Fruit Soup

Great post at ShrinkWrapped entitled Risks, risk assessments and Cassandras. The shrink contrasts the immediate and present danger from the Islamists and a nuclear Iran with the much longer term and milder threat from possible climate change. The point he makes is that, in most people's eyes the urgency and risk levels are reversed.

My explanation for this is functional idiocy or, more politely, execrable levels of education.

Most political arguments or statements which are applauded in the UK seem to rely on two or three buzzwords (`progressive' and `modern' immediately spring to mind) which are entirely meaningless. Most of what passes for education is sloganeering.

To give one of my (least) favourite examples, my elder daughter was asked (in Food Technology) to create a fruit soup. Now, it so happens that there is a nation which specialises in fruit soup - it's Finland. Typing `fruit soup' into Google gets you a lot of recipes, too. But that's not what she was asked to do. Instead she had to survey her classmates to find out what they'd like in their fruit soup. She had to choose the most popular three ingredients and use them to make a soup (after plotting the statutory bar chart of the number of votes for each ingredient). She was not given, or asked to find, any recipes to adapt for her purpose. She was expected to produce this delicious creation from scratch.

Here we have the worst sort of “education”. Ignore the history, ignore the thousand years of culinary expertise which is available in pre-digested form [sorry for the inadvertent pun] in existing recipes. Teach the children that nothing matters except what is new, that past experience is no guide and that expertise is oppressive. Uneducated, inchoate desires and being progressive are all that matters and if it’s a disaster, well then, never mind, it was a noble experiment and we’ll ignore those outside puking behind the bike sheds as we return to the drawing board or food blender for another transgressive attempt.