ALL MUST HAVE PRIZES
'At last the Dodo said "Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.' Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Britain's private school sector began a challenge to new A-level examination results that saw Education Secretary Estelle Morris concede first a public enquiry, and today that the qualification might be scrapped altogether. The independent schools' headmasters protested when their star pupils failed to get the expected A passes. They allege that the Department for Education put pressure on the examining authority to restrict passes so avoiding charges of 'dumbing down'. The real story, though, is that Morris so quickly caved in to demands that students' marks be raised in the face of political protest.
The problems with Education in Britain arise out of the extraordinary expectations loaded onto schools. Qualifications have come to be seen as the only viable means of personal advancement, a fact the governing Labour Party seized upon when it named its priorities before the 1997 election: 'Education, education and education'. With school attainments elevated so greatly in the minds of parents and children, it is to be expected that exam results will be hotly contested.
But the education system has a more profound weakness, its tendency to grade inflation. With the expansion of higher education, standards have undoubtedly fallen. Under pressure to recruit, schools and colleges adapt to students' apathetic side, instead of appealing to their instinct for excellence. Exam results are no longer seen as a measure of individual effort, but become instead the outcome of public negotiation.
THE GERMAN WAY
At the time of writing, today's election in Germany is too close to call. Between right-winger Edmund Stoiber's Christian Democratic Union and incumbent Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party/Green coalition the polls have swung from a big majority for the latter to a two-point lead for the former.
Whoever does win, the issue that the election turned upon was not the sluggish economy, or even the four million unemployed, but Germany's standing in the world.
The ruling coalition emphasized its establishment credentials by German involvement in the war against Serbia over Kosovo - at the cost of the junior coalition Green Party's pacifist virginity. But now Schroeder has said, in a pointed metaphor, that he will not 'click his heels' because America wants him too. SDP supporters have been even less diplomatic, comparing US president Bush's to Hitler, as one cabinet minister did, or suggesting Bush is in the grip of a Freudian complex about his father, as novelist Gunter Grass did at the party's final rally.
Such ostentatious attacks on America are part and parcel of the German assertion of independent political initiative. Having operated for years under the umbrella of an American military alliance, the German establishment is saying that it will make its own way in the world. At root these are not expressions of sympathy for the people of Iraq, but of a resurgent German nationalism. This appeal to German pride, more than hatred of war, explains how Schroeder used the issue to swing the polls in his direction.
Pointedly, the opposition leader Stoiber is offering a different kind of German chauvinism. Promising support for the US, Stoiber is turning his fire instead on muslims, 4000 of whom he has promised to expel.
For the US, the threat of German opposition to its campaign against Iraq is not as serious as the fact that a government could be elected on the basis of thumbing its nose at President Bush. The election of a Republican to the White House, and the subsequent War Against Terror had the effect of pulling the world to the right, with European nations such as Spain, Italy, and Holland voting out social democrat governments. Last weekend Sweden bucked the trend by returning its social democrat government. If Germany does the same, the divisions between Europe and America will become more pointed.
-- James Heartfield The 'Death of the Subject' Explained is available at GBP11.00, plus GBP1.00 p&p from Publications, audacity.org, 8 College Close, Hackney, London, E9 6ER. Make cheques payable to 'Audacity Ltd'