Grade inflation

A-levels out tomorrow, with a new A* grade, which - if we're honest - we all know is stupid. There's nothing concrete about an A, it just means best, so what is the point about making more people get them or variants of them. Not that is matters much - the grading system could be 1,2,3,4, or scored like Tennis, provided it ranks. The real problem is summed up by the often reliable Mary Beard pretty well:

I fear I can see now what will happen. We will have used that bright new shiny A* grade to help us distinguish, just like we were told it would, the very very very good from the merely very good applicants. When/if it turns out that independent schools have monopolised the new grade, we will get blamed for not being sufficiently committed to access and social mobility.

There's a long version of this complaint about social mobility, but I haven't the energy. I will however briefly note that the problem as it seems to me is a lack of an underlying vision of what education is for. It isn't about citizenship, because that doesn't mean anything; it certainly isn't about skills in the workplace, for if so, it's an astonishingly inefficient system we've devised here. It's about intellectual enquiry, what has been called the 'life of the mind', and the ability to cultivate that on an ongoing basis, not stopping at 18 (or 21). Along the way, a slew of other skills get picked up, and of course a lot of people fail to properly engage with the ambition, so those skills are pretty useful. But they aren't the point, or at least not the point of education, rather than training..

And Michael Gove's 'liberation' of schooling seems to me likely to founder (regardless of other issues) unless he makes it clear what the ambition is for schools. I don't disagree with reform of the history curriculum for example, but devolving decisions about purpose down to the school level just leads to fragmentation and incoherence. I wish Michael Gove would sort this out rather than buggering around with structural reform that while not entirely bonkers, I suspect limited in positive impact.

The love that dare not speak its name

I went to the Cambridge Folk Festival on Sunday. It was brilliant, and I've spent most of the week listening to Kris Kristoferson, who headlined, and buying CDs by the Carolina Chocolate Drops who are my new favourite band, or more accurately my favourite new band.

But, and this is very small but, these are country artists. Kristoferson lives in Nashville and is Country royalty and the Drops are really old style country - banjo, fiddle, jug and occasional kazoo - not folk. It's not worth getting overexercised between the distinction between the two genres genres, they in many ways overlap, and I think it's one of those areas where, as the man himself said on my version of Me & Bobby McGee, 'if it sounds country, that's what it is.'

Not that we say this in England* - viz. the 'folk' festival. Somewhere our collective consciousness got stuck with rhinestones, line dancing, and bad check shirts (and Billy Ray Cyrus' ill advised haircut), so admitting to Country tends to be met with surprise if not horror. Where, against their better judgement, mainstream opinion does find it likes country, then we tend to adopt one of three overlapping tactics :

1. Adopt another term (see Americana, usually used to describe Johnny Cash's last albums), but a cursory look at the people involved reveals its obviously country and in fact the official definition has it as 'based on the traditions of country'.
2. Consider it ironically, ideally with obvious country elements downplayed, see Dolly Parton
3. Put it in another genre, see Folk above, though many other things have been tried. Gram Parsons coined the phrase 'Cosmic American Music' which mysteriously never caught on

But these are nonsense: Cash is always country; listening to Dolly Parton's My Tennessee Mountain Home, Please don't stop loving me, or Daddy was an old time preacher man should put to bed any notion that she exists in a camp vacuum; while everyone files Parsons under Country now, though they add a hyphenated 'rock' to it (which, listening to his cover of the Louvin brothers’ Cash on the Barrelhead, feels slightly optimistic).

And I love country, though inevitably not all the more modern manifestations of the genre. Done right, it includes not only some of the most poignant songs of loss ever recorded (Haggard’s Long Black Limousine or Kristoferson’s original Sunday morning coming down – in fact, ideally as I heard it on Sunday), but also the most uplifting (I defy any anyone to listen to Lester Flatt’s Roll in my sweet baby’s arms or Emmylou Harris’s New Cut Road without smiling) and even indeed funny (Kinky Friedman’s honky tonk They ain’t making Jews like Jesus anymore being my personal favourite). Nor is it – as it is often accused of being - parochial of limited in range or topics. I’ve yet to hear a better charting in music of the changing role of women than Loretta Lynn’s string of 1960s hits (Take for example One’s on the way juxtaposed with The Pill); Cash’s Bitter Tears takes swipes at Custer, the American icon about the same time the Beatles had graduated to saying that the Queen was a ‘nice girl’). And some are simply beautiful both the string of famous hits, but also the obscure like the Flatlanders’ Bhagavan Decreed. And I’ll be burying my mother to the Carter Family’s Will the Circle be Unbroken. I’ve noted the ones that leapt into my mind above, but I could repeat the exercise many times over, and I’m not sure what other genre I could do the same.

There are many reasons for this, and now isn’t the place to cover them, though it’s worth noting that Country also, like folk, places a high premium on the repeat and the cover. I have endless covers of several songs, and this gives it a texture that most modern music lacks, though classical has the same benefit of depth, though to an even greater degree. I’m broadly conditioned to like things that do this, and this is no exception. It's epitomised for me in Waylon Jenning's Are you sure Hank done it this way - where the modern star compares his life to that of Country greatest son. Unfavourably it would seem, though quite how even Jenning's self-destructive life comes out worse than Williams I am not sure. Nonetheless, this strong streak of conservatism, which also manifests in a broader range of political opinion that the soft left of pop, is core to Country and helps make it great.

Do you think we could reflect that in festival naming please.

* And it is only England. One of the joys of the iPlayer is that I can go beyond the single hour long Radio 2 Country offer and tap into larger and more interesting offers from Northern Ireland and Scotland who seem much more interested in the genre

Unlikely allies

Sometimes, just sometimes, I worry about the Today programme. Not in any way enough to make me listen to anything else, and certainly not when such excellent items as this piece by Dr Murray are recorded. But other times, like this morning, when they had a silly woman on to respond to Giles Fraser's attack on wedding trivialisation on the Thought for the Day slot yesterday (are you keeping up?). She burbled a bit and after arguing initially that nothing had changed and that weddings had always been a celebration, she then wittered a bit about how Giles Fraser was old fashioned and they had to change. She was shit, and we could have had a better discussion if they'd asked some nine year olds what the answer was. We then went on to today's Thought for the Day, which was a platitude filled paragraph of pointlessness - something about being nice. I forget.

And it was a shame, because while Giles Fraser is usually boring and platitudinous himself, or, as they pointed out this morning, 'modern' (and thus usually a bad thing), he actually had something to say. I didn't agree with all of it, but I enjoyed it, especially because was a full blown rant. His thesis, that we have got the focus of weddings wrong, is probably true. Most of the weddings I have been to are good at preserving the sanctity of the ceremony, and in making it a solemn occasion, even the secular ones, which normally don't count. But they don't always, and very often we guests don't treat them as such - we've all thought "glad that's over; where's the bar?", or at least I have. And that's a shame: for us, for the couple, and indeed for God. Not for nothing is marriage, in sacramental terms, unique, as the priest does not play an essential role, the couple alone are the ministers of the sacrament. And this says a lot about the church's teaching on marriage, which is far from the caricature painted by this and other silly critics. I've been deeply affected by good weddings, when I've been concentrating on what it means and the commitment it proclaims: a reminder both of my own and of the covenant of God with his church. Weddings are magical not because of the very welcome free booze, but because of the important bit at the start. The more we spend on the back end, the more the service risks being overshadowed, and that is anathema.

And, deliciously, this was a Thought for the Day that provoked debate - good and welcome; it would be even more welcome it we'd then actually had one. Someone should fix that.

Bibliography, July 2010

Acquired (5)

B. Goldacre, Bad Science
R. Fischer, Wiffle lever to full
J. Hannan, God's Philosophers
A.W. Montford, The Hockey stick illusion
L. Sterne, A Sentimental Journal though France and Italy

Read (6)
BOTM: L. Sciascia, The wine dark sea

Adamson, The European courts 1500-1700
Cragg, The Church in the Age of Reason
R. Fischer, Wiffle lever to full
J. Hale, The Civilisation of Europe in the renaissance
Penguin History of Britiain: the Tudors

Remaining - 53

New books starting to creep in, though all save Sterne were gifts. Sterne I was reading about in Slightly Foxed (which, by the way, is lovely) and then saw the next day for a pound - serendipity such as this should not be blocked.  It's also starting also to be a bit of a slog. Hale is long and while good, I feel it's a thesis that could have been expressed quicker. In reaction perhaps, Sciascia is my book of the month. I first read him on holiday in Sicily and then picked this up later. He's a delight, especially in this collection of short stories, though his novel The Day of the Owl is also excellent. They're biting, brilliant evocations of his native Sicily, where, as he observes, the sea is never 'wine dark'.