Search results

It seems fitting, in this particular issue of Technical Education at the present time, for a former editor of an educational monthly — New Education — whose magazine changed ownership last December in somewhat dramatically sudden circumstances, to seize a second chance of looking forward to try to make out future trends. Is the Black Paper an off beat isolated phenomenon, soon to fizzle out of the second lease of life which Ted Short gave it at Easter? Or is it the first of a series of attacks on the steady reform of educational institutions and curriculum which has been going on over the last twenty five years? Is Tom Howarth, with his new views on culture and anarchy, a second Matthew Arnold, come to pluck English Education from the slough of despond into which it has been steadily sinking for years? Or is his book the last gasp from a fading corner of the educational scene, which has only lasted so long because class attitudes and institutions are so deeply ingrained into English society? It may be still too early to say. But it looks as though this sort of debate — or one very like it — will go on in the educational world into the forseeable future.

‘Why,’ asks Tom Howarth, High Master of St. Paul's, ‘is it considered an almost unspeakable human defect to have élitist tendencies?’ Either Mr Howarth is unobservant or he observes selectively.

The first group focuses on climate change science. In the opening chapter of this section, Jerry Mahlman (Senior Research Fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research) describes what he terms the “global warming dilemma.” According to Mahlman, the scientific community has reached an effective consensus that immediate and quite aggressive steps would be required to avoid climatic changes that are large in comparison with those observed in the Earth's geological record. Stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, for example, would require permanent emissions reductions of roughly 60–80%. Moreover, the long lags in the Earth's response to changes in the composition of the atmosphere suggests that even this stringent scenario would be insufficient to prevent moderate temperature increases in the coming decades. Based on his reading of the scientific literature, Mahlman concludes that deferring action until climate change has broadly recognized deleterious effects would most likely “lock in” quite profound environmental impacts with effects lasting for centuries and even millennia. In terms of mechanisms, this argument appeals to the view that today's greenhouse gas emissions might use up the Earth's assimilative capacity, thus increasing the length of time that greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere. On top of this, Mahlman notes that most scientific studies have emphasized time scales of one century or less in evaluating climate impacts. But impacts such as sea-level rise, which would be strongly affected by the melting and breakup of glacial formations such as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, occur over much longer time horizons with a high degree of irreversibility. This makes climate change an issue of intergenerational fairness that pits present society's willingness to bear significant economic costs against the goal of protecting future generations from environmental harms that are hypothetical and yet potentially catastrophic.