Monthly Archives: February 2013

Back to basics at school

Anyone who was at school about 30 years ago will remember how shit the lessons were, especially if it was a grammar school. The focus was very much on traditional learning, avoiding creativity and certainly having very little vocational or even particularly relevant. So english literature, english history ( the biased version) and geography, maths, french, the sciences, religious instruction (christian only) and a bit of latin thrown in.

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We spent most of our time asking ourselves ‘what use will any of this be to us in life?’

In the last 30 years things have moved on a bit: creativity gets more focus; every school seems to love a music scholarship, religious education covers lots of religions and things like technology and citizenship have slipped on to the syllabus.

Personally I don’t think it’s gone far enough: here’s a few suggestions: creative thinking, society, anthropology, politics, careers and the workplace, the art of persuasion, philosophy, politics and economics, health education, personal finance, cosmology, storytelling and film making. And that’s just for starters.

So when I hear Michael Gove boffing on about reforming education and the Baccalaureate (hopefully now consigned to history where it belongs) it reminds me  again what conservatism is so often about.

Not about giving every individual the freedom and responsibility to make the best of their lives, with a gentle nudge from a small state, (which I sometimes think David Cameron and other more progressive tories would like it to be). No, it’s about avoiding change. Or worse, it’s about turning the clock back.

You know, the good old days. With grammar schools and classics teachers, church services and family days ( mum and dad and 2.2 kids ), no multiculturalism, a nice well presented ruling class and a working class who knew their place. The Queen, The Union Jack, the occassional conflict to keep our army chaps busy and definitely no gay marriage ( in fact preferably no gay anything).

And the school syllabus, well how about english literature, english history ( the biased version) and geography, maths, french, the sciences, religious instruction (christian only) and a bit of latin thrown in. How very progressive Mr Gove.

Fox Attacks

In behavioural economics they call it heuristics. It’s the discipline that explains a whole series of built in biases in the way humans think. Heuristics are mental short-cuts or rules of thumb that often result in thinking errors. The availability heuristic is particularly relevant in the case of Fox attacks.

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Put simply, the availability heuristic operates on the notion that if we can recall something easily we tend to overestimate its importance. The classic would be shark attacks. When we read about a shark attack it sticks in our memory and so we tend to  over-estimate the risk and its importance. In reality the chances of being attacked by a shark are infinitesimally small.

This applies to the recent media coverage about Foxes and Fox attacks. The number of Fox attacks in recent years are in single digits. Compare this to the fact that over 6,000 hospital admissions in the UK  last year were for dog attacks. But dog bites are so common they are not even reported in the press, so few people worry about the issue.

The recent hysteria and demands for action after the Fox attack in London are exactly what the availability heuristic would predict.

The reality though is: there are around 40,000 urban Foxes in the uk. They may be a bit of a pain, annoying everyone’s pet dogs, occasionally going through the bins and making a lot of noise. But they aren’t usually dangerous, most people like them and in a country that needs to hang on to all the wildlife it can, they do add a certain exotisism to the city experience.

It’s amazing how  animal species are respected when they are few and far between: how much we love red squirrels, deer, beavers, stoats, pine martins and hedgehogs. But heaven help the species that actually do quite well: grey squirrels, foxes and badgers seem suddenly to change status from darlings of the nations to pests and pariahs.

So lets try and fight the availability heuristic and not waste time and money worrying about urban Foxes……. now dog attacks…that’s another matter.