The Underhill Journal

A fascinating article with lots of videos about crow behaviour in the wild. These are interesting because the crows use tools, a behaviour that is traditionally associated with notions of Human Superiority to other animals. The article about crows is here.

From Spiked Humour.

I was having a discussion yesterday with my partner about the state of Education in this country (although really this applies to any Institutional Education anywhere) and we were trying to pinpoint why it has become so rotten.
Jean Baudrillard wrote about this topic in Simulation and Simulacra, and I think his views are worth pointing out. He believed that Universities had become factories for providing certificates and were no longer places of real learning. Simply put, (and these are my words not his) the focus of education has shifted from the acquisition of knowledge to the acquisition of a chit of paper meant to represent that knowledge.
What does this mean for education though, because surely the chit of paper is supposed to be the same as the knowledge?
Well, the fact of the matter is that it is not. Educators everywhere teach their students only those techniques and facts that will guarantee them success in their exams, thus narrowing the field of knowledge that they are delivering to their students. Natural curiosity and self driven study is snuffed out, because it represents a threat to the curriculum of the exam, and students are instead encouraged to learn to regurgitate only what they need to know for to acquire their all important chit of paper. There is no longer any room for individuality.
So exam performance increases year on year, university uptake increases year on year, and yet employers and University professors continue to bemoan the lack of quality that they are receiving from this supposed boom in educational standards. Graduates are also finding life increasingly difficult as their degrees are now worth only marginally more than the qualifications that took them into university and it is experience that Employers want more than anything else.
But let's go back a step and take a look at the state of schools in this country (and those of England and Wales). We are being told that teachers are having growing problems with school discipline, that children are increasingly out of control both in and out of the classroom and that boys are grossly under performing compared to girls. What I find most irritating about these kinds of problems is that the establishment seems to be trying to bend itself over backwards to lay the blame on poverty and parenting, while introducing ridiculous and gimicky solutions into the classroom, in the form of lessons in "respect" and things like cheque writing. If I recall my time in school correctly (and my memories are backed up by the numerous teenagers that I know through work and Martial Arts) teaching these kinds of things in school is doomed to failure because children just don't want to listen to this stuff.
All the while parents are being forced to spend less and less time with their children in order to pay the outrageous bills that our modern society puts on us. The family unit is falling apart under the strain of society, separation rates are increasing, youth crime rates are apparently increasing and so is the gap between the rich and poor in society. All the while schools take kudos from the parents that do take the time to help their children educationally, and try to avoid giving out the kind of support work that educationally deprived children need to help them succeed because of the expense. Underachieving schools in poor areas are being forced into PPP projects and City Academy status to deal with their standards, rather than receiving the extra funding they need to help their students.
Parents are not to blame and neither is poverty and gimmicks are simply exacerbating the problem. The fault can be laid squarely at the education system.
Think about it - would you really, truly say that a modern school reflects accurately the kind of world it's supposed to prepare it's pupils for? As far as I can see, a modern school exists in a little bubble of it's own, with it's own rules and hierarchy and very little room for those who are genuinely inquisitive or need extra help to bridge the gap between their own experience and academia. Children leave school lacking horribly in real life experience, and this can't be sorted inside the bubble. It's about time the entire system was broken right open and children were moved out into the real world to learn.

I could apologise in advance for this as it could be offensive to some Christians, but I'm not going to. You can't complain about Muslims being offended by cartoons of the prophet and claim offence at this, especially seeing as their God is the same God as yours!

This is funny.

This is a nice, concise little video explaining the fundamental problems with the common Christian view of the founding of their religion. I've studied the subject in some depth in the past so it does cover a lot of old ground for me, but I like the way this is presented (except for the awful Hymns....hehe)

I am fascinated by chimpanzee's and their other cousins (humans included of course). I remember quite distinctly a visit to Amsterdam Zoo that we made several years ago. In the Chimpanzee house, there were loads of people gathered around watching the chimps and the chimps were getting pretty fed up with it. One of the chimps got quite aggressive in fact, and he/she was making gestures at the people watching and kicking and hitting the glass that seperated us from them. It made me feel quite sick, to be honest, because I could see that the chimps were very unhappy with their position and unhappy with their lack of privacy. Even thinking about it now brings a lump to my throat - would we ever consider placing a human family in a cage against their will for public display? That day I realised that there is no ethical difference between keeping a chimp family captive and keeping a human family captive. It made me realise that the divide between us and them is really quite superficial and mostly maintained for the benefit of human ego's.
Today I was reading an article about an Austrian chimp that reinforced my opinions about our close Ape cousins. Here we have a chimp who is at risk of homelessness in a modern european country and it begs the question of the legal rights we must give to Apes and, ultimately, other creatures. We genuinely need to broaden our definitions of what constitutes "people", because the more we understaned about other creatures, the more we begin to realise that there are not so many great differences between us and them.
Anyway, here's something for a little light relief and food for thought (all at once). This chimp is a Black Belt and really quite amazing to watch.