Apparently due to Boris, the debate over the value of a degree is raging again. Unsurprisingly, various sorts are criticising the value of ‘academic’ rather than ‘vocational’ degrees. Also unsurprisingly, they’re wrong.

Technorati Tags: english+spelling, simon+jenkins, spelling+reform
Last Friday, in the Guardian, Simon Jenkins wrote that he welcomed the decision of the Scottish Qualifications Authority that they would accept text-message spellings in school examinations in “a direct challenge to the English at their most reactionary”. “The dark riders of archaism will protest and the backwoods will howl. [...]

On the one hand, we have a government which is going to tell the future generations that all is well. That we have “freedom, fairness, civil responsibilities [and] democracy”. But then notice the clever avoidance of the words rights, and liberties that are normally associated with the word “civil”. Then assess that in comparison with [...]

British kids, as anyone who’s met one can attest to, are stupid. Their English, so new research tells us, is worse than those for whom the empyrean tongue is a second language. Half of them can’t spell ’separate’. Almost four in five think that there’s an apostrophe in the possessive form of [...]

This week’s ranter: Ken Owen blogs at Militant Moderate, and his chief interests are cricket, constitutions and controversy. Occasionally he even has something amusing or relevant to say.
Motivations, motivations, motivations
Tony Blair made a big thing of “education, education, education” in 1997, yet his record has been unimpressive. Let’s leave aside that the massive increases in [...]

I don’t know if he’s doing it just to piss Cameron off, but Basher Davis has started spewing out policies like a man who’s just downed a bucket of Blue Bols. We’ve had the policy to join the Ligue communiste revolutionnaire in sticking it up Brussels, the policy to entrench inherited privilege forever, and the [...]

“Best practice” is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot these days. I first encountered it three years ago working for a transatlantic fellowship programme out of Washington, and while I disapprove in general of government-based managerialist buzzwords, today I am going to use it for the first time.
I was thinking about the 2002 [...]