PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
Why Education is not a Commodity
The arguments advanced by government ministers like David Willetts for the draconian reform of university funding are confused and specious. They would certainly fail any exam in logic. Rather than reason, they depend on various forms of mediatised rhetoric, like Orwell’s newspeak, or doublespeak, or what the writer Steve Poole has called unspeak—although sometimes they amount to simple misrepresentation, derived from hasty and inadequate statistics, or falsehood resulting from denial. Read more
On Campus
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/19471489[/vimeo]
In On Campus, Terry Eagleton speaks at a meeting at the London School of Economics about the contradiction between education for society and education for the economy. South of the river, the Vice Chancellor of Roehampton University, Paul O’Prey, considers the implications of government measures with colleagues.
With Terry Eagleton, Paul O’Prey, Joe Kelleher, Nina Power, Laurie Penny and Ruby Hirsch.
Video blogging
“Last autumn, in response to the coalition’s spending cuts, Britain saw the emergence of the first mass protest movement in a generation. One result has been an outpouring of online video, giving a very different picture to the one presented by the mainstream media, but making it hard sometimes to see the wood for the trees.
To that end, the New Statesman is pleased to announce a collaboration with the documentary film-maker Michael Chanan, who has been filming some of the events fuelling the protest movement. Focusing on the arts, both within and outside academia, he is building up a picture of the movement as it develops.”
Watch these videos here. Read my blog about the project: Video Blogging for the New Statesman: Camera in hand and idea in the head.