The US is far better than I ever expected, even if it does have messed up healthcare, money and road systems
A Brit studying abroad across the pond might not sound that adventurous, but it's been an eye-opening year for me at the University of West Georgia in the much stereotyped US south. Here's the best and worst of what I learned about America:
I'm not very good with numbers, so maybe this didn't help me, but I still cannot understand American coins after living here for 10 months. One of the coins which is larger actually has a lower value than a coin which is smaller (and of the same colour), go figure. "Dimes" and "nickels," still mean nothing to me.
Having said that, you get phenomenal value for money everywhere. Buy a drink which isn't alcoholic (because you're under 21) and you get free unlimited refills at the vast majority of establishments. First few months I was here I kept rejecting refills, presuming they'd show up on the bill, but they never do. You'll also find the portion sizes here are more than generous, taking home meals in "to-go boxes" is commonplace.
Beyond meals, shopping is also generally cheaper in America. Even organic foods are basically on sale.
I paid $687.44 per semester for the mandatory international student health insurance that all internationals must take upon enrolling at my institution. It covered me for the student health centre, a couple of practices outside the campus and one hospital. Republicans say that Britain's National Health Services is evil and doesn't work … try private medical insurers.
When you're not embroiled in a spat with a local hospital as to whether or not your insurance plan covers you for that particular treatment at that particular hospital, the hospitality you receive when visiting American homes is second to none. I have been shown nothing but kindness from Americans, and I've been invited to countless people's homes during the year to spend the weekend with them, rather than being trapped in university dormitories. The TVs are also huge, which makes a day of Netflix after finals a reliable choice.
I don't know about you, but there is nothing better than hearing the same Top 40 songs repeated over and over again. I thought the repetition of songs on Capital FM in the UK was bad enough, but here it's just the same playlist, almost hourly. In the south it's either that or country music stations, choose your poison.
Also, try and get any informed debate from any major national news network in the US, MSNBC will invite on mostly liberals to their shows and come to the conclusion that background checks for gun buyers are a good thing. Fox News will do the exact opposite. CNN doesn't quite have the open debate that I'd like to see. As a result, all politics here is skewed towards spin, not facts. Don't get me started on the one third of every televisual hour being advert breaks, either.
Yes, Intercourse, PA does really exist. There are also some amazing street names, if you fancy living on a student visa in a country in which most streets use any of the following names "Creek", "Lakeview", "Circle", "Way", "Court" and "Drive" then be my guest. I have no issue with the names here, but some of them are a little bizarre, if overly optimistic: "Happy Valley Circle", for instance, in Georgia. The numbering idea for towns and cities is very wise, however, "1st Street", "2nd Street" and so on. I like the system, the names just take a while to adjust to.
The interstate highways are a beautiful system, modelled by President Dwight Eisenhower on the autobahns in Germany, but unfortunately that is where my love for American roads ends. Each junction in America is of increasing complexity, it seems to me, with some angles almost making it impossible to make a turn quickly enough. Road networks here also seem to have either too much information, meaning an information overload three miles before an exit is due, or not enough, and without a GPS you'd be completely stuck.
How can a Brit go abroad and not mention the weather? While Georgia weather is bipolar (it snowed in February, the next day it was 24 celsius, we also had hailstorms during spring break), when it is beautiful, it is stunning. Fortunately, the weather being beautiful accounts for about 70-80% of the year.
Asking for Oregano in any Subway sandwich causes a minor crisis at every outlet I have been to. For some reason, all the syllables from this word are removed, yet one of my host "moms" complains how the Brits drop the ends of words (Buckingham, Birmingham, Manchester, etc), usually, Americans are the ones to extend the vowels, but with oregano, this does not apply at all, clearly. I did once find myself saying to a friend on Skype after three months of being here, "oh, what a beautiful accent you have", I thought that was something only Americans said.
Clumsy sentences are also abound, "Gotten sick" and "Keep off of the grass/rocks/enjoyable water feature" are personal favourites.
America is beautiful. I went travelling out west over the Christmas break and took over 1,000 photos in a week. Even the scenery where the houses are set in Georgia is beautiful. A lot of America is truly stunning. The suburbs are peaceful and quiet, with birdsong and the gentle rustle of wind through the trees as you step out of a car. I've heard California is even nicer, but I really can't imagine how that's possible.
I'm so torn, America is far better than I ever expected, but at the same time I must return to the UK to continue my studies. As much as this country has been great to me, and it really has, the people are just fantastic, I must return to the UK, where no one talks on public transport and where we'll complain when it's too hot and moan when it's too cold, despite packing inappropriate clothing for both occasions. I can't wait, but at the same time I'm leaving a fan of our former colony.
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Motoring can be a dirty business, but Toyota's new Auris Hybrid is doing all it can to keep it clean
Price from £21,745
MPG up to 74.3
Top speed up to 112mph
It's almost a year since the mother of all traffic jams entered the record books – Beijing's 60-mile, 12-day monster. It spawned its own micro economy with food sellers and laundry workers plying the lines of trapped drivers, while the rich abandoned their cars and paid others to sit in their static vehicles.
The jam put into context the paltry three-hour tailback I was stuck in over the bank holiday. We lay on the grass embankment and chatted to our new neighbours about the Ohio kidnappings, the Padstow boat tragedy – and about the sheer waste of resources a standstill jam causes.
Even when flowing sweetly, Britain's roads are voracious. According to Roadclock.com, on any average day, more than 350,000 tonnes of carbon are emitted, 85,000 tyres will be replaced and 100m litres of fuel will be consumed – netting £1,000 per second in duty for the tax man. Start factoring in congestion, rush-hour snarl ups, weekend gridlock, marital friction ("Why on earth did you come this way?") and you start to feel the nauseating strain a jam puts on us.
Which is why, in some small way, I was glad the car I was stuck in was Toyota's Auris Hybrid – an eco car that does almost 75 miles to a gallon with just a nostril caressing whiff of emissions – 85g/km. The ethically pure Auris is as clean as Jay Rayner's dinner plate…
The notion of a green car will, of course, always be oxymoronic. Like false truths, turkey ham or Arsenal trophies, some pairings seem poles apart. But manufacturers are working hard at pulling the opposing ends together. And with its Auris hybrid, Toyota is doing better than most. Thanks to aerodynamic improvements, weight saving, engine readjustments and technological cunning, this Toyota has beaten off the likes of Volkswagen's Golf Bluemotion and BMW's i3 electric supermini to claim the title of Green Car of the Year 2013.
Hybrids, electrics and alternatively fuelled cars have all been hailed as the solution to our motoring ails, but they tend to be over expensive, over complicated and, frankly, over-rated. They're ordinary cars that have been forced into a new template in a vain attempt to capture the green pound. They feel heavy, fragile and unreliable. But they're getting there, and this new Auris is another step forward.
With its 1,798cc, four-cylinder petrol engine plus two electric motor generators, this flagship model is fun, responsive, clever, laughingly easy to control and strikingly good looking. It's a hybrid car I'd happily own. Not because it feels like the latest and best of the current crop, but because it feels like the first of the next.
Over the years, Toyota has built some stultifying cars. But with the likes of the GT86 and now this, the Japanese giant seems determined to regain its place in the world. The new Auris will continue to be made in the UK, at the Burnaston factory in Derbyshire, where the outgoing model is already a top seller for Toyota – one rolls off the production line every 66 seconds.
Compact yet roomy, classy yet affordable, drivable yet green… the Auris is perfect for anyone wanting to occupy slightly less space on our crowded roads.
Email Martin at martin.love@observer.co.uk or visit guardian.co.uk/profile/martinlove for all his reviews in one place
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Throughout history, economic upheaval has destroyed whole industries – and created new ones. But now, some fear automation may mean the death of mass employment
Suddenly a robotised, automated economic reality is moving off the science fiction pages and into daily life. The growing use of unmanned battlefield drones is encouraging the growth of pilotless commercial aircraft – the first ever flew in British airspace last month. Google's driverless car is completing ever more trials ever more successfully: the world's major car companies are all hot in pursuit, working on their own prototypes of their own versions. The automated checkouts at supermarkets are becoming as familiar as bank cash machines. From staff-free ticket offices to students who can learn online, it seems there is no corner of economic life in which people are not being replaced by machines.
This is the "Great Reset" – a cull of broadly middle-class jobs with middle-class incomes that is apparent across the west, but with little current sign of what industries and activities will replace them.
The world has lost millions of jobs before – on the land or in the old horse-powered economy – but they were soon replaced by jobs in the car industry or the new service industries. What worries many economists and computer scientists is that today's technologies are going to remove people from economic activity completely. Some argue that a dystopian world is emerging in which good jobs and full-time employment will become the preserve of an educated, computer-literate elite. For example Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google are plainly riding the new wave, but they are not mass employers like Tesco, Ford or General Motors.
Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University, asks if we are ready for a world in which half the adult population does not work. The Great Reset – the economy resetting itself, after a major technological shock, to deliver jobs for all – may never happen.
The omens are all around. The US economy has never generated so few jobs in an upturn since records began. In Britain, the Resolution Foundation charts the ongoing squeeze on low and middle incomes, and observes brutally that already Britain has the second highest proportion of low-paid jobs in the developed world. The formal unemployment numbers, now ominously rising five years since the crisis began, do not capture the full extent to which the economy is not delivering good work.
Plainly some of the explanation is that the economy is still reeling from the effect of the financial crisis and the accompanying vast overhang of private debt. But economies have an embedded resilience. Output will return to the levels of 2008, probably some time next year. There will be an economic "recovery". But this raises the question: what happens afterwards?
Think through the implications of the driverless car. These will be vehicles whose complex sensors allow them to communicate with one another, so that they know one another's intended route. One of the reasons Google is investing so much is that whoever owns the communications system for driverless cars will own the 21st century's equivalent of the telephone network or money clearing system: this will be a licence to print money. The benefits are endless. Roads will both be able to carry more traffic and be safer. Personalised door-to-door transport will become hugely pleasurable: your car will deliver you to your home or place of work and then park itself without you. Road accidents will plummet. Energy efficiency will be transformed. Insurance rates, even the need for insurance, will plunge. Personalised transport, ordered by your mobile phone, will gradually replace mass transport networks.
But the implications for employment are awesome. Thomas Frey, senior futurologist at the DaVinci Institute, lists taxi-, bus- and truck-driving as soon-to-be-extinct occupations – along with traffic police, all forms of home delivery and waste disposal, jobs at petrol stations, car washes and parking lots. The cars themselves will be made by robots in automated car factories. The only new jobs will be in the design and marketing of the cars, and in writing the computer software that will allow them to navigate their journeys, along with the apps for our mobile phones that will help us to use them better.
Professor Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary, thinks that the challenge of the decades ahead is not debt or competition from China but the dramatic transformations that technology is bringing about. Summers believes that the transition to the automated economy that robotisation implies has only just begun. The invention of 3D printing, in which every home or office will be equipped with an in-house printer that can spew out the goods we want – from shoes to pills – anticipates a world of what Summers calls automated "doers". They will do everything for us, eliminating the need for much work. The only jobs will be in writing the software and building the "doers", creating a bifurcation of the labour market that is already discernible.
At least Summers sees some underlying economic dynamism. For techno-pessimists such as economist Professor Tyler Cowen the future is even darker. It is not only that automation and robotisation are coming, but that there are no new worthwhile transformational technologies for them to automate. All the obvious human needs – to move, to have power, to communicate – have been solved through cars, planes, mobile phones and computers. According to Cowen, we have come to the end of the great "general purpose technologies" (technologies that transform an entire economy, such as the steam engine, electricity, the car and so on) that changed the world. There are no new transformative technologies to carry us forward, while the old activities are being robotised and automated. This is the "Great Stagnation".
That is a very lopsided view of the future with little recognition of the opportunities. The growth of transformative technologies is not tailing off: as scientific knowledge explodes and crosses new boundaries, they will accelerate. The 21st century will witness more technological and scientific advance than in the last 500 years. The pace of change is certainly accelerating – business models today already become obsolescent in less than 20 years, and that figure is going to fall further. But human demands are infinite. Notwithstanding robotisation and automation, I identify four broad areas in which there will be vast job opportunities.
The first is in micro-production. There is going to be a huge growth in micro-brewers, micro-bakers, micro-film-makers, micro-energy producers, micro-tailors, micro-software houses and so on who will deploy the internet and micro-production techniques to produce goods at prices as if they were mass-produced, but customised for individual tastes.
The second is in human wellbeing. There will be vast growth in advising, coaching, caring, mentoring, doctoring, nursing, teaching and generally enhancing capabilities. Medical provision will explode, with replacement organs, skin and limbs opening up new specialisms and industries. Taste, sight and hearing will be vastly enhanced. Ageing will be deferred, with old-age advisers offering advice on how to live well in one's hundreds. Geneticists will open up a live-well economy. Instantaneous language translation will break down language barriers.
The third is in addressing the globe's "wicked issues" . There will be new forms of nutrition and carbon-efficient energy, along with economising with water, to meet the demands of a world population of 9 billion in 2050. Space exploration will become crucial to find new minerals and energy sources. New forms of mining will allow exploration of the Earth's crust. The oceans will be farmed.
And fourthly, digital and big data management will foster whole new industries – personalised journalism, social media, cyber-security, information selection, software, computer science and digital clutter removal.
Doubtless the futurologists can come up with more: the truth is, nobody knows. What we do know is that two-thirds of what we consume today was not invented 25 years ago. It will be the same again in a generation's time. What is different is the pace of change, obsolescence and renewal – and new dangers of extraordinary inequality not just in wages, but in working possibilities. Firms and individuals will be on their mettle to open up, innovate and constantly reinvent themselves. If there is to be a successful Great Reset, Britain will need the open innovation structures, financing mechanisms and social support institutions to capitalise on the opportunities quickly, rather than be overwhelmed by the risks.
This is what threatens our future, our living standards, and this is what we should be arguing about – not the European Union, despite the efforts of Ukip and the Conservative party. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.
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We thought we were protected by paying through PayPal – but it won't return money taken by bogus MMA car insurance brokers
My son took out a £1,300 car insurance policy – or so he thought – with the insurer MMA. I encouraged him to play safe and use my PayPal account for the transaction. After a couple of months, he discovered that the car was not insured. MMA claimed he had been a victim of fraudulent brokers, who had set up bogus policies in MMA's name, and that police were investigating similar cases.
Since he can't afford new insurance he has had to sell his car. I contacted PayPal, who said they couldn't help as I was outside their 45-day period for claiming a refund. I always thought PayPal was the best method, but now I wish I'd used my credit card. It will take me a long time to save £1,300 again. LB, Hyde, Cheshire
• I bought a balloon trip voucher as a Christmas present for my son and his girlfriend and paid the £181.99 through PayPal. Two days before the booked flight the company, Go Ballooning, went into administration. PayPal insists the claim is not valid because it was made outside of its 45-day refund window, even though the voucher is valid for one year and the company only operated flights between April and October. Is there any way I can reclaim my money? JW, Hertford, Hertfordshire
"The safest way to pay," boasts PayPal. Baloney! If both of you had paid directly for your purchases by credit card you would have been protected by Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act, which does not impose a deadline for refund claims when a contract is breached. And Mastercard, Visa and American Express allow up to 120 days for debit card customers to lodge a claim.
Moreover, unlike the bank card schemes, PayPal protection only covers goods, not services, so even if circumstances had allowed you to lodge a complaint in time you would not have been covered.
PayPal, after pondering its own logic for six weeks, says its safety claims are based on the fact that users don't have to disclose their card details to individual traders. It insists its 45-day rule was calculated to allow buyers enough time to identify a problem and lodge a complaint without incommoding sellers with too lengthy a dispute period. However, PayPal, as a one-off goodwill gesture, has offered JW a full refund. MMA says that you, LB, are the victim of "ghost broking" in which customers are deceived into buying non-existent insurance. Sadly, in your case, no refund is forthcoming.
If you need help email Anna Tims at your.problems@observer.co.uk or write to Your Problems, The Observer, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Include an address and phone number. We regret Anna cannot reply to letters individually.
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Special school head Trystan Williams is passionate about learning outside classroom and has taken his pupils to the ends of the Earth to prove it
I had no interest in becoming a teacher, my dad was a headteacher and my mum was involved in special needs education and I didn't want to follow their lead. I did a master's in sports science research at University of Wales and at the end of my master's, two of my senior lecturers came and told me they had a place for me on a PGCE course. They persuaded me to take it and they were absolutely right. I loved it.
I did the majority of my teaching practice in a really tough Welsh-speaking secondary school and discovered that what I really enjoyed was working with the most challenging kids. I was motivated by wanting to help transform lives of children. But I must admit in the first six months of my first job at Mounton House, a special school in Chepstow I did think: "What the bloody hell am I doing?" It was so challenging. I was PE teacher there for two years and then promoted to head of PE. After five years I got a job as deputy head of The Springfields Academy in Wiltshire.
We are the school that children who have been excluded from mainstream schools are sent to but when I started our school had the highest exclusion rate in the whole area. The school wasn't meeting the needs of all of our pupils. The first three years as a deputy were a massive learning curve. It was a tough school and there were some outstanding professionals here but there were also some that weren't so good. There were questions being asked regarding the future of the school and it was not far off closing.
Everything started to change when we became the first special school to be made a specialist sports college in 2005, which enabled us to be much more flexible in our curriculum and I was appointed head in the same year. The specialist sports college status meant we were able to be much more flexible in our curriculum. I was able to increase the amount of PE staff and fully restructure. The Youth Sport Trust has been instrumental in supporting me and my school, as well as helping us embed sports and PE in every aspect of what we do. In 2007 we got an outstanding Ofsted. Now 88% of our pupils are making more than two levels of progress in every subject at every key stage.
Our school has to meet the needs to society's most vulnerable and disaffected students. The students coming to our school have complex educational, social and emotional needs – including foetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), severe mental health issues, complex communication and emotional difficulties, autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Asperger's – and these have resulted in multiple permanent exclusions from schools across six local authorities.
For us, everything comes down to aspiration. You have to unpick the root causes of problems and find creative ways of working with young people to achieve their potential. So that's what we do. We have 11 therapists employed by the school who work hand in hand with teachers. Three years ago 0% of our pupils got five A-Cs at GCSEs, now we have a rate of 30-40% A-Cs – including maths and English. It's incredible because 50% of our students come to the school in the bottom 2% nationally in literacy and numeracy – these were children who have been labelled as 'unteachable'. Now young people are leaving prepared for their next step, whether that's in mainstream colleges, apprenticeships or continuing specialist education.
The greatest hurdle so many of our students face is that of self-belief. If you can give them a challenging and stimulating environment, they truly begin to believe in themselves and the contribution they can make. You've got to be really creative. We don't even use the word 'behaviour' any more – it's about engaging learners and if they are disengaged they won't learn. With our pupils successful engagement is more likely to take place outside the classroom. We've opened a 100-acre farm. Pupils can learn as much about literacy and numeracy on the farm as in the classroom. It frustrates me that so often in education we stick to doing the same things we've always done. If you look at an operating theatre 100 years ago it's completely different, but look at a school 100 years ago and what have we really changed apart from swapping a blackboard for a whiteboard?
We have pioneered the concept of Extreme Classrooms at The Springfields Academy. Learning outside the classroom, whether collecting mini bugs on site or trekking to Everest Base Camp, is an intrinsic element of our work. The idea was started over a few beers with polar explorer Alan Chambers who suggested taking a group of our pupils on an expedition to the North Pole. At first I thought he was crazy but we ended up co-founding Extreme Classrooms, and six weeks later a group of our staff took a group of children to 'the coldest classroom', 78 degrees north.
Then through Engage in their Future, a network of 200 special schools, we took a group of children to spend 10 days to the 'hottest classroom', living with Maasai Warriors in Tanzania. We will literally go to the ends of the Earth to give our pupils an education.
In September 2011 we became an academy. We were the first residential school to become one and so have helped shape the process. There are real challenges in becoming an academy, including the huge differences around financial reporting and levels of accountability, but I now have much more freedom to innovate. Our relationship with the local authority has never been stronger and I have found being an academy has improved our outcomes because the money we get is used as we want it used – there is no spillage, that has been the biggest difference.
Yes. The new Ofsted framework is brutal but school leaders have to have the courage to see Ofsted and exams as processes we have to go through. In 2005 our school had a point score of 32 at key stage 4, that's barely the equivalent of one c grade at GCSE. Now we have a target point score of 260. So our pupils are making outstanding progress by doing things that are not traditional, by being creative and quirky, and we have the evidence to prove it.
We used to do things traditionally and that resulted in the worst rates of exclusion and not in education or training (Neet) figures in the local authority. In our school, staff members constantly think and rethink solutions to help their pupils learn. Let's face it, Ofsted is outcomes driven, it's all about results. I think teachers can overplan and should save their energy for teaching and being creative. I have enough faith and trust in my staff that I don't need to check their planning. I'm interested in outcomes and doing the best for our pupils.
A young man called Scott Prince came to our school at the age of 13 after being permanently excluded from another special school. I was asked by the local authority to buy him a three-wheeled bike. I refused and said we would instead teach him to ride a two-wheeled bike. After several weeks of hard work we saw him whizzing past the window on his bike. When he saw me, he threw the bike on the floor and shouted:"You're my dad!" I knew that meant he was really pleased with himself and really pleased with me. That will stay with me forever. Against the odds, instead of riding a three-wheeled bike with everyone staring at him, he could be as independent as any other 13 year-old because of the aspiration that he could ride a two-wheeled bike. We've won national awards, but that is a career highlight. I get my energy from spending time with my pupils, that's the reason I'm in this job.
Trystan Williams is principal of The Springfields Academy in Wiltshire. Find out more about Extreme Classrooms – including information on the Highest Classroom on Earth challenge to Everest in October 2013.
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More than 40 million people globally take an SSRI antidepressant, among them many writers and musicians. But do they hamper the creative process, extinguishing the spark that produces great art, or do they enhance artistic endeavour?
Twenty-five years after pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly unleashed Prozac on the red-braced 80s, SSRIs are still the world's most popular antidepressants. They are swallowed by more than 40 million people, from Beijing to Beirut, knitting a web of happiness from New York to New Caledonia. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, of which Prozac is the best known, are the defining drug of the modern age, the crutch of choice for the worried well. In the US, where one in 10 takes antidepressants, you can buy beef-flavoured Prozac for your dog, trademarked Reconcile. The Prozac revolution has not only changed the way we think about depression (aided by Eli Lilly's mammoth advertising campaign); it has also changed the way we think, full stop.
In his 1993 book Listening to Prozac, the psychiatrist Peter D Kramer explored the ethical issues around the rise of what he termed "cosmetic pharmacology". With a daily pill people could now banish social awkwardness or the unhappiness of relationship break-ups, forge brassily assertive personae from their once shy selves. Like the Soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Prozac was making people "better than well". Kramer wrote of the "personality transformations" that occurred in a substantial minority of those taking the drug, briefly pausing to speculate as to what impact this might have had on their creativity. While we know, thanks to Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched with Fire, that poets are up to 30 times more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder than the national average, we have no idea how or if the pills they take to treat the disease affect their creative output.
The French writer Henry de Montherlant said that happiness writes white. For me that whiteness was the colour of a 20mg Cipralex pill – a close cousin of Prozac – taken at the breakfast table. With the depthless chemical happiness of the drug, a thin layer of snow seemed to fall over my mind, blocking access to strong feeling, cutting me off from the hidden impulses that drove me to write. Sometimes I did feel "better than well", but more often I was haunted by the uncanny feeling that I was skimming over the surface of my life. Looking back, those Prozac years have a curious, occluded feel, as if viewed through a gauze.
To celebrate the drug's quarter-century, I spoke to other writers, artists and musicians who have taken SSRIs, trying to establish whether they have been a bane or a boon for our collective creativity. I've deliberately concentrated on the arts, rather than the sciences. This is partly because, while we've all seen Carrie Mathison in Homeland and John Nash in A Beautiful Mind, there is significantly more literature on artists and writers taking antidepressants than on chemists and economists. It's partly because the arts are my bailiwick: I'm not on "are you on drugs?" terms with that many scientists.
We expect our artists to be, in Baudelaire's words, touched by "a breath of wind from the wings of madness". In his book Poets on Prozac, Richard Berlin speaks of "an entire generation of writers who became famed for the dramatic excesses of their psychiatric disorders". Sylvia Plath sits at the head of a pantheon of artists who took their own lives – Virginia Woolf, Alexander McQueen, Ernest Hemingway, David Foster Wallace – and who battered their bodies into submission with drugs and booze (see also Roberto Bolaño, Amy Winehouse, F Scott Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday). It's easy to agree with Dryden when he says, "Great wits are sure to madness near allied, / And thin partitions do their bounds divide."
From Heinrich Heine to Edvard Munch, many resisted treatment for their depression, fearing a loss of creative urges. When offered psychotherapy, the poet Edward Thomas replied: "I wonder whether for a person like myself whose most intense moments were those of depression, a cure that destroys the depression may not destroy the intensity – a desperate remedy?" Sigmund Freud – who also killed himself – argued that artistic creativity is a product of neurosis. We deal with the conflicts in our subconscious by making objects out of them. If this, grossly simplified, is the theory behind the link between mental illness and creativity, then the worry for artists is that in banishing their black dogs they are also dousing the flames of inspiration, blunting the edge of their genius.
Creativity and pharmacology have a troubled past. Chloral hydrate, used as a sedative for the first half of the 20th century, left patients feeling sapped and sluggish. The playwright Antonin Artaud accused it of lowering his "mental water level", causing a "diminution of my morality and my intellect". He finally died of an overdose of the drug. In an unpublished letter discovered in 2001, Ted Hughes revealed that Sylvia Plath was taking a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI) in the days leading up to her suicide. She'd had a negative reaction to a similar drug as a teenager and in the letter, Hughes blames the MAOI and the doctor who prescribed it for her death.
Plath's antidepressant was remarkably similar to Nardil, the drug with which David Foster Wallace struggled for many years. Making little headway with the novel that would be published, incomplete, after his death as The Pale King, Wallace began to wean himself off Nardil. His biographer, DT Max, said "he thought that removing the scrim of Nardil might help him see a way out of his creative impasse". Instead, he remained blocked and, as his friend Jonathan Franzen put it, "when his hope for fiction died, after years of struggle with the new novel, there was no other way out but death".
This is not the essay in which to debate in depth the efficacy of SSRIs. Irving Kirsch claims – to my mind convincingly – in The Emperor's New Drugs that their benefits have been substantially overstated. What is clear is that their side-effects have not. Apart from stifling the libido, SSRI use has consequences that are particularly significant for artists. A 2009 study by Oxford University, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, found that those taking SSRIs reported "a general reduction in the intensity of the emotions that they experienced". They described themselves as feeling "dulled", "numbed", "flattened", or "blocked". If poetry is (as Wordsworth claimed) "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings… emotion recollected in tranquillity", then could Prozac bring artists too little feeling, too much tranquillity?
I spent most of my 20s on SSRIs of one sort or another. I was a difficult teenager, expelled from school and lurching from one illegal chemical high to the next. I was prescribed Prozac in the wake of one particularly manic episode and continued to take it on and off for eight years. My GP at university persuaded me to quit for a while, but when I moved to London I found a pharmacy that would sell me my SSRI of choice over the counter, no questions asked. What should have been a temporary buttress ended up forming part of the architecture of my young life.
Writing on SSRIs was like swimming in mud. Words came slowly or not at all; emotions were perceived as if at a great distance, alien and remote. Even at a sentence-by-sentence level, I was aware of a certain lag in my writing, a syntactic sluggishness – the imprint of a brain that was failing to catch up with itself. I missed the hectic moods of my teens where I'd write great (I mean clearly terrible, but great in my mind) stories on my father's ancient Amstrad, caught up in the flow of words. Fuddled and frustrated, I quit writing altogether and didn't start again until I'd given up the pills.
In a recent Radio 4 documentary, Will Self considered the legacy of Prozac's first 25 years on the planet. What he didn't say on air, but admitted to me in a subsequent email, was that he'd had his own run-in with SSRIs. I'd mentioned "Inclusion", a surreal story in his book Grey Area that satirises the psychopharmacological brouhaha surrounding Prozac. "I was prescribed Seroxat (I believe wrongly)," he wrote in reply, "to help me with withdrawals from a bad crack habit (what's a good crack habit?). After being on it a couple of weeks, I borderline intentionally took a heroin overdose and nearly died... so, I have a negative view of the drugs." Self, however, didn't blame the SSRIs for obstructing his artistic flow: "Heroin, cocaine, marijuana and alcohol were really the drugs that ended up fucking my creativity; the Seroxat was just a way station on the escape ramp to abstinence."
Other writers identified with the creative hamstringing I'd experienced on SSRIs. The novelist Amanda Craig was an early adopter of Prozac in Britain. Suffering from profound depression, she found SSRIs unhelpful, even damaging, despite the brief lift they gave to her mood. "Prozac enabled me to function, but dulled everything," she told me, "including the shafts of joy that gradually pierce depression. It changed who I was and that included who I was as a writer." She finally stopped taking the pills and turned her experience of depression into a bestselling novel, In a Dark Wood.
Children's author Lucy Coats is another who found herself blocked by SSRIs. "I've been depressed all my life," she told me, "but it came to a head with postnatal depression after my second child. I was badly depressed and my doctor put me on Seroxat." Although the drugs offered some relief from her symptoms, it was at a heavy price – her creativity. "I took it for six months and I felt as if I was walking through this grey world, with all the joy totally stripped out of it. I could feel neither happy nor sad. It was absolutely vile. As a writer, I need to feel emotion of some kind. The creative spark was completely extinguished for me. I had a deadline and I had to ask the publisher to give me more time because I could not write. Everything I wrote was kind of lumpy, disgusting clay and I couldn't shape it into anything."
It's not just authors who have suffered creatively from the effects of SSRIs. I spoke to my brother, Sam, better known as Preston from the Ordinary Boys. Or, if we're honest, better known for going on Celebrity Big Brother and marrying Chantelle Houghton, one of his fellow housemates. He's since forged a successful songwriting career. I knew he'd been on Prozac throughout his time in the Celebrity Big Brother house and asked him how it affected him – creatively and otherwise.
"More than anything," he told me, "it made me really sweaty. And it seems a banal thing, but it was debilitating, particularly as it was a time I was in the public eye. As for creativity, Prozac just makes you a bit 'Yeah, OK, fine, whatever' about stuff. You lose the inner critic. And that goes for life as well as art. I got married to someone I'd met on a TV show and didn't really know. I think if it hadn't been for the haze of the drug, I might have made better decisions."
I can relate to this (and not just because he's my kid brother). With my creative blockage came what I later identified as a kind of moral blockage. Because actions didn't feel like they had consequences – in that nothing seemed able to shock me from the pallid world the drugs had wrapped about me – I pushed myself into more and more extreme situations, desperate for a spark of authentic feeling. I was haunted by the sense that I was living in the third person. This inability to feel implicated in my actions had its own creative repercussions – the characters in my novels seem to lack agency, are buffeted by forces beyond their control (as several reviewers have pointed out). I gave Charlie Wales in This Bleeding City a Valium addiction, but actually what I was describing was life on SSRIs: "With dead eyes and dead hands, I navigated the world. On the way to work in the mornings I pressed a pill into the furry lining of my cheek and felt it melt, bitter and comforting as I sat on the fusty orange seats of the tube and watched flares of electricity light up the darkness of tunnels. I had stopped reading. Instead, I just watched."
For other artists, Prozac has been a life belt thrown as they drowned in a sea of depression. In an exchange of letters with the historian Roy Porter, Zoë Heller speaks of how, after taking Prozac, "I stopped lying in bed in the middle of the day. I stopped crying all the time. I began to entertain visions of my future that were, if not entirely rosy, then at least not entirely gloom-laden." The original Prozac pin-up, Elizabeth Wurtzel, is another who claims to have been rescued by the drug (although a careful reading of her memoir Prozac Nation might give the credit to the rather less zeitgeisty lithium).
Wurtzel's book has not aged well – it is stuck in the 90s, po-faced and narcissistic. It lacks the note of authenticity that characterises the best books about mental illness. Wurtzel is also unsure exactly how she feels about the drug. At one point she gushes, "Prozac was the miracle that saved my life." Several pages later, though, she admits that "the secret I sometimes think that only I know is that Prozac really isn't that great". Writing about depression is difficult precisely because it is a disease that strips us of words, of narrative. One of the most impressive works on the subject is by the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis. Her memoir, Sunbathing in the Rain, joins Lewis Wolpert's Malignant Sadness and William Styron's Darkness Visible, three books sent back by emissaries from deep within the abyss of depression. Gwyneth Lewis is another who benefited greatly from Prozac.
When we first met a couple of years ago at a writing retreat in Norfolk, Lewis was literally wearing rose-tinted spectacles, but the world didn't always have such an optimistic hue. After a serious bout of depression, she found herself incapacitated, a ghost in her own life. Sunbathing in the Rain is her description of journeying into and, eventually, out of her despair, during which time SSRIs offered "some psychic space, a small but crucial distance between me and the horrors". I asked her about her experience of writing on the drugs.
"When I get ill, I get so ill I can't write at all," she told me. "I don't work when I'm wretched, I work when I'm happy. The antidepressants offered a pathway to effective working." But there were drawbacks. She stopped taking the pills during a sailing trip with her husband, finding that they rendered her spaced-out and unreactive (and a poor sailor to boot). "I was distanced and dissociated… I'd see a rock coming towards us and I just wouldn't move." She was also aware that the loss of sex drive so common to SSRI users had creative repercussions. "Part of what you feel as a poet is libido towards language. Being on these drugs will change your language use because they change who you are."
For Lewis it was a decision between writing on Prozac or not writing at all. For Keeril Makan, the choice was rather different. One of America's most celebrated young composers, he struggled for years with a depression that would often find vivid reflection in his work. He describes his music as "informed, almost viscerally, by my depression", and spiky, atonal pieces such as The Noise Between Thoughts attack the listener with a bleak physical force. Finally, though, he reached a point at which he had to step away from the darkness. "Although I was still composing," he told me, "it was such an excruciating process and was putting me in contact with these really difficult emotional places. I couldn't go on with my daily life. I was creating music I was happy with and people were interested in, but I had to live as well."
He started taking antidepressants and meditating and found that his music gained a new depth as he dragged himself out of his depression. "Being on the antidepressants does change the type of emotions I'm experiencing," he said, "but I think they can be just as interesting. If anything, this helps the composing. I was working on an opera recently and I don't think I could have written it before. I was too one-dimensional, emotionally. Things were just dark but now there's both – dark and light." I confessed to admiring the raw power of his early work and he chuckled. "It's true that I'm not as fully immersed in darkness as previously, but I guess I don't care, because I couldn't keep doing that. It was a question of living, or creating this music that was negative and violent. I made my choice."
It shows how little we understand of the functioning of the brain's neurochemistry and SSRIs' effect upon it that a pill that may cause blockages (as it did in my own case) has also been prescribed as a cure for writer's block. In a Late Show documentary aired in 1995, the psychiatrist and author Oliver James gave five artists Prozac to see what effect it would have on their creative output. Two of them – the New Order frontman Bernard Sumner and the poet Alan Jenkins – were blocked when filming began. Sumner, who was working on his Electronic side project with Johnny Marr at the time, was afflicted by a hyper-critical internal voice, and said that the process of writing lyrics was "like breaking a horse". As he wrote, he'd hear repeated in his head: "You can't do this, you can't do this."
I spoke to James about the effect of SSRIs on writer's block. "What the film showed," he told me, "was that once you removed the depression – and Prozac did seem to do that, whether by placebo or not – people could write. When I first met Bernard Sumner he was clearly blocked and by the end of it he'd written some lyrics." There was a hitch, though. "What I couldn't say on the documentary was that he may have done some work, but I'm not sure that it was any good." This seems to be one of the problems with the use of SSRIs to free up the creative impulse. While, as Gwyneth Lewis said, it's very difficult to write during periods of intense depression, it may be that we need to be a bit down on ourselves in order to produce good work.
James agrees. "On Prozac you become more confident, you're less aware of other people's feelings, less worried about what other people might think about you, you're more able to act as opposed to [being] self-absorbed and stuck. You may be talking crap, producing crap, but you don't care and just press on. And that's a real change of personality for some creative types – to stop caring what other people think. It's a dangerous game."
We begin to recognise the precarious high-wire act that most creative depressives undertake, trapped between the unbearable pain of their illness and the equally unbearable blockages brought about by their medication – walking Dryden's "thin partitions". We need the critical voices in our heads (mine is that of a reviewer who gave my second novel a mauling on Radio 4), but they mustn't swamp us with their carping and condemnation. In Touched with Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison looked at manic depressive artists who took lithium, a drug which "inhibits creativity so that the individual is unable to express himself". She found that, overwhelmingly, the artists either gave up the drug or reduced their dosage "in hope of achieving a kind of controlled cyclothymia [mood swings], willing to take the undulations of power and imbecility in exchange for periods of high enthusiasm and flowing thoughts".
In this essay, I've deliberately only quoted artists who would let me use their names in print. This is partly because, post-Leveson, we know that "a close friend" means the journalist made it up, but also because I think it's important that the subject be addressed in the open. One thing that has struck me while researching this piece, though, is the sheer number of artistic friends and acquaintances who have taken Prozac – some of whom agreed to be quoted, some who preferred to remain incognito. I mentioned that I was writing this article on Twitter and was contacted by a host of creative types keen to share their experiences – positive or (more usually) negative – of working on SSRIs. This is far from a clinical survey, but it does feel like our creative industries are smoothing the jagged surfaces of their lives with SSRIs in astonishing – even epidemic – numbers.
My conversation with my brother confirms this impression. "Everyone in music is on Prozac," he says. "It's like it's part of the job description." We know from toxicology reports that Michael Jackson, Michael Hutchence, Heath Ledger and Brittany Murphy were taking Prozac (although for them it was but one of a heady concoction of drugs), while stars such as Sheryl Crow, Robbie Williams and Olivia Newton-John have spoken about their reliance on SSRIs.
"It's partly to do with the stress of the business," my brother tells me. "If you're really successful you have little time to yourself, you're having to sleep when and if you can, you don't have much control of your life. And if you're playing a gig in Tokyo on Friday, you can't commit to therapy, to sitting down once a week and talking through your problems. You never know where you'll be one week to the next, so you just take a pill and get on with it."
There's another factor in the celebrity antidepressant narrative – doctors. "There's a kind of understanding you come to," my brother tells me. "Because most people in the music industry use private doctors and it was certainly the case with me that I went to this one doctor because I knew I'd get the drugs I wanted. I was paying and she knew that if she didn't write the prescription I'd just go elsewhere." Certain doctors would gain a reputation for being particularly laissez-faire with their prescriptions. "I don't think it was necessarily that they were corrupt or anything," my brother says. "It was more that the only people they saw were these neurotic actors and musicians. Now I see an NHS doctor and she's having all sorts in her surgery so when I come in moaning she's just like, 'Come on now, pull yourself together, you'll be fine.'"
One of the effects of the Prozac revolution has been an increasing acceptance that mental illness is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, a simplified standpoint that has been reinforced by the press and celebrity commentators. In a 2011 Larry King Live interview, Jim Carrey came out with some exemplary bio-babble, both meaningless and pernicious: "Certain elements of the brain like tyrosine and hydroxytryptophan… instead of being a serotonin inhibitor, which just uses the serotonin you have and Prozac and things like that. It just uses the serotonin you have and it doesn't allow it go back into the receptor. But it metabolises your serotonin after a while and you have to keep taking more and more to feel good. This actually creates dopamine and creates serotonin."
Bolstered by heavy drug company spending, the message has been put out there: the brain is an organ like any other; treat depression as you would a stomach upset or broken ankle. This narrative misses the extraordinary complexity of the brain and the very limited understanding we have of its operations. The neurotransmitters which are influenced by SSRIs are intricate and multivalent – indeed the role of these neurotransmitters in the control of mood was only discovered by accident when examining the effect of the anti-psychotic thorazine on the brain's chemistry. In her Prozac Diary (1998), Lauren Slater referred to Prozac as a "revolution in psychopharmacology because of its selectivity on the serotonin system; it was a drug with the precision of a Scud missile, launched miles away from its target only to land, with a proud flare, right on the enemy's roof." Such grandiose claims have faded with time as we come to understand how little we really know about how – and if – Prozac works.
In Daniel Nettle's book Strong Imagination: Madness, Creativity and Human Nature, he turns a scientific eye upon the creative process, looking in depth at the types of mental illness associated with creativity. Of particular interest is his work on serotonin – the neurotransmitter influenced by Prozac. He shows how serotonin systems function to help us to adapt to psychological challenges, reducing anxiety and providing "a carapace against a fickle and confusing world". When I questioned him about the specific impact of Prozac on creativity, he described serotonin-related drugs stimulating "energy, concentration and an expanded mental horizon", although he added that, in the decade since writing the book, he had become convinced that Prozac and related SSRIs were much less effective than once thought.
It is comforting to believe that, to quote Robert Lowell, the lack of a little salt in the brain is all that stands between us and sanity. Irving Kirsch's research for The Emperor's New Drugs suggests, however, that SSRIs are barely more effective than placebos. While the drugs have clearly delivered dramatic benefits to some like Gwyneth Lewis (and, indeed, Oliver James himself, who when he briefly took Prozac in the 90s said he felt "miraculous" on it), it seems to hamper as many creative types as it helps. We need to be sane to work – being an author requires discipline, doggedness, a rhino-hide for criticism – but we must also be open to the insanity of creativity. The state of manic flow when we write, paint, compose or merely play is a kind of cogent madness and antithetical to my experience of the drab fog of SSRI "happiness".
Within three weeks of my own Prozac fog lifting, I was writing again. Yes, I still felt down, so down some days that I couldn't work and buried my head under the duvet, but the trade-off was days when my fingers couldn't move fast enough over the keyboard, my pen struck sparks from the page. In Deborah Levy's Swimming Home, the heroine, Kitty Finch, has just quit Seroxat. "It's quite a relief to feel miserable again," she says. "I don't feel anything when I take my pills." It's been five years since I took my last SSRI. The happiness I get from my writing is deeper seated and more authentic than anything that could be confected in the laboratories of Big Pharma. The drugs didn't work for me and, more importantly, I couldn't work when I was on them.
Alex Preston's novels This Bleeding City and The Revelations are published by Faber & Faber (£7.99)
1988 The first SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor), Prozac, is made by Eli Lilly and launched in the US.
1989 The drug reaches the UK. It hit the covers of Newsweek and New York magazine, which described it as the "new wonder drug for depression".
1991-2001 Annual UK antidepressant prescriptions rise from 9m to 24m.
1994 Elizabeth Wurtzel's memoir Prozac Nation is published, establishing the drug's position in popular culture.
1994 The first of many lawsuits concerning side-effects of the drug goes to trial. Joseph Wesbeckerwent on a killing spree in 1989, killing eight before shooting himself. His violence was claimed to be a side-effect of taking Prozac.
1994 Psychiatrist Peter Breggin's Talking Back to Prozac, critical of the drug, is published.
1995 Prozac is referenced in the Blur song Country House: "He's reading Balzac and knocking back Prozac… It's the helping hand that makes you feel wonderfully bland."
1998 Prozac Diary, the candid memoir by Lauren Slater, is published.
2000 Zoloft overtakes Prozac as the most popular SSRI in the US.
2001 Prozac (fluoxetine) loses its patent. Eli Lilly loses $35m of its market value in one day and 90% of its prescriptions in a single year.
2004 Prozac is in our drinking water. The Environment Agency says the drug is building up in British rivers and ground-water supplies, probably via the sewage system, but in quantities so dilute they could have no effect.
2008 Antidepressants are now the third most common prescription drugs in the US.
2009 The Lancet ranks the top 12 antidepressants from 117 studies. Zoloft and Lexapro come in first for their combination of effectiveness and fewest side-effects.
2010 One in 10 people in Europe has now taken an antidepressant
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The collapse of a factory in Bangladesh has put sustainability in the fashion industry back on the agenda. Here are the best news stories and teaching resources to deal with the issues in class
The deaths of more than 1,100 garment workers when the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh collapsed last month, as well as those at a Cambodian shoe factory on Thursday, have forced consumers and retailers to re-examine the impact and ethics of fast fashion.
Here we round up the best news stories, multimedia, teaching resources and websites to help you study the working conditions of garment workers and the sustainability of the fashion industry in the citizenship and geography classroom, and beyond.
Cambodia shoe factory collapse kills workers
On Thursday 16 May a ceiling came down at Wing Star Shoes plant in Cambodia, killing at least two people. The latest in a long line of industrial accidents killing workers in the fashion industry making garments for the west.
Fashion chains sign to help finance safety in Bangladesh factories
Will the collapse of the Rana Plaza building lead to a change in practice? Some of the world's biggest fashion chains, including H&M, Zara, C&A, Tesco and Primark, have signed up to a legally-binding agreement to help finance fire safety and building improvements in the factories they use in Bangladesh. The government in Dhaka has also announced plans to raise the the minimum wage for garment workers.
Eight top fashion retailers fail to sign Bangladesh safety accord
A number of retailers failed to put their names to a Bangladesh safety pact, including Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury's and New Look.
Bangladesh building collapse: woman rescued after 17 days speaks of ordeal - video
A woman found alive in the rubble of Dhaka's Rana Plaza after 17 days tells how she got rescuers' attention with a stick as she heard voices above her.
Bangladesh building collapse – pictures
Devastating photographs of the Rana Plaza collapse which killed more than 1,100 people in April 2013.
Fashion doesn't give a damn about garment workers
Thought-provoking comment piece by Lucy Siegle – author of To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World – which gives an insight into the fashion industry and how the world's 40 million garment workers work to try and complete near-impossible orders.
Was your T-shirt made in the Dhaka garment factory? You have no idea
Applying any ethical criteria is challenging when it comes to fashion – so isn't it time we had Fairtrade labelling for clothes?
Death in Bangladesh is too high a price for quick-fix fashion
Blog by 18 year-old fashion lover on how she has stopped buying cheap clothes. She points out teenagers' spending power is worth £7bn a year – imagine if that were channelled into buying fewer well-made clothes produced under fair wages.
Time for an international minimum wage
Bangladeshi writer Muhammad Yunus' insightful comment piece is great for sixth formers who want to delve deeper into the how foreign buyers can unite to lift workers out of 'slave labour'.
Desperate poverty behind the tragedy of Dhaka – The Day
An article from schools news service The Day on the terrible race to save victims in the worst recorded industrial accident in Bangladesh. The activity that goes with the article asks: are Western companies to blame?
Ethical clothing lesson
Excellent lesson written by citizenship and English teacher Charlotte Rashford which introduces the issues of sweatshop clothing factories. Also see the associated starter activity and group work plan.
Guide to becoming a Fairtrade school
Step by step guide to becoming a Fairtrade school including how to set up a steering group and adopt a Fairtrade policy.
Send my Friend to School PowerPoint
Many garment workers across the world are school-aged. This PowerPoint introduces the 2013 Send My Friend to School activities to primary school kids, including facts and figures and real life stories. Also find a PowerPoint for secondary.
Love fashion hate sweatshops
Some really interesting material here from the War on Want campaign for a fashion industry that respects workers' rights.
Blood, sweat and t-shirts
Six young fashion British lovers swap shopping for the factories and back streets of India, where they go to work making clothes and living with the workers - the result is a hard-hitting expose of the garment industry and the clips of each episode here are just tailor made to play in lessons.
Labour behind the label
A campaign that works to improve conditions and empower workers in the global garment industry. It's great site to explore, packed with advice, resources and action that can be taken.
In praise of sweatshops
It can be hard to find the pro-sweatshops view if your school debate club has to argue it. The Spectator kindly provides one in this blog by Alex Massie.
Anti-slavery campaign
Interesting info and action from this organisation which promotes the eradication of slavery and slavery-like practices, which include garment workers paid a pittance working in dreadful conditions.
Facts and figures on child labour by UNICEF
Many garment workers across the globe are children. Get the stats here.
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Sponsored Q&A: The deadline to land your first teaching post is fast approaching. For last-minute advice, join our expert panel live on Wednesday, May 22 from 6pm to 8pm
Finding your first job as a newly-qualified teacher (NQT) can be challenging; the whole application and interview process has its own particular set of laws and is unlikely to be comparable to any other recruitment process you have ever experienced. There's the issue of writing an amazing application when you only have a limited pool of teaching experience to call on and then even if you get an interview how do you overcome those killer nerves and teach an outstanding lesson to a bunch of children you have never clapped eyes on before?
You may feel confident about your skills in the classroom but how can you make sure this comes across to the interview panel? What questions do you need to ask of the school to ensure you have all the information you need to make an informed choice if you get offered the job?
The peak period for landing your first post is from Easter until the end of May when the bulk of class teacher and subject teacher posts are advertised, but job advertisements continue to trickle through until the end of July when term ends.
But what should you do if haven't landed a job by then? Is it worth trying to get part-time work in the hope that it will turn into a full-time post or are you better off opting to be a supply teacher?
On Wednesday 22 May we'll be doing our best to provide the answer to these questions and more in our NQT career clinic. We've got a panel of experts on hand to help provide tips and ideas for NQTs out there looking for guidance and support on how to get their first post in teaching.
So why not join us? The live chat will kick off at 6pm and run until 8pm but you can post questions below for the panel to answer or you can email them to emma.drury@guardian.co.uk or tweet them to us @GuardianTeach.
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33-year-old wins case against top City law firm, but her counsel warns of many similar cases
A trainee lawyer is in line for compensation from a top City law firm after winning her case for discrimination after she missed out on a job because she was pregnant.
An employment tribunal found that law firm Travers Smith denied Katie Tantum, 33, a permanent job because she became pregnant in the final stages of her £42,000-a-year contract.
A hearing will be held in June to determine what level of compensation Tantum, who is the daughter of a former MI6 Middle East director, should receive.
Nigel Mackay, who represented the Cambridge graduate for law firm Leigh Day, said: "We are delighted for Katie. It takes courage and tremendous resilience to stand up to your employer, even more so when that employer is a leading City law firm and you are only just embarking on your legal career.
"The evidence in this case was very clear – Katie's level of performance meant that she would have been offered a permanent role at Travers Smith but she was denied that role because she was pregnant."
The case was heard at the Central London Employment Tribunal in February, and the ruling sent out on Friday. Mackay said that Travers Smith, which specialises in corporate, financial and commercial law, was not alone in its attitude.
"Despite there being equal numbers of female and male law students taking up training places at City firms, women are still failing to progress to senior roles in anything like the numbers of their male colleagues," he said.
A spokesman for Travers Smith said: "We really did not expect this decision at all. We are very surprised and disappointed by it
"Throughout the proceedings, we thought our evidence was strong. We still believe that, although the employment tribunal has found otherwise on one aspect of this claim.
"We sincerely regret that one of our former trainees was left unhappy from her experience at the firm, and we will take on board the lessons to be learned."
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Oscar-winner attacks council decision to order Central School of Speech and Drama in London to remove hoardings that support charitable work
Dame Judi Dench has come to the defence of the drama school where she learned her Oscar-winning craft.
The London borough of Camden has banned two advertising hoardings outside the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama on supposedly aesthetic grounds.
The Central says that it receives up to £150,000 a year from advertisers using the sites, which it donates to theatre charities involving thousands of young people nationwide, and that there have been no complaints since they went up 27 years ago. An appeal to the secretary of state will be heard on Tuesday.
Dench, widely regarded as the finest actress of her generation, has written a passionate letter to the council in which she expresses dismay at the removal of "a vital source of revenue" to theatre and arts education.
Noting that Camden itself has withdrawn funding from various arts and social programmes, she writes: "To penalise this independent goodwill at such a time of recessionary hardship seems misguided."
She refers to "the considerable benefit" from the hoardings, singling out £50,000 given annually to the Shakespeare Schools Festival, which reaches 1,000 schools across Britain and involves 50,000 children – "many from deprived areas," including Camden. The hoardings have also provided funds for disadvantaged youths involved with the Roundhouse and a "black theatre" summer school.
The Central, in north-west London, is one of the UK's most prestigious drama schools. Its alumni include Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave and Peggy Ashcroft. The hoardings also fund bursaries for future Oliviers.
Dench's letter mentions her family's long association with the Central, "one of the finest centres of drama training and research in the UK". She and family members, including her daughter, live in the area or are studying there. "Therefore," she says, "I feel that I can also comment on grounds of planning and local aesthetic value." Calling for Camden "to reconsider its action", she adds: "The alternative will diminish the borough's effectiveness as a centre for the arts, and narrow the scope for its young people to participate in the theatre."
Professor Gavin Henderson, the school's principal, said that the money from the hoardings was crucial. It helped to support the neighbouring Hampstead theatre's educational programmes after the council withdrew funding: "Camden council has … cut back on all their arts funding to a point where it's virtually nonexistent. But their planning department [has been] … looking at hoardings that they don't like aesthetically… [and] issued orders for these to come down."
The two electronic hoardings are displayed against a nondescript modern building owned by the Central and overlook a busy traffic route. Henderson is all the more surprised by the aesthetic argument, because Camden's real eye-sores go unnoticed: "The council is quite happy to have hugely unsightly rubbish and recycling bins located immediately beneath these hoardings, with vermin running in and out. Rats. None of that registers at all and that's in their domain, not ours."
Other objectors refer to Camden market, where the council permits "ugly" advertising eyesores to deface classic Victorian houses and shops.
The Central has received further support from Dame Jenny Abramsky, chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund, former head of BBC Radio and a board member of the Shakespeare Schools Festival: "Government … is urging universities and arts organisations to do more to attract funding from the private sector in these times of grave economic restraint. These hoardings are an unusual and original example of a higher education and arts institution doing just that. They should be applauded."
Valerie Leach, Camden's cabinet member for planning, said: "Camden council is one of the biggest supporters in the country of our local voluntary sector. This delivers a range of arts projects. We have a duty … to protect … local areas from hoardings without any formal planning permission, such as this site."
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Britain's reluctance to pursue multinationals risks turning us into another Italy
On the edge of Rugeley stands Amazon's largest distribution centre in Britain. Life for the workers who trudge around the 800,000 sq ft warehouse is not as bad as it was for the men who once worked in the pits of the Staffordshire coalfield, but that is not saying much. They must carry satnavs, which direct their movements round the stacks and flash warnings from managers to stop dawdling or chatting with colleagues. Britain being the way it is, they have no job security.
Trade unionists call the Amazon shed a "slave camp". But whatever arguments they have with Amazon's management, one point should be beyond dispute – Rugeley is in Britain. British customers send Amazon their money. British workers package their goods and send them off in vans along roads built and maintained by the British taxpayer. If workers steal – and before they can go home or visit the canteen, they must walk through airport-style security scanners to prove they have not – Amazon will call on the taxpayer-funded police to arrest them and the taxpayer-funded criminal justice system to prosecute them. Admittedly, Amazon's buyers who supply the stock are based in Slough rather than Rugeley. But the last time I looked Slough was in Britain too.
Amazon.co.uk is a UK company. It has to be. An online retailer cannot relocate offshore. It needs local distribution centres to service local markets, otherwise the costs of moving its stock would be ruinously expensive.
Yet Amazon pays just £3.2m tax on sales of £4.2bn because the Revenue allows it to get away with arguing that it should be taxed in Luxembourg. The same lack of connection between corporate tax status and commercial reality applies to Starbucks, Google, Vodafone, Goldman Sachs and every other company the British state allows to dodge tax.
The traditional defence that companies just take advantage of legal loopholes and you would "do the same in their position" falls apart in a country where the tax regime defies the evidence of our eyes. Leaving all other considerations aside, you will never be "in their position".
If you want to understand any society, look at its tax system. If one man or a clique can tax at will, you can conclude the society is a dictatorship or oligarchy. If you have reasonably progressive and universal taxes, you can assume it is a modern democracy. Britain has elements of democratic taxation. The same rules on occasion apply to everyone. But other parts of the system resemble the ancien régime of pre-revolutionary France. Only in our case the privileged estates the government exempts from taxation are the corporations rather than the aristocracy and the church.
For a generation, politicians have extended exemptions by selling Britain as a country where big businesses would be lightly taxed. When I put it like this, I make the policy sound too cool and rational. The process was far more emotional than that. Tycoons enchanted politicians. They convinced them that their interest and the national interest were as one. So deep was the ideological capture of the top of the British state that corporations have not on the whole had to corrupt ministers.
No one has accused Gordon Brown of taking bribes, to quote the most egregious example. But in his abject period as chancellor, Brown ensured that his friends in private equity were taxed at a lower rate than their cleaners. One might have thought that the crash of 2008 would have discredited the notion that all will be well if we let capitalism run riot. Not a bit of it. George Osborne invites multinationals to advise him on how to tax multinationals. At their behest, he allows companies to move money to tax havens and then deducts the costs of their shady transactions from their British tax liabilities. The result of two decades of special treatment for vested interests can be summarised in one statistic. Between 1999 and 2011, British companies' profits increased by 58% but revenues from corporation tax increased by just 5%.
To understand the scale of the avoidance, it is not enough to look at the permissive laws, however. Richard Brooks's The Great Tax Robbery is close to being this year's indispensable book because, as a former tax inspector turned Private Eye journalist, he has the material to show how the wealthy are exempt from what few laws apply to them.
"Dear Saddam," ran a spoof letter doing the rounds of the Revenue in the run-up to the Iraq war, "we are trialling a new weapons inspection regime modelled on the Inland Revenue's approach to large corporate taxation. All you have to do is tell us you don't have any and we'll go away."
One inspector said in his bitter farewell speech that he once thought that the Revenue's advertising slogan "tax doesn't have to be taxing" was a bad pun. "Now I realise that for big business it meant what was said on the tin."
British politicians and a series of negligent and doltish managers ordered the Revenue to back away from big business. In his justifiably notorious speech to the Confederation of British Industry in 2005, everyone remembers Gordon Brown promising "light-touch" regulation for a financial services industry that was already careering towards bankruptcy. We forget that he went on to say that he would apply a light touch to "the administration of tax" for big business as well.
The Revenue itself promises corporations that, rather than doing its job and collecting monies owed, it will follow a "customer-focused supportive and enabling approach". Or as Dave Hartnett, the former permanent secretary for tax, who cut sweetheart deals with Vodafone and Goldman Sachs, explained it in 2010, Britain had a "non-confrontational" approach.
I have written before that the willingness of New Labour, the Tories and the Revenue's senior managers to pursue the working and middle classes while exempting powerful corporations would turn the British into Italians. We would start to believe that tax evasion was respectable. We would view a state that hit the ordinary man and woman while sparing big business as immoral and illegitimate. That moment is drawing closer. The old complaint that there is one law for the rich and another for the rest does not do justice to the debasement of public authority in Britain. When it comes to tax, too often there is no law for the rich whatsoever.
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Amazon has come in for plenty of stick for paying so little tax in the UK. But its actions display such impish wit that it's hard not to revel in the majesty of a terrible thing well done
There's something fishy about Google's motto, "Don't be evil." I'm not saying it's controversial but it makes you think, "Why bring that up? Why have you suddenly put the subject of being evil on the agenda?" It's suspicious in the same way as Ukip constantly pointing out how racist they're not – which my colleague Charlie Brooker said on 10 O'Clock Live was, "rather like someone who's just moved in next door saying, 'Hi, I'm Geoff, your non-dogging neighbour.'"
But we mustn't assume that the maxim was an attempt by executives to draw a line under some diabolical brainstorm, in which the internet giant pulled itself back from the brink of green-lighting a scheme to grind our bones to make its bread. It could just as easily have come out of a discussion of the possibility of doing good. "Always do good", "Try to do some good" or "Be good" might have been previous drafts of the motto before they concluded that goodness was as impractical as malevolence was distasteful and decided on "Don't be evil" as more realistic in a modern business environment. "Settling for one notch below altruism" is all the slogan really means.
Still, I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies. And there's no earthly reason why Google should do any good to anyone but itself – which is presumably why it pays so little tax. Although that's not how Matt Brittin, Google's head of sales in northern Europe, explained the situation to the House of Commons public accounts committee on Thursday. "No one in the UK can execute transactions," he said. He wasn't bemoaning a lack of competence in British workers but proudly talking MPs through a tax dodge. Even though there are sales staff in Britain, "No money changes hands." Nudge nudge, wink wink. Since the vast majority of Google's £3.2bn of UK sales are routed through Ireland, the company paid only £6m of corporation tax. I'm not saying that's necessarily evil, but it's certainly not good.
Amazon, in contrast, has never ruled out evil as part of its business plan, aspiring only to "Work hard. Have fun. Make history." It sounds like an Apprentice contestant's Twitter profile. Last week it emerged that, despite £4.2bn of UK sales, the company paid only £2.4m in corporation tax in 2012. In the same year it received £2.5m in government grants. Which makes it a net benefits scrounger. And, in terms of sheer rapacious acquisitive nerve, I'd say that has made a little bit of history.
Is there any point in my being angry about this? Everyone else already is. It feels like the interesting thing would be to come out in favour of it. After all, as the company's spokesman proudly announced: "Amazon pays all applicable taxes in every jurisdiction that it operates within." So maybe it's fine. Better than that, maybe it's crazy and interesting. It's a challenging artwork, but instead of oil paint or wood or clay or the excrement of the artist, it's constructed out of pure injustice. A huge, malevolent sculpture of unfairness, ground-breaking and thought-provoking, reminding us of the iniquities of the natural world – a corporate metaphor for the worms that will one day eat all of our corpses.
Like any really important work of art, it's bound to upset a few people. Just as Banksy causes collateral damage to the neatness of walls, so Amazon's masterpiece is a defacement of the public purse. But it's not just some hooligan's tag, like Google's artless Irish scam. This shows an impish wit and a dark insight. What elevates Amazon's activity is the fact that it applied for government grants. The elegance of that corporate choice is like the ambiguity of the Mona Lisa's smile, the ruthlessness of Mike Tyson's punch and the adaptability of the malaria virus combined. There is no point in criticising anyone or anything that can do that. They can only be admired or destroyed.
The more you think about it, the more brilliant it is. At first glance, the deftness of securing government funding, which was intended to sustain and encourage marginal businesses, is rather pleasing. The thought of the thousands of small enterprises that could have been nourished and helped to survive by the cash Amazon has swallowed in one tax-cancelling mouthful is challenging and absorbing. It's the monster that's made a myriad food parcels into its canapé.
But it gets even better. If, for a second, you make the mistake of thinking that giving Amazon handouts might nevertheless help the UK – by incentivising the company to create jobs in Britain even if, for tax purposes, it exists only in Luxembourg – then think again. Because Amazon is the great job-killer. For every job it creates, more than one is destroyed on the high street. It's the great annihilator of work and yet it's receiving a job-creation government subsidy. It doesn't just absorb money that would be better spent creating employment elsewhere, it deploys it to decimate the chances of that employment.
I understand that the changes in work and business patterns being caused by the internet are inevitable and irreversible. To try to stop them would be railing against the tide. Still, it's amazing that Amazon, in an act of dazzling contempt, has persuaded the treasury actually to pump water into the rising sea.
I don't really think that these problems can be fixed. It's the role of politicians to say that something must be done – with a sense of purpose if in power, and outrage if in opposition. But their jobs are too tenuous and short-lived, the international tax system too complex and the corporations too tenacious to stop this sort of thing happening. Loopholes will crop up by accident and, where they don't, the intense and remorseless lobbying of the already astronomically wealthy will ensure that more are created.
We can work ourselves up in impotent fury or – and this is a calmer way to live – just sit back and enjoy the majesty of a terrible thing done well. Amazon's tax and grant arrangements are the beautiful ivory candlestick revealed by the silhouettes of British taxpayers' incredulous faces. The politicians and public provide the backdrop of incompetence and rage in front of which huge companies can display their work of corporate perfection. As the mushroom cloud showed us decades ago, evil can be beautiful.
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A post-apocalyptic Moscow metro system is a great setting for some serious gunplay
The original Metro 2033 was a sleeper hit, earning praise for its sharp blend of tense, post-apocalyptic terror and superb action long after its release. No surprise though, as the Metro games are far deeper than even hardened players might expect from a first-person shooter.
Based on the novels of Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro: Last Light follows Artyom, a young man trying to survive in the ruins of Moscow's subway system, a network serving as humanity's refuge after a nuclear war.
The world Glukhovsky created is presented in fine form here, visually through a claustrophobic web of crumbling tunnels and a ruined surface populated by mutated abominations, and narratively with a story that examines fascism and communism, prejudice and the pursuit of power.
As a result, the gameplay almost becomes a slave to the story but despite this, Last Light is a delight. The survival horror and FPS elements complement each other as well here as they did in the original, with the urge to blast every flickering shadow tempered only by the scarcity of resources.
A superb effort, written and presented with a skill that proves games can be both as complex and rewarding as any other art form.
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This Japanese 2D fighting game sequel is very different from its predecessor but just as impressive
Persona 4 Arena's brand of 2D fighting is, at first glance, a far cry from its brilliant RPG forebear. Once players spend time with this intricately balanced and beautifully animated beat-'em-up though, they will discover it is every bit as deep and involving as its predecessor.
Arena sees lead Yu Narukami drawn into another mystery in the parallel Midnight Channel world. This time, it involves being forced to fight his friends while finding out exactly why. The battle system is remarkably complex, demanding mastery of blocks, attack breaks, counters and more, plus awareness of power and health gauges. While far from entry-level, Arena will appeal greatly to fans of the original Persona 4 and lovers of top-tier Japanese fighting games.
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New venture Librii is seeking to set up self-sustaining libraries with internet access in poor and isolated communities
A decade ago, Brewster Kahle, philanthropist and founder of the Internet Archive, created the first digital bookmobile: a complete printing press in the back of a car. With a power source, satellite internet connection, printer and binder, the vehicle and its descendants subsequently printed thousands of public-domain books where they were needed most, such as in rural areas without internet connection, including schools and refugee camps across Africa.
In 2003, it was estimated that less than 1% of Africa's population had access to the internet. Since then, that figure has grown to just 15%. Private companies have been laying high-speed cables along the coasts, but it's slow to make progress inland: even where access is available, it is often low speed and unconnected to the facilities on the ground needed to make the most of it, particularly for education. (The vast majority of people in Africa who do access the internet do so via mobile phone.)
Now, with an initial funding of $50,000 from Kickstarter, library startup Librii is building its first "eHub" prototype: a shipping container filled with computers, printers and training materials, connected to a simple, low-cost study centre, which will let visitors access information, print books and other materials and, crucially, contribute back to the project and the web at large. Once the prototype is complete and tested, a partnership with the University of Ghana and Librarians Without Borders is intended to start shipping the embryonic libraries to Africa, following the frontiers of fibreoptic cable as they push into the continent. While Librii is an NGO, the libraries will be fully self-supporting after the first year, seeking local sponsorship and generating their own income. Recognising that local knowledge, architecture, infrastructure and education are all vital components in the project is what makes Librii's approach an exciting one.
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New venture Librii is seeking to set up self-sustaining libraries with internet access in poor and isolated communities
A decade ago, Brewster Kahle, philanthropist and founder of the Internet Archive, created the first digital bookmobile: a complete printing press in the back of a car. With a power source, satellite internet connection, printer and binder, the vehicle and its descendants subsequently printed thousands of public-domain books where they were needed most, such as in rural areas without internet connection, including schools and refugee camps across Africa.
In 2003, it was estimated that less than 1% of Africa's population had access to the internet. Since then, that figure has grown to just 15%. Private companies have been laying high-speed cables along the coasts, but it's slow to make progress inland: even where access is available, it is often low speed and unconnected to the facilities on the ground needed to make the most of it, particularly for education. (The vast majority of people in Africa who do access the internet do so via mobile phone.)
Now, with an initial funding of $50,000 from Kickstarter, library startup Librii is building its first "eHub" prototype: a shipping container filled with computers, printers and training materials, connected to a simple, low-cost study centre, which will let visitors access information, print books and other materials and, crucially, contribute back to the project and the web at large. Once the prototype is complete and tested, a partnership with the University of Ghana and Librarians Without Borders is intended to start shipping the embryonic libraries to Africa, following the frontiers of fibreoptic cable as they push into the continent. While Librii is an NGO, the libraries will be fully self-supporting after the first year, seeking local sponsorship and generating their own income. Recognising that local knowledge, architecture, infrastructure and education are all vital components in the project is what makes Librii's approach an exciting one.
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Reading on mobile? See the trailer here
In the sixth film in this profitable sex, speed and demolition franchise, Dwayne Johnson (formerly known as "the Rock") as an Interpol officer uses moral blackmail and promises of amnesties to lure a crowd of freewheeling, fast-driving international criminals from their romantic lairs in sunny climes to defeat a renegade SAS man who has accumulated top-secret military equipment to hold the world to ransom. This is an excuse for mayhem on a spectacular scale mostly in Britain and Spain as a band of petrolheads led by the appropriately named Vin Diesel use mechanical torsion to defeat malevolent extortion.
The endless chases, stunts and fights are as spectacular and preposterous as the occasional verbal exchanges are sentimental and childish. An illegal road race through the night streets of London's West End is particularly brilliantly staged. "The Rock" forces the Metropolitan Police's security to release restricted documents merely by squeezing a top cop's hand to pulp, thus applying enhanced interrogation to the special relationship. The end credits promise that Jason Statham will be joining the team in the next episode.
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Cognitive scientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett is one of America's foremost thinkers. In this extract from his new book, he reveals some of the lessons life has taught him
We have all heard the forlorn refrain: "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!" This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appreciate it as a pillar of wisdom. Any being, any agent, who can truly say: "Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!" is standing on the threshold of brilliance. We human beings pride ourselves on our intelligence, and one of its hallmarks is that we can remember our previous thinking and reflect on it – on how it seemed, on why it was tempting in the first place and then about what went wrong.
I know of no evidence to suggest that any other species on the planet can actually think this thought. If they could, they would be almost as smart as we are. So when you make a mistake, you should learn to take a deep breath, grit your teeth and then examine your own recollections of the mistake as ruthlessly and as dispassionately as you can manage. It's not easy. The natural human reaction to making a mistake is embarrassment and anger (we are never angrier than when we are angry at ourselves) and you have to work hard to overcome these emotional reactions.
Try to acquire the weird practice of savouring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you and go on to the next big opportunity. But that is not enough: you should actively seek out opportunities just so you can then recover from them.
In science, you make your mistakes in public. You show them off so that everybody can learn from them. This way, you get the benefit of everybody else's experience, and not just your own idiosyncratic path through the space of mistakes. (Physicist Wolfgang Pauli famously expressed his contempt for the work of a colleague as "not even wrong". A clear falsehood shared with critics is better than vague mush.)
This, by the way, is another reason why we humans are so much smarter than every other species. It is not so much that our brains are bigger or more powerful, or even that we have the knack of reflecting on our own past errors, but that we share the benefits our individual brains have won by their individual histories of trial and error.
I am amazed at how many really smart people don't understand that you can make big mistakes in public and emerge none the worse for it. I know distinguished researchers who will go to preposterous lengths to avoid having to acknowledge that they were wrong about something. Actually, people love it when somebody admits to making a mistake. All kinds of people love pointing out mistakes.
Generous-spirited people appreciate your giving them the opportunity to help, and acknowledging it when they succeed in helping you; mean-spirited people enjoy showing you up. Let them! Either way we all win.
Just how charitable are you supposed to be when criticising the views of an opponent? If there are obvious contradictions in the opponent's case, then you should point them out, forcefully. If there are somewhat hidden contradictions, you should carefully expose them to view – and then dump on them. But the search for hidden contradictions often crosses the line into nitpicking, sea-lawyering and outright parody. The thrill of the chase and the conviction that your opponent has to be harbouring a confusion somewhere encourages uncharitable interpretation, which gives you an easy target to attack.
But such easy targets are typically irrelevant to the real issues at stake and simply waste everybody's time and patience, even if they give amusement to your supporters. The best antidote I know for this tendency to caricature one's opponent is a list of rules promulgated many years ago by social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport.
How to compose a successful critical commentary:
1. Attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way."
2. List any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).
3. Mention anything you have learned from your target.
4. Only then are you permitted to say so much as a word of rebuttal or criticism.
One immediate effect of following these rules is that your targets will be a receptive audience for your criticism: you have already shown that you understand their positions as well as they do, and have demonstrated good judgment (you agree with them on some important matters and have even been persuaded by something they said). Following Rapoport's rules is always, for me, something of a struggle…
When you're reading or skimming argumentative essays, especially by philosophers, here is a quick trick that may save you much time and effort, especially in this age of simple searching by computer: look for "surely" in the document and check each occurrence. Not always, not even most of the time, but often the word "surely" is as good as a blinking light locating a weak point in the argument.
Why? Because it marks the very edge of what the author is actually sure about and hopes readers will also be sure about. (If the author were really sure all the readers would agree, it wouldn't be worth mentioning.) Being at the edge, the author has had to make a judgment call about whether or not to attempt to demonstrate the point at issue, or provide evidence for it, and – because life is short – has decided in favour of bald assertion, with the presumably well-grounded anticipation of agreement. Just the sort of place to find an ill-examined "truism" that isn't true!
Just as you should keep a sharp eye out for "surely", you should develop a sensitivity for rhetorical questions in any argument or polemic. Why? Because, like the use of "surely", they represent an author's eagerness to take a short cut. A rhetorical question has a question mark at the end, but it is not meant to be answered. That is, the author doesn't bother waiting for you to answer since the answer is so obvious that you'd be embarrassed to say it!
Here is a good habit to develop: whenever you see a rhetorical question, try – silently, to yourself – to give it an unobvious answer. If you find a good one, surprise your interlocutor by answering the question. I remember a Peanuts cartoon from years ago that nicely illustrates the tactic. Charlie Brown had just asked, rhetorically: "Who's to say what is right and wrong here?" and Lucy responded, in the next panel: "I will."
Attributed to William of Ockham (or Ooccam), a 14th-century English logician and philosopher, this thinking tool is actually a much older rule of thumb. A Latin name for it is lex parsimoniae, the law of parsimony. It is usually put into English as the maxim "Do not multiply entities beyond necessity".
The idea is straightforward: don't concoct a complicated, extravagant theory if you've got a simpler one (containing fewer ingredients, fewer entities) that handles the phenomenon just as well. If exposure to extremely cold air can account for all the symptoms of frostbite, don't postulate unobserved "snow germs" or "Arctic microbes". Kepler's laws explain the orbits of the planets; we have no need to hypothesise pilots guiding the planets from control panels hidden under the surface. This much is uncontroversial, but extensions of the principle have not always met with agreement.
One of the least impressive attempts to apply Occam's razor to a gnarly problem is the claim (and provoked counterclaims) that postulating a God as creator of the universe is simpler, more parsimonious, than the alternatives. How could postulating something supernatural and incomprehensible be parsimonious? It strikes me as the height of extravagance, but perhaps there are clever ways of rebutting that suggestion.
I don't want to argue about it; Occam's razor is, after all, just a rule of thumb, a frequently useful suggestion. The prospect of turning it into a metaphysical principle or fundamental requirement of rationality that could bear the weight of proving or disproving the existence of God in one fell swoop is simply ludicrous. It would be like trying to disprove a theorem of quantum mechanics by showing that it contradicted the axiom "Don't put all your eggs in one basket".
Sturgeon's law is usually expressed thus: 90% of everything is crap. So 90% of experiments in molecular biology, 90% of poetry, 90% of philosophy books, 90% of peer-reviewed articles in mathematics – and so forth – is crap. Is that true? Well, maybe it's an exaggeration, but let's agree that there is a lot of mediocre work done in every field. (Some curmudgeons say it's more like 99%, but let's not get into that game.)
A good moral to draw from this observation is that when you want to criticise a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form …don't waste your time and ours hooting at the crap! Go after the good stuff or leave it alone. This advice is often ignored by ideologues intent on destroying the reputation of analytic philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, macroeconomics, plastic surgery, improvisational theatre, television sitcoms, philosophical theology, massage therapy, you name it.
Let's stipulate at the outset that there is a great deal of deplorable, second-rate stuff out there, of all sorts. Now, in order not to waste your time and try our patience, make sure you concentrate on the best stuff you can find, the flagship examples extolled by the leaders of the field, the prize-winning entries, not the dregs. Notice that this is closely related to Rapoport's rules: unless you are a comedian whose main purpose is to make people laugh at ludicrous buffoonery, spare us the caricature.
A deepity (a term coined by the daughter of my late friend, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum) is a proposition that seems both important and true – and profound – but that achieves this effect by being ambiguous. On one reading, it is manifestly false, but it would be earth-shaking if it were true; on the other reading, it is true but trivial. The unwary listener picks up the glimmer of truth from the second reading, and the devastating importance from the first reading, and thinks, Wow! That's a deepity.
Here is an example (better sit down: this is heavy stuff): Love is just a word.
Oh wow! Cosmic. Mind-blowing, right? Wrong. On one reading, it is manifestly false. I'm not sure what love is – maybe an emotion or emotional attachment, maybe an interpersonal relationship, maybe the highest state a human mind can achieve – but we all know it isn't a word. You can't find love in the dictionary!
We can bring out the other reading by availing ourselves of a convention philosophers care mightily about: when we talk about a word, we put it in quotation marks, thus: "love" is just a word. "Cheeseburger" is just a word. "Word" is just a word. But this isn't fair, you say. Whoever said that love is just a word meant something else, surely. No doubt, but they didn't say it.
Not all deepities are quite so easily analysed. Richard Dawkins recently alerted me to a fine deepity by Rowan Williams, the then archbishop of Canterbury, who described his faith as "a silent waiting on the truth, pure sitting and breathing in the presence of the question mark".
I leave the analysis of this as an exercise for you.
This is an edited extract from Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett, published by Allen Lane (£20)
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The fifth instalment of the series brings path-building puzzles galore, if you can stand the fiddly bits
Nintendo has created something of a stealth franchise with the Mario vs Donkey Kong series – this is, almost unbelievably, the fifth entry. Minis on the Move shifts attention away from puzzle-platforming to the path-building brainteaser.
Essentially an inverted tower-defence game, clearing each stage means guiding toy versions of Mario and friends past such perils as spike pits and wandering enemies. Early levels are deceptively simple until a steady trickle of new gameplay mechanics, including rotating squares and sliding panels, increase difficulty considerably.
Persistence will mostly win out, though fiddly and unresponsive tile-swapping sections will test the patience of even the most devoted Mario fans. A charming, largely enjoyable puzzler, well suited to the portable form.
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Anger over the financial affairs of multinationals such as Google, Amazon and Starbucks is gathering momentum in Westminster. Now the UK is poised to lead the debate about international tax reform at next month's G8 summit
Huge orange and green cranes hover over a vast building site at King's Cross, London. Over the next three years, 2.4 acres of this site will be transformed into a million square feet of an 11-storey headquarters for the internet giant Google, no doubt chock-a-block with colourful Big Brother-house-style sofas and surreal chill-out zones that mark out its other 70 offices in 40 countries.
The property deal is estimated to have cost around £1bn and was heralded by the site's development consortium as the "most significant property transaction of recent years".
"This is a big investment by Google, we're committing further to the UK where computing and the web were invented. It's good news for Google, for London and for the UK," said Matt Brittin, vice-president for northern and central Europe, when the purchase was announced in January.
Like Amazon, Google is seeing increasing success in the UK where one in every $10 of sales is now generated. Yet both firms claim they are merely touching down on UK soil, without a "permanent establishment" and therefore are not paying tax on profits from billions of pounds worth of sales made here.
On Wednesday, Google won the advertiser of the year trophy at the 54th annual Clio Awards – the Oscars for advertising professionals. Accepting the award in New York, Robert Wong, chief creative officer of Google Creative Lab, said: "At the highest order, our job is to remind the world what it is they love about Google."
That popularity has hit a serious snag. The next day the company was branded "evil" by Margaret Hodge, chair of the public accounts committee, while this weekend Ed Miliband called it "irresponsible". "If everyone approached their tax affairs as some of these companies have approached theirs we wouldn't have a health service, we wouldn't have an education system," he said.
Along with Amazon and, before that, Starbucks, Topshop, Boots, Vodafone, Goldman Sachs and Greene King, Google is the latest to have become the target of grassroots hostility towards their aggressive tax avoidance policies. The actions of these corporations are not illegal, nor underhand, but especially when we're all supposed to be in austerity together, jarring horribly with public opinion.
Something "doesn't smell right", as the Guardian's editorial said this weekend, after it ran an account of the extent of Amazon's dealings in the UK, far wider than what its tax lawyers are implying.
The debate is now raging over whether these companies are the happy beneficiaries of a tax system knitted with loopholes, or the malicious purveyors of smoke-and-mirror accounting. HM Revenue and Customs claims the former – public opinion is rolling towards the latter. Lin Homer, chief executive of HMRC, claimed the public don't understand. Asked why she was not taking a tougher line with internet giants, she told the public accounts committee: "We see, but understand more fully, some of the information that might seem to the general public to be surprising."
But campaigners say tax collectors and leading politicians have been caught out; too engrossed in austerity plans, they are scrabbling to keep up with people who point out that there are other ways to balance the books.
"Without a doubt, they are behind the curve," said Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant, economist and founder of Tax Justice Network. "They have all been caught by surprise because this has come from civil society, a campaign that has been going on for almost a decade but has only been picked up by politicians after the banking crisis when they suddenly realised they were desperately short of cash."
He said HMRC had been ducking tax avoidance completely. He said it had powers to tackle any suspect tax returns of foreign-based companies. "If the breach is blatant, then they can act. What we haven't got is politicians who will stand up to this. It's a critical point. If the state will not stand up for its right to tax big corporations then we are in deep trouble."
UK Uncut began campaigning on the issue in 2010 and it was its legal challenge that revealed how HMRC waived a £20m bill for Goldman Sachs, as well as a £6bn bill to Vodafone. Journalists, tax experts and campaigners have been investigating and exposing the tax scams being perpetrated by big businesses for far longer – pointing out glaring loopholes in Britain's tax system.
When Matt Brittin of Google told the public accounts committee in November 2012 that Google did not have a sales presence in the UK, it was the news agency Reuters that quickly uncovered evidence to the contrary, resulting in Brittin being recalled in front of the committee on Thursday, where his company's behaviour was described as "devious, calculated and, in my view, unethical" by Margaret Hodge.
"You are a company that says you 'do no evil'. And I think that you do do evil," said Hodge, referring to Google's motto, "Don't be evil".
Amazon may also be recalled, after numerous whistleblowers from among its employees approached journalists to contest official accounts of its trading practices within Britain.
For the moment the government's line is that this is a global problem that cannot be solved unilaterally. On Monday, Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, will meet David Cameron, a meeting No 10 insists is not about tax, but to do with Schmidt's role on the prime minister's business advisory group.
Labour leader Ed Miliband, who is due to give a speech to Google employees on Wednesday, has backed a "country by country" international scheme on tax declaration but says that he is concerned that no firm proposals have so far been put forward for the G8. "You have to have much greater transparency. Tax offices have to know country by country how much profit people are making, how much tax they are paying. Unless you know that you won't get to the bottom of what is happening. You have to deal with tax avoidance schemes. You have to deal with tax havens.
"We are saying there has to be a big, big push on this. It has to be done internationally and if it is not done internationally, Britain should act on its own."
All eyes will be on what, if anything, can be agreed at next month's G8 meeting in Scotland, where, as host of the event, David Cameron has pledged to put tax avoidance at the top of the agenda as he insists it is an issue for international co-operation rather than unilateral action.
And it would not be just the wealthy who would be watching the progress of the talks, said Melanie Ward, head of advocacy at ActionAid UK.
"At the G20 summit in 2009, Gordon Brown led the beginnings of a global crackdown on tax havens and, for the first time, put an emphasis on helping poor countries to deal with the losses to tax havens that cost them three times as much as they receive in aid each year. But in the intervening years, tax dodging died away as a big UK issue," she said.
"It's shot back up the agenda with rising public anger over the antics of Starbucks, Google, Amazon and reports of sweetheart deals between the government and Goldman Sachs. The UK should close tax loopholes, but the truth is that the UK is responsible for one in five of the world's tax havens in the form of many of the crown dependencies and overseas territories. These tax havens are a leech, sucking resources from the UK and poor countries alike, so action needs to start with pulling them into line.
"Ultimately, this is a global problem and the solutions are global. That's why David Cameron must lead the G8 to deliver an unprecedented assault on tax dodging when it meets next month. This means calling time on tax havens and ensuring that poor countries are at the heart of any new deal to share tax information between countries.
"There is a serious risk that a deal will be agreed between rich countries and tax havens that would leave poor countries out in the cold. This would be entirely unacceptable. Tax dodging is hurting ordinary people, wherever in the world they live."
Richard Murphy said the moral case for international action had already been won. "We now just have to beat off the accountants and businesses who oppose democratic accountability to the state to get it," he said.
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Google executive chairman says company accounts comply with international law
Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt has defended his company's financial affairs after a Commons committee branded the internet giant devious and unethical for sheltering its multibillion-pound profits from UK taxes.
Writing in the Observer, Schmidt said his company's accounts were complicated but complied with international taxation treaties that allowed it to pay most of its tax in the United States.
Schmidt said that he understood why Google's apparent sidestepping on UK taxation had generated controversy and called for a reform of international tax law.
"At a time when families are having to tighten their belts and funding for vital public services is under pressure, corporate taxation is rightly a hot topic," Schmidt wrote. "And as a company that has always aspired to do the right thing, we understand why Google is at the centre of that debate."
His remarks follow Google's mauling at the hands of the Commons Public Accounts Committee on Thursday. Members reacted in disbelief after it emerged that they paid just £3.4m of tax on £3.2bn of sales taken from UK customers last year as their sales were technically "closed" in low-tax Ireland.
Schmidt insisted that corporation tax should be paid on a company's profits rather than its revenues and said because his was a multinational corporation whose engineers were chiefly based in the United States, Google's taxes should be channelled there. This, he said, obeyed rules laid out by politicians.
"We pay more taxes in the US than in any other country – around $2bn in corporate income taxes to the US government in 2012," he wrote. "It's the same for UK-based technology or pharmaceutical companies, which pay the majority of their corporation tax in the UK, as that is where most of the activity that generates their profits takes place."
Schmidt said that the debate over international taxation showed it could benefit from reform. He added that because Google was able to generated large revenues, it was also able to plough money back into the UK economy.
"While profit has become something of a dirty word, it's important to remember that many corporations reinvest their profits in research and product development, which in turn tends to lead to job creation, further economic growth and, ultimately, more tax. For example, Google has just announced plans to invest more than £1bn in new offices in London's King's Cross. It's been estimated that this investment will generate some £80m a year in new employment taxes and £50m in stamp duty. This is in addition to the significant amounts we already pay in UK tax through corporate, local and employment taxes."
Schmidt's comments came as Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, said he believed some multinationals, including Google were not fulfilling their social responsibilites.
Miliband told the Observer: "Now, what is the politicians' responsibility: change the law. But it is also to talk about the kind of society we want to create and what the responsibilities of a company like Google are.
"I don't think they are living up to their responsibilities at the moment and I will be very clear about that on Wednesday.
"It is part of a culture of irresponsibility. If everyone approached their tax affairs as some of these companies have approached their tax affairs we wouldn't have a health service, we wouldn't have an education system."
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Quantum mechanics research could hold the key to a new generation of super-fast computers
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost," wrote Richard Feynman, the greatest physicist of his day, "not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there." Which is another way of saying that physics is weird. And particle physics – or quantum mechanics, to give it its posh title – is weird to the power of n, where n is a very large integer.
Consider some of the things that particle physicists believe. They accept without batting an eyelid, for example, that one particular subatomic particle, the neutrino, can pass right through the Earth without stopping. They believe that a subatomic particle can be in two different states at the same time. And that two particles can be "entangled" in such a way that they can co-ordinate their properties regardless of the distance in space and time that separates them (an idea that even Einstein found "spooky"). And that whenever we look at subatomic particles they are altered by the act of inspection so that, in a sense, we can never see them as they are.
For a long time, the world looked upon quantum physicists with a kind of bemused affection. Sure, they might be wacky, but boy, were they smart! And western governments stumped up large quantities of dosh to enable them to build the experimental kit they needed for their investigations. A huge underground doughnut was excavated in the suburbs of Geneva, for example, and filled with unconscionable amounts of heavy machinery in the hope that it would enable the quark-hunters to find the Higgs boson, or at any rate its shadowy tracks.
All of this was in furtherance of the purest of pure science – curiosity-driven research. The idea that this stuff might have any practical application seemed, well, preposterous to most of us. But here and there, there were people who thought otherwise (among them, as it happens, Richard Feynman). In particular, these visionaries wondered about the potential of harnessing the strange properties of subatomic particles for computational purposes. After all, if a particle can be in two different states at the same time (in contrast to a humdrum digital bit, which can only be a one or a zero), then maybe we could use that for speeded-up computing. And so on.
Thus was born the idea of the "quantum computer". At its heart is the idea of a quantum bit or qubit. The bits that conventional computers use are implemented by transistors that can either be on (1) or off (0). Qubits, in contrast, can be both on and off at the same time, which implies that they could be used to carry out two or more calculations simultaneously. In principle, therefore, quantum computers should run much faster than conventional, silicon-based ones, at least in calculations where parallel processing is helpful.
For as long as I have been paying attention to this stuff, the academic literature has been full of arguments about quantum computing. Some people thought that while it might be possible in theory, in practice it would prove impracticable. But while these disputes raged, a Canadian company called D-Wave – whose backers include Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and the "investment arm" of the CIA (I am not making this up) – was quietly getting on with building and marketing a quantum computer. In 2011, D-Wave sold its first machine – a 128-qubit computer – to military contractor Lockheed Martin. And last week it was announced that D-Wave had sold a more powerful machine to a consortium led by Google and Nasa and a number of leading US universities.
What's interesting about this is not so much its confirmation that the technology may indeed be a practical proposition, though that's significant in itself. More important is that it signals the possibility that we might be heading for a major step change in processing power. In one experiment, for example, it was found that the D-Wave machine was 3,600 times faster than a conventional computer in certain kinds of applications. Given that the increases in processing power enabled by Moore's law (which applies only to silicon and says that computing power doubles roughly every two years) are already causing us to revise our assumptions about what computers can and cannot do, we may have some more revisions to do. All of which goes to prove the truth of the adage: pure research is just research that hasn't yet been applied.
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The chairman of Google responds to criticism that companies such as his are not paying their fair share of taxes
At a time when families are having to tighten their belts and funding for vital public services is under pressure, corporate taxation is rightly a hot topic. And as a company that has always aspired to do the right thing, we understand why Google is at the centre of that debate. In the interests of moving the argument forward – away from accusation and toward action – here are three principles we hope most people can agree upon.
First, corporation tax should be paid on a company's profits, not its revenues. When a company only operates in one country, it's obvious where its profits are generated and thus where its taxes should be paid. But for multinational companies with a global presence, it's much more complicated. To pay the right amount in taxation, you need to determine where the profit is actually created. So most developed countries, including the UK, have worked together to create a set of tax treaties. These are based on the principle that corporate taxes are levied in the country where a company conducts the economic activity, and takes the risk, that generates its profits – not where products are consumed.
Most of Google's engineers are based in the US and that's where much of our product development takes place. So we pay more taxes in the US than in any other country – around $2bn in corporate income taxes to the US government in 2012. It's the same for UK-based technology or pharmaceutical companies, which pay the majority of their corporation tax in the UK, as that is where most of the activity that generates their profits takes place. Equally important, this system ensures that the same profits are not taxed twice, or even more than that, across different countries, something that would reduce any company's ability to invest in future research or new jobs.
Second, politicians – not companies – set the rules. As the head of Revenue and Customs said in the House of Commons last week: "We are duty-bound to collect and investigate under regulations set out by lawmakers, not on what you'd [ie politicians] like us to collect." When legislators are doing the lobbying and companies are articulating the law as it stands, it's a confusing spectacle for everyone.
Third, given the intensity of the debate, not just in the UK but also in America and elsewhere, international tax law could almost certainly benefit from reform. It's why the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) will be publishing a hotly awaited paper in July on how to make these rules simpler and more transparent. Change won't be easy because it will require the renegotiation of international tax treaties, not just action by individual nation states. And many of those countries will doubtless have competing interests.
For example, it's tempting for every government to assume that they will benefit if and when the current structure changes. But in reality, it's probably only a significant increase in corporation taxes globally that would make every country a "winner" – and the consequences of that would likely be less innovation, less growth and less job creation.
That said, the UK government has the perfect opportunity to take the lead in shaping this complex debate at the G8 summit next month. We hope George Osborne seizes the initiative and makes meaningful tax reform one of the top items on the agenda.
Finally, while profit has become something of a dirty word, it's important to remember that many corporations reinvest their profits in research and product development, which in turn tends to lead to job creation, further economic growth and, ultimately, more tax. For example, Google has just announced plans to invest more than £1bn in new offices in London's King's Cross. It's been estimated that this investment will generate some £80m a year in new employment taxes and £50m in stamp duty. This is in addition to the significant amounts we already pay in UK tax through corporate, local and employment taxes.
Our hope is to move the debate forward, with everyone engaged constructively in developing a clearer, simpler system – one in which companies that abide by the law know that the politicians who devised the rules are willing to defend and commend them.
Eric Schmidt is executive chairman, Google
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Aurora Academies Trust is challenged over use of patented 'Paragon curriculum' that has been criticised by Ofsted
An academy running four schools is paying its US parent company £100,000 a year to use its patented global curriculum, which has been criticised by Ofsted for lacking a "local" focus.
Aurora Academies Trust insists that the Paragon curriculum is transforming the fortunes of the primary schools in East Sussex. But unions and local Labour activists question whether the licensing deal represents the first step in plans to allow private companies to run schools for profit. Tory modernisers are said to be keen on the idea.
Aurora's progress will be studied closely by education experts. It has "lead sponsor" status with the Department for Education, meaning it is consulted on policy decisions and is likely to run more schools in the future.
Aurora's decision last autumn to take over the four schools – King Offa and Glenleigh Park in Bexhill and Heron Park and Oakwood in Eastbourne – came after education secretary Michael Gove criticised the local authority for "failing actively to pursue sponsored academy solutions".
Aurora was established by Mosaica Education UK, a subsidiary of Mosaica Education Inc, an American company which describes itself as a "global leader in education reform" and runs schools in 12 US states, the United Arab Emirates and India.
Aurora pays Mosaica £100 per pupil per year in royalties to use its curriculum. There are about 1,000 children at the four schools, meaning Mosaica receives about £100,000 a year from the arrangement.
Aurora insists Mosaica does not profit from the deal. But Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, the largest teaching union, questioned the transparency of the arrangement.
"This is taxpayers' money, which should be targeted directly at children's education in the classroom," she said. "What is most shocking is that no accountability mechanism exists to prevent this, nor is there any form of quality assurance."
Parents of Aurora pupils will consider the money well spent if it produces good results. Mosaica claims that its schools produce superior academic results by "utilising a unique school design which combines a proprietary curriculum, Paragon, with state-of-the-art technology".
However, a study of Mosaica's achievement scores by the American Federation of Teachers union, suggested that the company's self-evaluations inflated student scores, claims that are denied by the company.
Under the humanities-based curriculum, students "learn about character, ethics, empathy and self-esteem, implicitly by studying the world's great heroes, both canonical and unsung, and by stepping into the shoes of great historical figures, both real and imaginary".
The approach appears at odds with Gove's views of how history should be taught in the national curriculum. He wants pupils to learn more about British history, complaining that one teenager in five believes Winston Churchill was a fictional character, a statistic drawn from a survey carried out by Premier Inn.
He has also been critical of teachers using imaginary figures to help understand history, recently denouncing the use of Mr Men characters to teach 15- and 16-year-olds about the second world war.
Several parents have praised the Paragon curriculum for giving their children a "more international perspective". A recent Ofsted inspection found that the King Offa school, which had been in special measures, "is making reasonable progress in raising standards". But it noted, "that teachers are not sufficiently confident in adapting teaching materials to the needs of their pupils. Moreover, the curriculum currently lacks a distinctively local element." A study conducted by Arizona State University suggested that many US charter schools that had been run by Mosaica end up severing their links with the company.
Last year, a school in New Orleans took legal action to break its contract with Mosaica. The organisation that took over the school complained that the curriculum was not aligned to state standards, resulting in students failing tests. The school won the lawsuit, but had to pay Mosaica $100,000 to break the contract.
Tim McCarthy, chief executive of Aurora, said that US charter schools regularly switched education providers. He said that Aurora was making significant progress: "We're looking at some little green shoots. We've got a school out of special measures within seven months and we're getting fantastic engagement with pupils and parents."
McCarthy said that Aurora was now tailoring its curriculum to include local history, such as the Norman invasion. "It's a living, breathing resource that is always changing," he said of the curriculum. "The thought that this is something off the shelf is wrong."
He said that "all of the money from the schools is put into running the schools" and that Aurora provided teachers with 90 hours of professional development training.
But Paul Courtel, a local Labour activist, questioned whether Aurora and Mosaica were playing the long game: "I think the substantive financial gain to Mosaica would be the introduction of 'for profit' free schools in the event that the Conservatives are re-elected, with an overall parliamentary majority, in 2015."
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Unfounded fears have driven some Christian groups to co-opt the language of discrimination for their reactionary policies
Christians make up 78% of the American population, 90% of Congress, and 100% of presidents thus far. But to hear some conservative Christians tell it, they are a persecuted minority. Newt Gingrich recently claimed that LGBT rights have caused Catholic adoption services to be "outlawed" in Washington DC and Massachusetts. In a loaded speech on the House floor last week, Representative Steve King accused President Obama of racial favoritism and "[eroding] western Judeo-Christendom", unfavorably comparing his congratulatory call to Jason Collins, the newly out NBA player, with strangely unspecified slights against Tim Tebow, "who will kneel and pray to God on the football field."
Fears of marginalization because of Christian faith, even persecution, have deep roots in white American evangelical culture, dating back to the Scopes Trial and before. As with Representative King's comments, they're often steeped in white racial anxiety and resentment. This persecution complex is also taught – actively promoted and reinforced through fearmongering aimed at youth.
One example: "The Thaw", a modest viral hit produced by Reach America, a "Christian youth leadership program" based in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. In the video, about 20 local teens – all white except but one – list ways in which Christians are systematically "frozen out of the public sphere" and public schools. Christian students are expected to "check [their] religion at the door," forbidden to pray, or to "write about God" in school. They hazard bullying and "rude and disrespectful" treatment, "dirty jokes" from fellow students, and "pornography" disguised as "sex education". The curious notion that Tim Tebow has been punished for his public faith comes up here, as well.
The teenagers wax nostalgic for an America where "school prayer and pledge to the flag was welcomed [sic]," before God was taken "out of … history books" and the country was "stolen" by "people who do not love our God". They call on students to join an "army … with Christ [as] commander", to reverse this political and religious decline.
In stark contrast to this dour picture, Idaho reporter Maureen Dolan writes that two high schools near where The Thaw was made have active prayer groups that meet on school grounds. At Lake City High, principal Deanne Clifford prays with students. At Coeur d'Alene High, local churches "regularly" send "representatives … as 'approved visitors' [who join] the students for lunch in the cafeteria".
It's this cognitive dissonance that's most striking, and disturbing, about "The Thaw". The language of bullying and social isolation of students who don't fit in, increasingly a concern for many parents and schools, is harnessed for a defense of the imagined good old (viz segregated) days when conservative Christian tenets were even more privileged in school curricula: abstinence-only education, creation science, mandatory school prayers, etc. The absence of such privileges – infringements on the equal rights of students and families who believe differently – is presented as bullying and persecution. As Reach America director Gary Brown says:
"Bullying is in the eyes of the beholder, I guess."
This is precisely the sort of counterfactual reasoning and co-opted rhetoric of social justice that influential groups on the religious right use to promote their policies, rather than actually help students who are truly vulnerable to bullying and discrimination. Focus on the Family, for example, has developed a "True Tolerance" program to defend "parental rights" and help students stand up to "homosexual indoctrination" and "bullying" of Christians in public schools – by opposing anti-bullying programs that work to make schools safer for LGBT and gender non-conforming students.
Fueling such reactionary activism is a powerful sense of grievance, stoked by a thriving cottage industry that churns out misinformation like "The Thaw". In such a climate, dubious accounts of anti-Christian discrimination or coercion are believed readily. In recent weeks, for example, tales of students forced to engage in "lesbian kissing", or disqualified from athletic events for religious gestures have circulated widely in conservative media, only to be debunked shortly thereafter.
Factual rebuttals, however, have little impact in a culture where people are trained to overlook the considerable influence of conservative Christianity in society, and to instead believe their communities need more political capital. Paradoxically, children like those in "The Thaw" are encouraged to seek influence, even run for office, in a system they're taught to deeply distrust. This disconnect is embodied in Reach America, which "[encourages] Christian parents to remove their children from traditional public school systems", but counts among its supporters a member of the Coeur d'Alene School District Board of Trustees and a candidate for election to another local school board.
This mindset obscures serious problems of discrimination and bullying that many students face in schools – not usually for being white conservative Christians. And indeed, these problems are often perpetuated by the direct influence or complicity of the religious right. In Florida, Kiera Wilmot, a 16-year-old African American girl, was arrested and transferred to an "alternative school" after an experiment resulted in a small explosion with no injuries or damage. Her case has brought attention to the criminalization of black students and other students of color in public schools – far more likely than white students to be suspended, expelled, and funneled into the "school-to-prison pipeline" by zero-tolerance policies.
The same conservatives likely to complain that the Bible has been "taken out of schools" have spearheaded efforts to censor the history of white supremacist violence and colonialism from public education, overhauling history textbooks in Texas and shuttering a Mexican-American studies program in Tucson, Arizona on the grounds that it "encouraged students to resent white people". In my own town of Medford, Massachussetts, representatives from state "family values" organizations have shown up at city council meetings to oppose guidelines to protect transgender students in public schools, claiming, among other things, a violation of parental rights.
Ultimately, this is what is most troubling about "The Thaw": it represents a generation raised to believe their divine mission is to entrench a racialized and politicized Christian supremacy – not Christian inclusion – in the public sphere. Children on the religious right are being taught that they've been robbed of their voice, and that they have a calling to to reclaim it through political and cultural activism. In a lot of ways, they're succeeding.
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