The Critical Commentator

  Personal Debt and Social Media Newgate, Committed for Trial ,   Frank Holl (1845-1888) Photo Credit:  Rochdale Arts & Heritage Service [CC BY-NC] Displays of lavish spending on social media such as Instagram are to blame for dwindling household savings and rising debt, experts say…They trace the trend to the rise of shopping channels on TV, and of mobile phones and email, which gave people new outlets to brag about their holiday, night out or new dress. It was exacerbated by the rise of social media which, they say, is wholly organised around consumption. They, the Researchers at the US National Bureau of Economic Research, explain that the most visible people in an online network are the ones who are shown consuming the most. In other words, the friends who are constantly posting about mini-breaks and meals out are the ones most likely to appear in timelines. Social media sites designed for sharing pictures and videos, such as Instagram are particularly influential...

  The Dunce Harold Copping (1863-1932) Photo Credit: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum [CC BY-NC-ND] After nearly three years of deliberashuns, the International (Internashunal, surely?) English Spelling Congress has voted for a noo set of spelling rools, called Traditional Spelling Revised (TSR), to "become the new norm", eliminating silent letters such as the "w" in "wrong" and making changes to up to 18 per cent of words, "making English easier to learn" on the back of news that 200,000 children will leave primary school this year unable to read and write properly. So, yeah, fine, go on, lower the bar. That's the way to do it in education now. Too many thick kids leaving our schools? Then redefine "thick" and, woohoo, you've got a generation of geniuses... hang on. If they're simplifying spelling, then surely they must do the same with maths. The younger me would have been laughing. "Coren, what's two times ...

 Of the 49 individuals in government who have had control over the English schools system since 1900, only four previously taught in schools themselves. As Andria Zafirakou, the winner of the 2018 Global Teacher prize, expresses it: "The people who sit in 10 Downing Street are like gods to us teachers." That's to say, they seem so remote, their actions so unintelligible to those who actually work within schools that they might as well be gazing down from Mount Olympus, arbitrarily firing lightning bolts on to asphalt playgrounds. In many ways Those Who Can, Teach , Zafirakou's first book, is a response to the government's scatter-gun approach to education, a plea for them to take notice of the pressures teachers are increasingly placed under, and how education policy is damaging young people. Her simple, direct style often feels close to a manifesto: "We are the ones who go above and beyond the duties we were employed for," she writes. Zafirakou drives ...

Lucy Foulkes, 33, whose career is in academic psychology and who is at present attached to University College London, recently asked an undergraduate student how her friends discussed their moods. "She said everyone in her year group - more than a hundred students - self-identified as having depression or anxiety disorder or both." Foulkes was so struck by this that she had to try and understand it. Even with an expanding diagnostic definition of these illnesses, only a small minority of students would, statistically, meet the criteria for clinical depression or anxiety. Instead they were doing what so many of us, seem to be doing, "liberally applying the psychiatric terminology that is now commonplace in our culture to more transient or low-level unhappiness or worry", as she writes in her new book, Losing Our Minds ... Beata Beatrix Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] "Hang on, who is this conversation about mental health helpi...

 I'd like you to feel sorry for some wealthy young investment bankers. Please don't stop reading. The ones in question are the junior analysts at Goldman Sachs who were in the news last week after complaining to their managers that their working conditions during lockdown had become intolerable. The situation they describe is extraordinary. Many were putting in 98-hour weeks... How did these ambitious, smart, wealthy young people find themselves in a situation of such abjection? The answer, I think, lies in modern attitudes to human nature and a peculiarly 21st-century kind of contempt for human nature and its limitations. This contempt pervades our culture but it is explicit and most extreme in elite tech circles, where "transhumanists" dream of the day when human minds and bodies will be technologically augmented in order to make us cleverer, more physically powerful and even able to cheat death. Zusammenbruch Ludwig von Hofmann (1861-1945) Photo Credit: Leicester M...

 Some rugby writers for the  Times   give their predictions for the Six Nations, 2021. Rugby Player Sylvain Kinsberger (!855-1935) Photo Credit: World Rugby Museum [CC BY-NC] Owen Slott: How will they finish? England, France, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Italy. England won two trophies last year and got nowhere close to their potential. Grand slam? Yes Sam Warburton How will they finish ? England, France, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Italy England and France are ahead of the pack... It will be a tight battle between Wales and Scotland for fourth and fifth. Stuart Barnes How will they finish? France, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Italy Grand slam? Yes John Westerby How will they finish? England, France, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Italy.  England would not be expected to beat Ireland and Wales away, but those games will be less daunting without crowds. Grand slam? Yes Steve James How will they finish? England, France, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Italy. England and Franc...

Headteachers in England are among the highest paid in the world, and the gap between school leader and teacher salaries is one of the widest, new analysis has revealed... England's highest-paid headteacher of a single school is Colin Hall, at Holland Park School in west London. He received between £280,000 and £290,000 in 2019-20, according to recently published school accounts, compared with between £270,000 and £280,000 the year before. Academy chain heads are also earning salaries in excess of a quarter of a million pounds. Sir Kevin Satchwell, the executive head of the Telford City Technology College Trust, was paid between £290,000 and £300,000 in 2019-20... The top earner by far, however, is Sir Dan Moynihan, chief executive of the Harris Federation, which runs 48 primary and secondary academies. He has seen his salary increase to between £455,000 and £460,000 in 2019-20 - a £5,000 increase on the 2018-19 salary band... (Julie Henry, The Observer, 2021) Teachers in England fa...

Lionel Shriver has described her capitulation to cancel culture, admitting that for a forthcoming book she agreed to remove dialogue she was told was "othering"... She said: "In my upcoming book I had a little bit of an African accent in a very small dialogue.Touches of it. I was discouraged from using it because it was othering. Because it did not really hurt the book artistically I complied." She said that she hated the word, which is defined by the British linguists professor Lynne Murphy as "treating people from another group as less human than one's own group"... Raving Madness Caius Gabriel Cibber (1630-1700) Photo Credit: Bethlem Museum of the Mind [CC BY-NC] The rise of cancel culture and the accompanying boycotts and threats to those who opine "in the wrong way" on topics ranging from sexuality to racial politics has become a fraught subject in the arts. One side asserts that it is putting free speech at risk, while the other says it...

 A magazine editor who moved to the Cotswolds to pursue the good life has been ridiculed by locals after she publicly bemoaned the lack of taxis, the small size of schools and the presence of farm vehicles. La Pierre d'Avignon, Le Lavandou Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944) Photo Credit: Manchester Art Gallery [CC BY-NC-ND] Jade Beer, the former editor-in-chief of Conde Nast's Brides magazine moved her family out of London six years ago after growing tired of "the sheer mass of people, weary of battling the daily commute and the long hours. She wrote in the Evening Standard t hat they were "blissfully happy" after buying a cottage near the market town of Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire "on a sprawling estate and we had views of cows to the front and sheep to the back"... She bemoaned the fact that her village had one taxi driver who needed to be booked "a week in advance" and only offered pick-up times he was willing to do. She also said the neare...