Purpose and Audience - Mrs Sutherland's English Classroom



426720025717500Linlithgow Academy S3(a) NewspaperArticle -647700114681000HomeworkArticle QuestionsThinking about the article as a whole, give one reason why the title is effective. (1)2a) Which one of these best describes the purpose of the article:A. To persuade the reader that…B. To entertain & amuse the reader.C. To criticise…D. To inform the reader about… (1)2b) Quote 3 words or phrases that helped you work out what the purpose was. Then, explain how they helped you. (6)3a) What is the target audience of the article? You must write one answer down for each of the following: AGE GENDER NATIONALITY INTERESTS (4)3b) What about the article made you think it was for this audience? (4)4) In your own words, summarise the main points the writer makes in the article. Give 3 bullet points. (3)Remember, POINTS are not the FACTS we are given. They are the wider ideas the writer is highlighting to get their point across.5) Use a dictionary to write down the meanings of the words in bold. (1)6) What is the writer’s opinion on the topic? (1)7) Identify one of the writer’s uses of imagery or sentence structure. Explain why they were effective. (2)8) In what way is the final paragraph an effective conclusion to the article? (2)(25 marks)How a TV Sitcom Triggered the Downfall ofWestern CivilizationPicture this. It’s the story of a family man, a man of science, a genius who fell in with the wrong crowd. He slowly descends into madness and desperation, lead by his own egotism. With one mishap after another, he becomes a monster. I’m talking, of course, about Friends and its tragic hero, Ross Geller.You may see it as a comedy, but I cannot laugh with you. To me, Friends signals a harsh embrace of antiintellectualism in America, where a gifted and intelligent man is persecuted by his idiot compatriots. And even if you see it from my point of view, it doesn’t matter. The constant barrage of laughter from the live studio audience will remind us that our own reactions are unnecessary, redundant.The theme song itself is filled with foreboding, telling us that life is inherently deceptive, career pursuits are laughable, poverty is right around the corner, and oh yeah, your love life’s D.O.A. But you will always have the company of idiots. They will be there for you. Don’t I feel better?Maybe I should unpack this, for the uninitiated. If you remember the 1990s and early 2000s, and you lived near a television set, then you remember Friends. Friends was the Thursday night primetime, “must-see-TV” event that featured the most likeable ensemble ever assembled by a casting agent: all young, all middle class, all white, all straight, all attractive (but approachable), all morally and politically bland, and all equipped with easily digestible personas. Joey is the goofball. Chandler is the sarcastic one. Monica is obsessive-compulsive.Phoebe is the hippy. Rachel, hell, I don’t know, Rachel likes to shop. Thenthere was Ross. Ross was the intellectual and the romantic.Eventually, the Friends audience — roughly 52.5 million people — turned on Ross. But the characters of the show were pitted against him from the beginning (consider episode 1, when Joey says of Ross: “This guy says hello, I wanna kill myself.”) In fact, any time Ross would say anything about his interests, his studies, his ideas, whenever he was midsentence, one of his “friends” was sure to groan and say how boring Ross was, how stupid it is to be smart, and that nobody cares. Cue the laughter of the live studio audience. This gag went on, pretty much every episode, for 10 seasons. Can you blame Ross for going crazy?And like a Greek tragedy, our hero is caught in a prophecy that cannot be avoided. The show’s producers, akin to the immutable voice of the gods, declared that Ross must end up with Rachel, the one who shops. Honestly, I think he could’ve done better.Why such sympathy for Ross? The show ended in 2004. The same year that Facebook began, the year that George W. Bush was re-elected to a second term, the year that reality television became a dominant force in pop culture, with American Idol starting an eight-year reign of terror as the No. 1 show in the U.S., the same year that Paris Hilton started her own “lifestyle brand” and released an autobiography. And Joey Tribbiani got a spin-off TV show. The year 2004 was when we completely gave up and embraced stupidity as a value. Just ask Green Day; their albumAmerican Idiot was released in 2004, and it won the Grammy for Best Rock Album. You can’t get more timely. The rejection of Ross marked the moment when much of America groaned, mid-sentence, at the voice of reason.Yes, my theory is that Friends may have triggered the downfall of western civilization. You might think I’m crazy. But to quote Ross: “Oh, am I? Am I? Am I out of my mind? Am I losing my senses?” Did you know the song that originally accompanied the Friends pilot episode was R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know (And I Feel Fine).” A blissful song with an apocalyptic message that goes largely ignored.I was a teacher in 2004. I coached our school’s chess club. I saw how my students were picked on, bullied. I tried my best to defend them, but I couldn’t be everywhere. My students were smart, huge nerds, and they were in hostile, unfriendly territory. Other students would be waiting outside my room to ambush the chess club members who met in my room every day at lunch. During my tenure as a teacher, I gained the reputation of being a slayer of bullies and defender of nerds. I promise you: bullies can be mean, but they knew Mr. Hopkins was much worse.Maybe intellectuals have always been persecuted and shoved in lockers, but something in my gut tells me we’re at a low point — where social media interaction has replaced genuine debate and political discourse, where politicians are judged by whether we’d want to have a beer with them, where scientific consensus is rejected, where scientific research is underfunded, where journalism is drowning in celebrity gossip.I see Kim Kardashian’s ass at the top of , and I am scared.Maybe it’s all harmless fun. Like the good-spirited laughter of a live studio audience? Maybe. But I am sincerely worried we have not done enough to cultivate intellectual curiosity within our culture.Fortunately, there’s a resistance forming. People with grit, who aren’t afraid to begin a sentence with “Did you know…” These are the Rosses of the world. I saw them in my chess club. And I see them in my city, hiding at the art museum, crouching at used book stores, exchanging sideways glances at the public libraries and coffee houses, and sneaking around at our schools, community colleges, and universities.There was no hope for Ross. He went insane, and yeah, he did get annoying.So, how do we retain our sanity in a dumb, dumb world? I wouldn’t be a good teacher if I didn’t come prepared with a few ideas.No. 1: read a book. Something special happens when you set aside the inane distractions of modern culture and immerse yourself in a novel. You open yourself up to new ideas, new experiences, new perspectives. It’s an experiment in patience and mindfulness. The New School for Social Research in New York proved that reading literature improves empathy. It’s true. Reading makes you less of a jerk. So, read often. Read difficult books. Read controversial books. Read a book that makes you cry. Read something fun. But read.No. 2: learn something. Your brain is capable of so much. Feed it. Learn something new. The greatest threat to progress is the belief that something is too complex to fix. Poverty is permanent. Racism will always exist. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is too difficult to understand. The public education system is broken. Educate yourself, so you can be part of the conversation. Learn something scientific, something mathematic. Explore philosophy. Study paleontology. Try to learn a new language. You don’t even have to make fluency your goal, just get a few more words in your head. Listen to an educational podcast. Professors from colleges — such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford — are offering their lectures online for free. Think of what you could learn. One of my greatest challenges as a teacher was convincing students they were smart after someone had told them they were dumb.No. 3: stop buying so much crap. This may seem like a non sequitur, but I’m convinced consumer culture and idiot culture are closely linked. Simplify your life. Idiocy dominates our cultural landscape because it sells more Nike tennis shoes and Big Macs. When we thoughtfully consider what we bring into our home, we are less likely to be manipulated by empty impulses.And finally: protect the nerds. A computer programmer from Seattle is doing more to alleviate world poverty, hunger, and disease through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation than any other person in America right now. Nerds create vaccines. Nerds engineer bridges and roadways. Nerds become teachers and librarians. We need those obnoxiously smart people, because they make the world a better place. We can’t have them cowering before a society that rolls their eyes at every word they say. Ross needs better friends.Written by David Hopkins for MediumWe should look beyond economics and open our eyes to beautyWe seem to have forgotten that the human spirit is not satisfied by material progress alone.It’s time for us to reconnect with nature.Beauty. It’s a word we all use to describe our delight in the world around us: a landscape welove; a butterfly’s wings translucent in the sunshine; or a wondrous piece of architecture. We all love beauty; we have only to watch the numbers glued to TV’s Countryfile andSpringwatch, and the way we head for the beach and the countryside as soon as the sun shines, to see that it’s something that meets a real human need.Yet you’d be hard pressed to find the word in any official document, or to hear any politician utter it today. In fact we seem almost embarrassed to talk about beauty, other than in private. Instead we have invented all kinds of pseudo, managementspeak words to describe the things we need to look after: words like ecosystem services, natural capital and sustainable development. And when we’re making decisions about the future, all we seem to care about is whether we will deliver growth or generate an economic return.But it wasn’t always like that. Beauty was a word and an idea that people in previous centuries used freely and confidently, including in legislation and public policy. And because people celebrated beauty it was something they sought to create, in town and country, and enacted laws to protect the things and places people loved.Beauty is written deeply into our culture. Some of the earliest texts show a yearning for beauty, with Chaucer reminding us that it was the beauty of an April spring that “longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”. Medieval stonemasons constructed fabulous churches and cathedrals, carving flowers and animals into their stone. Throughout history, artists and architects have sought to achieve aesthetic perfection, and nature has inspired countless poets and authors.Perhaps the greatest champion of beauty was William Wordsworth. In the early 19th century he saw his beloved Lake District coming under pressure from the construction of ugly villas; the commercial extraction of ores; the invasion of the alien tree, the “spiky larch”; and the prospect of the railway arriving in Windermere. His cry – “is then no nook of English ground secure from rash assault?” – galvanised a movement of people who loved beauty and were prepared to stand up and defend it.John Ruskin took up the fight, campaigning against the horrors of rampant industrialisation and its social consequences, his efforts leading to the creation of the National Trust and to the first ideas about good planning, with its aims of “the home healthy, the house beautiful, the town pleasant, the city dignified and the suburbs salubrious”.Then, beauty mattered enough to shape policy for the public good. And so after the horror of two world wars, the 1945 government implemented a package of measures designed not only to meet people’s basic human needs but also their spiritual, physical and cultural wellbeing. The designation of National Parks, the protection of our cultural heritage and access to the countryside sat alongside the universal right to education, the NHS and the welfare state.We understood then, as we seem to have forgotten now, that the human spirit is not satisfied by material progress alone. As the 19th-century environmentalist John Muir said: “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread.”Yet today we seem to have become seduced by what the American economist Albert Jay Nock called “economism”: that which “can build a society which is rich, prosperous, powerful, even one which has a reasonably wide diffusion of material wellbeing. But it cannot build one which is lovely, one which has savour and depth, and which exercises the irresistible power of attraction that loveliness wields.”Today when we talk about progress we mean only economic progress, and our measure of that is GDP. GDP charts only income, expenditure and production, and doesn’t even try to count the many things that matter but money can’t buy, the things that make us happy, and the natural resources on which we all depend. So it flatters us into thinking things are going well while we are destroying our long-term future.Over the last century we have lost a vast richness of nature and much of the diversity of ourlandscape; we have degraded our soils and natural resources. In spite of huge efforts, nature and the beauty of the wider countryside are in a worse state than when the conservation movement set out to protect them. Add to this the looming pressures of climate change and it is clear we need to do things differently.And here beauty can help us. Beauty is not just about aesthetics: it is a way of looking at the world that values the things we can’t put a material price on, as well as the things that we can measure. We seek prosperity, but we need a different kind of progress. We live in an era where fewer of us are driven by religious imperatives, but we are not lacking in spirituality, nor in the capacity to be moved to strive for better things. Beauty can give shape to that yearning.Imagine how the world would look if we revived the fight for beauty. We would care more for the world around us. We’d build our cities, towns and infrastructure beautifully – imagine the debate about HS2 if we had set out to make it the most beautiful new railway in the world. We’d protect nature and the countryside, while still producing enough food. We’d care for our cultural inheritance and focus on improving our quality of life rather than striving for unsustainable levels of growth.John Muir, as so often, had the words for it: the fight for beauty is “not blind opposition to progress, but opposition to blind progress”. It’s a fight to which we all need to belong.Written by Fiona Reynolds for The GuardianSorry, Etsy. That Handmade Scarf Won’t Save the World.In her memoir, “Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Ms. Lynn remembers the thrill of receiving her first “store-boughten” dress from a social services agent when she was around 7. It was blue with pink flowers and “dainty little pockets.”“Mercy, how I loved it,” the singer recalls. Unfortunately, the family hog loved it, too. Thedress was chewed to pieces and the young Ms. Lynn had to go back to wearing the dresses her mother sewed from old flour sacks.Today, some 75 years later, you can buy a little blue dress with pink flowers on for $6.44. A handmade flour sack dress, on the other hand, will cost you $90 on Etsy.Once a mark of poverty, handmade is hot these days. Nothing seems to shout “upper-middle-class values” like hand-carved wooden children’s toys, handmade lavender soap from the farmers’ market, artisan country bread and chunky hand-knit scarves. Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade goods, brought this homespun mania to national attention last month when it went public with a bang, ending its first day of trading at $30, up 87 percent from its I.P.O. of $16. It’s now joined by dozens of other handmade-goods sites, and hundreds of artisan markets across America.Our hunger for handmade has gone beyond aesthetics, uniqueness and quality. In progressivecircles, buying handmade has come to connote moral virtue, signifying an interest in sustainability and a commitment to social justice. By making your own cleaning supplies, you’re eschewing environment-poisoning chemicals. By buying a handmade sweater, you’re fighting sweatshop labor. By chatting with the artisan who makes your soap, you’re striking a blow against our alienated “Bowling Alone” culture.While buying homemade gifts is a lovely thing to do, thinking of it as a social good is problematic. Like locavorism and “eco consumerism,” it’s part of a troubling trend for neoliberal “all change begins with your personal choices” ideology. This ideology is attractive: Buy something nice, do something good. But it doesn’t work, at least not very well.When it comes to complex issues, “vote with your wallet” campaigns have never been particularly effective in driving consumer change. In the 1970s, musical “look for the union label” TV ads were so ubiquitous they earned a parody on “Saturday Night Live.” But they didn’t halt the decline of unions. Around the same time, cars sported “Buy American: The Job You Save May Be Your Own” bumper stickers. Did it stop people from buying Toyotas? Hardly.A vast majority of people will continue to buy what they buy for one reason: It’s a good value. Very few of us will order a $50 handmade scarf on Etsy when one is available for $5 at Target. We can’t expect most consumers to avoid items made in sweatshops or by otherwise exploited workers. We need regulations for that. When “buy handmade” is couched as a solution to exploitative labor conditions, it’s easy to forget structural change-making.What happens when a Kickstarter project fails to launch?As curmudgeonly as this sounds, the sweet idea of “community building” through personalconnection with artisans is not as simple as it seems, either. A few years ago, I attended aconference for Etsy entrepreneurs, where I sat in on a seminar about “narrative building.” It was critical, the seminar leader explained, to give your customers something personal: pictures of your kids, a story about a project that failed. If they found you likeable, they’d be more eager to buy. This is what you might call “affiliative consumerism” — people buying stuff from people they know and find appealing. People who are like them. On the face of it, this is a good thing: Isn’t that what community is about? Yet it means that money stays in a circle of like-minded individuals.In her 2012 book “Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion,” the journalistElizabeth Cline visits Alta Gracia, a unionised garment factory in the Dominican Republic. The workers are paid a living wage, roughly three and a half times the Dominican Republic’s minimum wage. Is it better for my dollar to go to the likeable, just-like-me Brooklyn mom selling handmade headbands on Etsy or to a company that uses garment factories like Alta Gracia?Much is also made about the eco-friendliness of handmade.“Buying handmade (especially really locally) can greatly reduce your carbon footprint on theworld,” reads a post on the popular website Handmadeology.But few economists give much credence to the idea that buying local necessarily saves energy. Most believe that the economies of scale inherent in mass production outweigh the benefits of nearness. These same economies of scale most likely make a toothbrush factory less wasteful, in terms of materials, than 100 individual toothbrush makers each handcrafting 10 toothbrushes a day.An efficient toothbrush factory bound by strong environmental regulations would benefit everyone the most. A potentially positive effect of the handmade movement has been the creation of a new income stream for parents (mostly mothers) and others who need flexible work. Since its inception, Etsy has served as a sort of modern version of what selling Mary Kay and Tupperware used to be. It offers the possibility of self-directed part-time work that can be done while attending to child care responsibilities, a rarity in America. But the dream has only ever materialised for a few, and even those who become successful often burn out trying to stitch iPod cases for 16 hours a day. Again, what’s truly needed is systemic change: mandatory paid parental leave and subsidised day care.There are plenty of good reasons to buy handmade. You’re probably not going to find a squid shaped dining chair or a crocheted sloth at a big box store, for one. It’s important to support artisans who retain knowledge of traditional art forms. Many handmade items are also higher quality than their mass-produced counterparts. But will buying handmade change the economy or save the world? Not likely.Written by Emily Matcher for The New York TimesPrincess Leia gives a generation of women a new hopePrincess Leia, portrayed by the iconic Carrie Fisher, subverted the archetypal image of women characters that were floating in mainstream cinema in the 1970s. Leia exuded an aura of self-assurance, self-governance and a sense of stability. Very rarely did she exhibit her vulnerable, feminine side. Leia’s fierce determination to ‘lead’ (a traditionally male characteristic) the Rebellion and destroy the Evil Empire was groundbreaking in the history of how women characters were portrayed before Star Wars. Simply put, Princess Leia was a badass rebel.As a child with a pliable mind, I was brought up on a diet of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella fairy tales, here the eponymous characters were always shown to be dependent on men. By way of circumstances, these women cartoon characters would invariably find themselves entangled in sticky difficulties, and it was always the sword-wielding, charismatic, supremely intelligent Prince Charming who’d save the day by rescuing these women. Prince Charming was the quintessential “hero”, not Snow White, not Cinderella, not Sleeping Beauty. The fairy tales were instrumental in sending out the overarching message of patriarchy, that women were meant to be beautiful, coy and patient — to be rescued, you see. When I watched Star Wars for the first time, Princess Leia stood as a jarring contrast to that message. She altered what I was conditioned to believe.My perception of how women should behave in society changed when in Episode IV – A New Hope, Han Solo and Luke Skywalker sneaked into The Death Star to rescue Princess Leia. While the two men were engaged in a serious battle with the Stormtroopers, the Princess refused to sit back demurely, waiting for the men to finish them off. In fact, Leia was quick to pick up the gun (again, a weapon that is traditionally used by men) and fire back. She even openly mocked Han when he accidentally blocked their only route of escape. “This is some rescue!” Leia told him before shooting open an escape passage. “Somebody has to save our skin,” she continued, implying that she was the one who finally would. Right then, Leia’s character introduced a paradigm shift: in conventional terms, she was being “rescued”, but the film dramatically steered off conventionality when the Princess decided to take matters in her own hands. Here, it was she who was the hero. Leia spoke her mind and told the men around her to zip it when they were trying to wield their male entitlement to command women. For instance, Leia tells off Han in Episode IV – A New Hope, “I don’t know who you are or where you’ve come from, but from now on you’ll do as I say, okay?” She was practical, goal-oriented and smart.While Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia was sculpting a new sense of confidence in women, the 19-year-old Fisher at that time was as self-conscious as any adolescent girl would be.Unfortunately, Fisher was also self-deprecating. In her recent interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Fisher confessed that while many teenage boys saw her as a sex symbol, she saw herself as a “giant fat face, like a sand dab, with features…and the horrible hair…and to put more hair on either side [hair buns] on a round face was going to make it look even wider.” What this anecdote revealed was that Fisher was an ordinary girl who was conscious of her physical appearance – something that societal pressure continues to successful ingrain in our minds.Princess Leia’s propensity to become a sex symbol was evident. It led George Lucas to dress Fisher in a quasi-metal bikini – an outfit that went on to achieve cult status. Bikinis were a characteristic trope in sci-fi/fantasy productions. Whether it was Jane Fonda wearing the ‘spacekini’ in Barbarella (1968) or Raquel Welch in the fur bikini in One Million Years (1966), the bikini pandered to the ultimate male fantasy. So, in Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, Princess Leia’s character was unclothed. And she had to look sexually appealing, flawless. The director therefore, was extremely careful of Fisher’s appearance. In the scene with Jabba the Hutt, Fisher was dictated to sit erect. “I couldn’t have lines on my sides, like little creases,” Fisher informed Gross. “No creases were allowed, so I had to sit very, very rigid straight.”However, while Princess Leia’s outfit (interestingly bridled by chains) conformed to the overarching desires of the male fantasy, her character refused to conform to the role of playing the damsel, or to the idea that only the men kill the bad guys. In the scene, it’s not Han Solo nor Luke Skywalker who chokes Jabba to death with the chain, but Leia herself. In that moment, Princess Leia overturns the image of a woman who is a slave, to that of a fearless warrior. She rejects the idea of pandering to male desires by killing its representation – i.e. Jabba, the slug who forces her to wear the bikini in the first place.While on-screen Fisher embodied the feminine identity which was revolutionary andrebellious, off-screen she continued to instil hope and confidence in young women.Suffering from a mental illness which couldn’t be tamed by alcohol, Fisher unflinchingly spoke about her bipolar disorder. Every now and then she doled out inspirational nuggets to women. “Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident”, she had said once, which motivated women to plunge into action. But it was her crackling wit, deep-seated in feminism that conquered the hearts of many.Carrie Fisher and the character of Princess Leia, who Fisher confessed eventually melded into her, encapsulated the ideology of a modern woman who could think for herself and not bow to patriarchal agendas or stereotypes. The two broke the mould of feminine expectations, where Fisher, a strong champion of feminism taught young women that nothing should stop them from being themselves. Princess Leia delivered immortality to Carrie Fisher. Her passing is a monumental loss not only to cinema, but to generations of women who were taught the importance of carving their own identities, distinct from men. In short, Carrie Fisher gave our gender something we can never repay: a new hope.Written by Radhika Iyengar for The Indian ExpressHollywood Sets Up Its Lady Superheroes to FailFemale superheroes in lead roles just don’t work. Isn’t that what we’ve been told? Leaked emails from the CEOs of Marvel and Sony have called female-led superhero films disasters.Why is that? According to a exit polls, 40 percent of the Avengers: Age of Ultron audience was female, and similar stats have been published for other super-powered films. This proves (to those who didn’t already know) that there are women superhero fans. So why do we not get leads of our own gender?It’s understandable that studios and networks want to back money-making franchises, but let’s face it: female superheroes have not been given much of a chance. I analyzed superhero films going back to 2000 and found that of the Marvel and DC films that were released theatrically since then, only 4 percent had female leads (i.e. the titular character or the top-billed actor in ensemble casts).This was a depressing sample size of two: Catwoman and Elektra. Of these, Catwoman was the only true box office bomb; Elektra brought in more at the box office than it cost to produce. There are certainly financial failures in the 96 percent of male-led superhero films (Jonah Hex, anyone?), and yet these box-office flops have not prevented additional male-led films from being green-lit.Female-led films are set up to fail. Let’s use the Razzie-winning Catwoman as a case study. Catwoman had a production budget that was two-thirds that of Batman Begins, which came out the next year. Unlike the well-known directors who spearheaded male-led films, Catwoman had a director unknown and untested in the American market.Catwoman’s costume, clearly made for sex appeal, was criticised by fans and media alike. The male-written script may be the largest culprit. The main plot begins with Halle Berry’s character being killed over…face cream. Is it any wonder Catwoman wasn’t a success?Some may point out that despite the lack of lone superheroine leads, there are women in ensemble casts: Storm. Emma Frost. Black Widow. Such characters have been a saving grace to female fans.Yet it hardly seems fair that only a quarter of both the Avengers and the X-Men are women. When they do appear, these characters function largely as love interests for the male leads. Black Widow’s highly-criticized role in the recent Avengers film is a prominent example.The disadvantages suffered by female superheroes go even further than the films themselves. Offscreen, superheroines don’t get the same merchandising support as their male counterparts do. Mark Ruffalo (yes, the Hulk himself) tweeted about the lack of Black Widow merchandise. Of the 60 items initially released for the latest Avengers film, Black Widow featured on just three. This underrepresentation not only gives superheroines a disadvantage in terms of branding, but it supports the idea that they are less important to the industry.Television has been more willing to give female superheroes a chance. Of the DC and Marvel liveaction series that aired in the past 15 years, 27 percent had female leads. ABC does deserve kudos for picking up Agent Carter for a second season. This spin-off of Captain America proves that there is an audience for female-led shows in which the main plot is not a romance. In adult 18-49 sameday Nielsen ratings, Agent Carter is on par with the male-led The Flash, Arrow and Gotham.If only future shows would learn something from Agent Carter. Yes, Supergirl, I’m talking about you. The trailer for Supergirl markets the show as a rom-com about a ditzy blonde who goes from dorky to bombshell, falls in love, battles indecision on clothing choices, and somehow still manages to save the day in her brand-new miniskirt. So it’s basically The Devil Wears Prada…with superpowers.It’s patronising to market to female viewers as if we are only interested in fashion and romance. Do we not face the same major struggles that men face? The Supergirl trailer is shockingly similar to Scarlett Johansson’s spoof of the Black Widow movie that-sadly-will-never-be on SNL. Perhaps the Supergirl trailer is misrepresentative of the actual show. With female writers on staff and a sizeable budget from CBS, hopefully this is true. However, if the show really is as harebrained as the trailer makes it out to be, Supergirl will inevitably be cancelled. When that happens, Hollywood will have one more example of how female superhero leads just don’t work.That’s our double standard.Poorly penned scripts. Rom-com female superheroes. A lack of female writers. A lack of understanding female audiences. Unknown directors. Significantly lower budgets. Little, if any, merchandising. So, to all of you naysayers out there who say that female superhero leads just don’t work…well, of course they don’t. How can they be expected to succeed when they are doomed to fail from the beginning?Audiences certainly have a desire for action films and series with strong female leads: The Hunger Games, Alias, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the most recent Mad Max. Why can’t the superhero genre get on board?Of the announced 10 DC and nine Marvel films that will be released over the next several years, each publisher had just one female-led film each. Should we be happy that they each had one? Is that 11 percent of upcoming female films so much better than the 4 percent we had before? Still, with Captain Marvel and Wonder Women in the works, perhaps there is hope for female superheroes. More likely than not, these films will suffer in the same way that their predecessors did.With studios and networks putting no faith in their super-heroine content, there is little hope that female superheroes will be given the chance they works and studios should invest in female-led films and series. They should hire female writers, and take the time to understand female audiences, and focus on the strength and intelligence of their female leads (as opposed to their ability to win men). If they do all this, then we stand a real chance.You’ll see: Female superheroes will just work.Written by Kelsey Snyder for Wired MagazineThe Rise of the Female NerdFrom Lisa Simpson to Issa Dee, there’s never been a better time on TV for women who are geeks. “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.” —Dorothy Parker, 1925In the new superhero sitcom Powerless (NBC), Vanessa Hudgens stars as a variation on a woman we’ve met before: a cheerful, irrepressible go-getter who may be a little green but is clearly used to success. On her first day as Director of R&D at Bruce Wayne’s security company (though her branch is run by Batman’s sleazy cousin Van), Hudgens’s Emily brims with memorised quotes from her personal bible: Bruce Wayne’s guide to business, titled “Wayne or Lose.” No one on Emily’s team is impressed by her B-school nerdery, but they should be. This Muggle represents one of the most crucial yet under-appreciated cultural shifts of the last two decades.With the premiere of the otherwise unexceptional Powerless, Emily joins a sisterhood of nerdy females who dot the TV landscape — a sorority of women who’d never pledge a sorority. Their numbers have increased so gradually that their rise hasn’t garnered much attention, even though the recent narrative about the (mostly male) geeks inheriting the Earth has become a guiding principle in film development and TV programming. But the mainstreaming of female nerds in television — a process that began in the ‘90s — is a phenomenon worth exploring, as it marks a change in how we regard women’s intelligence, independence, and ambition.Lisa Simpson was arguably the definitive nerdy girl during the Clinton years, and is largely the model for smart female characters today: an overachieving, socially awkward outsider uneasy with traditional femininity and tenacious in her idiosyncrasies. Alternatively dreamy and sharp-eyed, she was often the most sympathetic member of her family on The Simpsons. But Lisa could also be a preening, self-righteous know-it-all, and was understood to be a perpetual loser: friendless, tribeless, romance-less. She’s Milhouse, with dignity. These contradictions make Lisa a delightfully deep character — and also reflect the anxieties about female bookishness in a less progressive time, before girls outpacing boys in school became a given.The combination of a girl’s intelligence with her determination made for some of the most memorably repulsed (or at best, grudgingly admiring) portrayals of female nerd-dom in the '90s. Election’s maniacally dogged Tracy Flick is perhaps the purest expression of that shuddering revulsion some have toward a straight-A female student who wants more than what she’s been handed by life. (I’d love to hear her “I Want” song.) Less am-bitch-ous, but still endlessly mocked, is Saved by the Bell’s Jessie Spano (Elizabeth Berkley), now remembered mostly as an extracurriculars-laden Type A whose self-destructive perfectionism pushed her into drug addiction. (Caffeine, but still.) Then there’s Berkley’s occasional Bell co-star, Tori Spelling, whose snorting, pigtailed Violet took the nerdy girl down several rungs further: a suitably four-eyed and otherwise personality-free mate for some boy geek.But the '90s was also the decade that gave us some of the most beloved female nerds of any modern era: Daria, Beauty and the Beast’s Belle, Freaks and Geeks’s Lindsay Weir, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Willow Rosenberg, and The X-Files’s Dana Scully — all characterised by a Gen X– friendly alienation from society. Nerdy girls became the centre or the co-leads of their stories. But it was still mostly the under-18 set whom we admired for their love of knowledge. And viewers looking for female nerds outside of the boxes of whiteness and straightness would mostly have to wait a while longer.Living well is the best revenge, the poet George Herbert wrote — and by that metric, nerdy girls and women should star in their own Tarantino flick. Theirs has been a quiet but steady vengeance, as smart female protagonists and fan favourites have vanquished their previous invisibility or twodimensionality to claim their place in pop culture, though mostly on TV. The gradual fusion between the nerdy and the normal has heralded a greater acceptance of women who tend to prize their own bright minds as people worth humanising and getting to know. (It’s an event that Stranger Things, in its salivating adulation for the ‘80s, completely missed about Barb, whom it treated as mere fodder. Fans’ outsize interest in the granny-glassed nerd showed how much time has changed and who we instinctively relate to now.) Thus we see today's female characters contending with the issues of being a well-rounded teen or adult, ones that 8-year-old Lisa Simpson has never had to deal with, like sex, tech, and work.Being allowed to grow up is a primary reason why nerdy girls and women still feel so revolutionary. There aren’t many close analogues to Tina Belcher of Bob’s Burgers, Donna and Cam of Halt and Catch Fire, or Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation. The strongest protests that a female nerd can also have a functional vagina still revolve around teenage girls like Tina, My Mad Fat Diary’s music-obsessive Rae, and One Day at a Time’s Cuban-American budding lesbian Elena. Sure, there are also the Hot Nerds cobbled together by capitalistic cynicism and the lusty male gaze — but you need more than a pair of glasses and a mouthful of jargon to make a convincing female nerd. Thankfully, though, the idea that novel-loving women aren’t applying their primed imaginations to their libidos is an antiquated one.So is the concept that nerds always have their noses buried in a book. Halt and Catch Fire’s engineer Donna and programmer Cam, who found a tech start-up in the early days of the personal computer and follow its entrepreneurial potential to Silicon Valley, are just two of the female nerds toiling (and mostly thriving) in the STEM fields. Other science- and tech-minded women who’ve connected with audiences include The Big Bang Theory’s Amy Farrah Fowler, Arrow’s Felicity Smoak, Orphan Black’s Cosima Niehaus, and NCIS’s Abby Sciuto. Flipping through channels — or, more likely in 2017, scrolling through Google image search results — girls can now imagine themselves in a rainbow of nerd types.But it’s arguably a nerdy female’s career — specifically when she uses her education, resolve, and autonomy to create or to do good — that best exemplifies how much progress we’ve made in celebrating a woman’s right to self-determination. To be a nerd is a feminist act, no matter the political leanings of the woman. Leslie Knope and Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Amy Santiago use their nerdiness in the service of peace and order, while 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon and Mad Men’s Peggy Olson turn the parts of themselves that don’t fit into the usual niches for women into career success. Even Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Rebecca Bunch, who implicitly challenges our general fondness for nerdy women by testing the limits of female “likability,” uses her years of neurotic book-learning to fight for her clients and help out her friend Paula. She’ll correct your grammar, but she’s so earnest about it that you almost won’t mind.It’s crucial to note that we should be able to see more female nerds of colour and from sexual/gender minorities. Other than Jane the Virgin and Ugly Betty’s titular characters and their nerdy women mentioned above, TV’s smart, awkward women, like The Mindy Project’s Mindy Lahiri, Insecure's Issa Dee, and Chewing Gum’s Tracey Gordon, occupy the margins of nerd-dom. Perhaps the most prominent female blerd in pop culture right now is the Afro-British Hermione in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, whom only London theatre-goers have had the chance to experience. We’ve come this far in admiring female intelligence in its infinite permutations. We can go further.Written by Inkoo Kang for MTVUK councils are selling off public toilets. We need a loo coupThe dearth of public conveniences in a growing number of areas is unhealthy, uncivilised and unfair. It’s time to take direct actionSell off public services, and the whole thing turns to shit. Nowhere is this little maxim made more clear than in the privatisation, renovation or plain old closure of public toilets. According to a report by the BBC, between 2010 and 2013, one in seven public toilets was closed because of local council cuts, and those that remain are of “a depressing standard”.There are now, apparently, large areas of the country with absolutely no council-run, free-to-use public toilets whatsoever. From Wandsworth to Newcastle, deserts of public inconvenience, devoid of safe, publicly owned, easily accessible loos are appearing. Whichever way you wipe it, the government drive for austerity has left many councils unable to provide this most basic service, dragging public health backwards towards an era of piss-soaked alleyways and mess in the streets.That means, for those of you selfish enough to be pregnant, have a prostate, suffer from anxiety, have the temerity to have lived beyond the age of 50, be disabled, have a weak bladder or no money to pass a coin-operated barrier or pay for a drink in a pub … well, what exactly? What are our options here? Pee in your own shoe? Stand behind a line of Spanish teenagers with matching rucksacks as you wait to use the toilet in a white-lit fastfood hellhole? Crouch behind a wheelie bin down an alley outside Lush and hope the pounding smell of bath bombs covers your secret leakage?It’s not just the obvious danger to public health, personal freedom and social inclusion that’s on the line here – the great British public toilet is also part of the national character. InOxford, where I grew up, it was possible to wander down some stairs beside what looks like the spire of an underground church and take a leak under the 19th-century Martyr’sMemorial. I have run half marathons along the river Lea, only to stop at the public toilets inCheshunt to empty the very last of my bodily fluids inside a 1960s blue and white box beside a gaggle of Canada geese. In the public toilets at the end of Butcher’s Row in Leeds market, I once pushed my pelvic floor to breaking point by trying to wee so silently that I could still eavesdrop on the conversation between the women from the tripe shop and the make-up stall, about the absolute state of the weather. Public toilets, like libraries, bus stops and park benches, knit us together; we don’t value them, we don’t think of them, but my God do we miss them when they’re gone. We’ll miss their felt-tip wall poetry, their tiles, their sanitary towel bins, outside taps, polished metal mirrors and Leonardo da Vinci bog roll dispensers (I always like to imagine that, just as he was putting the finishing touches to The Last Supper, Leonardo turned to his assistant and said, “Gary – I’ve got a great idea for a twin-tube toilet roll dispenser. Grab a pencil and put this down”).As with any mention of toilets, the temptation to make “piss away” and “evacuation” jokes is obvious but, in truth, the absence of toilets will be discommoding for millions of us. AsEleanor Morgan puts it in her new book, Anxiety for Beginners: “The relationship between anxiety and the gut can be debilitating for some. You can end up walking around feeling like a ticking time bomb and develop all manner of safety behaviours relating to being any kind of distance away from a toilet.” Morgan’s solution is to wander into a very posh hotel and “quite literally get my shit done, in my own sweet time, hopefully with one of Chopin’s Nocturnes tinkling through the speakers”. While this sort of low-level protest is wonderful for those of us who live in big cities and can move without assistance through the world, it is no use whatsoever for residents of, say, Merthyr Tydfil, who haven’t a single public loo in town, or Eastbourne, where the public convenience has been turned, in a spectacular digestive irony, into a takeaway, or those who cannot simply slip, unnoticed, past a security guard or receptionist. What of wheelchair users? What of the elderly? What of women in housing crisis? As Maya Oppenheim wrote last year: “If you’re on the streets, privacy becomes a distant memory.” Forget changing your tampon or washing your face in relative safety and seclusion – this is apparently a luxury we can no longer afford.According to the BBC, at least 1,782 facilities have closed across the UK in the past decade and, with no legal requirement for local authorities to provide toilets, locking out a loo is all too often seen as a soft option for saving money. There are now 22 councils with just one public toilet, including Manchester, Stockport and Tamworth. Speaking as someone who once ate a large fish and chip dinner followed by an ice-cream with a heavily pregnant friend in Stockport, I can tell you this is far from “convenient”. Of course, it is quite fun when an empty former toilet gets turned into, say, a dog grooming parlour (Portsmouth) a nightclub (Boston, Lincolnshire) or art gallery (Kingston), but it’s not exactly a fair exchange. Unless you let me dry my undercarriage on a freshly shorn terrier or wash my hands in a bottle of Aftershock Red behind the bar, these “improvements” are no good to me.So what’s my solution? Well, it’s not perfect but, until the government improves local council funding, may I suggest that we all start to simply do our business in the businesses that donate to the Tory party? You’ll find a list right here, from Greene King pubs to Carphone Warehouses to Ladbrokes. Use them at your leisure. Water their porcelain. Drop your slacks within their doors. Consider it a loo coup. And together we might just win.Written by Nell Frizzell for The GuardianLooking at your mobile? You’re cutting off a world of creativity – and flirtationIt’s a scene so commonplace that it’s hardly worth specifying the details. But t was on Wednesday night, in a restaurant in Mousehole in Cornwall. Next to us was a family of four, with two adult children. The daughter, in her mid-20s, was gazing down beneath the table at her lap, glowing blue, periodically stabbing at it. The view, the food, the waitress setting the food down, her family – they could all go away. She was going to engage with the world that wasn’t there, condensed and switch off-able.Simon Schama issued a heartfelt and sympathetic plea last week, which he must know sounded like Canute facing the waves with pretend dignity. Opening the new displays at the National Portrait Gallery, he reflected on the habit of looking outwards that created art in the first place, and regretted that we now seem to be in an age that looks downwards, or inwards. The exchange of looks, he said, citing Hogarth, is the “foundation of human interaction”. To observe what is there is the only place that art, thought, literature can start from.It’s fair to say that, now that pretty well everyone owns a mobile phone, your engagement with the world can be judged by where your phone is while you’re eating dinner. The woman in the Mousehole restaurant had yielded to a heartfelt request, I would say, in placing it in her lap under the table. More usual will be those who place it on the table beside the plate; and now, there are those who eat with one hand, the other holding the iPhone 6, rapt, quite oblivious of the poor waiter trying to pour your water.To me, it seems fairly staggeringly rude to behave like this when you’re in company, but nobody else seems to feel that way. The truth of the matter is that if present company were instantly removed, and replaced by the people who are currently receiving messages, the phones wouldn’t be put away. The messaging would probably continue, to another set of people. It isn’t about showing that you’d prefer to be talking to people who aren’t in the room. It’s about your preferred distance from the human race. Those who text at the dinner table would generally like their relations with humanity to be conducted at electronic speed, remotely.Of course, none of this is going to lead to art, or literature, or intelligent observation about our fellow human beings. Schama is right that the creative intelligence, as well as our existence as sociable beings, rests on the exchange of glances. The art of the past is the consequence of the indecently penetrating gaze. Look at Goya’s sketches of old women now on show at the Courtauld Institute, and you can see that sometimes he just stopped in the street and stared at a most interesting sight. Reports of the behaviour of great novelists often stresses their penetrating and rather disconcerting inspection – Ivy Compton-Burnett was said to look people up and down in a detail that was barely decent.Probably, in an age where most people are withdrawn in public, gazing downwards, it is scandalous to possess the outward gaze that writers and artists must develop. It often shocks or terrifies a class of would-be writers when I give them an exercise in observation – to transcribe an overheard conversation, or to describe a complete stranger’s clothes, gait or resting expression. In some ways, the practice of observation is experiencing a golden age since, like the woman in Mousehole, the targets are so absorbed that they don’t notice you staring for long minutes. But the perceived indecency of the act of staring has led to its being policed and controlled. I’m always being told to “move on” by security staff when I’m just looking at the interesting sight of a shoplifter being wrestled to the ground. Once, at Exeter University, where I was supposed to be teaching writing, I found myself being reprimanded by an angry head of faculty. I had been discovered transcribing the interesting speech patterns of a colleague in a dull faculty meeting.It isn’t universal, and travellers often discover cultures where it’s quite normal still to gaze with civil interest at each other. And I don’t believe that it’s irreversible. In Japan, it’s universally accepted as unacceptably rude to make a phone call when on public transport. It would be nice if people understood, not just the rudeness of preferring your phone to the physical presence of your friends, but how stupid it makes the phone-wielder look. In a room of people gazing down, or wielding their phone as an intermediary, the conspicuous intelligence, the obviously interesting presence is the face looking upwards and outwards, with curiosity; the best company is the one that meets a frank, flirtatious gaze with another one.Written by Philip Hensher for The GuardianWhen women can be misogynist trolls, we need a feminist internetYvette Cooper’s campaign against online abuse is an important step towards tackling a culture of spite where women vent their insecurities on each otherWhat a work of wonder is the internet. When, at the click of a mouse, all the world’s knowledge is there for the asking, no one need be ignorant of anything any more. Wouldn’t that make us wiser, better, cleverer? What utopian hopes it stirred in the early days.Instead it’s an exaggerator of everything human, where the bad is extraordinarily horrible and noisier than the good. Today Yvette Cooper launches Reclaim the Internet, a brave campaign in the House of Commons against online misogyny, with women politicians from all parties. They can expect torrents more online abuse as they call for people to join a consultation on what can be done about the poisonous sexism, racism, homophobia and plain bullying the web has unleashed into the ether. Public figures to some extent grow thick skins, but ordinary people unexpectedly subjected to abuse-storms are easily traumatised into silence.The Demos research that accompanies today’s launch trawled the internet over three weeks for abuse using just the words “whore” and “slut”, screening out joshing self-references.10,000 aggressive messages sent to 6,500 women were found in the UK alone, just using those words.Sad, angry men sitting in their bedsits in underpants, hating women unattainable to them?Yes, there are plenty of those. But the shock is that most abuse comes from very young women, directed at other women. This is playground behaviour taken to another level, where all the world can see on Facebook or Twitter the petty malice and spite young girls spit out at one another and at other women they envy or resent.Why? Like the sad angry men, girls lashing out express all their own insecurities and lack of self-esteem. If you hate yourself and your body, if you can’t match the impossible ideal woman imagery all around you, then you lash out to make yourself feel better.Anonymity allows abuse to flourish, when people would never be so casually rude or nasty in person.You see it in the transition from primary to secondary school, how often confident, strong girls can be knocked back, consumed by desperate anxiety about the way they look in a new terrain of competition. The spitefulness girls generate can turn on a perceived loser or bring down anyone who gets above herself. There’s no doubt it’s far worse now as the internet adds in sexting boys expecting porn-star girls with cosmetically mutilated genitals and vajazzles, spewing out revenge porn, turning break-ups of brief teen relationships nastily viral. In the echo chamber of the web, everything vile in life is magnified and advertised, multiplying the malevolence.What’s to be done? Yvette Cooper’s Reclaim the Internet is exploring the role of police and prosecutors, the duty of Facebook, Twitter and other platforms and the obligations of employers, unions and other organisations to offer protection – all areas where political pressure can get something done. Anonymity allows abuse to flourish, when people would never be so casually rude or nasty in person. Cooper calls too for new ways for us as individuals to tackle abusers and support victims, turning on the trolls with wit and sarcasm, as Laura Bates does so well in her Everyday Sexism Project.But now we know many trolls are young women, the searchlight shines on schools’ failure to look after children’s well-being. Cooper points to the lack of good compulsory sex and relationships education, to empower girls. Give them strength to resist sexual harassment and bullying, to face down body-image tyranny, to stand up for themselves and one another and you can break the cycle of misery they deflect onto each other. Prudes and cowardly politicians who prevent putting honest sex and relationship education at the heart of schooling fail to see how keeping pupils happy and protected is the first prerequisite of learning. I have visited Swedish schools where they set up feminist girls’ clubs to protect and support each other, to look after each other going out at night, to resist the bullying and trivialising of girls’ lives. Teachers said it improved their happiness – and their results. Back in the 1970s when feminist groups drew women together for mutual support to resist misogynist pressures, we never imagined that girls 40 years later would suffer far worse.What stops learning is all the social pressures that get in the way – from this sexism to all the torments of family problems that trip children up. But Gradgrind Michael Gove’s first act was to strip out “children and families” from the brass plate on his education department, reducing schools to the three Rs, and mountainous tickboxing paperwork for teachers monitoring only hard learning. He banned the nascent Every Child Matters programme that looked after the well-being of every aspect of a child’s life, from cradle to college. The arts have been all but stripped out of too many schools under crude exam pressure. Drama, above all, helps children express themselves, role play, explore the stresses in their own lives and others’, learning empathy. But education for kindness is not on the curriculum for these politicians, who should note the rising suicide rate among the young.The internet has turned all discourse rougher, pushing politics and all views towards extremes. It can make individuals feel inadequate and vulnerable and let them lash out to express their own insecurities. As the Guardian’s the web we want project explores, it is in our hands to shape a civilising internet that serves us well, not one that tears civilisation apart.Written by Polly Toynbee for The GuardianIn an age of robots, schools are teaching our children to be redundantIn the future, if you want a job, you must be as unlike a machine as possible: creative, critical and socially skilled. So why are children being taught to behave like machines? Children learn best when teaching aligns with their natural exuberance, energy and curiosity. So why are they dragooned into rows and made to sit still while they are stuffed with facts?We succeed in adulthood through collaboration. So why is collaboration in tests and exams called cheating?Governments claim to want to reduce the number of children being excluded from school. So why are their curriculums and tests so narrow that they alienate any child whose mind does not work in a particular way?The best teachers use their character, creativity and inspiration to trigger children’s instinct to learn.So why are character, creativity and inspiration suppressed by a stifling regime of micromanagement?There is, as Graham Brown-Martin explains in his book Learning {Re}imagined, a common reason for these perversities. Our schools were designed to produce the workforce required by 19thcentury factories. The desired product was workers who would sit silently at their benches all day, behaving identically, to produce identical products, submitting to punishment if they failed to achieve the requisite standards. Collaboration and critical thinking were just what the factory owners wished to discourage.As far as relevance and utility are concerned, we might as well train children to operate a spinning jenny. Our schools teach skills that are not only redundant but counter-productive. Our children suffer this life-defying, dehumanising system for nothing.The less relevant the system becomes, the harder the rules must be enforced, and the greater the stress they inflict. One school’s current advertisement in the Times Educational Supplement asks: “Do you like order and discipline? Do you believe in children being obedient every time? … If you do, then the role of detention director could be for you.” Yes, many schools have discipline problems. But is it surprising when children, bursting with energy and excitement, are confined to the spot like battery chickens?Teachers are now leaving the profession in droves, their training wasted and their careers destroyed by overwork and a spirit-crushing regime of standardisation, testing and top-down control. The less autonomy they are granted, the more they are blamed for the failures of the system. A major recruitment crisis beckons, especially in crucial subjects such as physics and design and technology. This is what governments call efficiency.Any attempt to change the system, to equip children for the likely demands of the 21st century, rather than those of the 19th, is demonised by governments and newspapers as “social engineering”. Well, of course it is. All teaching is social engineering. At present we are stuck with the social engineering of an industrial workforce in a post-industrial era. Under Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and a nostalgic government in Britain, it’s likely only to become worse.When they are allowed to apply their natural creativity and curiosity, children love learning. They learn to walk, to talk, to eat and to play spontaneously, by watching and experimenting. Then they get to school, and we suppress this instinct by sitting them down, force-feeding them with inert facts and testing the life out of them.There is no single system for teaching children well, but the best ones have this in common: they open up rich worlds that children can explore in their own ways, developing their interests with help rather than indoctrination. For example, the Essa academy in Bolton gives every pupil an iPad, on which they create projects, share material with their teachers and each other, and can contact their teachers with questions about their homework. By reducing their routine tasks, this system enables teachers to give the children individual help.Other schools have gone in the opposite direction, taking children outdoors and using the natural world to engage their interests and develop their mental and physical capacities (the Forest School movement promotes this method). But it’s not a matter of high-tech or low-tech; the point is that the world a child enters is rich and diverse enough to ignite their curiosity, and allow them to discover a way of learning that best reflects their character and skills.There are plenty of teaching programmes designed to work with children, not against them. For example, the Mantle of the Expert encourages them to form teams of inquiry, solving an imaginary task – such as running a container port, excavating a tomb or rescuing people from a disaster – that cuts across traditional subject boundaries. A similar approach, called Quest to Learn, is based on the way children teach themselves to play games. To solve the complex tasks they’re given, they need to acquire plenty of information and skills. They do it with the excitement and tenacity of gamers.The Reggio Emilia approach, developed in Italy, allows children to develop their own curriculum, based on what interests them most, opening up the subjects they encounter along the way with the help of their teachers. Ashoka Changemaker schools treat empathy as “a foundational skill on a par with reading and math”, and use it to develop the kind of open, fluid collaboration that, they believe, will be the 21st century’s key skill.The first multi-racial school in South Africa, Woodmead, developed a fully democratic method of teaching, whose rules and discipline were overseen by a student council. Its integrated studies programme, like the new system in Finland, junked traditional subjects in favour of the students’ explorations of themes, such as gold, or relationships, or the ocean. Among its alumni are some ofSouth Africa’s foremost thinkers, politicians and businesspeople.In countries such as Britain and the United States, such programmes succeed despite the system, not because of it. Had these governments set out to ensure that children find learning difficult and painful, they could not have done a better job. Yes, let’s have some social engineering. Let’s engineer our children out of the factory and into the real world.Written by George Monbiot for The GuardianPurpose and Audience16859252501900019615151397000Purpose is … 1619250831850195262529273500Audience is …center0Glossary020000GlossaryWordDefinitionExampleSimileThis is an expression which compares one thing to another using the word ‘Like’ or ‘as’. Her hair was as black as night.MetaphorMakes a comparison between two things by saying that something is another thing. She had a heart of stone.AlliterationWhen the writer chooses words that start with the same sound to make a phrase stand out.She sells sea shells on the sea shore. RepetitionThis is when a word or phrase is used more that once to make it stand out to the reader. Gas, gas, quick boys.Question MarksIt might be a simple question or a rhetorical question, where the writer already has an answer in their mind. They might affect the tone. Is it right to test things on animals just to create more beauty products for us?Semi-colonThey do the same job as commas. They separate items in a list or join two related sentences together. The group of people is 12 rows deep; 15 minutes later there are lots more.ColonThis is an introducing mark. It tells us there will be a list, a quotation or an explanation. The skills they need: to drive,confidence, tracking safety. ................
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