Category Archives: The Journal
Graduates Into Employment….
Many young people want to remain in cities like Liverpool after their higher education, but opportunities to develop professionally if they do so are still often quite limited. So what exactly is a ‘graduate job’? And how do graduate jobs fit in with local economies?
There’s a brand new ‘Met Quarter’ shopping arcade in Liverpool city centre which looks quite interesting, so that was where we headed in search of some coffee, after a meeting in town this morning.
The new arcade is indeed worth a good look – all shiny steel and glass and smart labels – but there was one aspect of it that certainly wasn’t new to us. Our friendly and welcoming waitress was someone we already know because she’s a recent graduate. Like several others of her graduating year, she is employed in a capacity which gives her an income, but doesn’t really use her formal skills.
A conundrum for cities on the edge
This is a familiar problem for cities like Liverpool, perceived by bright young people to have excitement and ‘edge’, but with relatively weak economies.
The question which always arises in this context is, how long will a recent graduate stay in employment which doesn’t fit their recently acquired formal skills? Is it right to encourage young people to stay? Or should we be encouraging them to fly the civic nest, with a promise that we’ll keep in touch?
Liverpool has plenty of graduate incubators and ‘Graduates into Work’ programmes. Both have very important functions in the local economy. The former helps proto-type entrepreneurs to take their ideas forward; the latter, of course amongst other things, is often especially helpful for local graduates who already have their homes and families in Merseyside and need to stay.
The initial post-graduate years are critical
Is there an issue when young graduates remain in Liverpool in low-skill jobs, just at the time when they should be busily extending their experience and applying thier newly acquired knowledge?
Figures on graduate retention beyond a year or two are notoriously difficult to find for given locations. These are however crucial to our understanding of how the high skills agenda should be developed in an emerging economy such as Merseyside’s.
What some graduates and those with second degrees actually do after graduation remains a mystery, but the suspicion is that if they stay in a city like Liverpool they do not always fully use their new skills. Maybe we need to be honest enough on occasion to help them get experience elsewhere which, we all hope, they will later come back to Liverpool to use.
A fair exchange?
That young graduates want to stay and enjoy the vitality of a city such as Liverpool is excellent. Their enthusiasm and determination to make something of their lives here is something everyone warmly welcomes. But if we want these young people to develop their potential properly, we need to think of ways to establish a freeflow of skills and experience between our own backyard and other places.
Then, when the local economy really does come up to speed, we’ll have plenty of skilled and experienced people waiting, who already know us and want to be part of it.
To Blog Or Not To Blog? That Is The Question
The nature of ‘blogging’ has been quite throughly explored of late; but here is the humble observation of a person who is actually trying to do it, and to find a new way of sharing ideas into the bargain.
Having now completed 150 entries over a period of six month on this Weblog, I hope I’m beginning to get the hang of it.
I read recently that a new Blog is created somewhere every second of every day, but that half of them fold within three months. Frankly, I’m not surprised. I expect that for quite a lot of people it’s bit like writing a Diary, and after a while Life takes over….
More a Journal than a Diary
For me, however, this exercise has become defined in my head as ‘journalistic’, in the sense of examining the events and ideas of the moment – or perhaps sometimes those which are distinctly against the grain of that moment?
And in that too I’m not alone. Both The Economist and The Guardian, for instance, are currently engaged in what might be called meta-analysis of the ‘meaning’ of contemporary journalism; and both have concluded that a lot of it will in future involve direct engagement with the reader.
What is a blog?
Indeed, The Economist‘s Survey of new media, published this week, addresses the issues very clearly: A blog, argues Dave Winer who pioneered weblog software, is ‘the unedited voice of a single person’, preferably amateur and, in The Economist‘s words, having ‘a raw, unpolished authenticity and individuality’. This, it seems to be agreed, is what distinguishes blogs from formal newspapers; just as blogs must in the view of readers be accessible and personal in a way that organisational productions often cannot be.
Well, obviously, I couldn’t possibly comment in this particular context; but I do feel that approaching my Blog Journal over quite a time now has changed my understanding of what it’s all about. To start with I was quite nervous of sharing these ideas, and then I began to feel more confident that readers would understand the spirit in which they are offered – as indeed has always been the case.
More direct and better linked?
And I suspect that I now write more directly than I did to begin with. It’s quite a challenge to move away from ‘academic speak’ whilst still trying to stick to the established rules of evidenced-based commentary. But what I’ve lost in third party style has perhaps been compensated for by my better grasp now of how to link / reference my pieces to other writers’ work, directly through the internet. It’s a challenge always to find the right links to illustrate a given point, but I’m coming to think that even partial connection is better than none.
What next?
So what next? Well, discussions with Nick Prior, who designs this website for me, have taken me to thinking we need photographs! This will not make the weblog a newspaper, but it may help to add interest and show you more about what’s what, especially when I write about events and places I know. My first assignment of this photographic sort was therefore today, in Sefton Park.
And maybe I shall try some more ideas as well… an educational or musical ‘column’, or something special about Liverpool, perhaps? Who knows? Or perhaps by Entry No. 200 we shall all know?
Thank you as ever for joining with us in this adventure.
Creationism Is An Attack On Rationality: The Scientists Rally At Last
It has taken the scientists quite a while to wake up to the serious dangers for science and its rational underpinnings of creationism and the ‘theory’ of intelligent design. But now at last this danger – to the scientific community and far beyond – is beginning to be understood and confronted.
It’s taken a long time, but the scientists are at last beginning in numbers to fight back vocally against the attack from the Creationists, those mainly right-wing religious followers who believe despite the evidence that the story of the Old Testament is somehow literally true – and, even more worryingly, that it should be taught in schools. And in this rebuttal the scientists have been joined also by most mainstream churches and religious people – the large majority of whom in the case of both science and religion have until recently mainatined it is enough simply to ignore the creationists’ exotic claims.
But now scientists are seeking the active support of the churches to back evolutionary theory, especially in America, where Creationism and the related ‘theory’ of Intelligent Design have made the most headway.
Disputing creationism is not enough
It is not however enough simply to say that scientists should dispute creationism and intelligent design.
Far more is at stake than ‘just’ the challenge to an explanation of the origin of life on earth – vastly significant though this is.
The ideas of the creationists are, as some have recognised for decades, an affront to rationality. It is said that the President of the United States is a prominent supporter of creationism, or at least a proponent of intelligent design, but we must ask how this can be so when he is also a lawyer.
Lawyers may indeed sustain the view that ‘both sides’ of an argument should be aired, but rarely do they believe this even when one of those ‘sides’ has barely any evidence to uphold it. So what else is going on?
Economics and authority
The position of those who support creationism is usually authoritarian, and often anti-intellectual. This is in many respects evident in the current enthusiasm of some to promote such beliefs in Britain. In the USA, perhaps, this stance is even more established.
Many on the right of politics and religion like certainty. They do not feel comfortable with complex debates about evidence; and they are happier when intellectual challenge is replaced by the logic of big business. In other words, there is a deterministic preference here for authority and authoritarianiam to come together so that all is right with the world. God has pre-ordained the universe and our place in it, and this place is evidenced by our wealth (or not) and our religious observance. It’s an old-established way of thinking. Let there be no more debate!
A chasm between world views
For the vast majority of scientists there is a vast chasm between the exploration of the evolutionary paradigm and the determinism of the religious right. Small wonder then that scientists have been ill-prepared for the creationist onslaught.
And sadly small wonder too that many who might challenge the attack on science have not done so, perhaps for fear that in so doing they might also put at risk the funding of their research. There are significant numbers of wealthy benefactors out there who are comfortable with the idea of a creationist world and their hypothecated place in it.
Perhaps the scientists have failed to appreciate how precarious is the wider understanding of their work. Perhaps they have continued in their research mostly oblivious of the threat to their way of interpreting the world.
Fundamental issues
Neither of these positions can be seen as any more than innocent or at worst naive. But what is at stake is fundamental. Few people would wish to dispute the entitlement of individuals to perceive the world and all that is in it in their own way. Many however, the scientists amongst them, must now challenge more overtly and vigorously the view that we can dispense with informed debate and rationality. At last this is beginning visibly to happen.
Wirral’s Ness Gardens: A Place To Learn Whilst You Enjoy
Ness Botanic Gardens, owned by the University of Liverpool, are a delightful example of how learning and enjoyment can come together. They are the creation of a cotton merchant who wanted to share his absorbing interest in plants from across the world (and especially from the Himalayas) with the people of his hometown, Liverpool. This work, begun in 1898, continues to prosper to the present time.
Ness Botanic Gardens are on the Wirral near Chester, away from the River Mersey facing the splendid windswept views of the Dee Estuary which overlook the North Wales coast. They offer delightful views which take one back to more pastoral times, and include the habitats of many species of birds and wildlife.
This apparent tranquility and timelessness has not however prevented some very forward-looking management on the part of those responsible for the site. Just this week (14 April 2006) saw the opening of the new Horsfall Rushby Visitor Centre, designed alongside a wider programme of development to encourage year-round enjoyment of this special location.
Where academic excellence meets family fun
The story of the Gardens is both unusual and enlightening. They were created by a Liverpool cotton merchant, the Fabian Arthur Kilpin Bulley, who wanted to establish in Britain the ‘new’ Himalayan and Chinese mountain plants he had funded the plant explorers George Forrest and Frank Kingdom Ward to discover . And so in 1898 began the adventure which was to become Ness Gardens, a place of elegance and education, as it welcomed vistors from near and far.
In 1942 Arthur Bulley died and left his ever-expanding Gardens to his daughter Lois (1901-1995), who presented them to the University of Liverpool in 1948, with an endowment of £75,000 per annum on the understanding that they be kept open for the public. Her intention that this beautiful place continue to fascinate and inform both young and older people is reflected in the current Visitor Centre, scientific programme and educational developments.
Journey of discovery
Our own involvement in Ness Gardens began back in the 1970s, when a reseach student friend at Liverpool University experienced what, at that time, seemed like a cruel blow. He had been assiduously observing a derelict site in the city centre to find out what sort of road-side plants and grasses best grew on such unpromising terrain when, because of a misunderstanding by a Council employee about location, a ton of topsoil was dumped on his experimental venue. The anguish was terrible – should there be an official complaint because the experiment was ruined; or should there be celebration of the act of reclaiming the derelict site for better use, albeit by mistake?
Resolution of this dilemma arrived in the form of an offer to recreate the dereliction by transporting a huge load of rubble to a fenced-off location at the edge of the University’s Ness Gardens. Our humble role in this adventure was occasionally to give our friend a lift over to the site to continue his work. The experiment was repeated, the results brought forth much in the way of understanding how to use grasses to reclaim land, the young scientist’s career was launched to great acclaim – and we became regulars at Ness Gardens.
The research and development continues
The striking thing about Ness Gardens is that, not only does it change dramatically with the seasons, but it has consistently expanded and grown over the years. The Gardens have spread across much more of the site, with a growing number of areas of specialist interest (the latest is the ‘Prehistoric Garden’ just created from an existing clay marl pit); and the world-class science has similarly developed over time.
Here is a place always worth the journey, where there is a conscious intention to deliver first-class research in the context of a welcome for everyone. Support the Friends of Ness Gardens if you can – and be sure to visit their new Centre and see the Gardens for yourself.
From Euston To Ecology, Engineering And Enterprise With The Virgin Trains Windowgazer
Travel takes many forms. The idea behind the ‘Windowgazer Guide’, a booklet explaining what can be seen as one’s train travels from London Euston northwards, is excellent. Here is a concept which can take us not only on physical journeys, but also on journeys of discovery of many sorts, scientific, environmental, cultural and much more.
How many people know that, as their train passes Stafford on the way northwards from London Euston, they are right by the 360 acres of the Doxey Marshes, an especially important breeding ground for lapwing, redshank, snipe, yellow wagtail, sedge, warbler and pochard? Or that a short while thereafter as they get to Crewe they are at the centre of a town celebrated in 1936 by W H Auden and Benjamin Britten in a documentary (Night Mail) extolling the work of the Royal Mail trains?
These are two of the interesting facts which I learnt from the Train Manager as he read from a travel guide over the public address system, on my journey home from Euston just this week.
It’s one of those odd co-incidences that the same day I ‘discovered’ the Windowgazer Guide I also learnt that today (9 April 2006) is the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of one of Britain’s greatest bridge builders, Isambard Kingdon Brunel – the man, so my Windowgazer Guide tells me, who came with his colleague engineer Thomas Locke especially to observe the installation of Robert Stephenson’s pioneering Britannia tubular bridge, now spanning the Menai Strait which divides Angelsey from the rest of Wales. My interest already alerted by the commentary on my train journey, I found the story of Brunel immediately relevant and memorable.
Always something new
This has set me pondering the many ways in which we can learn something new every day.
The Windowgazer Guide I saw is a free publication available on the Virgin Train North West line from Euston to Wolverhampton, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. You obtain it from the refreshment carriage bookshelf, and it offers all sorts of interesting information about your journey.
The scope for this sort of publication, drawing together information across the whole range of arts and science is enormous. And it’s not ‘just’ trains which offer opportunities of this sort. Almost every journey does the same.
Bringing local knowledge to bear
The trend towards local access to the internet, be it via schools and community centres, libraries, housing associations or whatever, affords huge scope here. It would be great to see projects across the country which encourage local people to share their knowledge via the internet so that we can enjoy journeys illuminated by fascinating facts and ideas, wherever we go. What we learn might sometimes spark new and beneficial ideas of all sorts, who knows?
Perhaps there’s a way that someone could use the ‘Grid‘ to make available a route map of the U.K., with trainlines, roads, canals and whatever else marked out, onto which individuals and local communities could add their particular knowledge of where they live and work?
Getting from A to B is one form of travel. Sharing information and enjoying new ideas is another, perhaps even bigger, adventure.
The Dismal Message Of Some Human Resource Advisers
Human resource specialists seem to spend a lot of time these days developing ways of ‘testing’ potential employees. Technology does have a part to play in assessing candidiates for jobs, not least because it comprises an attempt to move beyond stereoypical and unfair assumptions. But to work to greatest effect technologically-led assessment must be considered carefully, and with due acknowledgement of the difficulties of ‘proving’ it is meaningful. If educators made the same deterministic (and dubious) assumptions as some human resource managers, there would be far less call for educational services.
Like everything else in our brave new technological world, ‘human resourcing’ has been re-branded as a science.
In many ways, this is to be applauded. Anything which moves us on from the old-style way of ‘jobs for the boys’ has to be an improvement. But in at least one respect it’s worrying.
New-style appointment procedures
Many appointment procedures now begin with an application form which asks questions about how the propective employee has tackled a variety of challenges, followed by ‘assessment’ at a ‘centre’. And only after all that does a real human being perhaps deign to conduct a personal conversation or interview with candidates about the post in question.
So, once the standard information has been recorded, the initial application form in these cases often states that in one way or another that ‘past experience is the best indicator of future performance’. This is generally the prelude to a requirement that the applicant gives ‘brief’ accounts of how he or she dealt with a difficult situation, resolved a dilemma or took a fractious group of people to some sort of resolution of their problems.
Real scenarios, or imagined?
Wonderful. Presumably in every case the job the applicant is going for requires a vivid imagination? Because the only sure thing we can learn from such accounts is that people are good – or not – at writing (very) short stories. These may indeed be stories related to the skills and scenarios of the post in question, but they are hardly testable against hard evidence.
Degree certificates may not tell us much, but they do confirm that a job applicant’s claim to be a graduate (or whatever) is genuine. Such genuineness cannot be established for these ‘mini stories’. Of course many people do tell the truth when they give accounts of their past actions; but it’s a certainty that not all of them will be doing so.
Thus we are confronted by a situation in which those who stick firmly to the truth (as they understand it) are likely to be competing against others who are not so fussy about such matters… or who simply have convenient memories. In this context, what useful value can anyone put on the assumption that person’s future actions will follow from their reported history?
Assessing what?
Then there’s the second stage of the selection process. For some posts it is fair enough to ask the candidate to perform tasks like the one s/he aspires to in the job on offer. If you say you can type forty words a minute, then here’s your chance to demonstrate that. If you claim to be able to work with spreadsheets, please go ahead and show you can.
But some tasks, especially at more senior levels, require careful and balanced judgement. They are about bringing experience and human insight to bear on difficult situations. They require a wide grasp of the influencing factors and a steadfastness in terms of dealing with people.
I.Q. tests by another name?
In such tasks there is little reason to suppose, as increasingly is assumed, that non-contextualised ‘verbal reasoning’ tests and the like will take us very far. An untitled poorly written paragraph of general assertions such as often appears as part of these ‘tests’, giving no indication of who wrote it, or for whom, makes little sense to those who know that all real-world interaction takes place in the context of unarticulated as well as formal intentions. This real-life exerience makes it pretty problematic to answer stark multiple choice (i.e. non-discursive, computer-markable) questions about what such paragraphs supposed to ‘mean’.
Perhaps there’s an irony, given the observations above, in the likelihood that only those without much imagination may be comfortable responding to such mechanistic examination.
The validity of I.Q. (Intelligence Quotient) tests has been under challenge for a full half century now; and the British ’11 Plus’ examination – in some respects a precursor of these types of mechanistic tets – is rightly history, discredited and still a cause of great distress to many whom it so cruelly labelled unsuitable for more academic or rigourous secondary education.
The clash between the premises of education and those of candidiate selection
Checking out the general abilitiies of people going for particular jobs is a sensible idea. Myers Briggs tests, for instance, give a useful – though not infallable – indication of how a person might approach given situations, thus helping everyone (including the candidate) to assess whether s/he is ‘right for the job’.
This, however, is a long way from the claim that what’s happened in the past is a good indicator of a perons’s future behaviour and capability. Indeed, those of us who have worked in adult (and perhaps even children’s) education would be out of business entirely if everyone believed this to be so.
Of course past experience helps to mould future behaviour; but much more important, given a general level of aptitude and attitude, is the opportunity which presents, or does not present, to learn and develop.
How do they know?
It’s a question which I’ve asked before, but it still seems reasonable: How do the decision-makers actually know that their way of doing things selects the best applicants? And the answer is, unless they’ve followed up those who weren’t successful, and compared them (using fully valid criteria) with those who were, they cannot know for sure.
The human resource specialists and assessment centre gurus may be covering their backs and keeping some employers happy whilst they’re at it. And no doubt some do a very good job. But it still seems indefensible to claim that they really know what potential employees are ‘like’ on the basis of their new-style forms and some of the tests which have been devised for selection.
Those of us who have more belief in the capacity of people to grow and learn might fear the new ‘science’ of human resourcing sometimes gets dangerously close to the dismally deterministic ways of the discredited ‘educationalists’ of yore.
Frankly, were I a prospective employer, I’d expect more for my human resource investment than that.
Fire, Ice, Frost And Comets – A Lesson In Learning?
How we learn is always more complicated than we might imagine. The evocation of ‘fire and ice’ by both poet Robert Frost and, much later, NASA scientist Donald Brownlee, is an example to hand. Science and the arts alike depend for their impact ultimately on imagination and creativity, as well as rigour and formal insights.
Many years ago I was an American Field Service International Scholar, spending my senior high school year in Phoenix Arizona. This was a very ‘different’ experience to any I had had before or since, meeting an enormous range of people not normally encountered in suburban Birmingham England, my family home town at the time.
One of the enormous number of things I learned in Phoenix was the vast variety of interests to be found in a large American high school. And, drilling down from this, I came across a group of enthusiastic young people who Actually Read Poetry – and especially the poetry of Robert Frost, who was born on 26 March 1874 and died in 1963, not that long before I went to the States….. In a way we were perhaps a prototype Dead Poets Society, but with no sting in the tail.
A direct voice
Then a student of science, my knowledge of poetry at the time was (and sadly remains) pretty modest, but Robert Frost’s poems fascinated me. They are direct and elemental – qualities I do not enjoy in American classical music – but also somehow quizzical, which made them very challenging in a gentle sort of way; I was never sure quite what, apart from the pastoral or earthy images, they intended to evoke. And this was especially true of Frost’s Fire and Ice, which I learnt off by heart, and can indeed still quote:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
I subsequently discovered that there has been a huge amount of academic and also – engagingly – popular commentary on this poem, but at that time it simply drew me into a world away from the everyday, somewhere unknown and mysterious.
Where science meets art
Given the impression Fire and Ice had on me all those years ago, I was rather startled to read the BBC News online a few days ago, reporting Dr. Donald Brownlee, as chief scientist of the Nasa Stardust mission, on evidence that comets are ‘born of fire as well as ice’.
Immediately I was transported from a murky March day in Liverpool, back some decades past to the excitement of a group of young people in a sunny classroom in Phoenix Arizona, all seeking to understand the meanings, metaphorical and material, of the complex new world into which we were about to emerge as adults.
Frost had written of fire and ice as the future destruction of world; Brownlee spoke of the birth millennia ago of physical pieces of the universe; but the elements they referred to were the same. It seems fleetingly that we are back to the phlogiston philosophers, those earlier seekers after truth, but with an up-to-the-minute twist.
All ideas are creative
Here are modern observers interpreting their experience according to their different professional disciplines, each of them evoking, for me at any rate, striking and thought-provoking images. We all carry our own paradigms as the backdrop to our understandings, but explanations are worth little without imagination to bring them alive.
I may well have been studying science when I was in the States, but Robert Frost’s poems stayed with me at least as strongly as any of the factual lessons I learned.
It would be untrue to say the science left me icy, and the poetry set my imagination on fire. But without doubt in both instances the elemental images have been retained far more strongly than the formal educational input.
Let’s Celebrate International Women’s Day, Today (8th March 2006)
International Women’s Day is not a huge occasion for most people; but maybe it could be if we all grasped this annual opportunity to examine and where possible to celebrate, on a year-on-year basis, what progress has been made in gender equality. A start could be made, Monday Women decided, by ensuring we learn Herstory alongside His.
How does one ‘celebrate’ International Women’s Day? And, indeed, should one? This was one of the topics discussed by Monday Women in Liverpool, today.
Given that women make up over 50% of the population of the UK, I suppose I shall be impressed when we are also invited to celebrate International Men’s Day… but I do know, really, that this misses the point at least for now.
Anyway, we all do what we can. One year we even managed to produce a chamber concert including previously unheard music by the composer, Dame Ethel Smyth (who probably wrote the music around the very time when first glimmers of the idea of IWD came into being, not that far from where she was studying in central Europe). And on many occasions there have been conferences, readings and much else to recognise the parts women play in contemporary society.
Not a big issue for women or men?
But generally people don’t get very excited about International Women’s Day, as far as I can see. I wish they would. It would be excellent if, on this day, we not only celebrated the contributions of many thousands of unseen, unheard women in our local communities, but also began to ask, really seriously, just why are they so unacknowledged?
There’s a lead story in The Independent today about how campaigners say that unless urgent action is taken on the status of women, the Millennium Development Goals on reducing poverty, infant deaths and standards of education will not be met… but The Indy also reports that only one in four British women counts herself a feminist.
For those of us who have worked over many years to seek empowerment of women alongside men this is in some respects a truly puzzling and disappointing figure; but against it we need to ask what proportion of women in previous generations would taken this label. My guess, overall, is fewer than we imagine, despite Rosie the Riveter and all she taught us.
Herstory…
So let’s make a start by being a bit more realistic. If young people don’t know much about how things were (and how many young people actually want to look backwards at that point in their lives?) they will also not know about how things have changed. We more experienced feminists need to work from what is – i.e. an ahistoric perspective in which all that is wrong now actually seems to younger people to be ‘worse’ than what was before – and to find ways of challenging that strategically, not personally.
Rather than feeling upset that what we have worked for is not understood – upsetting though in my heart I must admit this is – those of us who champion gender equality need to find ways of ensuring that HERstory is told, to everyone, alongside HIStory. Then we shall be able to demonstrate what has already been achieved and, critically, to see more clearly where the obstacles to further progress lie.
Whose responsibility?
In curriculum terms, responsibility for herstory obviously lies with the schools and the government. But in other ways it lies with us all. I would like to see a focus on International Women’s Day 2007 on what each aspect of our daily lives has offered over the past year in terms of opportunities and life experience for women and men. Could this be a challenge for the media, and for us all? An agenda we could start to set now, for next year and all the years which follow?
In the meantime, Monday Women have said it already today on our e-group – have a great day!
World Book Day (2nd March 2006)
World Book Day is being celebrated today. It’s an occasion to appreciate bedtime stories and learned journals alike. Even in this technological era there is a place in our everyday experience for books which no other medium can fill…. just try organising your bookshelves to see how true this attachment is, and how early in our lives it begins.
It’s World Book Day today, and by a strange co-incidence in this house we spent quite a bit of it putting up new bookshelves in the hall – the only place left anywhere to park more books.
The decision to re-organise several boxes of books had nothing to do with today’s more organised focus elsewhere, but it brought home to me just in how many ways we all use books in our daily lives. Of course books tell us things, they help us to learn and to retain knowledge, and they offer entertainment and amusement; but they are also mementos of our lives.
Books as the biography of their owners
Re-arranging my books, I thought how they had been acquired, and what impact they have had on me. My C. P. Snow Strangers and Brothers series takes me back to when I was still a student, as they opened my eyes to a world of ‘corridors of power’ that I didn’t until then even know existed. Then there are the many books now back on view in our hall which attest to my academic and teaching years, ranging from the early writings on community, gender and health studies through to texts on the sociology and politics of science and knowledge. And side by side with these are those lovely books on European cities, each with their personal memories of summer days relaxing in the sun, and summer evenings listening to music and watching the stars.
Books as the biography of childhood
Then we can add to these adult memories, though still packed away in a cupboard but perhaps to claim their rightful place in a new home somewhere in the future, those children’s books we couldn’t bear to part with when ‘the family’ grew up and left. (I was delighted to discover recently that The Very Hungry Caterpillar is still a firm hit with the under-fives…. just as Winnie the Pooh and Toad of Toad Hall will never be forgotten.)
Legacies and futures
We rarely forget what we grew up with. There are moves afoot, both now via World Book Day, and through programme such as Sure Start’s ‘Book Start’, to ensure that every child in Britain has books of their own before they begin school.
We look back on our personal libraries, however particular, and remember and refer. Events such as World Book Day will help to ensure that, even in this technological age, the citizens of the future will also be able to hold memories and ideas in solid form.
Wasn’t there a saying somewhere (?the Jesuits) to the effect of, ‘Give me a child until (s)he’s seven, and I will show you the (wo)man…’? The earlier in childhood we start to know about books as the repositories of ideas and histories, the more we are able to share and extend these as we grow older.
Read more articles:
Communicating
No-Win Or Win-Win Gender And Babies Agenda?
Choosing if and when to have a baby has never been an easy decision, especially if both partners want to continue in employment. But the debate has shifted quite a lot in the past few years, and perhaps now a deeper understanding is emerging of what ‘work-life balance’ is really about.
Actually, of course, some folk would say it’s all-win for some, and never-win for others; but we do know, really, it’s not like that.
The question does however have to be asked, how can you get it right, if you’re a woman and a mum and a person who wants to make her way in the world?
History or Herstory?
Fact is, for the past fifty years it’s been even more complicated than for the years before then. Whatever is thought by those with shorter memories, the time from the end of World War II (1945) until the end of the sixties, and well into the seventies, was dreadful for women wanting to maintain their families and their careers.
The landmark equality legislation of the 1970’s certainly changed things for the better… but even I found myself in a situation, when ‘the family’ arrived, of having to resign my full-time post and then apply again for my job, as a part-timer. Maternity leave had never been taken by anyone at the college where I then taught, and anyway it was a mere four weeks or bust (which even after resigning was not much less than what I had, before I went back as a part-timer).
Strange then how, during WWII (I report here from the history books, not personal recollection), there was all sorts of support for ‘working women’, so it could be done when the will was there. But at that time of course, sadly, the men actually weren’t ‘there’ as well….
Improved, but still problematic
So I don’t go at all with the idea of some young women today that ‘it’s harder now than it was for our mums’ – who, it is I gather supposed, just had to work for ‘pin-money’, or else stayed at home supported by a bread-winning spouse who could earn for the family; for most of us I suspect that only happened on The Archers.
Nor of course do I believe that 1939-1945, with all its horrors, was a time when women always thrived. But classic films such as Rosie the Riveter (about a group of female engineering production workers in New York in the ’40s) demonstrate well the capability and willingness of women to take on ‘men’s jobs’ when they have to.
And nearer to home, I discovered in my own research in the 1970s that women who had entered academic science during the 1940s had a better chance of professional progression than younger ones, who had to compete with the men.
Complex judgements and issues
No, the issues now more complex than they were either when the need for skilled workers required women to take the job on, or indeed when the campaigns for basic rights (oh heady days!) were still to be won.
It’s rare for anyone today to announce their outright hostility to women – though there are many serious and shocking stories still to be told. The formal legal battles, if not the wage-related ones, have been quite largely secured. It’s beginning at last to cost those who don’t grasp equality a lot of money.
But that doesn’t resolve everything. We read daily of ‘reasons’ why women ‘should’ only have their children in a very narrow age-slot; and why they ‘must’ keep close physical contact with their babies for a considerable time. On a personal level these are harder things to deal with, than is straightforward sexist write-off. Psychological pressures can cause real personal pain; for fair-minded people sexism just causes anger.
Where’s the truth?
I don’t think there is a single truth in all this – except that no way is it ‘just’ a ‘women’s dilemma’. Whoever heard of a baby that didn’t have a dad somewhere along the line?
My recollection is that these psychological influences on decisions about having a family were always there, lurking in the scenes; but in previous decades we’ve had to concentrate on rights as such. Now young women (and their partners) have to make personal judgements, because genuine choice does at least to some extent exist.
It was never, ever, easy. But perhaps if real choices start to be made by women and men together, the climate might begin to change so that at least most folk understand and respect the dilemmas and decisions we all have to make, when we bring (or decide not to bring) babies into the world.
The expression ‘work-life balance‘ could be about to become genuinely meaningful at last.
A version of this article was first published in Diverse Liverpool: the gender issue, in March 2006, pp. 113-115.
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