Motherload

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8264590/The-11-plus-has-taken-over-my-life.html I rest my case. The Chinese Mother may have featured on the Today programme yesterday, but England has Lucy Cavendish (whom I have already noted on this blog worriting away about competitive mothering), coaching her son through the iniquitous 11-plus as if her life depended on it . Which it doesn't. From Chinese Mother to Bexley Mother. On the one hand at least she's honest. Sort of. But on the other hand, it's the kind of guilt-assuaging honesty that enables her to carry on doing what she's doing: openly manipulating the education system, while pleading necessity. And by using the rhetoric of self-deprecation, and apparently offering herself up to the court of public approval, by writing about her experiences in the Daily Telegraph, she exercises one more level of manipulation: she can play the victim, so that critics like me look like the bad guys for naming what she's doing. What...

I'm in a terrible hurry, so only have a few minutes to digest a couple of things with you. This puts me squarely in the category "overfed information junkie" for a thinker like Alain de Botton, who's been delivering Point of View on Radio 4. I've heard a couple of these so far. In the first, he argued that humanities teaching in British universities is culturally bankrupt; in the second that everyone else is. I was kind of cross about the first perspective, given how much of my life I gave to trying to help students think clearly, simply and forcefully about works of difficult literature. But I agree with the second perspective, because I find myself swimming about in it these days, running between pointless meetings, unable to research ideas in any depth, and overwhelmed by the number of books I 'ought' to have read, or be reading (quite apart from the cultural events that I never now see). I agree with him on the notion that we are bulimics of culture: u...