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As you preside over the bewildering and nonsensical inconsistency of mask-wearing in schools, I thought I might distract you with another matter of great importance: the behaviour of Ofsted inspectors.

As all of us involved in schools in England know, we work in a territory policed by a triumvirate: Ofsted, the league tables and the Sats results. There are no Covid-like press conferences where representatives of these three stand at lecterns being quizzed by journalists. Why not? After all, at key moments in the year (like GCSE Handwringing Day or International Performance Comparison and Sneering Day) education in schools is presented as if it were a pandemic of decline.

Perhaps we are supposed to believe that the three parts of the triumvirate work independently of each other, doing good, in the manner of Oxfam, Christian Aid and Children in Need, though with you at the helm. But if you had wanted to invent a set-up that was as undemocratic as possible and as unrepresentative of the people working in it, youd be hard pushed to beat it.

Right now Ofsted is causing particular concern. Did you see last weeks Guardian article, I cant go through it again: headteachers quit over brutal Ofsted inspections, and the readers letters that followed? If you missed them, please take a look. They paint a picture of a profession in distress. Headteachers say Ofsted inspectors are refusing to take into account the effects of Covid on schools. The head of Lancaster Royal grammar school, Dr Chris Pyle, says that some recent Ofsted reports exclude all specific references to the pandemic.

As Id hope you would acknowledge, the impact of the illness itself, the absences, the casualties, the lockdown and the online teaching has been a trauma felt acutely by school communities. Of what benefit can it be for Ofsted to turn up at a school and trample over people who have experienced such high stress and, in some cases, loss and bereavement?

The fact is this high-handed approach is bred by the structure and terms of reference of Ofsted. The idea that a judge, prosecution and jury arrive one day at a school, at short notice, conduct a trial and then leave is a poor way to run education. In my school visits these days, I also rush in and out though usually I give them a bit more notice of my arrival! But Im not inspecting teachers, Im doing that very non-Ofsteddy thing of coming in to support teachers and pupils. While Im there, I often hear from teachers about Ofsted visits. The one theme I hear over and over again is that they feel the inspectors were not sympathetic to the specific conditions of the school. Its as if inspectors come briefed with a notion that teachers are bad people making excuses for their own incompetence. So the report that some inspectors dont want to hear about the experience of Covid came as no surprise to me.

One headteacher told me an Ofsted inspector complained that the Year 6 results were showing a significant decline. The headteacher pointed out that the dip in scores coincided with the sudden arrival of a cohort of refugee children, none of whom spoke English. In other words, the composition of the class had changed between one set of scores and the next. Though the refugee children had made huge advances in the few months they had been here, the effect on the data was that the scores were low in an absolute sense. What did the inspector say to the headteacher? That it was no excuse. In Ofsteds world, data can exist independently of the people being measured. Please, Mr Zahawi, listen to the teachers and headteachers in the Guardian article and the letters. The system is not benefiting teachers, pupils or families, and its all predicated on the idea that the only way to improve education is through top-down hectoring.

How interesting to see that your government is trying to cope with Covid by encouraging people to choose the right path, whether that be the wearing of masks, getting vaccinated or holding parties. This approach is much preferred, Ive heard ministers saying on the radio, to making such measures compulsory. And yet when it comes to education, you and your colleagues drop this libertarian approach and opt for the big stick. Tell us: why should education be excluded from your libertarian methods?

We really do have to make our minds up whether we think education should be about consent or coercion. Here we are, in the midst of two crises threatening humanity: disease and climate change, and the best we can come up with for schools is the authoritarian triumvirate. Does it ever give you pause for thought that a coercive system might not be the best way to foster creative and questioning minds, the kind of minds we desperately need to solve humanitys problems?

Yours, Michael Rosen

Originally posted here:
Dear Nadhim Zahawi, please sort out Ofsteds lack of humanity. Theres no excuse - The Guardian

I wholeheartedly agree with Larry Penners opinion piece about the consequences of us becoming a debtor nation, the same way I agree with the authors opinion piece from ten years ago when he had his written tete-a-tete with then-Congressman Gary Ackerman on these very pages.But..The author makes suggestions about how leading Dems Biden, Schumer, Pelosi, and friends should show their faith in the bill.

But the author, who appears to lean Republican/Libertarian in his political opinions, neglects to mention that some Democrats voted against the bill and some Republicans for it.

Doesnt the author care enough about his opinion pieces to stop telling half-truths and tell the entire story?

The author is entitled to his opinion and is entitled to express his opinion. He should not omits facts inconvenient to his opinion.

The inference is the Democrats are bad and the Republicans are good when the truth lies in the middle. Let me add that at almost 60 years old I have never been a registered Democrat. Ive been Republican, Independence, Blank, and Conservative. Every enrollment except Blank has been affiliated with Republicans.

Nat Weiner

Bronx

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Readers Write: TANSTAAFL - For donkeys and elephants - Readers Write - The Island Now

Many years ago I had the privilege of delivering a lecture on the life and ministry of John Calvin in the unlikely context of the Interfaith Seminar of the Catholic Archdiocese of Trento in northern Italy. A lone Reformed voice speaking to a room filled with priests and monks at the historic epicenter of the Catholic Reformation, I may not have been the exact modern equivalent of Leonidas at Thermopylae but I enjoyed being heavily outnumbered nonetheless.

At the end of my lecture, every single question I was asked related to the burning of Michael Servetus by the Genevan authorities in 1553. The fact that Servetus was burned in Geneva was almost an accident of history. A hunted, notorious heretic, he might have perished at the hands of numerous others, Protestant and Catholic. But again and again those in the audience demanded to know how I could lecture dispassionately on the man who killed Servetus. Eventually, I pointed out that, when it comes to who burned whom in the sixteenth century, neither side in the Reformation emerged with much glory. It is always easier to blame the other side for the dark crimes of history while assuring ourselves that it would have been so much better if we had been in charge.

I was reminded of this when reading Casey Chalks recent article, The Autonomous Self Is a Coercive God, at Public Discourse. Chalk argues that conservatives need to be very careful about unconditionally embracing comedians Jim Breuer and Dave Chappelle. Though conservatives may appreciate the stands Breuer and Chappelle have taken against cancel culture and certain elements of woke orthodoxy, we must keep in mind that they are representatives of a libertarian notion of the autonomous self that is scarcely compatible with Christianity. Certainly I can affirm this central concern of Chalk's argument.

Yet I dissent from Chalks genealogy of modernity. He goes on to argue that this notion of the autonomous, emotivist self can be traced to Martin Luther. In part this is because Chalk depends upon Jacques Maritain's Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau for his reading of Luther. Luther is simply not the great apostle of subjectivism that Maritain claims he is. It may well be that subjectivism is where the Protestant Reformation led, but it was certainly neither Luthers intention nor his own stated position. The debate with Zwingli over the reality of Christs presence in the Eucharist is the most obvious example of his concern for objective truth detached from the individuals own beliefs, though one might also point to his notion of conscience as formed by the Word of God in the context of the Christian life, not as some principle of autonomous personal judgment. Whether Luthers positions on these issues proved stable in the long run is a matter for debate. The point is that he was wrestling with how to balance objective truth and personal commitment (an issue found throughout the New Testament). He was not arguing for human beings as isolated, atomized human beings.

This points to a deeper difficulty with Chalk's genealogy. In presenting Luther as the beginning of the problem, Chalk opts for the standard Catholic triumphalist opening: The Protestants are to blame. But Luther does not emerge from a vacuum. Philosophically, he is the heir of late medieval nominalism (a Catholic phenomenon). He achieves public prominence by asking for a debate about the sale of indulgences (a Catholic practice). Wondering about whether the sale of indulgences as exemplified by Tetzel represents the teaching of the Church seems wholly reasonable for a Catholic pastor concerned about the financial fleecing of his congregation. And the crisis of authority that Luther represents is not of his own making. The corruption of the papacy and the chaos of the fifteenth century shattered papal authority. Astute theologians might respond by saying that we are not Donatists, that the corruption of the men who lead the Church and even the corruption of the papal bureaucracy do not negate the truth of the gospel. That is true at a theoretical level. But in practice hypocrisy undermines credibility. It is not surprising that at the start of the sixteenth century there was a crisis of popular authority with regard to those who claimed to be Peters successors and Christs representatives on earth and yet who ostentatiously indulged the sins of the flesh. If Luther was wrestling with the question of religious authority, it is in large part because the religious authority of his day had so signally failed in its task. Perhaps modernity is the fault of a failed papacy and not a Saxon friar?

We can complicate the narrative of authority yet further. The advent of the printing press and the rise of cities and trade served to reconfigure social structures across Europe. Power, once tied to land, started shifting more toward capital. The marketplace rose in prominence, challenging old hierarchies. Increasing levels of literacy served to remake and energize self-consciousness. Even if, purely for the sake of argument, one were to allow that the thirteenth century represented a rather harmonious period in which church and state, and faith and reason, lived together in perfect harmony, that world depended upon a social framework that required material conditions that technology and trade simply swept away. There is no medieval solution to the problems of modernity.

The above is not intended as a piece of Protestant triumphalism. Rather, it is a call for more self-awareness regarding the matter of the problems of our present age. Did Luther cause modernity? Was it the failure of the medieval papacy? Or was it the printing press and the rise of capitalism? Until such time as we eschew the simplistic blame game and start to think more historically, we are unlikely to move beyond partisan point-scoring. More significantly, we will prove incapable of moving beyond pipe dreams and nostalgia to real solutions to our difficulties.

Carl Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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Blame It on Luther? | Carl R. Trueman - First Things

Maybe the Recall Dunleavy people saw the writing on the wall when they laid down their cannons this past summer and quit: Gov. Mike Dunleavy is, in fact, popular.

Dunleavy is the 16th most popular governor among the 50 states, according to Morning Consult, a survey firm that seasonally ranks the popularity of elected officials.

Dunleavy ranked higher than Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat who recently beat a recall attempt at the ballot box. Dunleavy also ranked higher than Gov. Brad Little, of Idaho, a Republican who is being challenged for governor by his own Republican Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin in the May, 2022 primary.

At 57% approval rating, Dunleavy is just one point below South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem in the survey.

The most popular governor in the survey was Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican serving in Vermont, who has a 79% approval.

Of the top 20 governors in the approval rankings, 15 are Republicans, while five are Democrats.

Dunleavy, who faced a recall campaign that started only three months after he took office, has seen his approval rating go up and down and up again. In the fourth quarter of 2019, Morning Consult had him at a dead even, with 42% approving, and 42% disapproving of him, and he was ranked 9 among all 50 governors for popularity. At that same time, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had a 58% approval rating.

Morning Consult successfully predicted the free-fall of former Gov. Bill Walker in 2018. The polling firm named him the least popular governor running for re-election in 2018, with net approval of -26%. He ended up with just 2 percent of the vote 5,757 Alaskan voters to Dunleavys 51.4% or 145,631 votes.

Walker posted the largest net slide in approval of any governor in the fourth quarter, falling 19 points compared to the previous quarter, the survey firm reported.

In this final quarter of 2021, a reputable Alaska survey firm showed the same results as Morning Consult did for Dunleavy, who will face off against non-party candidate Walker, Democrat Les Gara, and Libertarian Joe Miller, who is set to announce his candidacy on Monday morning.

Republican DeSantis, although much lauded by conservatives around the country this year for his battle with President Joe Biden, has a 52% approval in his state, and Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is at 50%.

The least popular governor in the country is Oregon Democrat Kate Brown, who has a 43% approval rating. That is up slightly from the fourth quarter of 2019, when 37% of Oregonians approved of her.

Read the analysis at this link.

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Poll: Dunleavy ranks high in popularity, compared to all other governors - Must Read Alaska

Hostile suspicion of others, encompassing everything from the position of their mask to their stance on mandates, has marked this wretched pandemic from the start. Now, in perhaps the unkindest cut, suspicion is aimed at people with long Covidthe symptoms that may afflict as many as a third of those who survive a first hit of the virus. One theory is that Covid infection riles up the body's defenses and can leave the immune system in a frenzy, causing shortness of breath, extreme fatigue, and brain fog. In The Invisible Kingdom, her forthcoming book about chronic illness, Meghan O'Rourke reports that doctors often reject these symptoms as meaningless. When medical tests for these patients come up negative, Western medicine wants to say, You're fine, says Dayna McCarthy, a physician focused on long Covid.

This is not surprising. Skepticism about chronic conditions, including post-polio syndrome and fibromyalgia, is exceedingly commonand it nearly always alienates patients, deepens their suffering, and impedes treatment. Until researchers can find the biomarkers that might certify long Covid as a real disease, the best clinicians can do is listen to testimony and treat symptoms. But the project of addressing long Covid might also be served by a more rigorous epistemology of painthat is, a theory of how we come to believe or doubt the suffering of other people.

In her 1985 book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry makes a profound assertion: To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt. Because the claim illuminates both pain and knowledge, and because women rarely attach their names to philosophical assertions, I'd like, belatedly, to dub this elegant proposition Scarry's axiom.

The axiom came to mind this fall for two reasons: I was trying to support a friend with long Covid, and I participated in a forum about how the media contends with racism. It was the second experience that illuminated the first and suggested Scarry's axiom as a way to understand the acute distrust that now pervades our pluralistic country.

At the forum, a socialist and a libertarian each lodged complaints. The socialist charged that the media's focus on racism leaves out a more significant battlethe never-ending class struggle. The libertarian argued that the media's focus on race fails to understand the individual, with his or her pressing fear of death and aspirations to art, money, and transcendence. The libertarian then took shots at easily offended undergraduates who put emotion before reason and are forever getting offended and needing safety, which he said were postures incompatible with education.

This familiar debate ground on. As far as I can tell, no one on any sideand I disagreed with both the socialist and the libertarianever budged. But perhaps that's because we kept missing a truth in front of our faces: that we were all dismissing as somehow less than real the pain of others while elevating our own, and that of our confreres, as hard fact.

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Why Is It So Hard to Believe In Other Peoples Pain? - WIRED