wallpaper animals

 Just wanted to share with you all this gorgeous bathroom with it's stunning tiles! and I mean exquisitely stunning! and how beautiful is that stool...I oh so Love the colour and the design is just beautiful!
 And how beautifully fresh is this room...I'm so loving the mix of blue with green at the moment...how about you? are you loving these colours in design at the moment?
And these...well these are for me in celebration of my 39th birthday yesterday...Happy Birthday to me! I can't believe I'm another year older... but yay!...I'm all the more wiser...  Thanks for all your lovely comments throughout the week and have a lovely weekend xx    images via tumblr

What sort of an industry is education? Behind that question is a question about industry in the first place. We tend to have a particular view of industry which manufactures or sells goods and services. In doing so, it creates employment and generates profits. The car industry makes cars; the banking industry sells financial services; the building industry builds houses; the supermarket industry sells food (but  increasingly provides banking and other services). A trite continuation of this is that "the education industry sells educational services". But what does that mean? Is an 'educational service' like a financial service? Or is it like manufacturing?

In the sense that advice is sought and benefited from in education, the education industry can be said to be like a financial service. However, in the sense that degrees are printed and coveted by potential customers, the education industry is like manufacturing. In these two aspects, the education industry has an important historical precursor: the selling of indulgences by the Catholic church.

That's perhaps not a good precursor, but really, little else fits in thinking about the kind of industry that education is. And in a business sense, it is highly profitable - until someone smells a rat and does something about it (enter Martin Luther!). However, the rat is there, and education as an industry (which is clearly where it is heading) has a big problem.

But I want to return to nature of industry in the first place. Because, as I discussed in my last post (http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/social-mobility-education-and.html) Industry does far more that manufactures or sells goods and services. In employing people, the workplace becomes the locus for human relationships and learning. And whilst the nature of the workplace itself has changed drastically in the post-industrial world, we all have someone to say 'good morning' to, or to gossip about the latest misdoings of management. Such exchanges are meaningful to individuals, and in good companies, camaraderie amongst the workers is an essential part of business success, and workers see their identities in the context of their professional and domestic relationships. In bad companies, there will always be pockets (or cliques) or camaraderie, although other workers may become alienated from their work or their role in the organisation.

Educational institutions, as workplaces, are no different. There is someone to say 'good morning' to, and there is plenty to gossip about. But learning is the thing in the educational workplace. Indeed, whilst in the software industry, programmers might say 'good morning' before diving into some code (actually, being programmers, they might not say 'good morning'!), workers in education say 'good morning' to each other before saying 'good morning' or afternoon to their students, and conversations bleed over from the work to gossip to administration and so on. Educational institutions make communications.

In a good educational institution there are individuals who are skilled in the art of making communications with students and staff which light up those students and staff and lead to ever more interesting communications. Such communication is borne out of the conviviality of the environment of the educational institution. Eyes can be looked into, gestures noted, questions asked, emails sent, blogs written and referred to and Skype conversations launched.

Communication is incidental in industries like banking and manufacturing. Whilst good organisations will nurture and exploit it, they will always ensure that it doesn't get in the way of the 'main job'. In education, it is the main job. Yet, in education it is often not recognised as being the main job by those who are not academics (often managers): they do not see the making of communications is an art where academics are masters of this art. They might be more inclined to see it as 'unproductive' and academics as 'lazy'. They may instead, see the education industry either as manufacturing degrees, or providing educational services, or (worse) selling indulgences. A bums-on-seats-retain-at-all-costs mentality is the natural consequence of this. Yet this is a poor way to achieve objectives around both recruitment and retention.

It is here that an Education Industry might be an enlightening operation. An Education Industry that sees its role in the "production of communications" will only focus on those communications that are meaningful (because only meaningful communications can be sustained). Conviviality, flexibility, openness and an embrace of diversity are essential elements to achieving this. But what is needed most of all is a sense of purpose within the industry that this is what it is about.

Education has traditionally seen itself as being about knowledge (just in the same way that religion can see itself as being about faith). Knowledge is tied up with communication; it seeps through the togetherness of people - whether they are in the workplace or the classroom. But with the industrial workplace increasingly not able to supply the pre-requisite conviviality in society, it must be left to education to fill the void, and consequently to nurture knowledge and fulfil the deep yearning for meaning that is felt by every human being.

Agreeing with Alison Wolf that "vocational education is a great idea for other peoples' children" won't make me popular since she's become Michael Gove's puppet. But I think on this, she's right. Vocational qualifications are dreamed up by the middle classes as a dewey-eyed guilt-driven solution to what even they can see as a tsunami of lost teenagers (God... there's a thought!) caught out in an employment market determinedly gluing people to their social position if their maths and english (capital E?) isn't any good.

So Gove sets about trying to get their maths and english (I don't care about capitals!) better, with a drive for more traditional education (just like he had!). But it's unlikely to work, and will probably serve to exacerbate their misery. How many times do you need to be told you're no good at something? Try just once more...

I suspect the root of the problem doesn't lie in the education system. I would be tempted to say it lies in the home, but this is not quite the whole picture. Kids who grow up with books and a family that loves reading, will learn to read. Kids whose parents worry about them learning their tables will learn to do maths (actually, kids whose parents don't worry about them learning their tables on ideological grounds, will probably do even better!). But having said all this, I don't believe homes are that different from how they were 50 years ago. Yes, there's more divorce and possibly more emotional chaos in the home - but the nuclear family of 50 years ago was pretty radioactive in different, but equally oppressive, ways. Yes, technology has invaded the home, but it has also given the kids something to talk about when they go to school. But what has changed is the environment of work, and I think the work environment more than any other factor is creating the social mobility problems that we now face.

Mass industrial employment was not predicated on an ability to read and add-up. Physical power and endurance (if you had it) was enough. Teamwork helped, but often social skills and intelligence developed  in the Steel mill or the mine, not the classroom. Physical work provided the step up, acknowledging the basic biological attributes of an individual, but then providing a context from where they might grow. And of course not everyone could hack-it (I would never have survived down a coal mine!) Whatever emotional trauma lay in the childhoods of individuals, some of them could do something that was rewarded and valued.

It is the end of industrialisation that is the end of social mobility. Service jobs self-select the articulate and bright. Service companies are run by the articulate and bright whose parents had books in the home and worried about their kids learning their tables. The end of industrialisation brings a radical split in society between the communicative classes and those whose childhoods are damaged in the home. This, I think, is why the miners' strike is such a critical historical moment. The workers knew what  they were losing. It wasn't the loss of an industry; it was the loss of equity.

The question is, how much of a time-bomb is the lack of social mobility? How worried are we? Do we believe there will be riots? How determined are we to do something about it that actually works, rather than pretending to do something about it 'because we ought to'? But if we were really determined, what should we do?

One thought is to reintroduce industrialisation: (*in a deep 'cinema' voice*) "The return of the industrial revolution - it's back! but this time, it has a social mission!" I can't see that somehow - even with the Hollywood treatment. If a robot can do the work, why not let it? However, "cottage" manufacturing may be possible. But what industrialisation presented socially - in the steel mills and the coal mines - was conviviality. People were together, being themselves and being useful, and being seen to be useful. From there, people could start to grow from basic human relationships and mutual recognition.

The end of industrialisation has brought social atomisation; or maybe it was the other way round. Either way, social atomisation has brought a lack of social mobility because socially-atomised industries (the service industries) require from their workers the inner emotional resources which can only be nurtured in a loving home. Industrial society did not predicate itself on the existence of loving homes. I think the most important lesson taught by industrialisation was that it had nothing to do with what was made. If it was simply about that and nothing else, industrial society should have collapsed as Marx predicted. Instead, it had to do with the fact that the factory was a context for learning and making sense of the world. It hung together not just because it suited capitalists, but because it suited workers too.

In their current form, the vast majority of service sector industries cannot provide an environment for conviviality. There is only one service sector industry which has the possibility of being able to do this. It is EDUCATION. But the nascent education industry faces a drastic choice as to whether to follow the other service industries and become socially atomised (with increasing formalisation of assessment, content, etc) or whether to become a new industry for conviviality.

 Isn't this just the most beautiful little nook you've seen?...in just the most delightful colours...perfectly sweet! Loving the effect of that wallpaper and how awesome does that mirror look? I so wish I had a little nook in my home and one so perfectly organised as this would be ideal...I'm Loving it!
Wishing everyone a beautiful rainy day...[well here on the gold coast anyway] and a gorgeous day wherever else you might be and an even more gorgeous weekend. Thanks for all your lovely comments throughout the week xx   images via tumblr

 Sometimes I just have the desire to be Glamorous...
 A little glamour can go a long way to making a girl feel fabulous...
and who wouldn't feel fabulous in these heels? I'm all for Glamour! Have a Gorgeous day! images via Dustjacketattic.blogspot