The ThunderDragon

One of my interests (and aims of my blog) is to encourage participation in politics as widely as possible. At least two of the three main parties have been talking about training, including media training, for younger members. The Liberal Democrats are talking about why their Leadership Academy should train everyone as they are all potential leaders.

Meanwhile, the Young Britons’ Foundation ran a training day at the Conservative Party Conference for young activists. Mike Rouse has kindly written an account for the Wardman Wire, which I have also crossposted to the Thunderdragon’s blog.

Conservative Conference Activists’ Training Day

At the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham recently the youth wing of the Conservatives teamed up with The Young Britons’ Foundation to provide activists with the opportunity to learn some media handling skills. There were around 100 attendees, including Torybear.

Vox Pop

This course taught how to handle being “vox popped” and how best to convey a message through a medium like TV.

Experience

The morning started with some presentations and sharing of experiences. Donal Blaney, from the Foundation, shared a particularly amusing tale of an appearance he made once where he discovered via his father who was watching that he had developed a hole in his shoe. From the basics of appearance to handling tough questions the course offered it all.

Attitude

There’s a thirst within Conservative Future for training and skills development. Many young people join the organisation without any previous experience of politics or the media and will have previously had to learn from experience or guidance by peers. This course enables everybody to be prepared for the cameras, the journalists and understand how to shape their communication for their audience. There’s no voodoo or dark arts, just simple training and advice that seems to really work wonders. The activists at conference started nervous but left confident.

Practical

The practical workshop came in the form of pretend “vox pops” where each delegate appeared in front of a camera and was asked a few quetsions: about the conference, about policies or about a made-up event. It’s a tough slog going through everybody that attended, so much so that all that camera handling and movement I was responsible for caused me to pull something in my foot causing days of agony.

Wrapping Up

It was worth it though, because Conservative Future now has a large group of people with much more savvy media skills out there.

Liam Donaldson, chief medical officer, is proposing a new authoritarian policy - cutting the legal blood alcohol limit for drivers aged 17-20 to zero.

That is a stupid idea for various reasons:

1. Young/new drivers are rarely the ones who drink and drive. They tend to have far more respect for the road and other drivers than older people who are arrogantly confident in their own driving abilities and their ability to consume alcohol.
2. It wouldn’t reduce the number of accidents due to drink-driving unless a far greater amount of policing was put into enforcing it.
3. This law could be broken by something as simple as having had a couple of drinks the night before - thus no longer being impaired by it - or by using outhwash that contains alcohol or by using alcohol in cooking.
4. The police would be encouraged to stop young drivers to an even gerater extent than currently, because of the likelihood of catching them and making an arrest to meet their targets. This would thus mean that theo se whoa re more likely to be drinking and driving would get away without being stopped.

Liam Donaldsons claim that

Young people have enough difficulty when they first start driving learning the skills on the road, they don’t need the complication of drink as well.

is true. But they don’t need the threat of being accused of drink-driving for having an amount of alcohol that doesn’t impair their driving ability either.

How is a driver that has turned 20 two days ago implicitly any more safe on the roads than one that will turn 20 in two days time? They’re not at all. And what about a driver who passes their test after the age of 20…? The issue of having two different levels just complicates things. If they want to reduce the legal blood alcohol limit, it must be done to all equally, not picking on one small demographic.

Besides, isn’t this what is called ageism?

The SNP conference has voted to support lowering the voting age to 16. I don’t think that this is a good idea at all. Eighteen is the right age for the franchise to be bestowed. Sixteen is simply too young. At sixteen you are usually still in compulsory schooling, so you certainly can’t be claimed to have reached maturity or adulthood.

As Andrew Allison points out, the law is confused. The legal age at which you can buy cigarettes was recently raised to 18, for one thing. You have to be 18 to be able to legally drink alcohol. You can’t marry without the consent of your parent or guardian until 18. You can’t drive until you are 17. Pretty much the only thing that you can do at 16 that you couldn’t before is have sex.

If the voting age was to be lowered to 16, it would make a mockery of every single age-restricting law that prevented sixteen year-olds from doing anything. How is it possible to claim that sixteen year olds are mature enough to vote, yet not to drink or smoke? if you support lowering the voting age to sixteen, you must also support lowering of every other age restriction to sixteen. Otherwise you simply are a hypocrite.

Source: BBC

Ban young offenders from having a driving licence?

That may work in a superficial way, but won’t in the long term. Preventing them from legally driving won’t stop them getting behind the wheel of a car, they will just do so with no insurance or training. In Cameron’s speech, he said:

Stopping him driving for buying alcohol? That’s excessively harsh. Certainly this idea is a bad one. Not being legally able to drive will not stop anyone who is actually a “young offender” from doing so.

However, the rest of the speech contained good ideas, such as:

• Enact powers allowing magistrates to sentence people to up to one year in jail, up from the existing six months.
• Scrap the early release scheme introduced by ministers to ease pressure on prison places.
• Free police from form-filling to allow them to spend more time on patrol.

There is no denying that they are all good ideas. Anyone who has been reading this blog knows that I am very much opposed to the early-release of prisoners. It’s just a pity that the one idea which has got the most media attention is so bad.

Sources: BBC, The Telegraph, The Guardian

Why I am hardly surprised by this:

Before anyone claim it, this is not proof that A-levels have been devalued and other such crap. I wrote my piece on the A-levels on the day they came out, gobsmacked that more than a quarter of A-level results were As. But the fact that there is a “litany” of grammatical errors on A-level papers does not mean that those who got As made these mistakes. These mistakes were made by those at the other end of the scale, such as in the 3.1% of papers which failed.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. I’m sure I have read basically the same article every year - but it isn’t even a “recent” thing, since even “examiners in 1952 wrote about ‘colloquialisms, crude forms and the abuse of punctuation’.”Also, any significant increase in the numbers of these sorts of errors in A-level exam scripts than before can be put pretty much entirely down to this Labour government’s drive to make people stay on at school to get A-levels, when they would be best served by going and getting a job or to a Further Education college and getting a more suitable type of teaching and resultant qualification for them.

What causes these sort of massacres of the English language in the first place? Part of it is inevitably down to modern technology - text speak on mobile phones, the spelling check facility in word processors, and the general abuse of spelling and grammar prevalent on the internet. These are of course “social” reasons for the mistakes. At least some could be simply down to exam nerves!

Can any of us claim to have never made a spelling mistake in our lives? To have a perfect grasp of the English language so flawless that no accusation could made against it? Of course not. I’ve made plenty of mistakes just whilst typing this post. Most of them were typos rather than actual spelling or grammar mistakes, though. I’ve also had essays returned to me from lecturers with grammar edits which have actually been wrong [though not all of them have been].

However, despite everything I have said above, there is no excuse for misspelling the word “Hitler” or words used in the question. Those people deserve to be given large conical hats with the letter “D” written on them, and sent to sit in the corner. Also, who would use Wikipedia as an academic source?!

Source: The Telegraph

The A-level results are again the Best Year Ever (Until Next Year), with more than 25% of the grades given being As. There is no doubt that those who got As worked hard for them, but when the number of top grades is at 25.3%, there is no doubt that something is wrong somewhere. When this is broken down into subject, there is a surprising development - 43.7% of maths A-levels given an A grade, compared with 14% of those in media studies. So media studies isn’t the nice easy Mickey Mouse course - instead, maths is, it would appear. However, that 96.9% got a passing grade isn’t a bad thing at all. The only issue I have is with the number of top grades.

To say that the exams were easier is a bit of a cop out. I doubt that the level of the questions in the exams have changed all that much, but what is far more likely to have changed is the marking schemes. Unlike the “back in my day” brigade [who used to have have to walk five miles to school each day, rain or shine, and it was up-hill both ways] who claim that A-levels are easier because they had “proper exams” rather than modules and coursework. But all those co-called “proper exams” ever did was mean that you crammed to pass them and then soon forgot everything again. Modules and coursework are more work but stretched out over a longer period of time, so you actually have to learn the subject, not just cram for the exam - the exam on which the last two years of your life, and your future, hung. The different system, in itself, does not and cannot account for the huge grade increases.

A-level grades have been increasing for the last 25 years. This does not mean that the youth of today are more intelligent than yesteryears, but neither does it rule that out. Even so, to claim that increased intelligence of youths is the prime or only reason for this is patently absurd. Certainly part of the increases can be put down to an improvement in teaching methods, and part of it could be explained away by an estimated increase in intelligence - but that more than a quarter of all grades is an A can mean nothing other than something is wrong with the system.

The students that have taken the exams have tried their best, like generations have before them, and they should be commended for it. It is the government and the examination boards who have let them down by quite obviously fiddling with the figures somewhere along the line. Either they mark them easier or they have lowered the grade thresholds. None of this can be blamed on the students who have simply done their best to get their qualifications.

What can or should be done about it? First of all, instead of giving universities just the grades, they should be given the full score sheet - this will allow them to actively select the best. The idea of adding an A* grade to the A-levels is necessary - to shift the grades in any other way would do nothing more than hurt the students who are yet to come.

The problem with the issue over A-levels is that people see high levels of As and think “oh, they must be easy if so many are getting As!” - but they’re wrong. They’re not easy. I would doubt that they are any easier than they ever were. The results may appear high to us, but that is not because the exams themselves are necessarily easier, but because the government has moved the goal posts.

Cross-posted on Educational Conscription.

Sources: BBC, The Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian

“I’m only 18 - but my opinions are important. It’s my generation that will have to clean up after you” claims an article on Comment is Free. Matthew Sinclair deals with most of rubbish he spouts, but there is one point in the CiF article that I want to address, the one in the title quoted above - “I’m only 18 - but my opinions are important”. In the article, Charlie writes:

“[Y]oung people feel strongly about things that will affect them… To dismiss young people’s opinions simply because they are young is ridiculous; no wonder so many of my friends have no interest. If we aren’t allowed to participate in debates with the older generation, what is the point of our becoming interested in politics?…
So let’s stop moaning about our young people. We have opinions and ideas on political issues , and it would be nice to be able to express them. Let us get involved in decision making - and, just once in a while, talk about the positive things that we’re doing rather than the negative.”

The opinions of young people tend to be dismissed for one very simple reason: they have nothing - or very little - to base them on. An 18 year old’s opinion has less “value” than that of a 40 year old because the 40 year old has life experience on which to base them. At 18, you have no real life experience. All your life you have lived at your parent’s home and under their protection. Your opinions are immature, unformed, uninformed, and easily manipulated - and very much the result of school indoctrination [for lack of a better word].

At 18 you think you know everything. I know I did. You think your opinions are intelligent, well though out and based on sound principles - but, of course, they’re not. They’re based on bullshit. 18 year olds know little or nothing about the real world outside of the closed and structured environment of school, where you are effectively spoon-fed ideas and answers. When you finally leave that safe environment and move out, you begin to realise that where you are wrong, and that things aren’t like you thought they are or would be.

Over the last four years at university, I have learnt a significant amount about life - but I know I still have a hell of a long way to go. But the first, and arguably most important, step is realising that your opinions are almost certainly wrong in at least one way, and that experience can and will teach you where that is. That is why an 18 year old’s opinion means little. Even that of a 22 year old like me doesn’t mean all that much - but I know why it doesn’t. As a mark of how opinions and understandings change, even just over the last year when I have been writing this blog, my opinions have significantly adapted and matured - and that is one of the reasons why I blog.

The voice of the ‘yoofs’ isn’t taken too seriously for one main reason: because they don’t mean squat yet. There is no real foundation on which they have been built, and they will change as you grow up. Mine have [and will continue to do so, I'm sure], and yours will. In forming opinions, experience is key - and 18 year olds simply don’t have any.