A theory that our ethics and scepticism are being misconstrued/misrepresented as selfish blinkered naïveté.

I wrote yesterday about the discounting of first-hand voices in favour of external “experts”. Today I want to talk about one particular flavour of discounting, applied to parents from electively home-educating families.

Can’t see beyond our own noses, allegedly

I’ve begun to think that one of the stereotypes of us is as so blinkered and self-obsessed that we can’t comprehend why other people have concerns.

It’s as if the basis of all our objections is “My kid’s all right, Jack, to hell with the others”. The implication would be that we’re too stupid and naïve to see what our stubbornness is costing other children.

When someone plays the well-known ace of trumps “If it saves even one child…”, how dare we not give in, stop arguing, and agree immediately to cooperate! What kind of callous selfish idiots must we be??!!

(This is related, I think, to why we so frequently hear the explanation “We don’t mean you of course, but what about those other families?”)

Liberty trade-offs

The fact is I do care about children-in-general as well as mine, and I completely understand the principle that sometimes a little bit of one person’s liberty has to be sacrificed to protect the liberty of someone else.

What hasn’t been demonstrated to my satisfaction - or at all! - is the necessity for (or any value in) this sacrifice of liberty: meaning the kind of expensive intrusive bureaucratic licensing-and-inspection system for EHE which is proposed in the CSF Bill.

Well-founded scepticism

On the contrary, it seems clear to me that extending the system as proposed would be damaging both to EHE children (in various ways) and to vulnerable people who actually do need help (due to sucking resources away from them).

Even for “those other families” - the very few where the parents are out of their depth, and the even fewer where the parents may have bad motivations - what’s proposed in the Bill is not a system well-designed for the children’s support.

A lot of my worst fears about the Bill becoming law are for the children who need most support - the children with special needs, who least fit the picture of what children are “supposed” to be able to accomplish at a certain age.

Remember, we’re not talking about a completely new system unknown to any of us; the Bill system closely resembles many Local Authorities’ existing ultra vires* systems, only “with added tooth-points!” and removing the option to avoid the harrow. It doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to realise what the Bill’s laws would look like in practice, and we do have reasons for the hypothesis that its overall effects would not be benign. Our scepticism is well-founded.

* “Ultra vires” means “beyond the powers [of the law]“. What I’m alluding to here is that many LAs in England have already taken it upon themselves to monitor EHE families in more detail than is required by law. EHE families frequently encounter LA staff who misrepresent current law; either they’re lying, or they haven’t bothered to learn the law themselves, instead making up the rules to suit their own prejudices.

Actually, I don’t even know why anyone would suppose that its effects would be benign - considering that the Government’s case for such laws rests on a load of myths and fears and inaccurate statistics. That’s not the way to make good law.

Give me evidence

I say to the Government: You want to change my mind? You want to convince me there’s a problem I don’t yet appreciate, which we need to fix? You want to convince me you’ve got the best solution to it? (or even one that doesn’t do more harm than good - that’d be a start.)

Well then, give me the evidence, include the raw numbers so that interested parties can check them without hundreds of FOI requests, and stop misleading people in order to prop up your argument. I’m eminently swayable by actual facts.

That demand isn’t coming from any blinkered selfish “we’re all right Jack” self-interest. It’s coming from a principle that truth is an essential foundation for ethical choices.

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There’s a quote which I’ve often found myself remembering lately in connection with the Children, Schools and Families Bill. It’s from a book by Jonathon Green, and the interviewee is Marcus Riggs. The interview was from a time after the Church had done some kind of report on gay people, although I don’t remember the details of that part.

… when people are trying to explore an area of human life - for instance, if you wanted to bake bread, you’d ask a baker; if you wanted to know how to put an electrical circuit in, you’d ask an electrician - but if you want to know what the experiences of gay people are like, they’re the last ones to be asked. ‘They would say that wouldn’t they, they’re gay.’ … The assumption in that report is that if you sat and talked to me, I’d give you a biased viewpoint.

But what I’d say is, ‘I’m a Christian and I’m gay and it’s caused me a lot of heartache to work through what all this means and come to some sort of way of living my life that has personal integrity. And that also enriches my relationship with God and the people around me. That I have worked very hard on.’

Who listens to whom?

The pattern is that if you’re from an oppressed or stigmatised group, people don’t want to listen to your version of your life. They want an “expert” to speak on your behalf, and “explain you” to them.

This means that other people who aren’t from your group can make a career of being an expert on your group. And the experts talk to each other and say “what do you think, Other Expert who isn’t from this group either?”

It’s a radical thing to allow someone from within the group to be in the “Expert” position. It’s a radical thing and an essential part of activism to be within the group and claim an “Expert” position.

Parallels

I’m thinking here of how cissexual doctors and policy-makers and “experts” go to conferences and talk about transsexual people, and make up rules for who should and shouldn’t get what kind of medical assistance to change their own bodies. It’s not my field, but I’m pretty sure that even now, after many years of campaigning by trans people, listening to transsexual people’s lived experience is only a small factor in making up those rules.

People with disabilities have been pioneers in challenging “experts’” opinion about them, saying “Nothing about us without us” (a slogan which many other groups have used too).

While writing this, I also remembered some writing by Charlotte Cooper, from a story about how she and a friend/colleague went as fat people to a couple of events about obesity:

I don’t think that you have to be fat to be able to say intelligent things about fat people or fat experience, there are people within the Fat Studies community for example who are not at all fat. What they have is empathy and respect for fat people, a capacity for self-reflection, a commitment to social change. They support other fat scholars, they use their power and privilege to include us … and they are not interested in building careers that denigrate fat people.

… most obesity researchers, including those I saw speak this week, are so alien to this kind of ethical position that they don’t even recognise that they themselves are part of the problem, they truly believe that they represent the solution, that they are the good guys.

When fat people are absent from events such as Body Image: The Impact of Magazines and Size Matters, we are abstracted and made Other. No wonder Ogden referred to fat people as “those people” throughout her presentation. …

… Who on those panels would be able to listen to somebody who they have already stereotyped and dehumanised?

Similarly, from an article about an academic book on fatness:

… works like Fat Economics make fat people abstract. These are works that do not include accounts by fat people, they are not written by fat people, and fat people have absolutely no voice in these works. … Research like this contributes to the notion of fat people as passive and stupid, people whose lives need mediating and explaining by thin ‘experts’ who arrogantly eye us as interesting scum in a petri dish.

Living it

I feel that some of the CSF Bill’s supporters are relating to people from unschooling families in a way similar to what Marcus Riggs describes:

“You would say that, you’re home educators”.

Our first-hand experience is being dismissed as bias unfitting us to perceive the issues correctly.

Not like “Well, you are the people actually living this, so we should listen deeply to what you have to tell us from your rich and varied experience of how it all works.”

At the Bill Committee

Chloë Watson, 17-year-old Chair of the Home Education Youth Council, put the challenge to the Bill Committee on 19 January:

… why not listen to the people who know what they are talking about - the people who are doing the home educating, who live it, who live with the consequences of what they do?

… Why not listen to the people who are saying, “This will wreck my child’s life”? Why not take notice of that, over and above the people who think, “Oh well, maybe in a few cases something might go wrong”?

(In Gill’s commentary on the Bill Committee, she includes a clip of Chloë speaking - second clip from the bottom. It’s worth a listen; there’s a wealth of additional meaning in the off-hand tone in which Chloë does the “Oh well, maybe in a few cases…”.)

What if…?

If the DCSF had employed someone from within the EHE communities to write what became the Badman Report, that person would still have had to do research to establish the facts. It’s not that being part of a community automatically gives you all the answers.

But what would be different?

Our input is vital

We - the unschooling families, collectively - have a close-up view of both non-school education and the existing system for interfering with it. As Kipling famously put it,

The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes.

That insight is vital if the Government actually wants to create a workable system.

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After coming up with the gears metaphor, I thought I’d sketch out what the gears might be for me. I imagined them something like this:

0 Not moving. I could have called this “neutral”, but somehow that seems like the wrong word. Stuck isn’t neutral. Exhaustion isn’t neutral. Moping around being mopey and miserable isn’t neutral.

On the other hand it could be a kind of relaxed resting peacefulness - but in that case, I’m probably not stuck, and some other metaphor would apply.

1 Minimal engagement. Playing computer games or just slightly pottering about e.g. tidying up. If this is the aftermath of some intensity, then I might be “processing” in the background. (Simple computer games can be a form of meditation, I think - they occupy the surface of your mind while things happen under the surface.) If pottering about, still feeling like each new thing is a re-start - not really any momentum from one task to the next.

2 Beginning to build momentum. Tidying could still be in here as long as it’s just putting things away that have an obvious home, or straightening up. Sewing or making badges as long as the process doesn’t really take any thought. Tinkering with writing (though not the process of deciding that something’s finished - I need to be more awake for that and it would be more like 4th gear).

3 Ordinary sized tasks. Returning emails, going to the library, sorting possessions, putting a wash in. Maybe some DIY that only requires repeating what I’ve already done, with no original thought.

4 Thought and organisation. Things that require more thought and a certain amount of awakeness. E.g. interesting DIY, planning. If I’ve had a day in 4th gear, I’ll almost certainly finish the day with a nice sense of satisfaction about what I’ve accomplished - which often involves some kind of tangible result in the 3d world.

5 Tricky interface stuff. Anything involving making arrangements with people I don’t know, especially if it involves some kind of time pressure and especially if I have to actually talk to them. I often have a sense of needing to “gear up” & “get my head in order” to do that kind of thing, but sometimes if I “get on a roll” it seems easy.

6 Immersion time. Song recording, coding, or any other complex task like accounts. This is often stuff that takes a while to reload into the brain, so that fitting it into “too small” chunks of time is very inefficient, and to me tends to feel intuitively like “there’s not even any point starting”. (And “too small” varies with the task - anything from half an hour to a day might feel that way.) Often, though not always, it’s the kind of thing I can “get lost in” so that time disappears.

This 6th level isn’t necessarily any harder than 5th gear; it’s the “chunk size” which distinguishes it. It needs to be preceded by ensuring that if I do give it that much time, nothing’s going to go wrong while I wasn’t paying attention to all the other stuff. Perhaps it’s more of a turbo button than another gear.

Writing

One thing which surprised me in a good way when I thought this through is the fact that tinkering with writing comes out so low-gear for me. I lucked into a good “effort-to-satisfaction ratio” there. The point is that despite being quite easy to do, it’s also quite satisfying to me, which helps me to move up through gears. I thought “Must remember that”.

This insight was definitely part of the source of the new era of “more than one blog post a month” :-) I realised that as a rule of thumb, “if in doubt, do some writing” had a lot going for it. And around Christmas and New Year I did have a successful gearing-up on the writing front.

Different cars

What was interesting, though, was that after a week or two of that, I realised that (slightly contrary to my expectations) my writing momentum hadn’t transferred onto the DIY. I was just doing more and more writing!

I found that to get going on the DIY, I had to give that a separate gearing-up all its own: starting with a bit of tidying, then assembling the tools and resources I’d want, and only then actually embarking on the work itself.

Not definitive

Of course everyone’s list of gears would be different - and the above isn’t the definitive list of gears even for me, just an approximate sketch. And there are different ways to apply the metaphor - including, as I’ve said there, considering each field of endeavour as its own separate gear system.

But the basic metaphor seems to be working well for me so far. Regardless of specifics, I can still tell myself: “Don’t bother trying to talk yourself into tackling big things. And don’t sit around waiting for the desire to tackle them to return. Instead, get stuck into the little things within easy reach. And trust that in a while, when you’re more rested and have some little accomplishments to be satisfied with, the desire to tackle big things will return of its own accord.”

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I’m a fan of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It’s a while since I read any of her books, but my quotes collection includes a good crop of thought-provoking ideas from her.

Found myself thinking about this one, from the book Tendencies:

Knowledge is not itself power, although it is the magnetic field of power. Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with it in mobilizing the flows of energy, desire, goods, persons. If M. Mitterand knows English but Mr. Reagan lacks French, it is the urbane M. Mitterand who must negotiate in an acquired tongue, the ignorant Mr. Reagan who may dilate in his native one.

Autonomous education in the Badman Review

This is reminding me of Mr Badman’s persistent lack of understanding of autonomous education (AE). As we said in AEUK’s submission to the Select Enquiry,

The author’s call for further research into AE sits oddly with his disregard of the available material.

When Mr Badman was meeting people in the process of “researching” his Review, various people told him about AE. And there are plenty of books and research relevant to it. But this information received almost no acknowledgement in the Review, and as far as I can tell, had little or no influence on Mr Badman’s own understanding either.

As a result, the Badman Review completely fails to recognise the incompatibility of autonomous education with Mr Badman’s proposed monitoring scheme.

If Mr Badman and his team had allowed themselves to learn about AE, it would have been most inconvenient for their beliefs about monitoring.

Maths

I’m thinking too of Mr Badman’s statistics on Child Protection Plans (CPPs). The other week at the Bill Committee, he was still talking about these stats as though they prove something, despite Graham Stuart MP carefully explaining to him back in October that they don’t.

The following exchange is taken from Question 85 at the Bill Committee on Tuesday 19 January 2010:

Graham Stuart MP: I must say that I am rather disappointed that, following our exchange at the Select Committee sitting, you have not reflected in any way on the child protection plan figures …

Graham Badman: I reflected a great deal on our exchange of views, I promise you. I did go back and look at the figures and I came up with exactly the same conclusion.

That session also produced this little gem:

Graham Badman: I fear we are in danger of going round in the same circle. I am afraid I fundamentally disagree with you. You think I am wrong; I think you are wrong.

Graham Stuart: It is maths.

(Hilarious or tragic? You decide.)

I’ve spent a quite preposterously enormous amount of time looking at those CPP statistics, and I assure the reader that they don’t warrant Mr Badman’s faith in them. (Details to follow when I’ve finished writing about it.)

But if Mr Badman and his team had allowed themselves to learn how statistics actually work, it would have been most inconvenient for their ability to convince other people that EHE children were at higher risk. It sounds so much more convincing when you throw in a few numbers!

It’s a human thing

It’s a very human thing to find it uncomfortable and unsettling to have your ideas overturned. Even though in principle I’m a great believer in finding out the truth, I’m sure I’ve felt that feeling a few times, and perhaps been somewhat reluctant to consider a new idea because of it.

(I wouldn’t claim to have done it quite so persistently, and certainly not in the context of being paid thousands of pounds in a professional capacity to report what’s true and known. But, “nothing human being alien to me”, I can empathise with the temptation.)

In my family of origin, this kind of behaviour would be satirised with the phrase “I have made up my mind; do not confuse me with the facts“ :-)

It can be especially painful for humans to have to “climb down” when they’ve taken a position in public and gone on and on about it. In this respect I have some compassion for Mr Badman, even while feeling cross and impatient with him. I wonder if he does actually know at some level that he’s got some things wrong, and just can’t contemplate the loss of face that would be involved in admitting it. It might not be very popular with the people who hired him, either.

But you see, one of the advantages of maintaining ignorance is that you never have to climb down like that.

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On the defence of elective home-based education from heavy-handed expensive intrusive bureaucracy, we have…

Not unrelatedly,

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This arose out of a discussion about how compulsory school can be used to protect children from being made to work (in the economic/ money-earning/ survival sense).

Could championing the right to non-school education for our own children indirectly expose other children to the risk of being coerced into labour?

If so, that would raise an ethical question, which one writer framed in terms of prioritising our own identies: parent vs global citizen. Louisa returns to this framing in the last paragraph.

Note that we were talking about children being made to work; none of the discussion included suggesting that children shouldn’t be allowed to earn money or otherwise contribute to their households by their own choice. That can be in itself an important part of someone’s learning and self-expression.

By Louisa

The way I see it is that to force a child to labour is to initiate force against the child’s life and liberty. The forced labour is not the disease, merely the symptom of the disease. The disease is the coercion of human beings by human beings.

To force a child to abandon the pursuit of his own life, identity and values and force them to attend school where they are required to internalise the values and priorities of the state is also an act of violence against the life and integrity of the child. It is another symptom of the same disease.

Ironically, one of the grounds on which we are being attacked is the assertion that home education is a means by which some parents force their children to internalise the values, beliefs and priorities of the parent.

It seems to me that most of those who make this argument against home ed (Daniel Monk for example) are patently unable to accept or unwilling to admit that the state is not neutral in this respect. The state does not attack home ed in order to protect the child’s right to pursue his *own* life, beliefs, priorities and values - though it claims to - the state attacks home ed in order to neutralise the percieved competition - parents.

It seems to me that many libertarians lose their way here, because they assume the state to have a benign or neutral interest when nothing could be further from the truth! The state does not wish to protect the integrity of the child: it wishes to ensure that the child internalises the values of the state and not the parent! It has no interest in defending the liberty of the child to form his own.

So what I’m kind of trying to get at, in my convoluted way, is that if we champion self-sovereignty and individual liberty, if we champion the right of the child not have force or fraud enacted against his life, liberty or property then we will always be on the “right” side.

We don’t have to choose between unregulated home ed and exploited children. We can instead choose and argue and campaign for individual liberty and self-ownership.

Children will always be abused, enslaved, coerced or exploited by either parents or state so long as either party believes it has a right to do so. This in my view is the disease that needs to change.

When we cure this sickness, symptoms of exploitation like child labour, child abuse, schools in their current form etc will all disappear. We don’t have to prioritise our identities. We can simply enact freedom and self-sovereignty for all citizens of the world. Starting with ourselves.

Thanks to Louisa for letting me share this here.

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There’s a series of books and related material by a bloke called Roger Hamilton, which uses an 8-category classification of people’s natural strengths, and if you take their test you get a sort of star chart thing of which aspects you’re most naturally good at. It costs $100 to do the test, which is not an amount of money I’d probably ever have spent on it - but a couple of years ago, I got a freebie code (thanks!) off my brother, who’d been to one of RH’s courses, and gave it a go.

I’m always a bit sceptical about things like this, but actually it turned out to be enjoyably interesting, and some of the description was quite recognisably me.

Here’s the pretty picture I got:

Slightly bigger version here.

So my two strongest ones were “Creator” and “Mechanic” - mechanic actually somewhat higher than creator. By “Mechanic” they basically mean something like “systems geek”. I had low scores on the roles involving lots of gregariousness and socialising and making deals.

Creator

Here are some words and phrases from the “creator” profile:

• inventor, visionary, pioneer, innovative, intuitive

• big picture thinker

• excellent at getting things started

• creating not just products, but the businesses and marketing plans that will drive those products to market

• likely to start their own business to support their product innovations

• can be extremely productive when you are using your creativity

Pitfalls for a creator include

• tendency to have many projects going at the same time, which can sometimes lead to distraction and lack of focus

• living the consequence of some creative idea they had in the past.

It being a while now since I did the test, I’ve forgotten most of the questions, but one I do remember the gist of because I found it funny.

It was something like “So your project just finished very successfully. What are you doing now?

I burst out laughing, because answer (c) so blatantly and perfectly described EXACTLY where I would be at! Had they been a fly on the wall?

Mechanic

Here are some phrases from the “mechanic” profile:

• mix of intuitive thinking and systems focus

• what they build tends to be built to last.

• distribution, construction and logistics

• creative focus is on the systems

• dynamic, yet with an introverted tendency … likely to pick your friends carefully.

• innovating and creating the systems processes … a system of your own creation.

• The value creation activities that are important to you include the documentation of all systems and processes … This becomes imbedded value that endures not just with the venture you are involved in in now, but the next one as well, and the one after that.

(hmm yeah… See me document my inventions)

One pitfall for a mechanic:

sensitivity to systems more of a curse than a talent, as they would always be the first to feel affected when things weren’t going to plan

Complementary people

The whole premise of RH’s stuff is that you use your profile to discover what kinds of other people you should hook up with, to generate most value in the world and most wealth for yourself.

Actually, mechanics are strongly recommended to connect up with creators, so it’s a pretty workable combination in itself.

The other one they’re both most recommended to hook up with is called “Deal maker”. Creators and mechanics aren’t that great at turning their ideas into money, and they’re generally not all that extrovert. Without someone else as a “deal maker”, I’ll probably never get super rich off my ideas.

But what also struck me was that now we’ve got the internet, to some degree my systems skills can enable me to set up systems which would do some of the world-facing for me.

Validation

Something I found very useful about this feedback is about valuing my systems-geekiness.

What I realised is that validation for creativity is really easy to come by. It’s a quality that’s almost universally lauded and valued, and envied by people who don’t think they have enough of it.

But most people are considerably more ambivalent about systems skills and process-geekery. About the best you’ll ever hear on that front is “Gosh, aren’t you organised”. And even then, that often has a sort of back-spin on it like ::cough::obsessive-pernickety-anal::cough::

It made a change to be told “This is one of your top assets”. It was almost like a coming-out moment - yes! I am a systems geek! So there! and hurrah!

Lord

My next highest two were “Star” and “Lord”.

The gist of the “Lord” idea (yeah I know, sexist name for it) is someone who controls a lot of resources - or at least the income stream from them - in a quiet way.

Compared to the Mechanic or Creator profiles, there wasn’t much in the description of this that I recognised as particularly characteristic of me. About the closest was “first to analyze a situation”. But it’s true that I do really like to own useful resources. I still remember the day when I first read that “the artist should own the means of production” and immediately thought “Yes!”

So in reality I’ve got, for example, a badge machine, some music gear, a lot of useful woodworking/DIY tools… and - not exactly on the Rockefeller scale here - a cellar which is quite unfeasibly full of reclaimed wood, cardboard and bubble wrap ::laughing to myself as I write::

Star

The “Star” profile describes someone who personifies their own brand - like Oprah Winfrey, or any number of celebrities or pop stars.

The intriguing thing about this to me is: Yes, I can see that (especially in my music projects) I do some of the things typical of the “Star” profile. (One of them is “defining and refining your identity” - and I recognise in that something of my uncompromising line about what Single Bass is and isn’t.)

But some of it does feel more like “doing” than “being”. I’m not actually as extrovert as the essentially “star” profile person would be. I have reservations about being famous - it strikes me as rather inconvenient and stressful. It’s more like, I figured out (with my systems skills) how “being a pop star” works, and then planned accordingly :-)

OK, I’m not in danger of getting famous from Single Bass any time soon anyway - it’s been on the back burner for ages. But the point is, it’s the creative aspects of it that I like most: both the obvious one of songwriting, and the systems-invention aspect of spreading it around.

And the rest…

There’s another profile-dimension called Accumulator that I have a bit of, and then the other three I have practically none of, according to the test & the pic. My main quadrant is introvert/intuitive, and in the opposite quadrant I’ve got basically nul points.

(In the interests of fairness to myself, I feel I must mention that by “Supporter” they mean “someone who knows lots of people and connects them” - in fact, “Connector” or “Team-builder” might have been a better name for it - so not having much of that in my profile doesn’t mean I’m not supportive of my friends.)

So yeah, on this system basically I’m a creator/mechanic.

Or I could say mechanic/creator, since actually my Mechanic score was higher - but it feels like Creator ought to come first in terms of real-time process. (And it does come first on RH’s list, with Mechanic at the end.)

Business vs other wealth

I’m ambivalent about RH’s material. On the one hand, he says that the wealth doesn’t have to be financial - it’s about your contribution to the world. On the other hand, pretty much all his examples are about business and money, and pretty much all the people he names are from that world.

I’d like to see him writing some stuff about how his eight roles work in families and communities and activism! For instance, who would be the “deal maker” I supposedly ought to work with in activism? What would they typically be doing, and how would I recognise them?

But the basic idea of “know your strengths and joys, and play to them, and find other people who like doing the other bits”, I think is fundamentally sound.

From me to me

The thing I most want to remember for myself about this just now is how much of a contribution it is to the world when you play to your strengths. It’s true, loads of the most worthwhile stuff I’ve done has been inventing - be it things that didn’t exist before, or the systems to make them work. “Can be extremely productive when you are using your creativity”. I’d like to give myself permission to groove with that a lot more: more of the sheer creativity, plus finding creative, cooperative ways to need to do as little as possible of the things I’m no good at :-)

Linky index…
Top of article
Creator
Mechanic
Complementary people
Validation
Lord
Star
And the rest…
Business vs other wealth
From me to me

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Sometimes I get into a sort of negative feedback loop like: “not accomplishing much, hence feel frustrated and incapable, hence no momentum / energy, hence not accomplishing much”. And I mope about.

Typical thoughts I might have in this state include “I ought to be more productive”, and “Look at these important things that aren’t even moving at all - aargh!”

Then by way of reaction, I might get a slightly exasperated urge to “go for the main things right now and stop faffing about”. Which, if I were to heed it, would launch me straight into the hardest tasks.

But in fact, it seems from experience that this is usually unrealistic for me, and trying to do it only leads to more stuckness. If I’m feeling stuck and low-energy and maybe a bit hopeless, what I’ve found usually works in fact is to start with minor pottering about and build momentum.

So e.g. rather than telling myself “Must… do… accounts…”, it might work best to tidy a small area of a room, and then think “Yay! what next?”

Gears in a car

A while back, I was talking about this on a thinking session, and I came up with a new metaphor: it’s like gears in a car.

Suppose you’re driving a car, and you try to set off in 5th gear. What’s going to happen? Probably the car will jolt, and make a noise it’s not supposed to make, and stall. And probably what won’t happen is the car goes off zooming really fast.

It’s not designed to work like that; you’re supposed to start in first gear (or maybe second, depending on vehicle and circumstances), and work up.

Remembering

And I thought: I must remember this. It’s pointless trying to make myself get all majorly active straight from a mope, when it’s so much more workable and natural to build momentum gradually. I know this, but it seems to be one of those things which is easy to forget :-)

I have more to say about this topic! But that will do as a start.

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

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Big thanks to Ciaran for telling me about it, and making it sound so intriguing that I went straight online to see if the library had it :-)

First of all I must say: if any of this interests you, and certainly if you’re in the habit of following news via any mainstream media, then time spent reading this book will not be wasted. It’s readily available; I got a copy from the library. It’s pretty gripping in places, with lots of real life stories.

Nick Davies is a journalist himself: “a Guardian man”, he says. The book focuses primarily on print media in the UK, but includes enough on TV, radio and other countries to show that similar patterns repeat there.

I’m going to start by quoting some largish chunks from the book, to lay out some relevant territory. (Bold bits added by me.) And then after that, I’ll say a few things I’ve been thinking about after reading it.

Then and now

Historically, the clearest threats to press freedom (i.e. the freedom to tell the truth) have come from outside of newsrooms; and they have tended to bring pressure to bear at the point of publication. The state did this through formal censorship, reinforced by secrecy, legal restraint and physical intimidation. Media owners, as we have seen, did this through direct and sustained interference. Both threats remain, albeit in more subtle form than in the past.

But now we are deep into a third age of falsehood and distortion, in which the primary obstacles to truth-telling lie inside the newsrooms, with the internal mechanics of an industry which has been deeply damaged. The problem now is not merely at the point of publication but also at the earlier and even more important stage of gathering and testing raw information. (p22-23.)

To put things in perspective, the author estimates a percentage of problems which nowadays come from owners’ and advertisers’ interference:

Journalists with whom I have discussed this agree that if you could quantify it, you could attribute only 5% or 10% of the problem to the total impact of these two forms of interference. (p22.)

So what’s the big problem nowadays, if not deliberate interference?

It’s time, and behind that, money.

More stories, less time

In preparing the book, the author commissioned some research from a team at Cardiff University. They estimate that since 1985, staffing levels on the national papers have slightly fallen, whereas the amount of editorial space they’re filling has trebled. (p63.)

At the same time, local papers and local news agencies were going out of business, depriving the national papers of the network of local journalists who in past times would have been feeding stories in.

… the Cardiff researchers surveyed national news reporters. Two-thirds of them said they were now producing more stories; and two-thirds of them said they were now doing less checking. … One told them: ‘Newspapers have turned into copy factories. This leaves less time for real investigations, or meeting and developing contacts. The arrival of online editions has also increased demand for quick copy, reducing the time available for checking facts.’

Another, from a different paper, said: ‘I think the time available to be thorough has decreased … The main consequence of that is that if things require lots of work, they are less likely to be embarked on.’ … And another: ‘I insist on making at least two check calls on every story, but this is becoming increasingly difficult to do, because of time constraints.’ (p64.)

The health editor of the Times, Nigel Hawkes, captured the view of many: ‘We are churning stories today, not writing them. Almost everything is recycled from another source … Actually knowing enough to identify the stories is no longer important. The work has been deskilled. (p59.)

The author asked a young graduate to write a diary of “one week in his working life on a regional daily tabloid”. At the end of the week, the young reporter counts up:

Number of stories: 48 (9.6 per day)
People spoken to: 26
People seen face to face: 4 out of 26
Total hours out of office: 3 out of 45.5 (p59.)

The author comments:

This is life in a news factory. No reporter who is turning out nearly ten stories every shift can possibly do his or her job properly. No reporter who spends only three hours out of the office in an entire working week can possibily develop enough good leads or build enough good contacts. No reporter who speaks to only twenty-six people in researching forty-eight stories can possibly be checking their truth. (p59.)

Recycled stories

The researchers also chose two random weeks and analysed all the stories in the Times, Independent, Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, to find out how many were original.

At the end of this unique investigation, they came up with a striking finding - that the most respected media outlets in the country are routinely recycling unchecked second-hand material. … this tends to come from two primary sources; wire agencies like the Press Association, and public-relations activity which is promoting some commercial or political interest.

…

… only 1% of wire stories which were carried by Fleet Street papers admitted the source. Most carried misleading bylines, ‘by a staff reporter’ or even by a named reporter who had rewritten the agency copy. The denial of PR input is at least as thorough… ‘We found many stories apparently written by one of the newspaper’s own reporters that seem to have been cut and pasted from elsewhere.’ (p52-53.)

Many weren’t properly checked before being recycled:

The researchers went on to look at those stories which relied on a specific statement of fact and found that with a staggering 70% of them, the claimed fact passed into print without any corroboration at all. Only 12% of these stories showed evidence that the central statement had been thoroughly checked. (p53.)

And these percentages left out the tabloids and various other sources of even lower quality:

These were simply the stories that were being presented by the best daily newspapers in the UK as an account of the most important or interesting events in the country over the preceding twenty-four hours. (p53.)

Relying on agencies

One common practice is to use something “off the wire”, i.e. from an agency such as Reuters or the Press Association (PA).

As one national newspaper correspondent told the Cardiff researchers: ‘Checking information has decreased, and what is worse, it is not expected by the news desk. I cannot tell you the number of times I am told to “take it off the wires and knock it into shape“, which is just terrible.’ … A section editor on a national daily told them: ‘We’ve always been reliant on wire copy, but we use it a hell of a lot more these days. It’s quite common for us to cut and paste a story off PA, renose it a bit to mask where it’s come from and then put it out there as our own.’ (p75.)

But the agency may not have checked it, either:

PA reporters told me they routinely start the day by writing stories from press releases and other newspapers and, since they may do this at six or seven in the morning, they cannot possibly find anybody to check them with. One of their senior editors agreed that this happens. He had previously worked for a regional newspaper and told me ‘We used to take what we were given from PA and accept it as fact but once I went to work there, I realised that we couldn’t.’

…

Another agency man told [the Cardiff researchers]: ‘My father was a journalist for Reuters for twenty-five years, and the working conditions were completely different. Stories would take much longer to put together, but when they were, they were more likely to be accurate and close to the truth.’ (p82.)

The author sums up in a line:

Journalism without checking is like a human body without an immune system. (p51.)

Truth and truth

And when you’re using agency sources, there’s another vital missing link: Reporting accurately what someone says is not the same as reporting the truth.

PA is a news agency, not a newspaper. It is not attempting, nor does it claim to be attempting, to tell people the truth about the world. As its editor, Jonathan Grun, put it to us: ‘What we do is report what people say and accurately.’ The PA reporter goes to the press conference with the intention of captruring an accurate record of what is said. Whether what is said is itself a truthful account of the world is simply not their business. … Sleuthing, Grun told us, is not PA’s role. ‘Our role is attributable journalism - what someone has got to say. What is important is in quote marks.’ If the Prime Minister says there are chemical weapons in Iraq, that is what the good news agency will report. (p83.)

No-one was watching

Moreover, the agencies don’t have enough journalists any more to properly cover the whole country, so important stories get missed entirely - e.g. from local governments, courts and even Parliament. No-one’s watching!

When I looked into this in the late 1990s, I found a criminal trial which had been running for three months at Leicester Crown Court, without a word of national coverage, even though it had unearthed Scotland Yard’s involvement in unlawfully importing Yardie gangsters from Jamaica who were used as informants and effectively given a licence to commint crime in London. (p78.)

As to Government:

Chris Moncrieff, who has covered Parliament for PA since 1962, told us … that PA now covers far fewer political meetings and speeches than it used to and relies far more on government press releases. ‘They’ve won’, he said. ‘If they put out in advance a copy of the speech, then we will not go. We now print what they want us to print. We go to far fewer meetings or not at all.’ (p80.)

And more…

I must say I finished the book thinking “What’s the point of reading a newspaper ever again? Most of what’s in it can’t be trusted anyway”.

There’s a lot more to it, which I haven’t cited here: the dynamics of which stories are likely to be chosen for print and which ignored; the money poured into public relations companies nowadays, and what they do; the success of organisations like Greenpeace in shaping stories; and a series of fascinating “case study”-type chapters, looking at different newspapers, different stories etc.

(Some of the stories are covered in even more depth at the web site connected with the book, www.flatearthnews.net.)

But what I found particularly illuminating was that whole scenario I’ve been describing via the quotes above: less and less time to research, understand or check the facts.

My own little case study

As I was reading, I kept thinking of that story in the Guardian back in October, reproducing some of the dodgy stats from Graham Badman’s work.

Now doesn’t that look like a perfect case study of the kind of thing Nick Davies talks about in the book?

So, given all that…

To sum up: the story shows no sign of having been written for the purpose of telling the truth.

It did forward the Government’s agenda and fill up some space in the paper, though. :-/

I wonder… if Jessica Shepherd even worked on the story at all - or if someone else stuck her name on it.

I wonder… who put which words of the article together at which points. Maybe it was based on a Govt press release, plus an Education Otherwise press release for Fiona’s quote? Maybe it was cobbled together at the Guardian, or maybe before that at the Press Association or Reuters?

Implications and possibly opportunities

I think this territory is important for activists to know and understand.

For one thing, it’ll give us a more realistic perspective on what we can expect from the Press.

Nick Davies again:

Most of the time, most journalists do not know what they are talking about. Their stories may be right, or they may be wrong: they don’t know. … They [now] work in structures which positively prevent them from discovering the truth. (p28.)

But also, there are opportunities here.

It’s not that I want journalism to be compromised like it is. In the case of the Children, Schools & Families Bill, and the plan to interfere with non-school education, I think we’d be infinitely better off with a Press which had time to find out and understand what was really happening.

(Or, failing that, at least we could do with something like the Center for Public Integrity, an independently funded organisation for investigative journalism in the States - also mentioned in the book.)

And the same is true for the world in general: truth is just generally helpful in doing good in the world, and lies generally are not.

But as long as the media does work that way, we should be learning how to take advantage of it like the other “players” do. Why shouldn’t it be our press releases that find their way in?

(Well, OK, one answer to that is it’s more risky for the Press to print things which go against current “received wisdom” - that’s another thing that the author talks about - but still, there are things we could say that wouldn’t hit that filter.)

Here’s another quote from that young journalist’s diary, from the book. Remember, this is about working on a regional daily paper:

Come in at eight to find the desk asking for a lead story, two 60-line basements [for the foot of a page] and 100 lines of nibs [news in briefs]. And they have no leads. I usually find some stories on my weekend off, but I’ve had a horrible cold. They tell me to check progress with a building being knocked down in the centre of town. They like stories with pictures, because they fill more space. I phone the developer and the council and turn it into a story. I take my first ever lunch break, wander the streets, copying down details of posters advertising car-boot sales, meditation evenings, whatever. Back in the office, I start turning them into stories. The desk panic because they still have no front-page lead. They steal an old story off the sports desk …

…

Then they tell me to do the Smilies: every day, on page seven, we run three happy, smiling stories, to make the readers feel good, complete with pics. No leads. I call my mum, who lives nearby, and she reads out bits from another local paper. I turn them into Smilies.

…

A real story walks in the front door: a young woman who has had her children taken into care because they say she has learning disabilities so can’t make a decent mum. She is desperate, been standing in the rain waiting for the doors to open. I tell her I’ll call her. I know I won’t; the desk aren’t interested. … No leads at all. I recycle some old stuff from my notebook and download a few upcoming events off the council website. (p56-57.)

Papers like that probably aren’t going to be interested in the politics we’d like them to report. But a couple of phrases stick in my mind.

They like stories with pictures, because they fill more space.

happy, smiling stories, to make the readers feel good, complete with pics.

Does anyone else see an opportunity here for some awareness-raising of non-school education? I can’t help wondering whether we could be in our local papers almost as often as we like, with very little effort, just by making a point of taking a few good-quality pix whenever we do anything interesting.

OK, not every child will want to have their photo in the paper, and not every family is prepared to risk bringing the attention of the Local Authority upon them in these times of prejudice and ultra vires practice. But still… remember the picnics with the bubble-blowing?

As for queer activism, I imagine local papers may not be quite as open to that, what with homophobia/biphobia and all; but still I’m pondering the use of photos in helping to get more bi news into Gay Times, Diva or the Pink, or any queer activism into the mainstream papers. Remember BiCon 2002 and the pix in Diva? or BiCon 2003 and the pix in the Big Issue?

And a last word

yeah, so I recommend reading this book :-)

Linky index…
Top of document
Then and now
More stories, less time
Recycled stories
Relying on agencies
Truth and truth
No-one was watching
And more…
My own little case study
Implications and possibly opportunities
And a last word

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

Other feedback welcome via that form too.

It’s possible I’ll be writing more about rights in the coming weeks, so I thought this could be a sort of foundation. It’s based on something I wrote back in May, in a discussion on one of the home ed lists.

To get a bit ontological…

The way I see it, the language of rights is a way for humans to communicate about what they feel/think/believe is most important.

Rights aren’t tangible things. They are facts like money is a fact.

If you have an apple in your hand, then even if everyone else disagrees with you about what an apple is, you can still eat it. Yum!

If you have a ten pound note in your hand, but everyone else disagrees with you about what money is, then it may not actually be a ten pound note any more - just a piece of paper.

Invention/creation

Humans haven’t always thought in terms of “human rights”. At some point someone invented that language, in order to convey something they felt/thought/believed was important.

After that, there were lots of conversations and negotiations and even fights, as people often disagreed but sometimes eventually agreed, until we have the metaphorical landscape we inhabit today. The ideas we have now of rights are the stories which people agreed on: perhaps usually because they seemed congruent with other stories we (some of us) value highly, like about the immanent value of humans.

Insofar as they are “real”, rights are real like money. Enough people agreed, such that in many situations you can treat them as real.

But because rights aren’t measurable like you might measure the dimensions of an apple, it’s not likely that everyone will agree about exactly what they are and where they come from.

(I think “human rights” do resonate with some partially hard-wired human capacities for empathy and fairness - at least in non-psychopathic humans - and one might hypothesise that that’s precisely why people have worked so hard to create/describe and uphold them. But e.g. some people would justify human rights by “that of God in everyone”, others wouldn’t.)

And people’s ideas of what rights exist can change.

In the field of “human rights” now, there might be somewhat of an illusion of stability: people have managed to achieve a “Universal Declaration”, so there’s a temptation to construe anyone falling short of it as “wrong” or “backward”, rather than the consensus as still evolving. But it’s clear at least that there isn’t universal agreement.

Holding and upholding

So, when we say we “have” rights, or talk about “having the right” to do something or other, in a way that’s only a convenient shorthand for our relationship with “rights”.

When we speak of “Upholding” or “Asserting” rights, that is i.m.o. more descriptive of the nature of them.

The US Declaration of Independence doesn’t say “These truths are quite obviously self-evident, as any fool can see, and there couldn’t possibly be any argument about it”. It says “We hold these truths self-evident.”

I.e. the people who signed it made a commitment to live their lives congruent with what they were saying. Like saying “This is where we make our stand”.

(Of course it was only white men they meant were created equal. It took other people later on to stand up for the equality of a lot of people they left out, and that process isn’t finished yet.)

That’s how rights come/came into existence. People spoke them into existence and upheld them over time, through language and action - sometimes paying high prices to do so, including death.

(”Uphold” in French is soutenir, from a Latin root also giving us “tenacious”, “tenacity”, “sustain” and “maintain”. Soutenir can also be translated “to defend”. Looking up the French, I also found tenir bon - “to hold one’s ground”.)

Legal rights

Legal rights are a subset of rights, having gone through a particular kind of argument to incorporate them into the legal system. But usually rights don’t get written into law until they’ve been at least partially accepted through non-legal avenues and conversations.

One way to put it is that the law is one of the main structures for holding our society’s current agreements about rights.

Often what we mean by “having a right” is “most people agreeing, plus a law”.

But laws can change. “Have” never means “Have and will always have, guaranteed”.

A precious inheritance

That’s my view of what rights “are”.

That’s in no way to say that human rights aren’t important.

I put in that disclaimer because sometimes people think it necessary to somehow prove them innate &/or God-given in order to justify them. That’s one story among many; personally I think that they’re important whether or not they were human-created, and certainly it’s taken human courage to activate them even if they were somehow innate in the first place.

It is to say that rights are more fragile and more in need of active upholding than they might sometimes seem to be. It is to say “Where we have this precious inheritance of agreement, which people worked so hard to create, don’t lose it by failing to recognise that its existence is maintained by people upholding it.”

To speak is to create

And in debating the nature of rights (such as for instance “children’s rights” and “parents’ rights”), I think it’s important to recognise that this conversation itself is part of creating and upholding the rights we speak into existence.

Because of the nature of rights as language-based, every time you talk about them, you’re also taking part in a tiny increment of creating or maintaining them - or altering/demolishing them (e.g. when you say someone “shouldn’t have the right to…”).

In other words, any conversation about rights isn’t just an analysis of what is. It’s also part of creating what could be and what shall be.

Linky index…
The nature of rights
Invention/creation
Holding and upholding
Legal rights
A precious inheritance
To speak is to create

Copyright © Jennifer Moore 2010. All rights reserved.

This post belongs to Jennifer's Uncharted Worlds blog. This message should only be visible in news aggregators. If you’re reading it on any other web site, it’s probably from a stolen RSS feed; in that case, please help by reporting it, giving the web address where you found it.

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