Current and former members of the military are among the most tattooed members of American society, with 36 percent having at least one, according to a recent Fox News poll:
One of the few groups more likely than members of the military to have a tattoo is young women. Among women under 35, 47 percent have been tattooed, compared with 25 percent of men in that age group. Over all, one in five American voters has at least one tattoo, and more than half of that group has two or more.
The infantryman is always more tired than the cavalryman, Colonel Ardant Du Picq reminds us:
His morale is therefore harder to keep up.
Fred Reed broods on the pursuit of racial amity:
Pondering the smoking ruins of American racial policy, I wonder whether it isn’t time to say publicly what many, if not most, of both races know: It isn’t working. It isn’t going to work. If it were, it would have. If it were working, we would not need the unending laws to force the races together when they don’t want to be together. If people wanted diversity, it would happen without compulsion..
The hope that black and white would mingle amicably if only segregation were dismantled relied on a peculiarly American inattention to life and history, and on a belief that people will behave as we want them to, instead of how they observably do behave. Human nature remains human nature, no matter how hard one holds one’s breath and turns blue.
It is not an easy thing that we try to do. Frequently, far smaller disparities than those between black and white lead to bloody conflict. Catholics and Protestants, Shia and Sunni, Jew and Christian are often virtually indistinguishable, yet share a history of internecine butchery of each other. Is there anywhere an example of two groups so large and utterly different as blacks and whites successfully merging?
Despite our best imaginings, race is far more than skin deep. The races differ wildly in culture, appearance, attitudes, views of each other, language, musical taste, dress, attitudes toward law, education, family, and the role of government.
What if it isn’t working because it can’t?, he asks:
Whites have no more desire to be black than blacks do to be white. This attachment of each race to its culture impossibilizes assimilation.
Things can seem to be working better than they are. Most whites see only bleached blacks, those in business clothes speaking perfect English on television. Few see the huge black urban ghettoes, hermetically isolated from the rest of the country. You can spend eight hours in these regions in a police car—I have, many times—and never see a Caucasian face. The ghettoes amount to a different country, a different civilization, in distributed enclaves. Assimilation before the heat death of the sun isn’t going to happen.
If you look at what people do instead of what they say, you will note that the races do not want to associate, and indeed don’t much like each other. For example in Washington, where I lived for many years, the races coexisted in compulsory amity at work but then went to separate neighborhoods, bars, and restaurants. When blacks wearied of the (black, actually) violence of the city, they moved to Prince Georges County in Maryland, heavily black; whites went to Fairfax Country, Virginia, almost all white. Black kids in white universities want black-only fraternities and living quarters. When whites threaten by gentrification to become a majority in black regions, like Washington itself, blacks hate it.
Robert Peal describes the madness of PSHE — Personal, Social and Health Education:
From teenage pregnancy to cyber-bullying, PSHE teachers are expected to teach away an ever-increasing list of society’s ills.
However, these high hopes for PSHE lessons fatally misunderstand how young minds work. As anyone who has tried to reason with a teenager knows, you cannot rationally teach ‘values’. You have to instil them. Values are transmitted culturally, by placing a youngster in an environment that encourages their cultivation. Our school environment is, to be blunt, one that cultivates laziness, anti-academia, reliance on teachers, disrespect and bad manners. The year sevens who arrived in the school in September were, for the most part, polite little angels. But they are already taking on the mores of their environment, and rudeness is replacing politeness, laziness replacing hard work. Our school makes pupils worse.
In an age of moral relativism, schools have become scared of actively promoting virtues. Instead, they treat pupils as perfectly rational creatures who only need to be educated on matters to ensure they make the right decisions. Thus, we teach lessons on the health dangers of cannabis, but turn a blind eye when pupils come into lessons visibly stoned. We teach lessons on the need to foster a good work ethic, but passively tolerate lazy, disengaged behaviour in the classroom.
Humans are not rational, and virtues (or as they are more commonly known, values) cannot be taught. Instead, they are developed through our cultural surroundings. What Aristotle wrote two millennia ago about virtue ethics is still relevant to schools today: ‘we acquire virtues by first having put them into practice.’
Colonel Ardant Du Picq describes the American use of cavalry in the Civil War:
The Americans in their vast country where there is unlimited room, used cavalry wisely in sending it off on distant forays to cut communications, make levies, etc. What their cavalry did as an arm in battle is unknown. The cavalry raids in the American war were part of a war directed against wealth, against public works, against resources. It was war of destruction of riches, not of men. The raiding cavalry had few losses, and inflicted few losses. The cavalry is always the aristocratic arm which loses very lightly, even if it risks all. At least it has the air of risking all, which is something at any rate. It has to have daring and daring is not so common. But the merest infantry engagements in equal numbers costs more than the most brilliant cavalry raid.
The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) teaches — and grades — character:
Inspired by the field of positive psychology, character education at KIPP focuses on seven character strengths—grit, zest, self-control, optimism, gratitude, social intelligence, and curiosity. These seven strengths are presented as positive predictors of success in “college and life.” Grit, for example—a term Angela Duckworth used to mean “perseverance and passion for long-term goals”—has been shown to correlate with grade point averages and graduation rates. Levin envisions that character education will be woven into “the DNA” of KIPP’s classrooms and schools, especially via “dual purpose” instruction that is intended to explicitly teach both academic and character aims.
There are three major problems with the new character education. The first is that we do not know how to teach character. The second is that character-based education is untethered from any conception of morality. And lastly, this mode of education drastically constricts the overall purpose of education.
Jeffrey Aaron Snyder’s first complaint is that there may be an increasingly cogent science of character, but there’s not science of teaching character — which may be true, but we’ve been unscientifically teaching character for centuries, up until the past few decades, when character fell out of fashion.
The second problem with this new character education is that it promotes an “amoral” and “careerist” form of character:
Never before has character education been so completely untethered from morals, values, and ethics. From the inception of our public school system in the 1840s and 1850s, character education has revolved around religious and civic virtues. Steeped in Protestantism and republicanism, the key virtues taught during the nineteenth-century were piety, industry, kindness, honesty, thrift, and patriotism. During the Progressive era, character education concentrated on the twin ideas of citizenship and the “common good.” As an influential 1918 report on “moral values” put it, character education “makes for a better America by helping its pupils to make themselves better persons.” In the 1960s and 1970s, meanwhile, character education focused on justice and working through thorny moral dilemmas.
Today’s grit and self-control are basically industry and temperance in the guise of psychological constructs rather than moral imperatives. Why is this distinction important? While it takes grit and self-control to be a successful heart surgeon, the same could be said about a suicide bomber. When your character education scheme fails to distinguish between doctors and terrorists, heroes and villains, it would appear to have a basic flaw. Following the KIPP growth card protocol, Bernie Madoff’s character point average, for instance, would be stellar. He was, by most accounts, an extremely hard working, charming, wildly optimistic man.
[...]
The decision to avoid overt references to values was no doubt intended to avoid the potential minefields of the “culture wars.” The trouble is that values have a way of intruding on territory that is meant to be value-free. What happens when your list of character strengths excludes empathy, justice, and service? The basic principle of individual achievement rushes to the forefront, as if filling a vacuum. This is “tiger mother” territory here — a place where the “vulgar sense” of success prevails. Life is narrowed into an endless competition for money, status, and the next merit badge.
I don’t think the KIPP schools are targeting the “tiger mother” demographic. As Steve Sailer points out, “KIPP is intended to counteract the morally disastrous culture propagated by hip-hop.”
The third and final problem with the new character education, according to Snyder, is that it limits the purposes of education to preparation for college and career:
If you click on the video at the top of the “Character” page on the KIPP website, you can watch a poignant clip of a parent describing how she wants her kids “to succeed” and to “have a better life.” KIPP and other similar schools are betting that the new character education will help students succeed academically and professionally. It is a risky bet, given how little we know about teaching character. It is also a bet without precedent, as there has never been a character education program so relentlessly focused on individual achievement and “objective accomplishments.” Gone are any traditional concerns with good and evil or citizenship and the commonweal. Gone, too, the impetus to bring youngsters into the fold of a community that is larger than themselves — a hopelessly outdated sentiment, according to the new character education evangelists. Virtue is no longer its own reward.
Jeffrey Aaron Snyder is an assistant professor in the department of educational studies at Carleton College — a world apart from inner-city schools.
The utility of cavalry has always been doubted, Colonel Ardant Du Picq notes:
That is because its cost is high. It is little used, just because it does cost. The question of economy is vital in peace times. When we set a high value upon certain men, they are not slow to follow suit, and to guard themselves against being broken. Look at staff officers who are almost never broken (reduced), even when their general himself is.
[...]
With the power of modern weapons, which forces you to slow down if it does not stop you, the advance under fire becomes almost impossible. The advantage is with the defensive. This is so evident that only a madman could dispute it. What then is to be done? Halt, to shoot at random and cannonade at long range until ammunition is exhausted? Perhaps. But what is sure, is that such a state of affairs makes maneuver necessary. There is more need than ever for maneuver at a long distance in an attempt to force the enemy to shift, to quit his position. What maneuver is swifter than that of cavalry? Therein is its role.
The extreme perfection of weapons permits only individual action in combat, that is action by scattered forces. At the same time it permits the effective employment of mass action out of range, of maneuvers on the flank or in the rear of the enemy in force imposing enough to frighten him.
Can the cavalry maneuver on the battle field? Why not? It can maneuver rapidly, and above all beyond the range of infantry fire, if not of artillery fire. Maneuver being a threat, of great moral effect, the cavalry general who knows how to use it, can contribute largely to success. He arrests the enemy in movement, doubtful as to what the cavalry is going to attempt. He makes the enemy take some formation that keeps him under artillery fire for a while, above all that of light artillery if the general knows how to use it. He increases the enemy’s demoralization and thus is able to rejoin his command.
Rifled cannon and accurate rifles do not change cavalry tactics at all. These weapons of precision, as the word precision indicates, are effective only when all battle conditions, all conditions of aiming, are ideal. If the necessary condition of suitable range is lacking, effect is lacking. Accuracy of fire at a distance is impossible against a troop in movement, and movement is the essence of cavalry action. Rifled weapons fire on them of course, but they fire on everybody.
In short, cavalry is in the same situation as anybody else.
What response is there to this argument? Since weapons have been improved, does not the infantryman have to march under fire to attack a position? Is the cavalryman not of the same flesh? Has he less heart than the infantryman? If one can march under fire, cannot the other gallop under it?
When the cavalryman cannot gallop under fire, the infantryman cannot march under it. Battles will consist of exchanges of rifle shots by concealed men, at long range. The battle will end only when the ammunition is exhausted.
The cavalryman gallops through danger, the infantryman walks. That is why, if he learns, as it is probable he will, to keep at the proper distance, the cavalryman will never see his battle rôle diminished by the perfection of long range fire. An infantryman will never succeed by himself. The cavalryman will threaten, create diversions, worry, scatter the enemy’s fire, often even get to close quarters if he is properly supported. The infantryman will act as usual. But more than ever will he need the aid of cavalry in the attack. He who knows how to use his cavalry with audacity will inevitably be the victor. Even though the cavalryman offers a larger target, long range weapons will paralyze him no more than another.
Wishful thinking?
John All fell 70′ down into a crevasse in the Himalayas and survived. He then recorded a video diary of his slow, painful escape:
A couple years ago, Professor All answered the question, why does everyone climb Everest in May?
It comes down to snow, temperature, and wind. “Mount Everest protrudes into the stratosphere, and most of the year the summit is buffeted by winds of over 100 miles per hour that will kill a climber in minutes or even hurtle them into the void,” All told Popular Mechanics. “It is only during the onset or cession of the Asian Monsoon that these winds die down and allow climbers short seven- to 10-day windows to climb the mountain.”
The highest recorded wind speed at the summit was a 175 mph in February 2004. For reference, a Category 5 hurricane has sustained wind speeds of at least 157 mph. Throughout the winter, hurricane-force winds pummel the summit for three days out of four.
The two windows in which those wild winds die down happen in May and September. But snow falls during the September calm, so fresh snow drifts offset the break from the wind. That’s why so many people try the ascent in May, All says.
Game of Thrones fans will be excused if they mistake Randall Carlson for George R.R. Martin, as he explains (starting at 32:23) what Winter was like when it came:
The theory of strong battalions is a shameful theory, Colonel Ardant Du Picq argues:
To-day, numbers are considered the essential. Napoleon had this tendency (note his strength reports). The Romans did not pay so much attention to it. What they paid most attention to was to seeing that everybody fought. We assume that all the personnel present with an army, with a division, with a regiment on the day of battle, fights. Right there is the error.
The theory of strong battalions is a shameful theory. It does not reckon on courage but on the amount of human flesh. It is a reflection on the soul. Great and small orators, all who speak of military matters to-day, talk only of masses. War is waged by enormous masses, etc. In the masses, man as an individual disappears, the number only is seen. Quality is forgotten, and yet to-day as always, quality alone produces real effect. The Prussians conquered at Sadowa with made soldiers, united, accustomed to discipline. Such soldiers can be made in three or four years now, for the material training of the soldier is not indeed so difficult.
Caesar had legions that he found unseasoned, not yet dependable, which had been formed for nine years.
Austria was beaten because her troops were of poor quality, because they were conscripts.
Our projected organization will give us four hundred thousand good soldiers. But all our reserves will be without cohesion, if they are thrown into this or that organization on the eve of battle. At a distance, numbers of troops without cohesion may be impressive, but close up they are reduced to fifty or twenty-five per cent. who really fight.
Sugru, the magic rubber stuff, has many uses beyond straightforward making, modifying, and mending:
BeanFest is a silly little game that has nothing to do with politics:
It’s a simple learning video game in which the player is presented with a variety of cartoon beans in different shapes and sizes, with different numbers of dots on them. When each new type of bean is presented, the player must choose whether or not to accept it — without knowing, in advance, what will happen. You see, some beans give you points, while others take them away. But you can’t know until you try them.
In a recent experiment by psychologists Russell Fazio and Natalie Shook, a group of self-identified liberals and conservatives played BeanFest. And their strategies of play tended to be quite different. Liberals tried out all sorts of beans. They racked up big point gains as a result, but also big point losses — and they learned a lot about different kinds of beans and what they did. Conservatives, though, tended to play more defensively. They tested out fewer beans. They were risk averse, losing less but also gathering less information.
Liberals and conservatives have different personalities:
Again and again, when they take the widely accepted Big Five personality traits test, liberals tend to score higher on one of the five major dimensions — openness: the desire to explore, to try new things, to meet new people — and conservatives score higher on conscientiousness: the desire for order, structure, and stability.
Conservatives pay more attention to the alarming, the threatening, and the disgusting in life:
In one experiment that captured this, Hibbing and his colleagues showed liberals and conservatives a series of collages, each comprised of a mixture of positive images (cute bunnies, smiling children) and negative ones (wounds, a person eating worms). Test subjects were fitted with eye-tracker devices that measured where they looked, and for how long. The results were stark: conservatives fixed their eyes on the negative images much more rapidly, and dwelled on them much longer, than did the liberals.
Liberals and conservatives, conclude Hibbing et al., “experience and process different worlds.”
Around 40 percent of the variation in political beliefs is genetic:
“Liberalism may thus be viewed as an evolutionary luxury afforded by negative stimuli becoming less prevalent and deadly,” write Hibbing et al.
The moral effect of combat is literally terrible, Colonel Ardant Du Picq reminds us:
A body advances to meet another. The defender has only to remain calm, ready to aim, each man pitted against a man before him. The attacking body comes within deadly range. Whether or not it halts to fire, it will be a target for the other body which awaits it, calm, ready, sure of its effect. The whole first rank of the assailant falls, smashed. The remainder, little encouraged by their reception, disperse automatically or before the least indication of an advance on them. Is this what happens? Not at all! The moral effect of the assault worries the defenders. They fire in the air if at all. They disperse immediately before the assailants who are even encouraged by this fire now that it is over. It quickens them in order to avoid a second salvo.
Lest you forget that this was written by a Frenchman:
It is said by those who fought them in Spain and at Waterloo that the British are capable of the necessary coolness. I doubt it nevertheless. After firing, they made swift attacks. If they had not, they might have fled. Anyhow the English are stolid folks, with little imagination, who try to be logical in all things. The French with their nervous irritability, their lively imagination, are incapable of such a defense.
Some quotes:
“Anybody who thinks that he could stand under a second fire is a man without any idea of battle.”
— Prince de Ligne“Modern history furnishes us with no examples of stonewall troops who can neither be shaken nor driven back, who stand patiently the heaviest fire, yet who retire precipitately when the general orders the retreat.”
— Bismarck
Nigeria is divided into three parts, Gary Brecher (The War Nerd) explains:
The North is a Muslim theocracy dominated by the Hausa and Fulani; the West, where the Yoruba kings (Oba) ruled city-states; and the East, where the Igbo operated on something a lot like ancient Greek assemblies, with every freeborn man entitled to a voice.
There are about 240 other ethnic groups, like the Niger Delta people, the Ijaw. Jonathan Goodluck, the current president—dude with the cool black hat?—he’s an Ijaw. But for most of Nigeria’s history, it’s been a three-sided fight: Yoruba vs. Igbo vs. Hausa-Fulani.
The Yoruba were the first to meet the whites and take up Western education. They dealt with the British town by town; to the Yoruba, your town was more important than the broader ethnic identity. The Igbo came late to British rule but took to education very quickly. The Igbo get called “the Jews of Africa” because they’re good at book-learning and business.
And then there were the Northerners, the Hausa-dominated Muslims of the dry inland territory. In a way, you wouldn’t be far off thinking of the great Nigerian divide in California terms: the coasts vs. the hot inland redneck zone. The North, in Nigerian terms, is usually called “Hausa,” or “Hausa-Fulani,” but it includes the Kanuri of the Northeast, who are the most remote from the coast and the fiercest opponents of anything coastal, Christian, or modern. These were all war-forged Sahel caliphates, with no tradition of local loyalties like the Yoruba, or egalitarianism like the Igbo. They had the traditional Sahel-Muslim organization, top-down all the way: Sultan gives orders to Omda, Omda gives orders to Sheikh, Sheikh gives orders to commoners. And commoners obey.
That style can be adapted to warmer, more moderate people like the Zaghawa, but among the Hausa and Kanuri it was Sultan and Jihad all the way. Even between Muslims, Jihad was the norm, with the Hausa northwest and Kanuri/Fulani Northeast fighting for the caliphate right through the Fulani War in the early 1800s. The wars often started with disgruntled Islamic scholars being kicked out of one sultanate, then declaring jihad against the ruler who booted them. The jihad would usually feed into an ethnic grudge, usually Hausa farmers vs. Fulani herders—the old Cain ’n’ Abel war. But all the jihads and dynastic struggles had one feature in common: It was always total war for control of the whole Western Sahel, with one man on top. That made for a huge cultural gap between the north and the coastal people, the localist Yoruba and the populist Igbo.
The British crushed the Northern caliphates early in the 20th Century, but found that they liked the North best of the three heads this Nigerian monster had. The second sons who were booted out of England to run the colonies always got on best with aristocratic, warlike desert people. They took to the Hausa-Fulani, with their cataphracts and caste system, like they were an unguarded tray of cucumber sandwiches. Most of all, the Empire appreciated the ease with which all of Northern Nigeria could be bought. Thanks to the strict, militarized hierarchy of the North, all the local British agent had to do was buy the Sultan and the whole people would fall into line.
It was a very different matter when they tried to tell the argumentative Igbo and localist Yoruba what to do. If you remember Chinua Achebe’s great novel “Things Fall Apart,” you’ll get an idea of what it was like when the Brits met the Igbo. And in a way, you can get a sense of what the Brit-Yoruba encounter was like from Amos Tutuola’s amazingly weird, cool books: “The Palm Wine Drunkard” and “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.” There weren’t any novels like that from the north, because the North didn’t take to Western education and books. The Hausa had walled off their world from the corrupt coasts. Come to think of it, the Saudis felt the same way; Riyadh was their place, right in the middle of the ugliest desert you ever saw. They called Jeddah, the port city, “decadent”—I swear to God, when I was out there a Saudi cop once said that to me, “Jeddah is decadent.” At the time, I was mainly awed that he knew the English word “decadent” when I was still figuring out whether “Yameen” meant “Go left” or “Go right.” But actually, if you’re a Saudi cop, “decadent” is probably one of the commonest words in your English kit—and it always seemed to be applied to coastal areas. Take Dammam —another coastal region, on the Persian (or Arab) Gulf. To the Wahhabi, Dammam is “decadent” too, full of Shi’ite traitors in the pay of Iran. I wonder if you could argue that extremely conservative theocracies do better in isolated inland areas. It works for the Pashtun, the Saudis’ only rivals. No Pashtun saw the sea til they started moving to Karachi a couple generations ago.
You might think that when the British grabbed Nigeria, they’d force the North to deal with a scary new world, but that’s not what happened. Instead, the British agents, always understaffed and eager to use local proxies, took a look at the Hausa system and, with their usual flexibility, decided they’d rule the North indirectly, through the Sultans. And if those Sultans wanted their realms insulated from outside influences, the British were happy to agree. So while Christian missionaries were embedded in every Yoruba and Igbo town, no Christian missionaries were permitted to operate in the North. No visitors of any kind were encouraged. In return for allegiance to the Crown, the Sultans’ hierarchy was untouched.
That’s why the North was the only part of Nigeria that wanted to stay British. The demand for independence was confined to “the coastal elites,” as they say in Bakersfield. When Nigeria got its independence in 1960, the Igbo and Yoruba were excited and eager. From the North there was only wary silence.
The Igbo and Yoruba started moving out of their traditional areas. Soon there were thousands of Igbo in the Northern cities like Kano and Maiguduri, buy and selling, making the locals feel that they were being played for suckers by these infidels.
The Muslim proletariat dealt with their resentment the way the Russians used to, before the Revolution: pogroms. Every few weeks Hausa mobs would get stirred up by the usual mix of envy and religious paranoia and chop up a few Igbo.
Independent, three-headed Nigeria only lasted seven years before exploding. In 1967, after coup and counter-coup, the Hausa decided, as they always do, that it was all the Igbos’ fault, and launched a huge pogrom, like the ones the Russians launched in 1905, targeting Igbo living in the Northern cities. In a few days, 30,000 Igbo trying to make a living in the North had been panga’d — or beaten or burned to death — and the Igbo had had enough. The survivors fled home, making sure everybody heard their horror stories. On May 30, 1967, Igbo officers declared the Southeast region an independent country to be called Biafra.
Most people don’t remember Biafra now, except as the second name of that spoken-word asshole Jello Biafra. It’s a shame; the Igbo deserve to have their heroic war remembered and honored. But like I said, nobody much cares about African casualties, and when they do, it’s always Africans as helpless victims—never, ever Africans as brave and well-organized armies. I’ve noticed that, over years of doing this column. When Africans are threatening to form a strong, united country, like the Igbo, the Tutsi or the Eritreans, they come in for some weirdly intense hate, and a lot of times it comes from the bloodiest bleeding hearts around. Creeps me out, actually, and I’m not easily crept.
The Igbo had the morale and the technical know-how; the Nigerian Army had the numbers and the weapons and a whole lot of ethnic hate going for them, along with consistent support from Britain and the USSR. The small, badly-supplied Biafran Army smashed the Nigerian Army in most stand-up fights, but thanks to numbers, foreign support and logistics, the Nigerian Army was able to isolate the Igbo in a little enclave of southeastern forest. Then they proceeded to starve the Igbo to death. Not by accident, not as an unfortunate consequence, but as military policy: avoid battle, starve the Igbo civilians to death.
And of course, you know who dies first in a siege: children. By 1970 two million Igbo were dead, nearly all of starvation, and the Southeast was part of Nigeria again.
Two million people. Don’t hear much about them, do you? Nobody minded much.
[...]
The Hausa have ruled Nigeria since 1970. When oil was found in the Niger Delta, far away on the coast, it was Hausa governors and generals who took more than 80% of the profits. Just think Oklahoma: When you’ve got enough religious hysteria going, the locals will reelect you as long as you say the right prayers, loud enough and public enough and often enough, no matter how much you steal and no matter how many people you kill. The Northern Islamists have had things their way, in legal terms; 12 Northern provinces now use Sharia law, which ensures nobody shoplifts more than twice unless they’ve got prehensile toes.
But the North isn’t happy. Boko Haram wants the people of the North to withdraw completely from the tech world. They say it’s all haram: getting the vaccination, studying computers, learning English, working in an office. It’s all part of a big corrosive scheme.
And in a way they’re right. When women start learning to read and write, like they’re doing now in parts of Northern Nigeria, they have a different value in the local economy: higher as potential office workers, lower as docile baby-makers. There’s an excellent survey from back in 1989 showing that parents from the countryside don’t want their daughters getting an education, but city parents are for it.
[...]
In a strange way, Boko Haram’s take on the place of religion in a culture is closer to the truth than the moderate view you get from progressive, urban Islamic intellectuals. There’s something very rigorous about Boko’s view: This is all of a piece, this world of ours, and any change to any part of it will bring the whole thing down. That’s the way it actually does work, and that’s something that’s understood by a lot of sullen, inarticulate conservatives all over the world, from Bakersfield to Kano. That’s what’s behind the rage of the silent majority in every country, the knowledge that new money will reverberate in unexpected directions, and is almost guaranteed to destroy the world you feel comfortable with, even if the changes seem innocent and totally devoid of religious significance. So any change is evil. Not just unveiled women or booze or churches, but all books, all education, and even those women going around vaccinating kids. Strange to think that, in understanding that much at least, the dumb thugs in Boko Haram understand social change better than the professors…or at least better than the professors are willing to say, in public.
And that’s the hope for Achebe’s people, the Igbo, the ones who get burned and chopped and shot to death in the Boko Haram attacks: They win, long-term, as the faster people, the corrosive element. One Igbo politician, Orji Uzor Kalu, said “The Igbo are the salt of Nigeria.” He’s echoing the Bible there, but I’d put it a little differently: The Igbo are the solvent. Boko Haram is a defensive movement, and the Igbo, forced to push out of their half-ruined home territory, have no choice but to move north and squirm their way into the rigid old Sultanates. These small merchants and schoolteachers who migrate north won’t see themselves as agents of change; they’ll have their own agendas. But they’ll bring it down anyway.
The funny thing is, if Biafra hadn’t been crushed, it would be rich now, and would draw migrants. By crushing the Igbo’s country, the Hausa made it inevitable that desperate Igbo would migrate north and start chewing away at the walls of their mud castles.
The discipline problem at Robert Peal’s school is depressingly normal:
A survey last October for the Guardian Teacher Network — hardly a bastion of old-fashioned disciplinarians — found that 40 per cent of teachers complained of being bullied by pupils and, of those who considered quitting, 50 per cent named pupil behaviour as the reason. A 2010 National Union of Teachers (NUT) survey found that 92 per cent of teachers believed pupil behaviour had worsened over the course of their career, and 79 per cent claimed that they were unable to teach effectively because of poor behaviour. During the last school year, 44 teachers were hospitalised with severe injuries from pupil attacks at a five-year high. Perhaps most worryingly of all, a 2008 Policy Exchange report showed that the atrocious reputation of British schools for poor behaviour was the main factor in deterring new graduates from becoming teachers.
Despite the recent arrival of an energetic new head, my school’s results remain stubbornly unimpressive. It is strikingly obvious to me and many of my colleagues that the fundamental impediment to pupils learning is a lack of classroom discipline. However, when I suggested this to a member of senior management at a training session, he winced at the very word “discipline”. “Right,” he said swallowing uncomfortably, “behaviour for learning” — this being the trendy euphemism, modishly abbreviated to B4L, favoured by schools too right-on to use the D-word. How, I wondered to myself, did British education get to a state where discipline is a dirty word?
In an essay on education written in 1961, the political theorist Hannah Arendt foresaw the steady erosion of discipline in Western schools. She wrote: “The problem of education in the modern world lies in the fact that by its very nature it cannot forgo either authority or tradition, and yet must proceed in a world that is neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition.” If this was a problem in 1961, it is a catastrophe in 2012.
Since Arendt wrote her essay, legions of progressive educators have denied the need for authority in schools. The permissive rhetoric of 1960s radicalism was particularly influential among teachers, and their ideological precepts were applied to classroom culture. The undisputed leader of this “progressive” movement in Britain was A.S. Neill, founder of the revolutionary Summerhill School. Neill documented his philosophy in his 1962 book Summerhill, a runaway success which sold more than two million copies. In it he claimed, “I believe that to impose anything by authority is wrong. The child should not do anything until he comes to the opinion — his own opinion — that it should be done.”
After the 1960s, radical educationists who subscribed to this thinking began their long march through the institutions. The idea of child-led learning came to dominate our teacher-training colleges and classrooms. Such thinking claimed that teachers should never coerce pupils to learn against their will, but instead place them in a situation where they can learn for themselves. The favoured description of a teacher’s job changed from “teaching” to “facilitating”. The rhetoric of child-led education was, and still is, extremely seductive, but it has failed to deliver. It is premised upon a fatally misplaced assumption that pupils can be relied upon to know what is best for them. The practical consequence of this utopian thinking has been the consistent fall in standards of British state education.
Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, British comprehensive schools gained their reputation for ill-discipline and low expectations.
It sounds like the problem is… ill-discipline and low expectations.
The paradox which afflicts schools such as mine is that when teachers are relaxed on discipline, discipline becomes their overriding concern. In strict schools where rules are consistently enforced, pupils know the expectations for their behaviour and teachers can focus on teaching. In schools where discipline is relaxed, ensuring good behaviour becomes an all-consuming battle.