Ed,
Are you really arguing that environment has no
effect upon learning or personality? That growing up next to
those things is the same thing as growing up on the plains of Canada and having
them in your history? Or that the wonderful Canadian sky
and all of that clarity is no better than the weather in London or Stuttgart and
that it has no effect on you?
REH
You have a point, Ray, but I'm not sure of how to characterize it. I
know that when I was a kid in Saskatchewan I used to love climbing up the
highest hill in the neighbourhood (all of two feet or so above the flat earth!)
and see as far as I could see. There, off in the far far distance, were
the grain elevators of the next town, and maybe even the next town after
that. My prairie relatives used to visit British Columbia, but they didn't
like it very much because they couldn't see anything. The mountains
blocked their view.
In spite of my background, I've never felt uncomfortable in large cities,
even the largest. However, I don't like dull, smoggy weather wherever
I am. I find it quite depressing. Perhaps that is an effect of
having been born under a clear blue sky.
The main point I was trying to make to Keith was that we share a
history. But that history isn't necessarily grand or national. It
may be quite personal. My wife, a very good geneologist, knows all
about her family in Ireland and pre-revolutionary America, and quite a lot about
the family in places like Somerset. There are people with her surname
buried in the cloisters of Salisbury Cathedral. Those things are as
much a part of her sense of being as is growing up in rural eastern
Ontario. I take an interest in what is going on in eastern and central
Europe because my parents emigrated from there and talked about it almost
incessantly when I was a child. I take a strong interest in England
because that is where much of what has made me as a cultural being came
from. Though my sky may have been bluer than Keith's, there are many
things we have in common.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2003
4:45 PM
Subject: Re: This sceptred compost heap
(was Re: [Futurework] Education
I'm in maroon this
time.
Ed
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2003
12:42 PM
Subject: This sceptred compost heap
(was Re: [Futurework] Education
Ed,
Thanks for this. I've read three different
summaries of this same OECD report this morning!
I've just come
back from a dogwalk and still dwelling on what I wrote after sending you
my previous posting. What was occurring to me is that the reason for a
number of the arguments we have is that our societies are much more
different than we might imagine -- or at least I might imagine anyway.
Time and again, I describe things going on here and I get the impression
from some of your slightly nonchalant responses sometimes that you might
be thinking that I am exaggerating. I also get the impression that you
live in a much more laid back -- indeed much happier and less stressed --
society than here. Hitherto, I've regarded the difference as a personality
one. However, during the dogwalk -- and I hope you don't think I'm being
patronising here -- I think our society is more complex than yours because
we have so many layers of history. Please don't think I'm trying to show
off -- but consider. We were building quite complex stone buildings at the
tip of Scotland and in the south of England before the pyramids were
built. By 1,000BC we had probably the most complex bronze technology in
the world (apart from China's), using tin from Cornwall and copper from
north Wales, with, correspondingly, a very advanced mining technology
(scores of tin mines stretching for miles under the sea bed in Cornwall
and over 50 miles of recently discovered tunnels in north Wales from that
date -- made with bone and stone tools), and with significant
manufacturing areas somewhere in between (not yet discovered) to actually
make the bronzes (of different blends for different purposes) and then
trading the products over thousands of miles from the Baltic through to
the Mediterranean. Then we've been invaded by the Romans, and the Saxons,
and the Vikings and Danes, and the Normans with their advanced feudal
system followed by the landowning classes. We were at the back-end of the
Mediterranean Renaissance but one of the first into long-distance trading
with Asia and big trading companies, the first into the Western Scientific
Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution, and the first into the
computer revolution. We are the third/fourth largest exporting country in
the world -- not of products (we're mined out of almost everything we ever
had by way of resources), but of a variety of services. In short, we
probably have the most mature job and social structure of anywhere in the
world. We live by our wits. We may not have the sheer mass, momentum or
technological products that the Americans have got but I think we lead the
world in the acquisition of problems, strains and stresses from all this
historical/technological development. We're a well-rotted compost heap,
showing extremes of anything that can be discussed in terms of job
structure and society. In addition, we're also geographically small enough
to have started the most comprehensive welfare, educational, social
services, health and transport services in the world and now we're
the furthest advanced in showing that they're breaking down -- that the
welfare society is absolutely cram full of problems and we're showing them
all in abundance, so much so that even a Labour government is trying to
privatise as much as it can get away with (albeit in more cunning ways
that Thatcher did). The only other country which has had such a complex
history as ours, running through the whole gamut of every type of economic
and technological development is China. I cannot think of any other with
such a varied experience and with so many historical residues which are
still fermenting away.
A couple of
points, Keith. One is that, for most Canadians, your history is
also our history. Whenever I've been to Europe, I've felt quite at
home because my people shared in the building of your ancient
civilizations and the monuments they left behind just as your people
did. When we were in Ireland a couple of years ago, we visited a
famine burial ground in the far west of the country. My wife's
and daughter's ancestors could have been among the famine victims buried
there. We visited Knouth and Newgrange which could also have been
their ancestral burial grounds. Then in County Carlow, we visited
the gravesite of my wife's multi-great grandmother, who was buried there
in 1799. We also visited Vinegar Hill in Wexford, where a
multi-great grandfather was killed. But it doesn't end there.
Both the multi-great grandmother and grandfather (different families) were
British landowners who had likely migrated from Somerset. I think
you get my point. Your history is also our history. However,
it goes well beyond that. Our institutions, our laws and indeed our
democratic processes were inherited from you. They were modified to
suit our purposes, but they differ only in detail and
degree.
The other point
is that I cannot see our society as being less complex than yours.
With perhaps the exception of some Tibetan monks living in the most
isolated of monasteries, we all share the world and it is not a simple
world. Like England, we too have comprehensive health, education and
social services that are in various stages of growing, maintaining a
stability or declining. The socialist ideals of 19th Century Europe
caught on here and flourished into a society that has tried its very best
to provide good services to its citizens. Margaret Thatcher's
neo-conservative ideals also caught on here so that one lot of politicians
is trying to take apart what another lot built up. We are in a
continuous process of reappraising our health, education and social
services, and coming to any real conclusion about what they should be like
and who they should serve is still a distant dream and will probably
remain so.
I don't think we
will ever really know whether we are a mature society or not. I
would suggest that it really doesn't depend much on history, but on how we
are able to handle our problems in the here and now. You are
suggesting that England has a difficult time in coping with the provision
of its various social services. You also seem to suggest that Canada
may have less of a problem. Does that make Canada a more mature
society than England? Perhaps, but I really don't think
so.
I'm very probably over-egging the pudding (once again without
wishing to be patronising in any way at all) but, in comparison, Canada's
(and America's) social, economic, historical, cultural problems are
somewhat simpler than ours. I'm not suggesting in any way that you are
personally naive, but I think that your problems can be stated (and
solved) in much more simplistic terms than could be done here. However, I
believe that many of the trends and problems here in England that I am
writing about will come to you, too, in due course -- because we are much
further on in what I believe to be the decline of the industrial
revolution.
I've dealt with
this in the foregoing. I can't for one moment think that any
country's problems are more simple than any other's. Each
country has its unique characteristics, but to classify these as more
simple or more complex is a bit of a stretch. Speaking of compost
heaps, we are currently into an election here in Ontario and will probably
be into a national election soon.
Ed
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