'Nother Solent

There's blame to go round on this one.

Yesterday's Education Guardian reports that

Council chiefs admitted today they were considering dropping a controversial policy of not blaming bullies in schools for their actions - following a scathing attack by the prime minister.
Teachers in Bristol had been advised not to "punish or humiliate" bullies in certain cases under the city council's "no blame" approach to the problem.

But the policy attracted fierce criticism from Tony Blair, who said it was an "extraordinary thing" for the Liberal Democrat-run council to advocate.

"I profoundly disagree with the decision that council has taken: bullying should be punished; children who bully must be made to understand the harm they have been doing," he told the Commons in November.

It's a poor lookout for the country when the national leader sticks his nose into the doings of city councils, and a worse one when they change their policies for fear of him. Nonetheless if one can think of it as Anthony Blair Esq. making the argument rather than the Prime Minister, Anthony Blair Esq. is quite right.

The city council revealed today that it was "reviewing" its no blame bullying policy after it was dropped from Department for Education and Skills' guidelines in December.

A council spokeswoman denied the education officials had performed a u-turn, but admitted that in light of the government's current position and the criticism the policy had attracted it was now being looked at again.

Ah, a "no blame" approach to one's own screwups.

The "no blame" approach, which was widely adopted in schools in the late 1990s, originated in Bristol as an alternative to directly punishing bullies.

As an alternative to teachers doing the job they are paid for, more like. Understandably few people enjoy the task of sorting out an alleged case of bullying. Where accounts conflict it can be difficult to know if bullying has truly taken place, or to know if just one or both sides are to blame - or even to ascertain (rather than assume) that it was all a misunderstanding and no one is to blame. It can even be frightening. Tough. That's what the "professional responsibility" teachers are always saying they should be admired and renumerated for entails.

Instead it encouraged the bully to discuss with their classmates the root cause of their behaviour and to find a way forward with the help of a teacher.

But the policy was attacked by Labour MP Dan Morris when it was again advocated in a guidance booklet, launched by the council during anti-bullying week in November.

Good for Dan Morris. What I always wonder about teachers and education bureaucrats who advocate a "no blame" approach to those who bully children is whether they also advocate it in cases of workplace bullying of teachers and cvil servants by their superiors. If so, I hope they have told their union reps.

The MP for Wansdyke described it as "dangerous" and "reckless" and said it did nothing to get the bullies to change their behaviour.

The schools minister Jacqui Smith joined in the criticism of the approach last month and announced a review to clarify the department's guidelines.

The executive member for children's services at Bristol city council, Jos Clark, said today that "no blame" had only ever been one of several approaches the council took to bullying. "We are reviewing our anti-bullying guidance to ensure it is as comprehensive and useful as possible to schools," she said.

How, exactly, can you have "no blame" as one of several approaches? Were the bullies blamed and not blamed on alternate days?

"Our aim has always been to have a practical and balanced approach that helps schools resolve problems and reduces or eradicates bullying by offering a wide range of advice and information so schools can develop their own approaches.

"Wide range of advice" is open to the same objection as above. I guess that on Fridays the council tells 'em to kill the bullies, just for variety.

"We have always been led by central government's anti-bullying guidelines, which, until very recently, contained references to the "no blame" approach.

A fair point. But I think that Bristol city council should not blame the government, but rather strive to identify the root causes of their behaviour.

"The schools minister has now announced a review of the DfES guidelines to clarify that the government does not think councils should recommend this approach to headteachers and we continue to follow their advice."

She added: "Together with the schools, we are determined to deliver real improvements and not to make the children of Bristol a political football."

Translation: please don't bully us, Mr Politician.

She said the council would now begin consulting with parents, teachers and pupils over its anti-bullying policy.

And the bullies. You forgot the bullies.

Hard Times in Brazil.

Via The Sharpener I found this article about Latin American politics: "The time of the underdog: rage and race in Latin America." Now I don't know anything much about Latin American politics - shut up at the back there - but one word struck me in much the same way the words "perpetual motion" strike a patent examiner.

Brazil’s Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, as he himself admitted, did not eat a solid meal until the age of 7.

Admitted? Given that this man is a politician, are you sure you don't mean "trumpeted at every possible occasion"?

...Mr. Bounderby delivered some observations to Mrs. Gradgrind on the circumstance of its being his birthday. He stood before the fire, partly because it was a cool spring afternoon, though the sun shone; partly because the shade of Stone Lodge was always haunted by the ghost of damp mortar; partly because he thus took up a commanding position, from which to subdue Mrs. Gradgrind.

'I hadn't a shoe to my foot. As to a stocking, I didn't know such a thing by name. I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty. That's the way I spent my tenth birthday. Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch.'

Mrs. Gradgrind, a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, of surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily; who was always taking physic without any effect, and who, whenever she showed a symptom of coming to life, was invariably stunned by some weighty piece of fact tumbling on her; Mrs. Gradgrind hoped it was a dry ditch?

'No! As wet as a sop. A foot of water in it,' said Mr. Bounderby.

Wish I'd been there.

Saw a few minutes of Guardian stalwart Polly Toynbee and a bloke from Civitas arguing on the telly about this Civitas report saying that political correctness is a bad thing. BfC said, among other things, that people were afraid of criticising Islam for fear of being labelled an Islamaphobe. If I'd been there I could have added, "as you know from personal experience, Ms Toynbee."

C S Lewis must be doing 1,000 r.p.m.

Not at the movie. The movie is good. At the - ulp - books of the movie. Glenn Reynolds links to a post from Stuart Buck who asks, "If you make a movie out of a classic and beloved children's book that has sold millions of copies, why on earth would you want to have someone write a book based on the movie?"

For a while both Reynolds and Buck were reassured that the "novelization" was but a harmless picture book with stills from the movie. Buck appears to have been disabused of this false hope; Reynolds not yet. For false hope it is – I know from personal experience that there are at least two novelizations-with-words out there because we got one of the things ("Peter’s Destiny") with our Shreddies and another ("Edmund’s Struggle") with our Honey Nut Cheerios. The Emperor over the Sea only knows what horrors the unopened packet of Non Honey Nut Normal Cheerios has hiding in it; probably "The White Witch's Trauma."

Something must be done. Breakfast has become a time of fear. I opened one of these books and read the last line and someone’s eyes were twinkling.

First we have to find the authors. This is difficult. They appear to have been written by Disney. Just "Disney". Who is this person or persons? The name seems familiar. Whoever they are they must be tracked down and burnt at the stake. What is the point of having a Bush-Blair theocratic axis ruling the world if we never get any fun?

I'll catch up

with the email in the next few days. But this one from John Costello was at the top of the pile.

I work for a store which sells various forms of furniture, most of which we put together, as well as the actual packs that people can take home. Since most of our customers have trucks or SUVs or have relatives with said, there's little problem bringing pre-assembled furnishings home (Remember me? Hessians. Am writing from the US.)

Hessians, yes, and the unforgettable Ronco Vegematic.

One of my various jobs is putting toether furniture for both display and sale. Most of our product comes from China, Malaysia, and now some is starting to come in from India. We also sell items made in the US. Haven't seen anything from Britain yet (there was a brief fad with British home decorations some years back, but really everything was too flowery and it wilted. But the national chain that sells bangers, haggis, brit made indian curries etc. does quite well.)

I would say that one piece out of ten or, from some manufacturers, one piece out of five, is badly manufactured. Not just mis-allignment of holes (with some pieces this is intentional -- having to 'drift' the pieces together [meaning that two strong men sweat pushing two metal pieces together while the third tries to insert a screw] allows you to put extra tension on the metal or wood and adds to the strength) but very badly out-of-wack and unusable. Or the marble top bathroom stands where the marble was not properly affixed to the wood, so that when one person lifted it up I heard a 'thunk' and turned to see the marble broken in two on the floor. Sometimes we have to cannibalize two packages to get one piece.

I've also bought 'flatpack' bookshelves etc. and had to put them together, and from my experience as a customer, I would say my experience in retail is typical. One bookshelf required far more space on the floor to put together than I had. Another required a cardboard backing to provide tensile sterength to the wood but the cardboard was cut wrong and would not do the job (my solution to the problem was far less-tech than your husband's.)

When a customer returns a piece we either immedeatly replace it, provide the missing part, or return the money. Anyone in the store who knows what they're doing is authorized to do that (of course, some people do _not_ know what they are doing. This is retail. The only thing lower are a) the temps hired by retail for Christmas or b) PHDs who go to work for colleges and universities and are paid by the 'line,' that is by the actual courses they teach, dirt cheap, with no tenure, no benefits, and no hope .) We want the customer back, and we seem to be doing a better job than Homebase.

John Costello

Let's welcome in 2006 with a return to medieval Jew-baiting.

This up-to-the-minute idea comes from His Excellency Presidente de la República Bolivariana de Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías:

"...the descendants of those who crucified Christ (...) have taken ownership of the riches of the world, a minority has taken ownership of the gold of the world, the silver, the minerals, water, the good lands, petrol, well, the riches, and they have concentrated the riches in a small number of hands"

Here is the Spanish text - see page 18 for the bit about "los descendientes de los mismos que crucificaron a Christo".

Normblog bends over backwards to be fair. In his second update he implies that, given the words about Bolivar that follow in Chavez's speech, the phrase "the descendants of those who crucified Christ" might be refer metaphorically to all capitalists, rich people or bad people. One of Tim Blair's commenters, "bobpence", makes a similar point and also cites a phrase of Chavez's about 10% of the people owning most of the wealth. Not even Chavez can believe that Jews make up 10% of the world's population, and a Google search of the words "Bolivar" and "Jews" turned up this reference to the fact that "Mordechai Ricardo assisted Venezuelan freedom fighter Simon Bolivar and his two sisters when they escaped to Curaçao" - along with much I didn't know about the Jewish history of the island of Curacao, where the oldest synagogue in continuous use in the Western Hemisphere can be found.

So it could be that Chavez's use of one of the oldest of anti-semitic tropes was just by the by. Still, he does have a bit of a previous.

Spanish-speakers can find out more about Chavez by reading Caudillo, Ejercito, Pueblo: La Venezuela del Comandante Chávez, by Norberto Ceresole (Estudios Hispano-Árabes, 2000). John Lee Anderson, writing in the New Yorker, described this book as follows:

This is a curious little how-to-be-a-dictator manual, written with Chávez in mind, by his erstwhile Argentine adviser. The author is an intriguing but odious-seeming fellow: In addition to being a Holocaust denier, he claims to have been a former Montonero guerrilla, a friend and adviser to Perón and other Latin military leaders, and a past member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.

Erstwhile adviser. Let's be nice here and remember that "erstwhile". Chavez only used to hang out with Holocaust deniers.