A barrier or bridge? Serious problems revealed in the UK citizenship test

Thom Brooks has examined the UK citizenship test and finds that it is highly irrelevant to living in this society, has many inconsistencies, and suffers from serious gender imbalance. To make matters worse, changes to the test this year have transformed it from being a practical trivia quiz to being purely trivial. Greater care needs to be taken to ensure balance and consistency, and it is worth reconsidering the purpose of the test

Be Careful What You Wish For: Popular Music in an Age in Which “Information Wants to be Free”

This article posits that the widespread adoption of music recording files as the “preferred” form for the storage, retrieval, and dissemination of music is not, and never has been driven by users/listeners; that this is an oversimplified understanding of what has happened since roughly the turn of the century. Instead, the article makes the historically-based argument that what has happened has been driven by the industry side of the equation – even in the face of what is, again, an oversimplified understanding: that the record industry has undeniably suffered and contracted in size and revenue as a result of the digital turn. The overarching significance of this argument is an attempt to bring some much needed perspective to the many analyses of what has been going on in the realm of popular music and the music industry, and to suggest what the consequence of this state of affairs might mean for the future of both the music and its industry

Historical Vignette-- Mettray

In 1840, near Tours, France, jurist Frederick Auguste Demetz founded Mettray, a family substitute institution for juveniles. Before opening Mettray, “Demetz trained 27 assistants for. . .seven months.” (Eriksson, T. [1976]. The Reformers: An Historical Survey of Pioneer Experiments in the Treatment of Criminals. New York: Elsevier, 1976, p. 102). The institution was known as a school and employed teachers. Its curriculum consisted of “religion, philosophy, physics, chemistry, mathematics, French, Latin, Greek, German, English, writing, book-keeping, drawing, and music. . .” (Eriksson, 1976, p. 122). Mettray students were “from more or less wealthy social backgrounds,” and they “left it reformed” (Eriksson, 1976, p. 123). In France, reforms in juvenile facilities took center stage around 1900. By that time Mettray had become almost military. . .the institutional population consisted of 325 boys sentenced for crimes, 99 who had been remanded for reformative Treatment (correction paternelle), and 25 who had been handed over . . . by affluent parents. . . .Each week the ‘families’ [groups of prisoners were assigned to a housing unit with a teacher(s) and called a family] had a good conduct competition, the winner being the one with the fewest penalties. The reward was an extra meal with meat and the best placing at institutional festivities. Fourteen different trades could be practiced, but the majority of pupils (a total of 253) did farm work. (Eriksson, 1976, p. 123). Mettray closed in 1937. During its early years it had been the innovative French juvenile institution. Later Mettray had become “the focus of increasingly bitter public criticism.” (Eriksson, 1976, p. 128)