Nice column by John Sutherland in The Guardian, which confirms one of my basic PE thesis - about the disjunct between politicians' and business leaders' call for a creative, enterprising society, and their inability to understand the level of social support required to sustain that creativity. My book was kick started in June 1997 - when the first people to object to New Labour's 'you don't work, you don't eat' workfare policy was Brit-pop luminaries like Alan McGee and Jarvis Cocker. Didn't they realise that unconditional dole had been the sustaining bedrock for pop invention for thirty years? And wasn't an industry bigger (at that time) than the steel industry worthy of some subsidy?
Sutherland makes the same point at the level of college and university. After crowing about the fact that University College London produces so many cool acts - all of Coldplay, and most of Basement Jaxx - Sutherland notes that it was based on quite a lot of student bumming-around:
The most pernicious reform introduced into higher education over the last 40 years is "continuous assessment" (also called course unitation and modularisation). It is the pedagogic equivalent of CCTV, a monitoring and measuring of student performance from freshman to finalist.Traditionally, you slacked for eight terms and worked like stink through the ninth, "revising" for the nightmare of finals week. Now you are examined from your first undergraduate essay onward. Hell starts on day one. Modularisation does for higher education what the conveyor belt did for automobile manufacture. No more hours of idleness. And, I fear, fewer like Chris Martin and Chris Nolan [of the Jaxx].
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