How much Lego have you actually [igot[/i?

Oooh discussing the dowry! I like it.

It should be borne in mind that I also like Wagner.

Are you watching the Met performing the Ring? Recorded the first 2 so far, not yet viewed.

I missed the first part, so have got myself the Blu Ray of [iRheingold[/i. I'm going to give myself over to it this weekend while tb is off watching the Tigers in Perpignan.



There's the start of a series on BBC4 this evening, with the director of Covent Garden explaining the whole cycle.7.15pm, I think.

I agree on most of this although others have also said there are hints that the ring was the H-bomb and Sauron was just the embodyment of the German nation (Evil thought to be destroyed only to return).
Tolkien did whilst joking say himself that it was a major work of creating a mythical history of GB as ours was destroyed when the Romans then the Vikings and finally the French decided that we had rather nice land that they wanted to own.

Yet Tolkien himself objected to the anti-German rhetoric that the government used during the war, even though he was avowedly anti-Nazi: he didn't like the demonisation of a whole people and didn't consider it any better if it was doneby the UK than if it was done by Goebbels.

There are major religious themes in it – JRR being a very observant Catholic, who is said to be responsible to CS Lewis finding faith (although he was less impressed when Lewis opted for the good old CofE).

Indeed but as you say he said other influences were not true as well plus he didn't need to demonize the German nation himself to use the idea.
My point is that if you start pulling it apart there is an awful lot in it to find (It's influences obviously).

[url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22558756Gove accused of bullying by NAHT[/url

I can only assume that the weasely little [is[/ihit was himself bullied as a schoolboy and judging by the way he's playing around with sports funding, I reckon the closest he came to any physical exercise was as timekeeper for the school speedchess championships

And in other education news: [url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22571711Academy group accused of funding extravagant jollies at taxpayer expense[/url

Read that report and you quickly summarise that Sir Bruce got off the gravy train at the last stop before Sacksville,



None of which would matter in the slightest if they were a private company generating their own income and profit and answerable only to their own investors - but its public money intended for education of children that they are being criticised on spending recklessly - "not having an order" in the quote above means that Sir Bruce has personally authorised payments to individuals without any paper trail, no substantiation, and no auditing - makes the bloke sound like some sort of buffoon who believes himself to be above scrutiny.

...and more misuse of public funds by private educational trusts amid a culture of not actually realising that you can't pay for your private party's using public money ...

[urlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22577069[/url


Meanwhile Gove seems to think its the way forward ...

[urlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22558756[/url

Quite surprised to read that over half of all secondary schools are now Academies, when did that happen (when we weren't looking).

Now school's are Academies thay tend to see themselves as businesses competing for customers (pupils). In Wigan, where there are more places than kids, some became academies to avoid closure by the council (my brother was made redundant when they closed the school at which he taught) and this has lead them to wasting money that should be spent on the kids on advertising to attract pupils. You see it on advertising boards around the town, on buses and even the electronic advertising hoardings at the DW stadium.

I spoke to my local Labour councillor about this waste of money and was told that as the Academies aren't run by the councils there is nothing they can do, even though they too see it as a waste of money, and that the spending would have had to have been authorised by the Board of Governors at the schools involved. In my opinion the Governors and / or head should be shown the door for wasting money that should be spent on the kids.

Hull is going the same way, the inspectors go in and judge a school to be 'failing' and push it towards academy status against the wishes of staff, pupils and parents. The Tory government want privatised education, they will tolerate very poor standards in academies, but LA schools need to be 'excellent' to stave off Gove's hatchet men.

Fascinating yesterday, though, to see that headteachers are very angry. These are not 'the usual suspects'.

And Channel 4 news last night was reporting that rumours coming out of the DofE say that Gove himself is personally rewriting the national curriculum.

Teachers will be angry - if it was up to them there would be no league tables no judgements on their ability?

You have to seriously question why have the exams been dumbed down so far - could be that they have to be to match the quality of teaching most of our kids receive - its a disgrace.

The disgrace is the number of individuals and companies that organise their taxes "efficiently", then have the cheek to criticise the standard of education of our children. A standard that they make damn sure they don't contribute towards.

As I said earlier in this thread: If Gove wants the nation's state-educated schoolchildren to reach the same standards as those educated in the private sector, the answer's simple: the state should provide the same monetary resources and create the same pupil:teacher ratio and general environment.

But that ain't going to happen is it?

A very simple maxim I've always held: Don't expect Rolls Royce service if you're only prepared to pay Lada prices

You have to question why so many people are so convinced that such things are facts. Where do they get these 'facts' from? Newspapers or politicians with agendas, perchance? Very few - if any - of whom will have frontline teaching experience.

Sal, would you accept that anyone who doesn't work in your line of work knows all about it from the outside?

Of course there will be youngsters who are 'limited' educationally (for want of a better word). There has never been a time when it wasn't the case and never will be (unless we genetically engineer it otherwise). And there are factors that will mitigate against a child getting the best out of their education, just as other factors will work the other way.

I have an element of distrust of the system. But that's less to do with teachers and their performances at work, and more to do with 30 years of political meddling.

I find it's possible to over-analyse things.

LOTR was a project and an experiment of sorts. It's not great [iliterature[/i but then it was never intended to be. It's epic, and detailed (too detailed in places IMO), and hugely influential. Parts of it are excellent, parts of it dull. As for the cribbing accusation, I don't know enough about Wagner to say anything about that but Tolkien was quite open about deliberately blending many source materials in his creation of Middle Earth. A read through the Silmarillion shows the detail to which he went in crafting the background to his opus and also clearly shows the mythic sources from which he drew.

It's also true that underlying and weaving through the tale is a kind of wistful requiem for what Tolkien considered to be better, simpler times. He practically bludgeons you with a sense of yearning for a past that is inevitably slipping away, and with the supposed virtues of that more rural time and place over the industrialised present/future.

It is what it is. Still a cracking good story overall.

I can certainly remember a time when we binned-off a sizeable chunk of children at the age of 11. If you didn't pass your Eleven Plus, you were shovelled of into a Secondary Modern school, destined to not sit CGEs or even CSEs, many such establishments didn't even have any provision after 4th year (year 9 or 10 now) and you simply left school at 15 years of age, with a testimonial and maybe a couple of School Leaver Certificates.

If idiot Gove has his way, we'll be back to pre-comprehensive selection.

At the very least, the comprehensive system offered equal opportunities and a chance to those who, for whatever reason, may develop later than the majority

I watched the first Lord of the Rings film at the cinema on a first date. Every second of the three hours or so it dragged on for seemed like a week. I have never seen anything as dull before or since. I only stayed till the end because I thought I might get laid. I did not.

He's experimenting with political dogma, probably something he read in a book at University - problem is that those kids who's lives he affects will be affected for the whole of their lives, the Secondary Modern system was bad but its saving grace was that the country needed lots of manual workers in those times and Secondary Moderns were ideal at churning out hundreds of thousands of potential manual workers every year to businesses that were far more prepared to actually do some training of those school leavers into something that could possibly develop into a career, not to mention formally approved trade apprenticeships where your employer would pick up the tab for your five year training scheme.

Somehow we seem to have lost sight of those facts.

You'd have been better slinging a few halfs of Stella down her neck if you wanted to get inside her pants than taking her to watch that bollox.

Top post.

I passed the exam taken at an arbitrary age. My sister didn't. So I've seen it from two sides of the coin. I don't think the problem was grammar schools themselves, but an attitude that anything other than that was inferior and didn't need to be invested in properly.

There was an interesting point made, some time ago, by Andrew Neil, noting how many politicians from working class backgrounds actually came up via the grammar school system. The way education is arranged now, there is still a division – but it's not based on some exam, but on parental funds, which is part of why we have decreased social mobility and, indeed, the number of politicians from genuinely working-class backgrounds.

You could also point out that our top two architects, Foster and Rogers, came from northern, working-class backgrounds and progressed through the grammar school system. So it wasn't just about enabling political careers to be built.

I think that what we've seen in the last 30 years is a recognition that, with much manual industry gone, there needs to be a change to the education system to 'bring up' (if you will) many of those who would have gone into those manual jobs to be much more conversant with IT, for instance.

Universities complain that rigour in the groundings of such subjects as the sciences has been neglected.

That's not the fault of the pupils or the teachers, though, but – as I mentioned earlier – constant political tinkering.

Agreed. Let's face it, you could analyse Janet & John to tell you something about the social times in which those books were used.

I don't know whether JRR himself thought of it as literature or not. What has tended to vex me – since my own moment of release from this cult, as mentioned earlier – is the idea that LOTR [iis[/i great literature, which is why it is so often voted into the top few in polls of great literature. IIRC, it was second in a huge poll at the end of the millennium.

I think your critique of it is spot on – but it seems to occupy a place that is way beyond that.

On only a very slightly different note (and also bearing in mind Rock God's comments) – it's going to take three films to tell the story of the [iThe Hobbit[/i? Talk about milking a gullible audience.

From everything I've read about JRR he didn't set out to write literature and didn't perceive the book to be anything of the sort. The famous quote about it being 'a tale that grew in the telling' appears to be literally true - he set out on an intellectual exercise and ended up with something greater.

I think the place it hold now is somewhat down to it being a mould-breaker. Prior to LOTR fantasy fiction was either childrens stories or [iConan[/i clones. He practically invented the modern Epic or High Fantasy genre. He was certainly responsible for me getting into fantasy (via being made to read [iThe Hobbit[/i at school) when I had previously ignored the entire genre, and I think a lot of other people followed the same path. I've since read many, many fantasy novels that are superior but LOTR still holds a special place for me as my introduction.

I completely agree about the movie adaptation of [iThe Hobbit[/i BTW. As much as I enjoyed the first installment I really can't see how it will manage three movies without serious padding.