Wouldn't rewarding success help?

More education and access rah rah on the News at the moment. All difficult and complex, but now increasingly feeling like a retread of every debate of the last 15 years and probably more. I wonder if we're missing a trick that we have tried everywhere else. Specifically, I wonder whether we (the state) should reward universities on results, or rather only allow fee uplifts based on results.

This seems to meet everyone's objectives:
1. Academics want the best students they can get, so presumably they'd be for it.
2. State educated pupils do better, on a grade for grade basis, compared to private, so it would encourage universities to take more.
3. And it engages with the levers that universities control, i.e. what students do at the university, not how well the primary and secondary sectors have done.

Lots of definitional questions here: for a start, you'd have to ensure consistency of degree (which we don't have), though you might have a sliding scale to even out the obvious prestige problem (i.e. a First is worth more in a university that has stupider children). And there are doubtless lots of other issues here. I can see the incentives going a bit wrong in terms of the dynamic between independent and directed undergraduate work. However, in essence this feels to me as if it deserves more consideration, especially compared to the complexity of what OFFA is going to have to do now.

I'm just not sure academics (and civil servants) have given it much.

It's all Greek to me

So, yet again, I find I have comments to make on baptism. It turns out I'm not very interested in other 'sacraments', even the eucharist. But I am fascinated by baptism, because for me the theology of belonging is critical to my sense of what it means to be a church. As an aside, this is my framework for opposing the Romish practice of first communion for children at the age of seven that my church has now instituted, but I digress.

 

This morning, Today had an item on changing the baptism rite to make it 'less archaic.' That's possible I suppose, but the objection made to the baptismal liturgy was that it was hard to understand because it used the phrase 'Kingdom of heaven.' This raises two possibilities:

1. The woman in question is a moron. This is not a complicated phrase to understand. While we do not have a functioning monarchy in most western countries due to democratic government, we do not elect God. That is a fairly simple and understandable concept. Kingdom isn't an odd word.
2. The woman in question is a heretic (or possibly a heathen). Of all the Christians who have spoken of the Kingdom of God, Jesus did it most and did it first. Actually the biblical phrase is basileia tou theou, and the word there could be translated as dominion, but is really Kingdom (or Empire), though that wouldn't really help matters. Saying it feels wrong is a sign you don't know your Greek, haven't read a single commentary and have unfortunately lapsed into heresy. You certainly shouldn't then appear on the radio to talk about it.

So, anathema. Change the liturgy if you must (but it will usually end badly), but not that bit, and not for that reason. People may not be getting their children baptised, but saying citizen of heaven or some other nonsense isn't going to change that.

Bibliography, January 2011

Read (12)

BOTM: H. Lee, To kill a Mockingbird

A.S. Byatt, The Children's book
A. Christie, The mirror crack'd from side to side
A.C. Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
D. du Maurier, Rebecca
L. Mitchell, Charles James Fox
A. Moore, Watchmen
R.C. O'Brien, Mrs Frisbee and the Rats of NIMH
M. Spark, The girls of slender means
Tacitus, The Histories (K)
Thucydides, The Peleponnesian War (K)
P.G. Wodehouse, Thank You, Jeeves

Bit of a rejig here. Because of what we might call 'Just in time' acquisition I've dropped numbers acquired. I will indicate what I've read on Kindle and what is a reread (with an *), but otherwise, anything else is bought or read from A's list .

I'd also add I almost had a tie here, though Lee's was best. Rebecca deserves an honourable mention. It's one of Anna's, and brilliant. Lushly written, clever in execution, painted with great characters, and fun to read. However, the lean, gentle prose of Mockingbird was better in every respect. Sparse, clever, and almost perfect descriptive prose, particularly at the start. It also had a lot more variation and shadow than I had thought it would.

In fact, neither were the books I expected them to be, and I'd single out two moments in both that were full of pathos almost carelessly thrown in beyond the main arc of narrative or point. In Rebecca there is a brief sequence near the end where Max comments that it is now too late, the nature of the girl he married has irrevocably changed by the knowledge she has gained, though of course the reader knows that knowledge is essential for her own happiness (sorry, that's a bit cryptic, but I'm avoiding spoilers). It's counterpart is the single line of Lee's where Atticus simply says ' Arthur, thank you for my children'. A hadn't remembered it, but it made me cry. That and especially the following sections I find critical to the book, representing a triumphant climax of the weaving together of the double, maybe even triple, narrative, and taking it beyond the already powerful (and famous) set pieces of the trial and its aftermath. A masterpiece.