Dangerous Belgian Barroso Tosspot Google EU Bloggers Generation

OK, so Pieter de Crem (above), Belgian Minister of Defence, goes to New York for a (cancelled) meeting and gets himself a little overjuiced in a bar and fails to comport himself appropriately. But he is observed and recorded by the young lady behind the bar who happens to be Flemish. She blogs about it and gets fired. Pieter complains bitterly about dangerous bloggers, despite the fact that it was he who made an arse of himself, in public, at the taxpayers' expense. Oh well, we've all done it. On TechCrunch and Jon Worth's Euroblog.

Meanwhile Barroso continues to demonstrate what an arrogant, self-important little autocrat he is. In the following YouTube clip, having defended the EU with lies and prevarication, he finally admits that it is a sort of 'empire' - unfortunately without realising that empire is the opposite of democracy. Previous empires did indeed work by forceful imposition of diktat: the EU now does it legally, through legislation, because the member states have signed away their sovereignty without telling their people what they have done. The idiocy of these people is only magnified by the comments of the ridiculous woman who pipes up at the end.



Barroso's contempt for ordinary citizens is compounded for us in Britain by his comments on the Euro (in my previous post).

And the ineffable stupidity of clever people continues to amaze. Dan Tapscott, an internet expert, thinks we should change the way we teach and learn because the internet has changed everything; although if his ideas are followed, there'll actually be no such thing as a 'teacher':

"Wikinomics can absolutely be applied to the classroom," Tapscott continues. The opportunity is to change the relationship between the student and the teacher in the learning process, by freeing up teachers from being 'transmitters of data' to doing what only humans can do: creatively develop customized learning experiences.

I'm in total agreement with the idea of using the internet in education: there's no doubt it's the biggest single positive development since the invention of the printing press.

However, I sometimes wonder how much teaching experts such as Dan Tapscott actually do. I suspect they've never had to deal with today's students, who, bright as they are, turn up at university knowing nothing. Either that, or they work only at the best universities.

I've encountered this crap about 'who is the teacher, who is the student' bull before. It may be applicable when you get to postgraduate level, but below then it's perfectly obvious. I am the teacher because I know more about my subject than my students. I've read more of it, I've studied more of it, I've thought more about it, discussed more of it, written more about it and even written more of it than they have. I hope that, for some students at least, I am more than just a 'transmitter of data'. This is a total misunderstanding of the role of a teacher - and a pretty dismissive one as well. Unfortunately one that is shared by by our own government.

I can tell him straight away that today's students are not 'digital natives', despite all the hype; they are not 'digitally immersed' and they don't have the ability to deal more quickly with lots of varied data compared with us oldies.

I have often been amazed at how illiterate and limited students are with regard to the internet and related technology. They can text and email (often without bothering to key in a subject line, however) and they can use Google a bit (though I doubt they know of any other search engine), and they can download illegal music. They use Facebook and sometimes MySpace. Some of them play online games. But that's it.

I have only encountered a couple of students who use their mobiles to make videos or vlogs. I've met none who post their own material on YouTube; who record their own podcasts; or who have their own blog - or indeed, even read blogs. And that's at a university with media and journalism departments.

They do learn how to use the net for gathering information - but it's often a copy and paste approach: they don't often read what they pick up or bother to think about it.

I am truly hacked off with people coming out with these grand sounding theories. There is no proper evidence to back up any of them. And though there are always ways of improving how teachers teach and students learn, there's no way round the fact (yes, the fact) that true education happens when something is difficult. The learning is in the difficulty (and the hard work).

Modern education seems to be posited on a number of nonsenses, one of which is that if something isn't fun or easy, it isn't education. It's the kids who are losing out, because they're being let down by the system; they're being lied to; they're being told they're well-informed and educated, and they're not. I'm sick to death of this shit.