One World Government

Living in the South East of England, I guess I ought to know a little more about H.G.Wells as he was born not so far away from where I live.

Science fiction is not really my genre. I don’t find it particularly inspiring, and not being a scientist, I find it all rather far-fetched and daft.
However, I should not be so dismissive. H.G. Wells was not merely a writer. He was an exceptionally gifted man who, had he lived a few decades later, could easily have been the first person to consider the workings of the internet, or even had a good bash at Quantum physics.

It is interesting to me how frequently the world synergises together; past and present, east and west for no apparent reason, and yet all of this happened on Friday in a split second of both hopelessness and another one of hopefulness.

After hearing the devastating news about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I went on to look at the Guardian website. On that site, I found an interesting article about H.G. Wells and his somewhat complicated sex life.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/11/hg-wells-david-lodge

Wells advocated a “world brain” and “one world government”; a true equity around the world where everyone had an equal say and that power, wealth and governance was equally distributed across the nations.

What a pity we didn’t listen to him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Brain

As I said, it looked as though H.G. Wells’s idea about a world brain was not so far removed from what we now know as the world wide web.

With one world government he believed that we were one humanity and should act accordingly, i.e. sharing, caring and working together to bring about world peace.
However, the right wing went and monopolised this “New World Order” and twisted it into something that was as far removed from Well’s Utopia than could be imagined. The Right wanted a new world order with finance at the core, dictating and controlling.
Looks as though they got what they wanted.
Big Society? It is an excuse of a New World Order and should be seen for the sham that it is.

Clearly I need to read more about One Brain and One World Government but it just made me think, upon reading about H.G. Wells, how far away from his ideology we actually are.

And then, in the depths of the Japanese disaster came a voice of reason that was from the President of the USA, saying precisely that: we were one humanity, one people – a mere word or two away from a hope of one world government; something that Obama could not possibly say because the present day Macarthyists would have him locked up with the other Commies that are not allowed to speak their mind in their so-called democracy.

We are one world, one nation and yet we continue to deny the fact that human beings are human beings wherever they live in the world. How many times has this lack of respect for both similarity and difference got the world into trouble? Whilst we are one world, we should also recognise difference and stop playing at this gross stereotyping as well.

I was quite appalled on listening to the great John Humphreys on Saturday morning. People around the world were reflecting on how ordered and calm the Japanese were in the wake of this terrible atrocity. In a country where there are about 2000 earthquakes a year, they are constantly waiting for the “Big One” just as the residents near the San Andreas fault are doing so too.

When the earthquake struck, they were frightened as much as anyone else might have been but they knew the drill and acted accordingly. Fortunately for them they live in a country where a government is progressive enough to consider the longer term infrastructure of the country and its people and has built buildings accordingly to withstand even the most intense Richter Scale disasters.

So on comes Mr Humphreys to ask a correspondent in Japan whether the Japanese people are evacuating their towns, affected by the potential fall-out from the nuclear reactor, of their own volition or because they have been ordered to do so.

Now I could be being picky here but I am afraid alarm bells were immediately sounding in my mind. Dear John, I felt a need to say, this is Japan not China. These are different nations, not the same. They are as different from the British are to the French or the British and the Russians, and yet simultaneously they are part of one humanity.

We all too frequently make assumptions based on ill-informed and frequently wrong facts, and we then group people together as though they are all the same, and yet we group them together negatively rather than glorifying in the gift on of one humanity.

It is complicated and I hope I am not contradicting myself. What I am trying to say is that of course one nation just as one individual is unique but we are also the same. Putting us together because we all have black hair, or all use a particular alphabet to write and read is just plain wrong.

Putting us together with shared values and a unification in hopefulness and mindfulness is a different matter altogether.

It doesn’t matter, as far as I am concerned, whether the disaster of this week happened six streets away, six miles, six hundred or six thousand. The people suffering are my fellow human beings and I have far more in common with them than the things that separate me. However, I also acknowledge that they have different customs, faiths and tastes that are possibly quite different to my own, and these differences are good and should not be ignored and certainly there should be no attempt to eradicate the difference with some sort of right winged eugenics operation.

People who are against a federal Europe do not understand this. They do not understand that in having unity we should not lose ourselves. Back to the individual; in joining two hands together in matrimony, for example, one should never lose sight of the person that you are and the person that you might end up being. The unity of nations does not suppress the uniqueness of one nation. It merely finds the positive commonalities and works with those according to a shared set of values that are probably based on the key instincts of survival – moving on to something more enlightened.

It does not deliberately make trouble with the differences.

As much as I would like to spend time in France, I am not French for all my state of being a Francophile. I am British and therefore am very different to my counterparts across the Channel. However, I wish to embrace their style of life and I appreciate their values, particularly when it comes to work and culture. I may be slightly different in France but I never see myself as a foreigner.

When I am in another continent, I do feel more alien to people around me, even if we are speaking the same language, as in the USA, but I still don’t feel “foreign”.

It has become such a divisive word.
It has become such a divisive world, and in continuing to stereotype we reiterate prejudice and encourage racism. And in negatively separating nations we do the very same thing.

It’s complicated, which takes me back to Obama and H. G. Wells.

Surely the one thing that is obvious is that we are one humanity and in some ways, many of the problems of the world might be eradicated if we saw this as a unifying factor of good rather than a communist dystopia.

We should be celebrating difference and we should be celebrating our uniqueness and individuality. Within the laws of shared values, we should grow and be who we want as a nation and as individuals. What we should definitely not do is define people together because the ‘look the same’ or their countries are in close proximity. What we should definitely do is cry for our human family who are suffering anywhere in the world, be in under the tsunami disaster of Japan or the extreme poverty of life in the impoverished villages of countries in Africa.

This week is Comic Relief. To placate the Daily Mail readers, the founders of Comic Relief decided from the offset that they would support charities both home and abroad. Aiming for £5 million in their first year, they exceeded this three-fold.
One of the extremely positive things about this organisation is that they respect difference and embrace similarity to accentuate and emphasise the suffering of one human to the consciousness of another.

Maybe this is what Obama would have liked to say on Friday. It is all of our responsibility as part of humanity to be concerned about our fellow human beings in Japan at this time of natural disaster but read into his words more, then really, wouldn’t it be great if we were a One World Government where the problems of our neighbours were our own irrespective of distance and difference?

I’d better go and check out what H.G. Wells might have said.

It just goes to show that we can all be in danger of dismissing the thoughts and views of someone based entirely on a lack of knowledge of them. It seems to me that there is something far deeper and meaningful in this man’s mind that his Time Machine concoction.

Jamie: Teaching and Learning

For some time now, I have admired and respected Jamie Oliver. He is a man with a genuine passion who felt a need to do something about what he deemed to be a serious problem in this country, i.e. getting young people to think about the food they ate, where it had come from, what it was doing for them and how a healthier diet could have a significant impact on their lives.

What I particularly like about Jamie is that he is eager and prepared to learn. He tries something that, in his own experience, he feels should work. When things don’t go according to plan he doesn’t stride on, resolutely sticking to his original ideas. He considers what is happening and tries to rethink his approach according to what he can see happening in front of him.

He did this in his first television programme about school meals. He had created these brilliant new menus that were healthy and well-planned but he had not taken into consideration the will of the children to actually eat these things. He had not considered how brainwashed our young people have become in their eating habits (oh yes, there is irony here for those who know the writer), and thought that by simply providing healthy options, they would all want to choose this new way of living.

But some of these children had never seen let alone eaten some of the fruit and vegetables he put in front of them. Some of them didn’t realise precisely what they were eating when they tucked into turkey twizzlers with their reconstituted meat from the carcasses of animals.

So, he planned a week of education around food. Maths lessons counted lemons instead of red circles. Literacy lessons looked at books on healthy eating. In the secondary school, he decided to make some turkey twizzlers so that the young people could see precisely what they were eating and how it was manufactured.

Surprise, surprise, once children and young people had experienced all of this, they happily tucked into his new healthy meals. Levels of concentration in the afternoon sessions of school increased, dinner times were calmer and the playground supervisers even suggested that the children were using their asthma inhalers less after a week of the healthy meals.

Now, all of this was a great success. Oliver went to meet the incumbent secretary of state for education and talked about what he felt was needed. The larger than life Charles Clarke listened and eventually gave a substantial amount of money to schools to improve the quality of their meals, and finally new standards for school meals were introduced. Whether they are being fully adhered to is a different matter but at least there was now a guideline for people to consider.

And still is.

Much of this development is down to Jamie and his determination to do something.

People like Oliver, however, get criticised. How can he be truly philanthropic if, for example, he is earning thousands of pounds by working for Sainsbury’s? Surely, his health rant was more to do with getting people into this particular supermarket so that the Sainsbury’s bosses could increase his pay for the after effects of more people flocking to their shops?

So be it. We live in a capitalist society. Jamie has become an iconic figure that people listen to. If Sainsbury’s are savvy enough to cash in on that, well – that is the system we have. I’m not sure that Jamie Oliver should be personally liable for the criticism of a corrupt system.

So, he had his meals under his belt but Jamie Oliver was not prepared to stop there. Even after the cameras had gone, he continued to campaign for healthy meals both in and out of school. He continued to endeavour to get people to consider what they were eating, how they were cooking and why it would benefit many to turn their backs on processed food and start making meals from scratch once more.

He moved on to “Fifteen” where he found some disaffected young people and began training them to be chefs. He is still committed to this cause, partly because he did not feel as though he had the schooling that he deserved. He felt that if he had been given the opportunities in school at an earlier age, he may have had a different start in life, and he acknowledges that he was one of the lucky ones.

And so to this new venture: Jamie’s Dream School.

Jamie Oliver left school with two GCSE’s. If my memory serves me correctly, he started cooking in the family run pub and it was here that he made his breakthrough into television cookery.

But that school experience did not leave Jamie. He was possibly haunted by this experience and was soon realising that our current system does not do much for the masses or even the majority who are not academically inclined in the traditional and sometimes archaic use of the term.

School does not work for some people. In certain instances, school does not work for some people to the point where they are completely disaffected.

So Jamie decided to look at a different approach.

Instinctively, he believed that if a young person was going to be successful and interested in a subject, they needed to be engaged. They needed their passions to be ignited.

Jamie said, “We’re not doing enough for those who fail; they need a more physical, tactile approach, involving people skills, team building, problem-solving, building things. These skills need to be taken as seriously as the sciences”

Too damn right Jamie, and although he is merely scratching the surface of what is endemically wrong with our education system, it’s a start.

He then decided to gather together twenty young people who had “failed” or rather that the system had failed them. He decided that he would look at educating them in a different way with the allegedly best practitioners in their field. He employed a so-called “super-head” to oversee all the teaching and thought about all the people he would like to employ. So politics was taught by the spin doctor Alistair Campbell, English by the actor Simon Callow and heaven forbid, History by David Starkey.

Enough has already been said about Professor Starkey this week in some ways. There has been criticism of the way he handled the class. He came in, all authoritarian, all chalk and talk and then went on to rant over the heads of the young people he was allegedly ‘employed’ to teach. He then furthered his brilliance by ploughing into one kid and calling him “fat”.

Now, as a piece of television, this was quite fascinating, albeit hugely distressing. Starkey was playing out the old school idea of education. He had been brought in because he was a genius – an intellect. But could he teach?

Jamie, I tell you, it is not only the non-academics who need to learn a bit of team-building, problem-solving and a more tactile and empathetic mode of teaching and learning.

Jamie probably didn’t set out to do this, but in employing the services of Starkey he has starkly (!) portrayed the problem with some of the teaching profession who cannot veer away from their out-dated methodology and have this horrendous assumption that they are there to hold power over young people rather than empower them.

Jamie says in an interview that anyone can teach.

I disagree and I think this programme is delightfully showing this to be the case. Not everyone can teach because teaching is not just about conveying knowledge. Teaching is about relationships. It is about respect, something that the young people in this programme constantly mention. It is about teachers facilitating learning, enabling, encouraging, accepting that they do not know everything. Teaching is about recognising the individual and adapting your methods and content according to the extreme individual needs of every child in a class.

I am beginning to think that the best teachers are born teachers, in that it is instinctively within them to be this person who enables, who cares, who understands, who values young people and their need to be supported in their learning lives.

Ok, some of the best teaching colleges may help these people to refine their methodology and everyone can improve. As I have said before, the person who thinks that they are a brilliant teacher should get the hell out of the classroom – did you hear that Starkey?

But I fundamentally believe that teaching is about relationships and an ability to communicate and relate to people rather than the content itself. Furthermore, in the days when all sorts of knowledge is at the tip of a finger on a keyboard once reading and writing has been learned, then the teaching profession really ought to consider the effects of this technology on their changing and evolving roles.

One commentator on the Guardian website defended Starkey. They said “Dr. Starkey is a true example of pure education and inspiration”.

Well if that is the case, why could he not inspire these children? Possibly because he abused them and put them down as soon as he walked in the room. “You’re here because you have failed” he said to the young people.

Starkey is not an example of pure education. He is an example of everything that is wrong about education; a total reliance on intellect at the expense of social, personal, spiritual intelligence.

Pure education is about embracing all the intelligences. Pure education is about recognising the many components of teaching and not just fact giving. Inspiration, true inspiration comes from the people who understand that they have to empower young people through igniting their passion. That is something that I think Jamie does instinctively.

I am going to stop here but I want to return to this later.

Jamie, as ever, got many things wrong here. He stuck the children in uniform because he thought that would help even though it clearly didn’t help a jot for him. He gathered people together who were often so preoccupied with their particular field that they didn’t think outside it – ever, in some cases. He could have done with the advice of some people who could really get the best out of young people but I do believe Jamie is willing to adapt and learn. He is half way there as some of the following quotes suggest, and these are things that I would like to return to later.

Good on Jamie. Good on him for seeing a problem, doing something about it and uncovering all sorts of other issues in the process.

Oh and Jamie, if you read this and want to discuss it further, I can help you, I am sure.

We hadn't bargained on keeping the class active, productive, putting up with the disturbances going on left, right and centre. At first, we looked weak and pathetic, then there was a middle stage where we didn't want to be at Dream School, but then we had to be a bit more humble and more dynamic in our approach; then you start to feel relationships and fall in love and start to run classes that are achieving stuff.

People tend to teach the way in which they were taught, and tend to parent how they were parented, which is probably part of the problem.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2011/mar/02/tv-review-jamies-dream-school?INTCMP=SRCH

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/13/jamie-oliver-dream-school-interview