As you know, Bath University is daft
Widdecombe
PART of the process of learning is to recognise what you do not know and if you never admit to ignorance then you will never learn. Yet some daft academics at Bath University have recommended that their colleagues drop the phrase “as you know” from their lectures in case they demoralise students who do not know.
The phrase “as you know” has several functions and we probably all use it a lot of the time. It can reinforce an argument and appeal to common sense: wrap up well tonight, dear. As you know, snow is forecast. Or it can acknowledge that one is stating the obvious as a prelude to something less obvious: as you know, Trump tweets all the time but have you noticed that he has never mentioned X, Y or Z?
In academic lectures, the second of those uses is commonplace and if a student does not know something that the tutor assumes he or she does then that should act as a wake-up call – as should any passing reference to a poet, inventor or physicist of whom the student has not previously heard.
The healthy reaction is: “I must go and look that up, widen my reading and find out more.” That, after all, is what university is about: learning.
HOWEVER what is really worrying about the Bath lunacy is that it seeks to cosset students against life at exactly the age when they should be learning to cope with its caprice and unfairness, when away from home and released from school, they should be finding their feet and learning how to stand on them.
Nobody can expect to get through normal human existence without being made to feel stupid occasionally and the earlier one learns how to cope the better. Similarly, nobody is going to coast through employment without a rebuke or a challenge and nobody is going to make friends through feeling offended by different views.
One of the great joys of university is emerging from the experience of a school where you were all being taught the same material in the same way to find that others have far outstripped you in scope and detail, to which the reaction of the intellectually curious is “Yay! This is what I should be doing!” Any other approach virtually guarantees failure.
As all sensible people know. NICKY MORGAN, the Remain MP who chairs a House of Commons Select Committee, has criticised the Prime Minister for a Cabinet composed mainly of men.
She chairs the Treasury Select Committee so it is worrying that she cannot do elementary statistical analysis. Out of 650 MPs, 208 are LONGLEAT Safari Park is to have koalas and I will be first in the queue to gawp! One of my favourite photos is of me with one of the creatures in Australia, where I cuddled a large mother koala with a tiny baby running all over her. She just sat in my arms, unfazed, chewing her eucalyptus leaf in the Cohunu Park.
The chap who ran it, Dino, presented me with a huge toy koala, which was too big for my hand luggage. It was a ministerial visit to look at Australian prisons and that country’s visa system and I was therefore coming back through VIP procedures – with the koala causing much amusement.
I called it Dino Dinkum and I have it to this day. But I would love to see a real one again. women or 32 per cent. Of the 29 MPs who sit round the Cabinet table nine are women or 31 per cent so the Cabinet reflects the make-up of Parliament.
Better still, the percentage of women in Cabinet far exceeds the percentage in the Conservative parliamentary party (21 per cent) so what OKAY, I do wish Meghan Markle’s father would keep his mouth shut and stop embarrassing his daughter. But equally it is wrong that Prince Harry has not yet met him and that he hasn’t seen his daughter for so long. Old man Markle may be a bit unconventional by royal standards – indeed by many standards – but he is still Meghan’s father and the couple’s negligence towards him is beginning to look not only unkind but snobby too.
THE FACTS IN THE COMMONS DON’T ADD UP FOR MOANING MINNIE MORGAN
exactly is Moaning Minnie Morgan’s beef? Anyway what does it matter? Who cares if the entire Cabinet is male or indeed female?
All that should count is ability not gender, age, sexual orientation or ethnic origin. Just ability. And thank heavens for a Prime Minister who has the sense to recognise that.