government – Little Boxes

At the government’s daily press briefing about COVID-19 on the 11th April, the government’s spokesperson, Priti Patel, repeated the mantra first put forward by Boris Johnson, and repeated ad nauseam by ministers since: “We are following,” she said, “the expert scientific and medical advice and taking the right steps at the right moment in time.” Patel was careful with her emphasis. The right steps. At the right moment in time. How does she know? The science says. It’s a bit like that game of Simon says… If Science says so, we do it.

Priti Patel, UK Government Press Briefing, 11 April 2020.

What Patel does not understand, or is not acknowledging, is that Science doesn’t speak to us like that. There is no single guiding voice, providing us with ‘the evidence’, making it clear what we should do and when. Doing-the-right-thing-at-the-right-time is little more than a political slogan, a ditty for us to sing as we merrily dig our graves. The message may provide some comfort—we all want to feel that the government is in control—but it is a false comfort at best. It is not a sign of good judgement and wise decision-making. It hides the details that we so desperately need to debate. It reveals a failure of our society to place the right people in the right positions, a failure of our education system above all else. We don’t need a government which can meekly defer to a scientist standing on the side to answer the difficult questions, but one that understands how to incorporate scientific evidence into policy making. This is not a matter of doing what The Science says. We are lacking leaders with a scientific attitude and an understanding of how science works. Why?

University faculties and departments of education… too small, isolated, underfunded, prone to fads, and ineffective at driving forward education strategy in the U.K.

Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, 2013, courtesy of H. C. Kuo, under a Creative Commons License via Wikimedia Commons

It was a Labour government, empowered by socialist ideals, that significantly reduced grammar-school education in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is a Conservative government, striving to meet the demands of middle-class families, that is now reversing this long-standing decision. So the pendulum swings once more, from non-selective to selective schooling… from more coursework to more exams, from less setting to more setting, from separating students with special needs to including them in mainstream schools… Teachers who grow old in the system get used to the state of things returning to a time gone by, before the first grey hairs had appeared and the wrinkles set in.

Category: government

Dying because our leaders don’t understand how science works

The Need for Large-Scale Education Research

University faculties and departments of education… too small, isolated, underfunded, prone to fads, and ineffective at driving forward education strategy in the U.K.