental assumption of federal, state, and local policymaking in America for over twenty years.

Although it has been asserted that effective corporate-school partnerships promote civic and personal well-being, increasing corporate involvement in education has been justified primarily on macro-economic grounds, i.e., as necessary to increase American competitiveness in the global economy. This justification has been so widely accepted that, at this point, business is involved in almost every aspect of public education in the United States.

For example, to an unprecedented degree schools are being integrated into the advertising and promotional campaigns for products as diverse as candy bars and automobiles. Further, public education is itself being packaged as a product by for-profit corporations known as “education management organizations.” Often with the help of policymakers, these corporations are aggressively seeking to create an educational “market” for the particular “brand” of school they are promoting. Rarely, however, are the public benefits and costs of for-profit education thoroughly and objectively calculated.

The effort to use schools as a platform for corporate advertising and propaganda or to create an environment supportive of for-profit public education has not gone entirely unchallenged. Critics believe that this barrage of marketing in schools is at best a distraction and at worst encourages students to make unhealthy lifestyle choices. Nor are such criticisms new. In fact, the marketing of products, services, or a corporation’s point of view to children in schools has evoked varying degrees of concern for the better part of a century.

Similarly, recent attempts to create a for-profit public education sector have been contentious, with many issues, such as how to hold for-profit firms accountable, still to be resolved.

This article will argue that many activities described as school-business partnerships are in fact harmful to children and undermine the ability of schools to provide sound academic programs and promote democratic civic culture. It concludes that it is now time for policymakers to take a more critical look at the purpose and impact of many types of corporate-school relationships and to decide what form of oversight is necessary to ensure that public schools continue as an expression of democratic values rather than corporate interests.

A Short History of Corporate Marketing in Schools As far back as the 1920s, concern about commercial influences in schools was significant enough to merit the appointment of a National Education Association (NEA) committee to study it. The Committee on Propaganda in the Schools was charged with determining whatpropaganda (including materials from corporations, governments, and other organizations)

was being received by America’s schools and what policies or other mechanisms were in place to deal with it.

The committee’s 1929 report identified several ways in which commercial activities might interfere with the academic programs of schools. For example, the decentralized nature of curriculum development and approval processes in the U.S. means that eachschool and school district must depend on its own, often limited, resources for evaluating the accuracy, fairness, and educational value of each sponsored material or program that is offered them; the principle of democratic control of curriculum content (generally through an elected school board) is jeopardized by the abundance of unsolicited and unevaluated materials flowing into the schools from well-funded outside interests; and sponsored materials and programs pose a distraction from the already-crowded course of study required to meet state or local standards.

More recent work suggests that the NEA committee’s concerns remain relevant today.

If anything, efforts to commercialize schools appear to be far more intense now than in 1929. Spending by corporations on marketing to children is at an all-time high. Moreover, as part of their overall marketing strategy, corporations are seeking access to schools in an unprecedented diversity of ways. Commercial messages, invitations to enter students in contests, proposals for exclusive vending contracts with soft drink bottlers, and offers of free equipment and services in return for advertisers’ access to students are now commonplace.

Educators, parents, and policymakers all feel commercialism’s impact. The apparent increase in commercial activities is probably the result of both the increase in marketing to children and in the vulnerability of schools. Schools experience strong demands for academic improvement from government agencies, parents, and the business community, and their budgets are being strained in the attempt to offer a wide variety of sophisticated and expensive technology to students. These intense external pressures are often stoked by corporations and used to rationalize commercialized offers of assistance.

Over the years, many researchers have attempted to identify, describe, and quantify commercial activities in schools. Research for the 1929 NEA report included a survey of 489 respondents, mostly city school officials, to determine what sponsored materials had been received and what policies or other mechanisms were in place to deal with them. The committee also conducted a review of state education departments’ laws or policies governing the use of such materials, interview sessions with groups of teachers, school visits, and an examination of advertisements for sponsored materials.

Using Free Materials in the Classroom and a similar pamphlet, Choosing Free Materials for Use in the Schools, were published in the 1950s by professional associations to assist teachers in the use of sponsored materials in their class-

In a Japanese bar you might find a print of a sumo wrestler’s hand on

rooms. Both guides warned teachers against uncritical acceptance of sponsored materials, but also recommended that they not reject such offerings outright.

Hucksters in the Classroom describes the results of the inclusion of four questions related to teachers’ use of “industry[-sponsored] materials” in the 1976-77 annual membership survey of the National Education Association.

The responses of 1,250 teachers suggested that approximately half of U.S. teachers used sponsored materials and indicated that a wide variety of commercial interests were represented, including banks, utilities, manufacturers, and food processors.

Channel One, the 12-minute current events program that carries two minutes of commercials, was launched in 1990 and is widely considered the bellwether of the recent expansion of commercial influences in the schools.

Roy Fox, Mark Crispin Miller, and Hugh Rank have all published critiques of Channel One’s content. 'Channel One in the Public Schools: Widening the Gaps' found that schools with high concentrations of poor students are almost twice as likely to use Channel One as schools serving more wealthy students.

Bradley Greenberg and Jeffrey Brand found that students who watched Channel One were more likely to express materialist values such as “Money is everything,” or “A nice car is more important than school.” Another study estimated the costs of instructional time taken up by Channel One’s current affairs content and its advertising content for each state. The authors estimate that, nationwide, the annual cost of instructional time taken up by the two minutes of commercials broadcast on Channel One is approximately $300 million.

'Captive Kids: A Report on Commercial Pressures on Kids at School' outlined various commercializing activities inschools. Captive Kids provided reviews and ratings of over 100 sponsored materials and contests, included a listing of national education organizations and their positions on school commercialism, and provided a comparison of Channel One and CNN classroom news programs.

Commercial Activities in Schools, issued by the U.S. General Accounting Office in September 2000 found that 19 states had some sort of regulation in place regarding commercial activities in schools, including some statutes that are intended to encourage such activities.

Tracking the Growth of Schoolhouse Commercialism 1990-2000 The Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education (CACE) has, since 1998, released an annual report on schoolhouse commercialism trends. Data for all three CACE reports were derived by conducting database searches of the popular, business, advertising/marketing, and education presses for articles describing each category of commercial activity. The frequency of relevant citations offers an approximation of the frequency with which a particular activity can be found in schools. The eight categories, and the percent change in number of citations

2.Exclusive Agreements—Agreements between schools and corporations that give corporations the exclusive right to sell and promote their goods and/or services in the school or school district.

Example: In 1997 Colorado Springs District 11 signed a 10-year exclusive vending agreement potentially worth $8 million with Coca-Cola.

Percent increase in citations between 1990 and 1999-2000: + 1,384% 3. Incentive Programs—Corporate programs that provide money, goods, or services to a school or school district when its students, parents, or staff engage in a specified activity.

Example: Through its “Book It!” reading incentive program, Pizza Hut offers school children who meet their reading goals a free Pizza Hut pizza.

Percent increase in citations between 1990 and 1999-2000: + 231% 4. Appropriation of Space—The allocation of school space such as scoreboards, rooftops, bulletin boards, walls, and textbooks on which corporations may place corporate logos and/or advertising messages.

Example: Cover Concepts offers schools free textbook covers featuring advertisements from the cover’s sponsors.

Percent increase in citations between 1990 and 1999-2000: + 539% 5. Sponsored Educational Materials—Materials supplied by corporations and/or industry associations that claim to have an instructional content.

Corporate Example: Mobil Corporation sponsored a lesson plan series called “Critical Thinking about Critical Issues.”

Industry Association Example: The Polystyrene Packaging Council produced the Plastics and the Environment Sourcebook.

Percent increase in citations between 1990 and 1999-2000: + 1,875% 6. Electronic Marketing—The provision of electronic programming and/or equipment in return for the right to advertise to students and/ or their families and community members.

Example: In an effort that recently failed, the ZapMe! corporation provided ad-bearing web access and computer equipment to schools in exchange for the rights to collect student webuse data, to advertise to students, and to use school facilities after school hours for corporate purposes.

Percent increase in citations between 1990 and 1999-2000: + 139% 7. Privatization—Management of schools or school programs by private for-profit corporations or other non-public entities.

Example: The Leona Group manages 34 charter schools in Michigan and Arizona, in return for a management fee.

Percent increase in citations between 1990 and 1999-2000: + 3,206% Fundraising—Any activity conducted 8. or program participated in to raise money for school operations or extracurricular programs.

Fundraising activities vary widely in their levels of corporate involvement. Because 1999-2000 was the first year in which database searches were conducted on the topic, no data are avail-

selling school able for comparison between years. However, fundraising appears to be the most widespread commercial activity, with the largest number of citations of any category in 1999-2000.

Opposition to Commercializing Schools Concerns expressed by parent, professional, and religious groups about the impact of commercialism on students have increased in recent years, and those concerns have resulted in regulatory efforts at the local, state, and federal levels. The American Dental Association has decried exclusive vending agreements between schools and soft drink companies, and the American Academy of Pediatrics has expressed concern about commercialism’s impact on children’s health. In 1999 the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution calling on school administrators and parents to remove Channel One from their schools.

State and federal elected officials have taken notice of this response to commercial incursions in the classroom. For example, Wisconsin State Representative Marlin Schneider proposed a total ban on advertising in schools in 1997. Faced with strong opposition from educators as well as corporations, Schneider then proposed a less expansive bill that would have barred schools from signing exclusive agreements with soft drink bottlers. Although neither version of the bill was adopted, Schneider persisted, introducing new legislation in 1999 that would prohibit school boards from entering into exclusive advertising contracts or contracts for telecommunications goods or services that require students to be exposed to advertising. The bill stalled in committee.

In 1999, the California State Assembly passed two bills on the topic of commercialism in schools.

Assembly Bill 116 bans in textbooks any “materials, including illustrations, that provide unnecessary exposure to a commercial brand name, product, or corporate or company logo.” The second bill requires that the contract be debated and entered into at a noticed public hearing.

Also in 1999, the Better Nutrition for School Children Act was introduced in the U.S. House and Senate to prohibit companies from using a legal loophole to distribute free soft drinks and other non-nutritive snacks during school lunch periods.

The bill was not passed before the 106th Congress ended. In 2000, the Student Privacy Protection Act was proposed, which would have required written notification to parents of any commercial research being conducted in their children’s schools. The notice would have to include: what information about their children will be solicited; whether the solicited information could lead to identification of the child; who will have access to the information and for what purpose; how much class time will be spent on the activity; and what the school will gain from participating. The bills would also have required written permission from the parents before a child would be allowed to participate in the research activity.

Schools as a Product The 1990s were a period of rapid expansion for what is now called the “education industry.” One of the fastest growing sections of that industry is that of companies managing public schools, particularly charter schools, for profit. Companies have always profited from selling necessary supplies to schools, but the concept of making a profit from the administration and practice of K-12 public education itself is new. Industry watchers have coined the term “education management organization,” or EMO, to describe these companies, and the comparison to HMOs seems accurate to both proponents and critics of the phenomenon.

One of the powerful putative benefits of marketbased education reforms is the alleged inherent accountability of the market, which can be summarized as “If the product isn’t good, the customer won’t buy it.” While this logic is simple enough, the world of public education is complex, and that complexity ensures that the wisdom of attempting to create a for-profit public education market is by no means self-evident. A few examples illustrate the practical and policy problems raised by allowing EMOs to run public schools.

In Austin, Texas, movers cleared out the premises of the Academy of Austin, a for-profit charter, in the middle of the night in November 1999. According to the Austin American-Statesman, children arrived at school the next morning only to find the class-

rooms nearly empty and their teachers packing up the remaining supplies. The school’s Michiganbased management company, Charter School Administrative Services, did not offer an explanation but simply informed the Texas Education Agency (TEA) that the school was being closed. A spokesman for the TEA told the newspaper that the state “cannot compel charter schools to complete the semester or the school year.”

Recent reports from across the country indicate that parents, community members, and the media find getting information on the operations of some for-profit charter schools nearly impossible. In Michigan, a survey conducted by Booth Newspapers, for example, found that a majority of charters in the state failed to comply with information requests filed under the state Freedom of Information Act. After making requests for basic data such as teachers’ names and salaries, the newspaper group received partial or no responses from 94 of 176 charter schools (53 percent, compared with a 5 percent noncompliance rate for a sample of 87 traditional public schools). According to the Associated Press, most of the refusals to respond were based on the argument that as a private employer, an EMO does not have to disclose information about its employees to the public.

The generous flexibility in some charter school laws allows conflicts of interest that would not be permissible in traditional public schools. In Ohio, the law permits members of a charter school’s governing authority (the school’s private board of directors) to have a financial stake in the school, to bypass the competitive bidding process to give contracts to friends or relatives, and to skip criminal background checks.

Where We Go from Here Despite the recent increase in public scrutiny of some corporate activities in schools, current trends suggest it is quite possible that by mid-century American public education will be transformed from an expression of democratic values into a system whose structure and functions are determined by mercantile criteria. This need not be the case. In some countries, children are already being protected from commercial influences in and outside of school. Moreover, Sweden has proposed a European Union-wide ban on all television advertising aimed at children in and outside of school.

Sweden has had such a ban for a decade. Denmark and Greece have also placed restrictions on TV ads directed at children. Unfortunately, to this point in America, policymakers have devoted much less time to thinking through the constraints that may be necessary on corporate involvement in the schools than to considering ways to expand school-business partnerships. This will have to change if we wish to retain and strengthen a public education system that serves the best interests of children and that promotes democratic civic values.

Alex Molnar is professor and director of the Center for the Analysis of Commercialism in Education (CACE) at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

The Center’s website can be found at www.uwm. edu/Dept/CACE.

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GRASSROOTS

GATHERING Friday 22nd October- Sunday 24th October Grassroots Gathering of activists for social and environmental justice will be coming together from all over Ireland for workshops and discussion at the student union of Queens University Belfast. The Grassroots Gathering is a bottom-up (grassroots, particpatory, anti-authoritarian, creative) network based on the principle that people can control their own lives and work together as equals both in how we work together now and in what we are working towards.

For more information email: greenaction @ earthling. net or Phone 07729785327. www. grassrootsgathering.freeservers.com/

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EDUCATIONED EXPERIENCES CRAZY SPANISH TEACHERS

BY HELENE COURTES

potato-shaped hand. I later decided to study Portuguese at University.

My Brazilian teacher referred to me as ‘Short Hair’ and would shout ‘ Brazilian Portuguese has a nasal sound, meow Short Hair, stand up and meow!!’

I fled France to teach in Belfast and found myself in a classroom of Gemmas, Jennas and Jemmas all scribbling away with metre-long pink fluffy pencils. Most of them hardly had any prospect of going to France except perhaps to visit Mickey Mouse and his gang in Eurodisney.

Teaching adults came as a breath of fresh air. I have learnt a few essential teaching rules from my early mistakes; Never become their pal Never patronise or underestimate them Never criticise another teacher Never compare them with each other I inherited from my father a love for poetic vibrancy in words and a vivid imagination from my mother. To this day, I know that all these elements, along with method, establish a great alchemy for interaction in a classroom. As to how much my students ever learnt from me?

Je ne sais pas..

One after the other they were mad; relentlessly so.

My first Spanish teacher would tell us about her miscarriages and how difficult it was to be a Jew married to a Muslim. Her second favourite topic of discussion was her pet, the school bully: “ children you have to try and understand why he bullies you “… he was a tank-built Yankee supporter who occasionally left me dangling from the coathanger in the corridor.

My second Spanish teacher wore black glasses in the classroom. She was born in 40s Spain, her parents immediately fled to a refugee camp in France only to be deported to Auschwitz for their communist ideologies. She was depressed.

My third Spanish teacher swung her long black hair into boys’ petrified faces. She once came up to the lanky guy beside me to announce that she wanted to ‘touch him, to shake him, to make him vibrate…with her words.’ She had an episode of heavy pelvising to a crackling tape she had proudly smuggled out of fascist Spain.

My fourth and final Spanish teacher would point at mistakes on my copy , using her triangular shaped nail protruding from her only deformed

THE NEXT SHIRLEY TEMPLE?

BY GLENN PATTERSON In the early summer of 1973, with a murder rate in Northern Ireland of roughly one a day and a bombing rate in Belfast, it sometimes felt, of closer to one an hour, my primary school decided to mount a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe in which, for reasons which take three acts and innumerable songs to explain, a conflict erupts between the House of Lords and the Kingdom of the Fairies.

I sang O, Little Town of Bethlehem at the audition (‘but in thy dark streets shi-ii-i-neth the everlasting light…’) and landed myself the lead role of Lord Chancellor. Not long before, Dustin Hoffman, then thirty-two, had been aged to look a hundred and twenty one in Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man. Finaghy Primary School’s teachers set their sights a little lower aging an eleven year old by a mere fifty years. But then, Penn had the legendary Dick Smith, and a Hollywood effects budget to call on. Finaghy Primary had a few of sticks of greasepaint. Still, the audience watched, awed by the transformation – or so I always remembered it – as old-man-me marched on to the stage to sing, ‘The law is the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent, it has no kinds of faults or flaws and I, my Lords, embody the law.’

I could sing it for you now. I could sing all the other characters’ songs too. In fact, I did sing all the other characters’ songs back then, or at least mouthed them, in between singing my own. Why not? I was having the time of my life up there. (In a touch worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan themselves I had fallen in love with the girl playing the boy with whom the girl who was my ward was in love.) The finale had us all, Lords and Fairies, singing it’s love that makes the world go round and flying off to Fairyland.

Recently I found a photo of the leads, standing in the school playground. There is the girl playing the boy who is loved by the girl who is my ward and there I am, at the centre, a chubby eleven year old with tinfoil buckles on my black gutties and purple and white lines on my face; and there at our backs is the school fence and beyond it who knows what manner of early summer `73 mayhem.

the vacuum

ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL

SCHOOL IS HELL

BY STUART WATSON

BY HUGH OLDLING SMEE All the way through my school days, I was told what the institution I attended stood for.

At my primary school, it was British flags and bulldogs, at my integrated school, it was a new breed of enlightened (but still Christian!) citizen, and at my ‘ancient’ university it was a long line of other fools, bending the head for societies acceptance. The badly be-suited bloke who welcomed us in the massive branded hall that we were herded into, gave us a run-down on the 500 years of history that we were neatly slotting into. And our tiny voices raised in one chorus: teach us how to think so that we might be like you.

The words ‘non-uniform’ haunted me throughout my entire secondary school life.

The school had the classic Grange Hill look of black blazer, black trousers and white shirt.

The colour came from the school badge and the school tie. The institution gave whatever identity you were to have. For five years, some people fought against this, looking to develop an identity, constantly staying behind in detention for wearing a black shirt, white shoes, leggings or in my case a rather dandy silk scarf.

The school would time and again punish pupils for being themselves and reward those who subscribed fully to the identity chosen for them by the school.

This rationale extends throughout education. Subsume yourself, the thinking goes, and rewards are yours. The educationalist and all-round Austrian thinker put the education system as achieving this: ‘The pupil is ‘schooled’ to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new.’

A good education is shaped by the individual, not by the institution that they ‘receive’ an education in. Rather than institutionalise education, we should demolish the schools and resurrect the pupils identity. What does it matter if we fail exams, wear Prince of Wales check and a white brothel creepers? What matters is that we engage with knowledge and that it is available to us when and where we need it. And you can do that anywhere, and wearing what you like.

LITTLE MISS JESUS

BY NEWTON EMERSON It seems churlish to complain about bad teachers when I only had one but she was an absolute stinker. Little Miss Jesus was a classic Stranny-granny spinster who taught because there was nothing else she could do – but who couldn’t teach either. Chaos reigned when we first realised there would be no control, followed by a more sustainable period of lowlevel anarchy, and eventually – our limited eight-year-old rebellion reserves exhausted – the boredom began. Days dragged like dead horses. A crisp packet blowing across the playground was entertainment gold. We talked so much at our desk that 24 years later, out of the blue, I got invited to one fellow-inmate’s wedding. There was only one subject that Little Miss Jesus ever really tried to teach: the love of God who sent his only Son to die for Us on the Cross at Calvary and Stephanie will you Please put That away! There was only one punishment that Little Miss Jesus ever really tried to enforce: reading your work out in front of the class.

This was embarrassing not because everyone laughed but because – like everything else that took place in front of the blackboard – everyone completely ignored it. Only the threat of a trip to Mister Corporal Punishment up the hall – who, predictably, would later become the best teacher I ever had - kept a lid on the powder keg. But funnily enough Little Miss Jesus also played her part in my academic awakening.

After several months of staring out the window I became so bored that I picked a book – Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - off the shelf behind me and read it. Then another. Then another. By the end of the year I was reading a book a day.

By the end of the following year, with the help of a decent teacher, I had reached my rightful place at the middle table.

Years later I saw Little Miss Jesus again, incongruously, wandering past the window of my local in Portadown. Seen for the first time out of context I recognised her for what she had always been – a weirdo. It is true that by pushing me to literacy via extreme tedium she did benefit my education. But may I suggest, to those hell-bent on putting a Little Miss Jesus in every classroom in Northern Ireland, that this approach might not work for everybody.

I did not enjoy my schooldays. Which is putting it somewhat mildly; fourteen years later the mention of the word can still bring on hallucinatory flashbacks strong enough to leave me trembling and in need of a stiff drink to regain my already fragile composure. I’ve long harboured the fond conviction that when Marlon Brando as Colonel Kurtz breathes “the horror… the horror” at the close of Apocalypse Now it’s not the existential void he’s staring into; no, at the moment of death all the portly demagogue can think of are his schooldays. Better to be cut to pieces by a machete wielding nut than relive that. Perhaps the greatest cinematic representation of the horror of school, however, is to be found in World War II docudrama Top Secret.

In one sequence, painful in its veracity, Val Kilmer’s character (I can’t remember, look it up if you care that much) has a “dream” sequence in which, back at school, he suffers the classic scenario: its exam time and HE HASN’T REVISED. As the bell tolls and the camera closes in on his anguished face the screen dissolves and reveals what is actually happening; hanging from the ceiling by a chain Kilmer is being flogged by his Nazi interrogators. The beatific smile that spreads across his face is a wonder to behold. I wept.

The doubters among you may think I’m overstating the case slightly, or are indeed wondering why you should give a toss. Such muddled thinking can only reveal the kind of sick perverted mind that actually enjoyed the experience, or a poor deluded fool who has introduced some formidable mental blocks to deal with the bitter memories. The dread in the pit of the stomach that begins on Sunday morning and intensifies over the course of the day to preclude the possibility of eating, sleeping or rational thought; the cold shock of waking on Monday morning with the threat of the seemingly endless hours and days ahead; the bus filled with similarly ashen faces, speeding all too quickly to the final destination described by Quentin Crisp as “a cross between a prison and a church”. Followed by the pleasure of lining up with a horde of other unfortunates in a dismal hall (also the scene of demeaning “physical education” sessions; the ability to perform a forward roll has surely served me well in life) to listen to the witless droning and religious platitudes of the senior staff. Of course this was only a prelude to the hours of grinding boredom ahead. Perhaps the majority of my teachers should themselves have been taught that lessons delivered with all the zombified enthusiasm of the undead don’t really instil a desire to learn in the recipients.

I can’t deny though that school does do a good job of preparing the child for the experience of work and life as a valuable member of society; never mind the trauma and irreversible emotional damage. The lucky recipient of a good solid education now has nothing to fear from the petty backbiting, arbitrary cruelty and pointless tasks which comprise the working day; they will by then have had several years experience of such joys. Indeed no matter how shitty and grim life can get, there’s always this thought to get us through: we’re not at school anymore.

ROUND THE BEND

BY ALLAN HUGHES I will never forget at the age of eleven, in my all boys school, my religious education/sex education teacher drawing on his blackboard a vivid (if unlikely) analogy for the sexual development of teenage boys. He likened the experience to boarding a train and each stop on the line representing an ever escalating sexual experience; first stop, holding hands, next stop, kissing, next stop, hands up a jumper (oh! the journey ahead!)... We were advised to travel carefully, one stop at a time, but on the train journeyed to the certainty that was full blown sex. This was the stop at which he advised us to get off the train and stay off. His tone moved down a pitch as he drew a sharp bend on the train track. If we stayed on the train, he warned us, we would succumb to the great sexual temptations of homosexuality, bestiality and sex with minors.

Years later he was convicted and sentenced for indecent assault and gross indecency against a number of his pupils.

The image of the train track came back to me and i wondered if he had considered it as a lesson in specific relation to his own ‘temptations’, did he think his own curiosity for the ‘journey’ had got the better of him, and if so, i wondered who did he think was driving the train?

the vacuum

reviews the ‘trees’, with their indistinct outlines, on the canvas is almost perfectly symmetrical and prompts thoughts on Rorschach inkblot psychology tests. These standardized tests are designed to measure how a person sees rather than what they see. They consider where one looks on the picture surface, what is seen first, the sequence of noticing large shapes and small, whether elements of the image are perceived as moving or static and responses to colour. As with Rorschach, encountering these paintings enables a kind of analysis of seeing, a selfconscious awareness of the process of looking.

Appalachian and Bluegrass Music Festival REVIEWED BY EUGENE MC NAMEE

The 13th Annual Appalachian and Bluegrass Music Festival Ulster American Folk Park, Omagh, September 3rd – 5th

Hannah Maybank at Queen Street Studio Gallery

The Ultras Eoin McNamee Faber and Faber, 2004

A Deuk at the Ulster-Scots Agency Wabsteid

This Festival gets more successful year on year with tens of thousands of people coming from all over the country and abroad to see the finest European and American Bluegrass musicians, singers and dancers. The Festival comprised a packed programme over three days of individual concerts by various groups on various sites throughout the Ulster American Folk Park, as well as a series of lectures and workshops on the music and the heritage associated with it. Featured artists included the Dale-Anne Bradley, The Bing Brothers Band, The Bailey Mountain Cloggers, The Gospel Jubilators, Red Wine and many more. On the Friday and Saturday evening there were full concerts featuring a succession of these groups. On the Sunday various of the groups also performed at local Church services, both Catholic and Protestant.

Bluegrass music is the flowering of the Scottish-Irish musical fusion taken over by the original Scots-Irish to the new American heartlands in the Carolinas, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee. This mountainy music, rougher and more raucous than the music that it comes from, is full of piss, vinegar, moonshine and The Lord. It’s also full of that drunken reeling spirit of, at least every second song, making sure you are picking, bowing, strumming or slapping whatever instrument you have at the maximum possible speed. It’s a music of incredible technical virtuosity, all carried off in an aw-shucks, thank-the-Lord register of self-effacement. In the slower ballads you can hear the influences of blues and Gospel music and trace out the roots of American Country music. In the faster tunes the legacy of Irish and scottish jigs and reels is apparent. The highlight of the weekend were the appearances by Dale Anne Bradley and her band, who have managed to keep the spirit of Bluegrass while reaching out to other musical forms and managing the whole thing with incredible musicianship.

This is the kind of gutsy music that should be the backbone to whatever musical re-imagination that might be of the cultural heritage of the Ulster-Scots people and their migration to the the Southern United States throughout the Eighteenth Century. These are the people that kept the White House stocked with Presidents for practically the entire nineteenth century, and that provided the heroes of the American Western Frontier; Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Jim Bridger, Jim Bowie, Sam Houston. Whatever you might think of the good or bad of those Wild West days, there’s no denying that the Scots-Irish were at the centre of the action. It still rankles that, with full support of the body charged with promoting that heritage, the piss-poor schlock of ‘On Eagle’s Wing’ was passed off as a representation of that experience.

Hannah Maybank at Queen Street Studios REVIEWED BY KAREN DOWNEY Hannah Maybank exhibited six paintings in Queen Street Studio’s refurbished gallery between 6 August and 9 September. These paintings could be described plainly, and ambiguously, as abstract. Repeated, and variously scaled motifs of natural elements, bird’s wings, trees and mountains appear to be cut into, mounted onto and inserted under the main surface plane of the paintings. This surface is also, in areas, highly distressed; blistered, cracked and broken.

The paintings are distinctly different in scale and colour, but each one provokes consideration of the seemingly systematic process by which they all have been constructed.

It appears as if acrylic paint and liquid latex are gently and repeatedly poured onto a raised, horizontal canvas, building up thin sedimentary layers around various stencilled shapes. Where the stencil is removed, a recess is created revealing elements of previously hidden layers. Where layers of paint are developed over the stencil, the surface becomes distended and fraught. The paint is also allowed to spill, in a controlled fashion, over the edges of the canvas, and one’s thoughts are momentarily moved to the business of confection and cake decoration, where coloured, sweetened, gelatinous liquid is artfully and seductively manipulated. The sides of the paintings reward closer inspection; singular, embossed driplines stream horizontally towards the wall creating the appearance of ghostly arches that drop into a bluntly serrated edge. The primed, base of the painting is, at times in part, visible through the web of drips, revealing the painting’s skeletal sub-structure.

Riding on the surface of one painting, Mounting Interference IV, are stylised images of uprooted, floating, blue-veined trees. These patterns are inverted horizontally, turned upside down to appear as liquid reflections suggesting watery depths. They are also cast at angles, inferring shadows creeping across rutted terrain, consequent on multiple light sources.

A sense of 3-dimensional space, in the form of strange and changeable imaginary landscapes, is conjured in this way. The arrangement of

The eye feels like a prehistoric insect crawling around a surface that has been exposed to radiation, into crevices and under lips of flayed, loose skin. Indeed at one level all the painted surfaces appear as skin that is diseased; skin that is under attack from within and without. One painting entitled Hosts appears to be carrying fossilized forms just beneath the surface like insects trapped or preserved in amber. The term ‘host’ also suggests the painting as a body, a viral carrier under immunologic assault. The burnt, jaundiced and sickly pink, yellow and orange seem like contaminated colour, colour that has been poisoned or inflamed, damaged through harsh chemical treatment. The main structural components in the skin are being broken down and the surface loosens, wrinkles, cracks, peels and falls away, exposing varicoloured membranous tissues beneath. This pustulate swelling and collapsing of sections of the surface make the paintings appear as living, breathing, dying things, both volatile and vulnerable. As paintings made from the tired body of modern abstraction, they are a well-reasoned, well-structured articulation.

The Ultras

By Eoin McNamee REVIEWED BY NEAL ALEXANDER The Slovenian philosopher and critic Slavoj Zizek argues that: “the true choice apropos of historical trauma is not one between remembering or forgetting them: traumas we are not ready or able to remember haunt us all the more forcefully. We should therefore accept the paradox that, in order really to forget an event, we must first summon up the strength to remember it properly.” Something like Zizek’s exacting imperative currently confronts Northern Ireland’s writers and artists, and in this context it is worth noting that, if nothing else, Eoin McNamee’s new novel further illustrates the extent to which ‘post-Troubles fiction’ remains a thoroughly contested and unsatisfactory term. Indeed, The Ultras is a novel that is openly haunted by unresolved historical traumas and political conundrums, exemplifying McNamee’s literally ‘uncanny’ ability to merge fact and fiction in ways that inevitably impel an unsettling interrogation of both.

The absent centre of the novel is Captain Robert Nairac, the Special Forces operative who disappeared near the border in 1977 and whose body has never been recovered.

This corporeal void is the enigmatic narrative hinge of the novel, and the point of fixation for Blair Agnew, a disgraced ex-RUC officer who blunders through a “world of whispered conspiracies, webs of deceit” in an effort to come to terms with his own part in the events he is struggling to understand. Agnew’s eccentric search for meaning leads him to believe that the seemingly peripheral figure of Nairac had in fact been central both to the British

the vacuum

lonely blizzard of paper

Secret Service war against the PIRA in the early to mid-1970s, and to the clandestine rivalries and antagonisms between the different Sectret Service agencies. So while McNamee initially elaborates a fairly straightforward narrative of collusion, whereby Nairac works alongside a ‘pseudo-gang’ of loyalist paramilitaries and is implicated in the Miami Showband murders of 1975, he also shows Nairac operating “in the spaces between organizations” and thereby leads the reader into an ultimately impenetrable labyrinth of conspiracies and collusions, fractions and double-deceits that intimates “the knowledge of clandestine governance, the dark polity.”

As the phrasing of that last line suggests, McNamee’s modern take on gothic stylings and his flair for bleak linguistic flourishes are both evident in this novel, although there is also a greater range of experimentation with dialogue and description here than in previous outings. It is slightly strange, therefore, that critics continue to dismiss his fiction as overwrought or heavyhanded – one recent reviewer complains that ““Ultra”, in this case, means “too much”” – which is, it seems to me, to spectacularly miss the point. On the one hand, the extreme self-reflexivity of the writing implies the need for McNamee’s prose to be held in check; on the other, it suggests that such excess or overdetermination is necessary in contexts that, by their very nature, strain against representation – are often literally unspeakable. In this sense, then, The Ultras continues, and further complicates, McNamee’s reading of post-war Ireland in terms of a specifically linguistic crisis, a historical situation in which semantics mutate and epistemology is compromised: “Agnew knew that the words alone were no good. You had to go outside the words. The meanings were unspoken, had not been formed into words.” Seemingly empty words trail a freight of unspoken, hidden meanings in their wake, which is why McNamee frequently flirts with cliché and seemingly banal aphorisms. Indeed, in The Ultras more than any other of his novels – even Resurrection Man – language functions as both metaphor and theme. In a recurrent device, the meanings of specific words are glossed precisely and compulsively, while characters are constantly alert to the idioms they and others are using, trying to translate the white noise of intelligence and conflicting reports into something they can understand and act upon. Similarly, texts proliferate throughout the novel, from the “lonely blizzard of paper” that Agnew accumulates in his caravan, to his daughter, Lorna’s, diary, which might hold the secret to her terminal anorexia. In each case it is hoped that careful analysis, or some new way of reading, will provide the inaccessible answers to compelling questions.

As McNamee recognises, this sort of confusion and the concomitant hankering after meaning are open to manipulation by State interests, particularly those who control the apparatuses of (mis)information. And it is striking that The Ultras portrays this phase of the Troubles less as an early prototype of the ‘war on terror’ now sweeping the globe and more as a particularly sinister war for the ‘hearts and minds’ of the population. Media control is in the hands of PsyOps, who monitor and manufacture public opinion, while at one point the arch-conspirator Clyde Knox remarks blandly on the ‘value’ of atrocity: “You need an atrocity to move things along. It’s important that a brisk momentum is maintained. People shouldn’t be allowed to dwell on things.”

Elaborate simulations coexist with genuine acts of murderous violence, and performative identities are adopted or discarded by a whole range of characters whose ‘true’ selves are little more than ghosts lingering at the fringes of their lives. This is particularly the case with the Ultras themselves, those semimythical figures of establishment conspiracy who constitute “a calm centre, a dark, ordering artifice” amidst the seeming chaos of the Troubles. Exemplifying the radical trajectory of crime fiction which penetrates the shadowy substructures of such conspiracies, as against its conservative impulse towards closure and the reassertion of order, The Ultras discovers a ferocious panoptic apparatus at the figurative heart of Anglo-Irish politics. And yet, this panoptic apparatus is also shown to be prone to various forms of disorientation, vulnerable to the sudden disintegration of previous certainties. In this regard, the geographical setting of the novel is crucial, for The Ultras shifts its focus from the urban and suburban settings of Resurrection Man and The Blue Tango to the equally treacherous terrain of the border areas of South Down and South Armagh. It is this landscape that finally outwits the chameleonic Nairac, who is repeatedly shown tracing imaginary lines on a map of the area: “He had a puzzled expression on his face, as if there were another, more detailed and clandestine legend elsewhere. One that gave reference points to the shifting nature of the place. The zones of infiltration. The cartographies of subterfuge.” Just as Victor Kelly discovers that the street map of Belfast ultimately exceeds his attempt to master it in Resurrection Man, so the spatial ambiguities that are encrypted in the border itself resist Robert Nairac’s efforts to unravel and enumerate them in The Ultras. Like the city, the border is a contested landscape – a place of competing and often contradictory forces – and it is one of the significant virtues of McNamee’s novel that an awareness of Ireland’s peculiar spatial complexity should be seen as intrinsic to any investigation of its historical traumas.

There are clearly dangers in meddling with history, but as a response to Zizek’s call for new and difficult forms of remembering The Ultras constitutes a rich and provocative intervention which speaks indirectly to the future development of (Northern) fiction, offering its freight of unspoken meanings as a means of addressing the voids which still haunt our present.

A Deuk at the UlsterScots Agency Wabsteid REVIEWED BY GAVIN FALCANER A body haes tae gree that the wabsteid o the Ulster-Scots Agency is a braw-leukin thing, athoot a dout ane o the maist vieve an attractive o ony organisation in thir airts an pairts. Near aw the wants A can see is mair adae wi the agency itsel — an the feck o thaim haes thair springheid in the legislation that set it up. Juist whit daftie cam up wi the norie o pittin langage thegither wi cultur unner the guidal o an ae body corporate A dinna ken, but the affcome haes been an ugsome brew o pushionous ethnic associes like tae pit aff thaim ootby the Protestant richt, as the noble Laird shawed us no lang syne wi his richtous indignation at no bein alloued tae ware £600,000 on the Twalt.

E’en if thon wisna the case, A hae ma douts that the fruizen — an in pairt, borraed an inventit — fowk cultur exponit on the wabsteid coud hae muckle appeal for yung fowk, e’en in the Protestant commonty that the heich heid anes

o the agency is maist interestit in; the fouth o Ingland taps seen in East Belfast ower the simmer is guid evident o thon. Tak tent: a cultur that isna dynamic is a deid ane.

Still an on, the experience o the agency ower the bygaen wheen o years haes been that cultur is a sicht less problematic nor langage, an the saicont buird heidit bi the selpromotin Laird wis notable for its — some wad say, canny eneuch — evite o the complicate an fochten-aboot linguistic element tae UlsterScots cultur. Ae diurnalist tauld us no lang syne that the deburse o agency siller wis gaun 10 tae ane in fauvour o cultur, leadin us tae speir whit wey it wis thocht fit for the agency tae be pairt o the langage body ava. The truith is that the tail’s been waggin the dug — in the bodies on the buird forby the deceesions taen wi’t — for ower lang on that coont.

The hame blaud o the agency haes a wheen weel-kent faces fae the muivement, a hap that brings us in mind o juist whit smaw the curn o steerers ahint the rane for leid status is. The faur the agency uphaulds siclike haivers is shawn bi the mentions gien tae “the UlsterScots language”, something the vera legislation that set it up says is a dialect o Scots. Conter tae whit Michael Montgomery says, the European Chairter didna gie recogneetion tae Ulster Scots as a leid sindert fae Scots (as sindert it wad hae tae be); the chairter haes nae legal import, an the British Govrenment nae pouer tae cheinge the implementation bodies legislation govrenin the agency athoot the greement o its Erse conterpairt. Mebbe the maist fashious thing on the wabsteid is the version o the European Chairter wi its mony an redundant mentions o “the Ulster-Scots language”. Sae faur as A can mak oot, whit the agency haes setten furth isna the offeecial line an is, for aw intents an

the vacuum

nae twa bodies will spell alike

ettles, an upmak. Interestin that public siller soud be gaun on siclike disinformation, tho it canna truithly be sayed that the agency haes iver ettelt at joukin a flyte, as the adverteesin o Philip Robinson’s Cruithinist an British Israelite “bairns’ beuks” on the wabsteid pruives; the Julie edeetion o The Ulster-Scot e’en haed a Cruithinist anthem commeesiont bi the agency fae a professional sangsmith.

Anither come-tae-pass no easy unnerstuiden bi thae fowk interestit in the forder o the leid is the orra concentration o the agency on America, a kintra wi nae Scotsspeakin commonties. The siller peyed for flichts tae the States is difficult tae juistifee if Ulster Scots is that haurd duin bi bis Erse, as Laird an his feres wad hae us believe, by an atower the fact that the antrin haut, stride an lowp ower tae Glesga on easyJet wad siccar hae duin mair for Scots — deed, thaim on the buird coud hae uised the inlat tae lairn the leid. The bit blauds setten furth bi the agency anent “the Ulster-Scots” in America (the’r wittins on the wabsteid anent a new ane on entrepreneurs) haes nocht adae wi uphauldin an forderin cultur on “the island of Ireland”, the boonds setten bi its remit. Smaw wunner, than, that fowk soud jalouse that, ance again, tax-peyers’ stents is gaun on something wrangous — this time, the upbig o a poleetical commonty like tae staund ahint Unionists juist as Erse-Americans staunds ahint Nationalists.

Mebbe twa-three bodies on the buird soud be amerciate for thair eydency.

Poleetical wi a smaw “p” wad be

Interestin that public siller soud be gaun on siclike disinformation, tho it canna truithly be sayed that the agency haes iver ettelt at joukin a flyte a guid way o descrivin the wey the agency wabsteid is uised tae uphauld a curn cryin thairsels “the Ulster-Scots Academy”, supportit bi a wheen fowk umwhile o the agency’s buird an employ. Whit for soud public siller gang tae a steerers’ club, athoot a linguist bidin in the North amang thaim, sae that thay can invent thair ain leid, killin anither in the process? Up tae nou, the ettles o the agency at bringin on Scots haes come tae nocht acause o the sweirty o the buird tae pit the kittle darg in the haunds o qualifeed linguists. Here’s howpin the same mistak isna made again.

The respellin fauvoured bi the academicians haes lowsit an explosion o respellin ither airts. The kinch wi siclike is that, whan the fact that Scots is a) etymological in its spellin an b) sib tae Inglish is slung a deifie, nae twa bodies will spell alike. Faur fae enforcin his ain staundart, the inventor o siclike acts as a fomentor o chaos, openin a Pandora’s box for awbody ither. The affcome can be seen in

the airtins tae Conal Gillespie’s News Letter column. Apairt fae ignorin 600 year o Scots leeteratur bi spellin the thon orra wey, a wheen o his wales thraws the hale communicative seestem intae dout. Whit wey’s a body tae ken whither tha means ‘the’ or ‘that’, aa ‘all’ or ‘at’, an wha ‘who’ or ‘what’?

A hae ae wee girn anent the layoot o the wabsteid itsel. It’s awfu difficult findin yer wey aboot, an the twa-tongued naitur o the unnertakkin disna mak it ony easier. Mebbe it wad be better tae hae twa wabsteids, ane Scots an ane Inglish, wi juist ae airtin atween thaim.

For that maiter, whit for no hae a wee summary in Erse an aw, juist tae shaw that Scots steerers is for thair ain leid an no agin onybody ither’s?

Ae thing that ye’ll no get on the agency wabsteid is resoorces. Wi twa-three notable exceptions, near aw whit’s putten forrit as “Ulster-Scots” is modren, revivalist an, weel, no that guid. Onybody leukin the real thing coud dae a lot waur nor hae a deuk at Sandy Fleming’s byous scotstext.org, but the feck o that’s fae Scotland itsel. It’s a shame that the agency didna tak the opportunity o forderin the Ulster dialect in an uncontroversial wey bi pittin the smaw corpus o tradeetional UlsterScots leeteratur on the wab itsel. The £300,000 spent on twa perfurmances o On Eagle’s Wing wad siccar hae duin the trick.

Falls Community offering training in

Council

are

currently

DIGITAL SOUND PRODUCTION at their premises in West Belfast.

If you are over 18 Unemployed and want to get into music production phone 02890202030 Now! Falls Community Council in partnership with The Sound Training Centre of Ireland are running a series of intensive 6 week long courses to train students on current software used for music production. Cubase, Reason and Soundforge are taught in a hands on atmosphere where original beats are cooked, samples looped and synth lines hooked.

Each student is taken through all steps of digital music production from composition and arranging through to mixing and mastering. All styles are catered for and no formal background in music or electronics is required.

Five courses are set to run throughout the year with places limited to six on each course. We will also offer a one week music production related work placement to completers.

This course is funded by BLSP through the European Structural Fund and is accredited by The Sound Training Centre of Ireland in association with Falls Community Council.

do the dog

leave the car

the vacuum

BELFAST WEEK OF WALKING. Toddler waddles with the help of the ethnically diverse and some well tanned octo- walkers.

You’re encouraged to walk away from the Olympia. Not too stenuous. Learn how to lead a group of walkers, see the sites and dander around the bars. Get fit. Get tight.

Take the dog. Just leave the car at home.

SEAMUS H

NIBBLES CINILINGUS FILM SCREEN- FATE MAGAZINE. September issue ING AND CLUB. White’s Tavern – 9/9/04 A welcome return of the Cinilingus we know and love. A Canadian comes close to a slap as he harangues the sweaty arts organisers earnestly grappling with today’s digital technology. The film, El Topo, was a gorgeous mélange of filmic textures; I’ll wear my glasses for the next one, though. After show music by two South Belfast geniuses was the icing on the bridie. Thursdays, upstairs at White’s, Couple of quid.

DR

A free entertainment guide for Belfast. The editors got together and decided to 'Leave the comfort of regular incomes and financial security and run with the dream' a dream too far i fear.

Fate is filled with the usual puff; C-list Belfast Celebs' , Style advice, gig and film reviews, food reviews (all positive in the hope that these restraunts will advertise in the next issue). All filler essentualy to the main ingredinets; advertising and listings, because the intention is to make money quickly with no interest in content.

An interview with Morgan- the manager of the Apartment Bar ( What a smug character he is), a non-column; 'Clubber of the month' and a round table discussion by Belfast's 'style icons' .

I give it another 2 issues...

SH

LINEUP – THE BELFAST EMPIRE PROGRAMME.

BELFAST FESTIVAL AT QUEENS PROGRAMME. According to the cover of this year’s programme Belfast has turned purple and naked female angels plague its skies. Much as I appreciate the designers sharing the products of their addled minds with us I can’t help but feel they’d have done better than to base the design on a quick glance at an issue of TV Quick magazine. And the listings inside? I think I’ll join the Icarusalike on the cover for a fiery demise in the sun.

SW

BIBLE EXHIBITION. Church on Donegall Street Exhibition of loads of bibles from around the world in all sorts of languages- big bibles and small ones too. I nearly got converted at the door by the exhibition organiser who greeted me with a firm handshake , but escaped by saying I was a lapsed graphic designer keen to regain by faith in the layout. Highlights included a bible said to belong to a man who was burnt a the stake for owning it in the fifteenth century.

A bible copied in short hand and a series of vinyl recordings of pages of the bible smuggled into Bulgaria ( In the 60s it was illegal to own

September/October 2004 Some genuine catches for Belfast here, interspersed with a lot of strange men pretending to be somebody more exciting. Typical blurbs on these tend to concentrate on the amount of gigs performed annually by the act rather than any musical transcendence achieved (see Citywide March/April 2002 for comment). Scratch Perverts are like a nineties version of the London Boys, I recommend Roy Ayers, however. Movieoke could be a laugh – I Spit on Your Grave, anybody? Note: A lineup in North Leith parlance is an instance of communal fellatio as performed by a female gang member on a group of ‘casuals’.

DR

a copy) SH

ZOO CRACK Current issue A joyfully informative and upbeat publication that goes some way to countering the depressing tales of psychotic young men throwing penguins into the lion’s enclosure that usually permeate a discussion of Belfast Zoo. Unfortunately however, the halcyon days of childhood innocence and simple life/death scenarios conjured up within ultimately sent me spiraling into a cynical mind-trap of confusion and selfpity.

DR

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