Down with choice

I'm already starting to get bored of NI - and I can't say much about it anyway, for fear that it will be misinterpreted. So, I've moved on, let's hope lots of the criminals end up in prison. It did allow me to make the first dents in Anna's quite frankly unreasonable position that universal suffrage is acceptable as a model for decision making, but that's about all.

Astonishingly, Parliament is actually doing something else, though you would be forgiven for not noticing, especially as it's by Andy Burnham, a deeply forgettable man. He's having some meeting to note that  the 'English Bacc' is restricting choice. The government's got some slightly feeble response where it says that it doesn't. This is a depressing debate, dragged off course by government mismanagement and misguided principles. Mismanagement first: it's clearly the case that there must be a two year easing in on this change. Pupils shouldn't be switching courses half way though GCSE - it's not fair and it's not helpful. The second issue is more important and more pernicious - it's about choice.

In particular, it's to do with the view that choice is fundamentally good. This is obviously and provably not true. Choice without information is a prison for the poor. And children don't have choice. We have carefully constructed an education system where they don't have choice. They cannot choose not to go to school; they cannot choose to be illiterate (or rather, they shouldn't be able to). And they cannot choose to study any subject. To my knowledge there is no Byzantine History GCSE (for shame!). And we do this for good reason. Children don't know anything. So we give them things to do that are good for them and will serve them well in later life, which sadly probably does not include Byzantine History.

It does however include Maths, English, Science and it should include a language and a humanity, which  should be history. And this is where the English Bacc debate has got silly. Of course it makes options narrower, but that's a good thing. Here are the subjects that are listed as losing interest: Art, RE, Citizenship, Drama and PSHE (Personal, Social and Health education). Some of these are not proper subjects, some are, but the point is that some children have been choosing do these subjects in place of Maths, English, or Science, history or French (or similar language). And there is no justification for that. None at all. Never. Before people protest, gifted artists can still do Art, unless they are only doing five GCSEs. Likewise for actors. The real point is that it is never acceptable to claim to have mastered 'citizenship' if you are unable to tell me anything about your own country's past cannot count.

However, the opposition to these proposals is thoroughly misguided. Here is the shadow minister:

Schools will steer resources and children into these subjects ... More pupils will take these subjects

Good.

This mantra of choice is absurd, and in this debate downright harmful. Resources should be focused on the key aspects of education from which everything else flows. We might have a debate about whether the humanities are essential, but the rest just are. And as the rest of the education system is predicated on compulsory learning so should this be - they're children remember. Choice be damned.

A.E.I.O.U.

At the centre of my dining room is a large family tree of the Habsburg dynasty. I bought it in Austria in 1997 and had it framed once returned. It's brilliant: visually arresting as it shows the slenderest of threads on which this greatest of dynasties hung when Maria Theresa succeeded and the vast sprawl of her many descendants; and important because it is the greatest of dynasties.

I don't mean the greatest in formal achievement, despite the motto signified by the vowels above - Alles Erdreich ist Österreich untertan. While Charles V and Philip II genuinely bestrode Europe at the head of an enormously powerful transnational empire, most Habsburg Emperors occupied places towards the bottom of Europe's top table, usually eclipsed by at least one other crowned head. However, as a dynasty it was unparalleled, leading to the rather waspish description 'let others wage wars, but you, happy Austria, marry!' I prefer the description I read many years ago which described the inheritance of Charles V as a 'genealogical joyride' - either way, they were magnificent, and enduringly fascinating as the increasingly complex and baroque Empire moved through the centuries. It was a tragedy for the dynasty, their people and for Europe that they ended up on the losing side in the First World War.

The person whose life it changed most was Otto von Habsburg - Lothringen (the formal name for the dynasty since the union with Lorraine). Born in the purple in 1912 as the heir (but two) the Empire, his father was the last Habsburg Emperor and from 1922, aged nine, he has been the head of the dynasty and claimant to the thrones of central Europe. He died on Monday aged 98.

Death of exiled potentates is not normally of great interest, but Otto mattered. The Nazis were terrified of a restoration and named the Anschluss Operation Otto; after the war, he was instrumental in securing Austria for the free world rather than let it be partitioned amongst allied soldiers, and he served as an MEP for decades, rather ironically given the Habsburg rivalry with the Wittelsbachs, for Bavaria. During his term, he is most famous for removing Ian Paisley from the chamber when he began to shout 'antichrist' repeatedly at the Pope. He was a magnificent man, and a monument to a vanished age, recalling the dedication of his great-great-uncle Franz-Josef, and the transnationality of his distant ancestor Charles V.

It's fitting perhaps that he goes at the same time as Patrick Leigh Fermor who recorded the world that outlasted its rulers for a single doomed generation between the wars. Yet, while Leigh Fermor was rightly lauded by the full set of news outlets a few weeks, only two broadsheets covered the Habsburg death in Britain, an oddly matched pairing of the Guardian and the Telegraph. We were relatively poor and the rest should be ashamed.

Bibliography, June 2011

Read (7)

BOTM - P. Leigh Fermor, Mani

T. Hasegawa, Racing the enemy
H. Jacobson, The Finckler Question
G. Maxwell, Lords of the Atlas
G. Robb, The Parisians
E. de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes
P.G. Wodehouse, Aunts aren't gentlemen

This wasn't a great month. I got very bogged down in Hasegawa's account of the end of  the war, and though fascinating (because I know little about the diplomatic machinations of 1945), it didn't give me a clincher for my 'we should have dropped the bomb' argument (quite reverse in fact). Elsewhere, much fun, but limited. Mani the inevitable favourite, but on rereading I think its appeal is to a certain extent personal. While it's a great book, it's made greater by the richness of the imagining of the Byzantine world that Leigh Fermor indulges in. There's a famous passage where he imagines the restoration of the Empire, but there are several more. They're all wonderful, and the rest of the book isn't bad either.