A battle is raging about what our schools are for. Ideas about ‘white privilege’ and the inbuilt racism of all ‘white’ societies are being embedded in pupils’ minds in more and more English schools. The outcry following the death of a man killed by the police 4,000 miles away in the U.S. mid-West prompted heads in English public schools simultaneously to feel they must announce reviews of their curriculum. The everyday language of some schools is undergoing radical change, with activists advising them to use only gender neutral terms, abandoning traditional expressions like ‘boys and girls’ and ‘mums and dads’. A London school’s geography lessons abandon geographical knowledge for discussions about pupils’ own identities. The names of Elizabethan heroes Drake and Raleigh are excised from the buildings of a Devon school for the sake of ‘inclusivity’.
These examples are just the tip of the iceberg.
Where does the pressure for these extraordinary developments come from? It is not from our current Government, though it has done precious little to stem the tide and even at times indirectly helped to accelerate it. It is certainly not from parents or the vast majority of the population. It is from school leaders themselves, ‘education experts’, teacher educators, universities and from a wider elite dominant across our major cultural institutions convinced of its own rightness and virtue. Its origins are in what the French call a pensée unique, a single way of looking at things that sees the world as divided between oppressors and oppressed, distrusts the nation state, seeks the overthrow of ‘Western hegemony’, redefines ‘anti-racism’ to mean a never-ending assault on ‘white privilege’, puts equity before liberty and believes in the subjectivity of all knowledge and values. It is a hydra-headed ideology and is threatening to corrode what schools should really be for.
A recent international ‘Education Summit’ in Budapest organised by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Hungary’s largest private educational institution, discussed how best to counter these threats also being experienced by some other countries represented at the conference. It was clear that the ideological divide in education is no longer just whether one is for or against the kind of progressive teaching methods that derive from Rousseau and Dewey, but of where one draws the line between indoctrination and education The focus of the conference was on how to uphold an education based on the transmission of what Matthew Arnold, 19th-century poet and school inspector, described as “the best that has been thought and said”, not on using schools as a means to shape young minds into taking the party line on whatever social causes – gender ideology, anti-racism, Net Zero – are in vogue at any one time.
The names ‘classical’ and ‘conservative’ were used at the conference to describe the kind of education that is under threat. Traditionally it has been called a ‘liberal education’, from the Latin liber meaning free, an education that enables pupils to free themselves from the constraints of their time and place, not tie them to it, and to use the knowledge they have acquired to make judgements about the world and their own lives. It is ‘liberal’ in a sense completely different from the radical progressive (and often very illiberal) ’liberalism’ of many on the Left.
Matthew Arnold is sometimes thought to have been advocating an education that was little more than learning lots of facts. Nothing can have been further from his mind, the purpose of a good education for him being to enable people, through acquiring access to their heritage, to turn “a stream of fresh and free thoughts upon our stock notions and habits”. A liberal education therefore exists for its own sake, as something of value in itself, not for utilitarian purposes such as promoting social justice, reducing our carbon emissions or preparing pupils for the 21st century economy. It may, by producing knowledgeable and thoughtful young people, help achieve all sorts of desirable social aims, but that is not its purpose.
It involves helping pupils acquire knowledge and understanding of the Platonic triad of ‘the true, the beautiful and the good’ and the habits of mind and sensibility that will enable them to grow into the inheritance of their civilisation and of their country’s common culture. It has a curriculum centred on the main academic disciplines and on physical and artistic activities. It provides pupils with the core knowledge needed to hold their own in public discourse within their society. The U.S. educationist E.D. Hirsch calls this “cultural literacy”. It also gives them what Hirsch calls “national literacy”, the knowledge needed as part of that induction into membership of the nation state that schools ought to provide.
In the humanities a liberal education focuses mainly, if not exclusively, on the dominant influences shaping one’s country, in this country on the Judaeo-Christian, Greco-Roman and Enlightenment roots of European and Western civilisation. It promotes Aristotle’s intellectual virtues – love of truth, acceptance of refutation, care in judgement – and does its best to inculcate the habits of behaving morally, focusing on duties more than rights. It aims to leave pupils with the habits of learning and a thirst for further learning throughout life.
What a liberal education does not involve is the constructivist notion that most things can be learned through discovery. It does not take advantage of the fact that pupils are a captive audience to indoctrinate them with beliefs and attitudes to which adults are proving resistant. Liberal education draws the line at being told to ‘decolonise’ its curriculum if the purpose is to root out ‘white knowledge’, make pupils take an excessively negative view of their history and to study works chosen because of the race, sex, gender or sexuality of their creators rather than for their intrinsic cultural value. A school following a liberal education also does not see a main purpose as offering a therapeutic programme to meet pupils’ emotional needs. It provides an environment in which it hopes pupils learn to behave well to each other, accept that sometimes one must agree respectfully to disagree, can talk to staff about their problems, and are (for most of the time) happy at school. It does not offer ‘happiness education’ or sessions about ‘wellbeing’ or take over responsibilities that belong to parents.
We are fortunately far removed in England (Scotland may be a different matter) from the current practice of some U.S. schools – private ones in the lead – where the curriculum appears to have been taken over by CRT (Critical Race Theory), anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism. We have a national curriculum which ought to provide an overall framework within which a liberal education can be developed, as well as GCSE and A level syllabuses in the main subjects which in some cases are a major improvement on earlier ones.
What we lack is a shared overall vision for the liberal education that I have outlined and, in the absence of this, the ability to interpret and add to the prescribed curriculum in ways that support the deeper objectives of that vision rather than undermining them. We also lack in many cases in schools the will to do this and indeed frequently a will to do something antithetical. A Daily Telegraph survey of 300 teachers in 2008 found that three-quarters agreed with the statement that it was their responsibility to warn pupils not to feel good about their country. Sixteen years later it is difficult to imagine that the situation has got any better. What we do not lack are the schools, some private, some state-funded, where, despite the pressures, the unquenchable Delphic flame of a liberal education is still burning. It is these we need to celebrate and from whom we need to learn.
Dr. Nicholas Tate was Chief Executive of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (1994-7) and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (1997-2000). In that capacity he was chief adviser on the school curriculum, assessment and qualifications to both Conservative and Labour Secretaries of State for Education. He is the author of What is education for? and The conservative case for education.
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There are good reasons why wind power was consigned to the history books and museums two centuries ago. It feels like we are regressing back to pre-industrial times.
The purpose of their ‘Great Reset’ is to take the West back to feudalism.
Chuckles believes that once we “his people” have been immiserated and enslaved he will be able to traverse his kingdom just like days of yore in a carriage and four. His organic farms will have his peasants toiling in the fields with a few opening gates for him while bending the knee and doffing their caps. Oh it will be so jolly. I am not so sure the dinghy warriors have such visions for their future though.
Thankyou My Liege. —–But if I am to be “reset” I prefer going back to the Medieval Warm Period where we all lay in the sun after our back breaking labour. Life was short, we had nothing but at least we were happy in the warm sun, just as the WEF would have it.
Living standards for ordinary people in the 15th century were higher than in the 16th, 17th, 18th and first half of the 19th century.
They had lots of holidays and feasts and a basic “welfare state” provided by the Church.
Yep. Medieval times were prosperous and that is when all the great Cathedrals were built. People do better when it is warm not cold.
That’s the plan.
A quick look at the topic suggests that it’s not strange. Quite a few occurrences of similar failures have happened, sometimes related to quality problems (both in manufacture and operation), not just unexpected weather. In simple terms, the more of them exist, the more faults will occur.
I was involved in an ecological assessment for a new onshore windfarm site in Wales some years ago. It was determined that birds flying toward turbines had a five percent strike rate. There was some disagreement on how many dead birds this would lead to but the general consensus was ‘a lot’.
I noted that the Clocaenog N-power report ( see https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/George_2010.pdf ) ‘modelled’ a ‘precautionary’ 98% avoidance and a realistic 99% avoidance rate for that development in NE Wales. These figures seem to be a random assetion or wishful thinking However if that really were the case then the Osprey chick that was killed by one of the nearby Brenig turbines. See https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/grim-discovery-reveals-what-really-19090066 and the Reach group newspaper article attempted to deflect blame from the turbine to a Channel 4 documentary disturbing the bird. The Welsh Water team who had gone to extraordinary lengths to see this chick reared on their lake reach adulthood, were understandably extremely upset and pointed out the documentary was filmed almost 2 weeks afterwards.
Silverbullet12 – I think the 95% avoidance – 5% collision or higher casualty is more realistic. but still lower than what is probably the case in moderate to stronger windspeeds. I’m informed that the casualties ranging from Goshawks and Kestrels to bats found on the ground here are not catastrophic impact injuries but more often injuries consistent with severe air turbulence and wake shear for several hundred metres downstream of the 1.5 acre swept area of the blades. That is what makes them much more lethal.that the adherents would have us believe.
This spectacular incident represents a safety mechanism failure which in turn reveals one of the innumerable weaknesses of what is an essentially medieval technology – trying to grab energy directly from nature windmill stylee.
In fact these ‘hi-tech’ turbines can only cope with wind-speeds up to c 50 mph (minimum c 15 mph) when built in brakes should kick in.
That’s right, mass shutdown has to occur when electrical generation would be maximised during gales and hurricanes.
In doing my research over these figures I also came across another (blackly) hilarious fact about this technologically reggressive comedic gift that keeps giving:
Each massive turbine requires c 300 litres of oil annually for lubrication.
Which means that the two largest onshore and offshore plants in the UK alone go through c 130,000 litres per year of the dreaded fossil fuel that Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil are demanding be completely abandoned in the ground.
You couldn’t make it up!!! :-).
A retired grid engineer told me that, during long periods of little to no wind, the windmills become consumers of electricity to maintain the spin, so as to keep the bearings greased and to prevent the bearings from becoming warped. I have tried to verify this for myself but as yet unable, would be grateful if anyone can help!
Yes, have come across this crazy concept before, would be of no surprise whatsoever.
Very similar to the fact that National Grid now has to maintain an extensive array of diesel generators across the country ready to kick in when the increasingly ‘alternative’ (ie inefficient and unreliable) leaning UK generating capacity fails to meet demand, ie to avoid mass power cuts.
This I know to be absolutely true. My current office place of work is rather in the fields so to speak, and there are two massive diesel generators just around the corner. The farmer happily charges rent. Our “business park” still suffers from a lot of power cuts, however. And whenever I tell my work colleagues that this is what happens when we expect rainbows and unicorn juice to provide for our power requirements, I can feel the “Not the Conspiracy Theorist again” energies coming my way…
Ask them if their continually rising electricity bills are a conspiracy theory.
Correct. Its to avoid ‘Brinnelling’ which is pitting of the main bearing races and step -up gears through wind induced vibration from the blades when stationary
And brinelling will lead to excess vibration, creating more wear. So, if that’s not calibrated right, then whoops off come the blades.
Good point. And with the high torque and unbalanced rotational stress at the slow hub speed of the blades any serious vibration that might cause bearing or hub failure means the blades are feathered oversize disk brake locks on until the bearings can be examined and changed. Which is why you often see one or 2 turbines in a group of 15 stopped and generating nothing for 2 or 3 months at a time.
And pulls electricity from the grid to prevent the blades icing up in cold weather.
I live near a batch of them and on days with no wind they are gently turning.
Ha, 50 mph…the gusts in the north of Scotland can be far greater, on a fairly frequent basis. I guess Caithness will be littered with blade shrapnel alongside the bird carcasses.
The one thing everyone always forgets, is maintenance, and its cost. The greater the complexity, alongside novel technologies, the more expensive maintenance becomes. I’ve seen newbuild schools in Scotland, all fancy atrium, corridors and lighting, all centrally controlled. Instead of a janitor being able to control the heating, lighting and changing of lightbulbs the tasks now require computers, control rooms, cherry pickers, electricians, heating engineers, computer engineers, and the lights are needed all day. Building constantly comsuming power. So how is that more efficient than traditional buildings where one old geezer had all the knowledge required and only needed a step ladder…
You could add marine and aviation to the list. Quite a few helicopters involved in maintaining some of them at sea, no doubt fuelled by kerosene.
Topsails and Headsails Mr Christian. Make way for Cape Horn. A delightful passage, with winds of steel that come at you day and night and men fall to the deck from the icy shrouds, while others curse their mother for having given them birth. —————Yes the same wind we now rely on for our light bulbs. Insanity just as it ever was.
The other related issue is the complexity of control arrangements to comply with frequency variation tolerance and the peak voltage levels with so many small alternators and inverters on line, compared with the old 500 MW alternators in the past. E.g. the old Didcot A coal fired one had 4 of those. To get that from a wind farm there would be many small ones all on the grid.
But nobody liked the cooling towers on the Oxford plain.
And ofcourse wind is diffuse energy that requires huge amounts of land and still cannot provide base load. It requires gas turbines ticking over full time waiting for the wind to stop. (which is often). Using wind is like having to buy 2 cars, because one of them only works 4 days a week but you never know what days.
Yep —-Diffuse energy requiring huge areas of land for part time energy that cannot provide base load is all the rage with the phony planet savers. Only by examining the real reason and politics behind this absurdity can we see why it is occurring all over the western world. ——The Climate is not the reason. The climate is simply the plausible excuse for the masses.
“What’s next? Solar panels that slide off roofs and crush people?”
Maybe not, but there have been quite a few roof fires caused by solar panels!
Safe and effective
It’s a very bold move to make your energy resources reliant on the weather you insist is going to change drastically in the future.
Or madness.
New Olympic Sport: Wind Turbine Blade Sets Giant Javelin Throw Record
stopthesethings.com/2023/12/15/new-olympic-sport-wind-turbine-blade-sets-giant-javelin-throw-record/
stopthesethings.com
“The wind industry (which really only got off the ground in the late 1990s and still generates a trifling amount of electricity) has clocked up around 231 fatalities, – see the helpful collection of wind farm death and injury stats compiled by Scotland Against Spin all available here: https://scotlandagainstspin.org/turbine-accident-statistics/ “
Traditional Scottish dwellings have additional protections against wind so I’m guessing wind is not a new thing in Scotland?
Possible perils of modern technology along similar lines…I was watching footage of the Japanese tsunami in 2011. Of course, amid the horrendous destruction were many thousands of cars bobbing around and crashing into everything else. How much more difficult would it have been if a fair proportion of those vehicles had been electric? Imagine those batteries flooded with seawater and then being subjected to multiple collisions.
I have seen footage of a Tesla burning underwater (having fallen into the sea), so, the next time there is a dangerous flood, perhaps something like Boscastle in Cornwall some years ago, will EV’s be major contributors to the carnage?
This should fun then!!
A wooden wind turbine…..
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67718719
Possibly glued together with the same glue they use on the compacted pellets they ship across the Atlantic to power Drax…although I think those are supposed to be stuck together with lignite from the wood itself. My ‘O’ level geography told me that lignite was a very poor fuel, coal being far more efficient. Perhaps an engineer could enlighten me.
Lignite has a lower specific energy ( or specific energy ) of 10,000-17,400 kJ/kg. Coals range from sub bituminous coal above this IEA definition to anthracites which are up to 33,000kJ/kg.
To make kiloJoules per kilogram more meaningful, I divide the value by 3,600 ( secs in an hour) to give kWh/kg. So a kilogram lump of lignite might hold 2.7 to 4.8 kWh or units while a kilogram of high quality hard anthracite holds 9kWh. Of course the efficiency of a furnace or stove, if used for domestic water heating or that of power station steam boiler and turbine system plus alternator and transformer sets mean that in the former, about 65% heats the house while in the latter only about 35-36% is exported as electrical energy. …..to charge your Tesla. The rest goes up the chimneys and is wasted in condensing steam.
While we are talking about wind turbines generating electricity this is only possible when the grid is connected to nearly the same generation capability of gas turbines. These burn natural gas which ranges from 55,000 kJ/kg down to 48,600 kJ/kg*. Much cheaper than electricity but the gas turbines when idling burn about 20% of full load consumption with negligible output.
Hope this helps.- these are real world calculated values rather than manufacturer sales claims. But if anyone can provide actual values I’d welcome these.
Not wrong but a combined cycle gas plant efficiency of gas to electricity is about 52-55% at full load. However if this is not at full power the steam cycle efficiency falls considerably, which it must if used to level off the wind generation. A much bigger problem is that the grid stability depends on the mechanical inertia of very large alternators (500 MW or more) whose rotating parts weigh 100 tons or more. Wind turbines are not directly connected to the grid, there is an electronic invertor between and have zero inertia. The next thing we will need is huge stations with motor driven flywheels weighing hundreds of tons to ensure stability of the system, but they don’t tell you that! Who pays for this, well you do! Such is always the ANSWER: make the consumer pay for these daft ideas, which will in the end fail completely. Not far off now, but the weather is not helping failure at the moment, but it will. A good cold snap, with almost no wind. Normal Winter weather.
“Still, let’s be fair folks. It’s all in the spirit of R&D. This is new technology after all”
Sorry Sallust, In my opinion its not. Wind turbines use crude and old technology, they are poorly designed and cheaply manufactured. A few years ago I was invited to a large production unit in Pudong, Shanghai, China where blades were being produced in a yard for a well known N European turbine brand. The technique was simple – manual layup in moulds, of resin over chopped strand fibreglass. The yard was uncovered and open to the elements with it drizzling heavily while the workers slopped the resin on with brushes. Quality control appeared absent.and the wet would have compromised strength by contaminating the catalyst-accelerator as well as water inclusion reducing longitudinal strength and fracturing internally in freezing conditions.
The wind Energy Science journal’s https://wes.copernicus.org/articles/3/427/2018/ Effects of moisture absorption on damage progression and strength of unidirectional and cross-ply fiberglass–epoxy composites, explains this alone can cause a 40% reduction in the ability of blades to resist the combination of centrifugal and bending forces.
The image heading the article shows the fractured fibreglass at the root where the blades are glued or bonded to the steel tubular connection to the hub flange.
Yet all that is required is some very safe modular reactors and some gas fired plants, some hydro, all of which take up very little room and the country will not look like a giant pin cushion “Bob’s Your Uncle”. ——-Plenty of electricity and thousands of birds of prey can relax a bit knowing they need not fear being spliced anymore, plus we might not be paying 300 quid a month for energy. ——Why do politicians always prefer the absurd?
OK my last contribution. Yes I totally agree we need modular reactors and these should have been constructed 10-15 years ago. Plus gas fired plants running on UK produced gas are the ideal. Hydro up to a point but Scotland has more potential for high head hydro than Wales and our 4 pumped storage schemes ( 2 in each of Scotland and Wales ) have a 2.8 GW output capability and a stored capacity if the upper reservoirs are full of 4 GWh. So with the national demand now of 35GW these could run 8% of our demand for a whole 1h 25 min. Thats all.
I think the obsession with wind turbines is
1) that they are generally on private land or on NGO land ( NRW in Wales ) with private funding. Hence they are a substantial transfer of wealth from public to private hands and corporate interests
2) they are absurdly highly visible icons ( a 3 armed cross ) of the dedication to saving the planet. As an island nation, an array of tidal flow turbines around the coast ( water is 880 x denser than air ) would be smaller but invisible and with tidal flow prediction years ahead being well understood would be far more reliable than wind. But the seabed land is supposedly the Crowns so perhaps there are some objections there.too. S Korea, a peninsula not very much smaller than England and Wales uses low head tidal turbines extensively. It manufactures turbines but uses few domestically.
Tidal is still a technology is not “On demand” and like wind it is only useful if the energy can be stored, which it cannot be. There is also the disruption to sea life etc. —Wind sun tidal etc are all part time energy. You cannot run Industrial society on those. They are only being used for ideological reasons regarding the irrational fear of a climate crisis, which in reality is only the excuse for the real reason for renewables. ——The idea that we in the west have used up more than our fair share of the coal gas and oil in the ground and are to fob our citizens off with wind and sun and we can like it or lump it
The SMR is a problem beast, its biggest problem being security. The second is cooling water, you cannot just put one in a Town, unless it on the coast or a large lake. Obviously neither of these is a problem on a military ship. To make the price anything like reasonable, it would be necessary to make many, many, just like cars. To do so needs a vast highly trained workforce. We no longer have such, as we have been de-industrialised too far. All in the name of climate change!
But you will get 40 years of life from an SMR and only 15 years out of a turbine, and for turbines you need to factor in the cost of the 100% backup from gas. So cost comes closer together
At least this won’t cost the energy generating company anything as they’ll pass the additional costs on to the consumer, so that’s a good thing, right? After all, we can’t have these companies going bust, they are the future for cheap, reliable energy!!
When people talk about the sun lit hills, in future it won’t be the sun lighting them up.
A characteristic of diesel engines is that the speed must be governed when they are running. Failure to control their speed will result in them increasing in speed until they destroy themselves. Wind turbines have this same characteristic. Blade pitch and brakes are used to control the speed. Failure of these control mechanisms leads to speed increases until they destroy themselves.
Saw one that looked a bit like that near Grimethorpe a few months back. I reckon a sort like the one in 1987 would flatten the lot.