Two interesting and neglected writers on education

Karl Popper 1902-94

Who were the mystery philosophers whose quotations I listed in two recent posts?  The first was Karl Popper, known mostly as a philosopher of science, who died in 1994, and the second was Tyrrell Burgess, a teacher, activist, and writer on the British education system, who died in 2009.  Until recently I had no idea that Popper had written about education - indeed, that he formulated a distinct and very interesting 'Evolutionary' theory of learning, some idea of which can be seen from the quotations I used.  Burgess was influenced powerfully by Popper while teaching at the London School of Economics, and he tried to put Popper's theories into practice when developing a teacher training programme based on Popper's ideas, at North East London Polytechnic (NELP), in the 1970s and 80s.  Burgess, of whom I have been unable to find a picture, became Professor of the Philosophy of Social Institutions at the University of East London, which NELP was transformd into in 1987.  He was a strong advocate of comprehensive schools, and a lifelong opponent of selection.

I came across them both recently in a terrific new book aiming to spread their ideas about the organisation of education, and in particulr about approaches to curriculum.  This is Learning, Teaching and Education Research in the 21st Century: an evolutionary analysis of the role of teachers, by Joanna Swann (Continuum 2012).  It is a very clearly-written account of Popper's evolutionary theory of knowledge and education, and of its implications for practice.  Popper argues that although the objective world exists, we can only ever have imperfect knowledge of it, and learning (indeed the practice of living) consists of a continuous process of identifying problems, creating hypotheses for addressing or solving these problems, and then testing the hypotheses to find out whether or not they are correct.  Our hypotheses can be found to be false (if our results contradict them), but they can never be proved to be true, as it is always possible that contradictory evidence will be found in the future.  Learning is therefore a process of identifying as many false theories as possible, and coming up with as many hypotheses that have not yet been proved false, as possible.

The implications of this are radical, as quotations like these demonstrate:

The process of learning, of the growth of subjective knowledge, is always fundamentally the same. It is imaginative criticism.

There are no subject matters, no branches of learning - or rather, of inquiry: there are only problems, and the urge to solve them.

Education should be organised wholly around, not the notional 'transmission' of a fixed and agreed body of knowledge (which Popper argues hardly exists anyway), but around the skills of perceiving the world as a series of problems, creating sensible theories and hypotheses for solving these problems, and then testing these theories and hypotheses.  In a word, there should be no pre-conceived curricula, and education should be organised around collaborative research projects, on subjects and topics chosen by students.  The teachers' role is to facilitate the selection of suitable projects and problems, and to guide students in their researches.

I really like these ideas, which align nicely with my thoughts about craft and professional learning, and also with the best research findings on effective learning, which emphasise the importance of students' motivation and engagement with the content of learning, and of being active rather than passive in the learning process.  In particular, Joanna Swann has a chapter using this theoretical framework to argue against prescribed curricula in schools and colleges, the paradigm of this being the English National Curriculum for schools.  It so happens that I am  in the middle of teaching a module on curriculum theory and design at this very moment, and I am going to give this chapter to my students: it is directly relevant to their assignment.

I am embarrassed that I didn't know about this significant body of theory before, though I have an idea that Popper, judging by his style of writing, may have made himself pretty unpopular with his academic colleagues - he seems in the couple of chapters I have recently read to be trying to pick fights with people perceived as critics rather than colleagues, in almost every line!

I want to think some more about Joanna Swann's book before posting some more on it.  In particular I want to compare the ideas in it with those of Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, fast and slow (Allen Lane 2011), which I have read about half of so far.  This is a book about the psychology of decision-making, how we learn to make better decisions, and it also takes an evolutionary perspective.  So I mean to write some more about this sometime soon.

One of those strange coincidences, when something strikes you, and then more or less at the same time gets echoed from a completely different angle, making you think that maybe it wasn't a coincidence (thought this is very likely indeed to be a false conclusion).  I was checking out books written by Tyrrell Burgess, and found that, inspired like me by Ambrose Bierce, he published a book called The Devil's Dictionary of Education!  (See my post of 21st October last year, not that I've done much about it since!)  Though this is only a coincidence, it suggests to me that Tyrrell Burgess was my kind of person!  Here is a brilliant joke from it:

Art History: n. numbing by painters (credited to M.Burgess)

It would be tempting but lazy to give up the idea of collecting my own collection of 'Devil's definitions' about education and just cite examples from Burgess's book.  What I will do is think about my own and then see if (a) he has included the same word or phrase at all and (b) whether his take on it is different in ny way.  It occurs to me that some such words might also appear in Keywords by Raymond Williams (OUP 1985), and if they do I will compare Williams's definition also.

Public Art in Hackney: some examples

Another mystery philosopher of education

Here are some more provocative quotations from yet another mystery thinker about education, another whose work should be better known in my view:

All knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is provisional, and always will be. We cannot prove that what we know is true, and it may turn out to be false.  The best we can do is justify our preference for one theory rather than another.....of course, we assume the 'truth' of our existing knowledge for practical purposes and are quite ready to do so; but we must be ready for it to be superseded....we cannot be sure that we have the truth: we can, however, systematically eliminate error.  the way we eliminate error is by testing.

Of course there have been many people with a sense of unease about the practice of education.  most important, there have been many teachers who have either instinctively or after worrying thought tried to organise learning rather than teaching.  They have encouraged 'discovery methods', project work and independent learning.  But they have been under attack, partly because these methods still sit uneasily in the rest of the system (how, for example, does one examine such work?) and partly because they have been unable to give as coherent an intellectual account of themselves as is claimed by traditional academics. This insecurity is no longer justified.  It is the traditional academic practice which needs to be defended.

What we have, in fact, is a continuum of learning, whose logic is the same, from the new-born babe (indeed, from the amoeba) to the research worker on the frontiers of knowledge.  Each is engaged in the formulation of problems, in solving them and in testing the solutions.  Most people will formulate problems that have been formulated many times before.  Their proposed solutions will be familiar; their tests commonplace.  But they will learn by this activity.  They will not learn better or faster if we parcel up received solutions to problems formulated by others: indeed this is an anti-learning process.  Moreover it inhibits the possibility of progress, because it is always possible that someone will formulate a common problem differently, will propose a different solution or a more effective test.

What is important is not a particular fact or even a particular ordered collection of facts, but method.  It is method rather than information which gives mastery, and it is method which must be the chief business of education.

The presentation of knowledge as bodies of organised facts is a way of ensuring its unhelpfulness to most people.

Since criticism is of the essence of the method, education must offer opportunities for students to be critical and to use criticism. 

Clue: All these quotations come from the same book, published in 1977.  They still appear to me to represent a radical critique of the basic assumptions of our entire education system, perhaps even more so now than when they were written.  Any ideas?  Answers in a day or two.

Mystery educational philosopher

All these quotes are from the same thinker, someone I didn't realise had written about education.  I will shortly be posting a review of the book I discovered them in.  Can you recognise the author?

I may be wrong, and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth.

We do not discover new facts or new effects by copying them, or by inferring them inductively from observation, or by any other method of instruction by the environment.

(Picture by Chris Bradey)

We learn only through trial and error.  Our trials....are always our hypotheses.  They stem from us, not from the external world.  All we learn from the external world is that some of our efforts are mistaken.

The process of learning, of the growth of subjective knowledge, is always fundamentally the same.  It is imaginative criticism.

Institutions for the selection of the outstanding can hardly be devised.  Institutional selection may work quite well for such purposes as Plato had in mind, namely for arresting change.  But it will never work well if we demand more than that, for it will always tend to eliminate initiative and originality, and, more generally, qualities which are unusual and unexpected.  It has been said, only too truly, that Plato was the inventor of both our secondary schools and our universities.  I do not know a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devastating system of education has not utterly ruined them.

There are no subject matters, no branches of learning - or rather, of inquiry: there are only problems, and the urge to solve them.

If I thought of a future, I dreamt of one day founding a school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations.

[If] we produce many competing ideas, and criticise them severely, we may, if we are lucky, get nearer to the truth.  This method is the method of conjectures and refutations: it is the method of taking many risks, by producing many (competing) hypotheses; of making many mistakes; and of trying to correct or eliminate some of these mistakes by a critical discussion of the competing hypotheses.

Does this last one give it away?

The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman 2

I was with two friends from outside London, who were looking for an interesting exhibition to go to, so I ended up going to see the Grayson Perry again!  This was a great thing to do - it's the sort of show where you notice different things if you go more than once.  Once again I took rather random notes about anything that struck me, and here they are (quotes from GP in italics):

Do not look too hard for meaning here, I am not a historian, I am an artist, that's all you need to know.

Deep in the mountains of my mind there is a sacred place where there is a monument to skill

Journeys as pilgrimages

Early English motorcycle helmet: title of a GP piece that looks like something vaguely Viking from 1200 years ago that's just been excavated, displayed next to the helmet GP made for his trip round Europe with Alan Measles.

If Alan measles had been around in ancient Egypt he would have hung out with Bes.

A walk in Bloomsbury, an encounter with the world: 'the journey has become a tired metaphor of reality television, describing a transformative experience.'

Ritual can become stultified if not kept relevant to its time and context

Shrines - in your pocket, in a corner of your house, or by a roadside, portable.

I can make art with hardly any money and on the kitchen table
A forge for turning old people into young, Russian print 1800

Fallen giant - cf Jerusalem, I wanted to make something that was about England

The Rosetta vase, yellow, covered with incantations (see picture in my earlier post)

Boli or power figure, from Mali, raw potency, pared down, apparently modern

Everything in the BM was contemporary once. The frivolous now, companion to Rosetta. I wanted it to have the look of a mystical diagram whilst the content consisted of banalities and buzzwords of Feb 2011.

Hello kitty hand towel pilgrimage souvenir

We trust maps. I like maps of feelings, beliefs and the irrational, they use our trust of maps to persuade us that there might be some truth in their beauty.

The wheel of life Tibet 1900. A map and self-help chart combined

Map of truths and beliefs. The entire landscape is a graveyard

Pilgrims travel light so the souvenir may be only a badge, a photo or a signature.



Map based on Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress. 1800.

Confucius

Votive stupas

Our father and mother - pilgrims made of iron

Tate Modern is the cathedral of the cult of modern art.

Relics

The chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont, 1728 - 1810.  French diplomat, spy, soldier and Freemason whose first 49 years were spent as a man, and whose last 33 years were spent as a woman. Died in England, buried in St Pancras churchyard.

Journeyman cabinet maker carrying the tools of his trade

Sheela-na-gig. PJ Harvey album of the same name

 
Do go and see this exhibition, whatever your craft, it's been extended for another month until February 26th.

This is the link to the British Museum teaser about the show: http://bri.mu/r0v6jH

Here's a link to the notes I took on my first visit to the exhibition: http://jayoptimistic.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/grayson-perry-exhibition-tomb-of.html

Standardisation in the work of Teaching and Learning

Forcing everyone to teach by the rules does not improve the “bad teachers”– it only hobbles the good ones (Papert 1990)

I came across this quote from Seymour Papert in Joe Bower's post at http://coopcatalyst.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/the-illusion-of-standardization/. He sees standardisation in education as one of the ways in which mass production techniques are being applied to the work of teachers. The justification for this is 'fairness': the argument is that everyone should have an equal experience of their education, otherwise something isn't fair. The fact that the quality of an experience - how it is felt by two different people - is completely immeasurable, and actually is a completely meaningless idea, is forgotten because of our fear of being unfair. Sadly, the price for alleviating this fear is 'dumbing down' to the minimum level set by the standards, exactly as Papert pointed out more than 20 years ago. Supporters of standards argue that because there are so many bad teachers, we have to have standards to ensure that teaching quality is consistent. This is another concept, along with standardisation, that needs looking at carefully by every teacher.

Joe also includes a link to an article by Maja Wilson, who tells the story of her son choosing a book to read and taking it to school, but being told off because he hadn't chosen the book from the 'levelled book tubs'.

'Standardisation' in education is a paradigm indicator of what Donald Schon, nearly 30 years ago, described as 'technical-rationality':

In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground where practitioners can make effective use of research-based theory and technique, and there is the swampy lowland where situations are confusing ‘messes’ incapable of technical solution. The difficulty is that problems of high ground, however great their technical interest, are often relatively unimportant to clients or the larger society, while in the swamp are the problems of the greatest human concern (Schön 1983 (1991), p42).
Schön uses the term ‘technical rationality’ for what he describes as


the dominant epistemology of practice...which has most powerfully shaped both our thinking about the professions and the institutional relations of research, education and practice – professional activity consists in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique (Schön 1983, p21).

He presents a compelling, almost overwhelming argument that the dominance of this version of epistemology in the theories of learning, research and professional practice has obscured the real importance of alternative, more expansive and provisional knowledges, resulting in the diminution of professional expertise and creativity in the design of a wide range of projects, and in addressing major social and educational problems. Unfortunately, his work appeared in the period just before two momentous shifts in Western politics and culture: the advent of computers on every workdesk, and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. These shifts gave a renewed and powerful impetus first to neo-liberal economic policies and secondly to a new wave of technical-rational social policy fuelled by the new capacity of organisations both public and private, to collect and crunch data. Arguments such as Schön’s for a more nuanced and complex appreciation of the work of professionals of all kinds were swept aside in the rush towards the ‘Audit Society’ – a paradigm of technical rationality, ‘audit’ being seen in strictly well-defined, contractual and numerical terms (Power 1999). This mode of thought is still dominant, probably to a greater degree than when Schön’s work was published nearly 30 years ago, and professional practice is even more clearly subject, though not unresisting, to its sway, not just in the structure, organisation and curricula of universities, as Schön demonstrated in 1983, but nowadays also in social, educational and economic policy, at least in the UK and the USA, where it has become an explicit element of the philosophies of every major political party.

As a result of this continuing dominance, the situation of professionals in every field has become much more problematic than when Schön was writing. They are far less trusted, they are less autonomous in practice, early ideals have been watered down, they are subject to various versions of ‘performativity’, the ethical issues they face are far more complex.  But the most important consequence of this situation is that the work of dedicated, thoughtful and hard-working teachers is undermined, with obvious consequences for learners of all kinds.

Papert. S. (1990, July). Perestroika and Epistemological Politics. Speech presented at the World Conference on Computers in Education. Sydney, Australia

Power, M. (1999). The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Schön, D. (1983, 1991 edition). The reflective Practitioner: how professionals think in action. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd

Professionalism as profound involvement with material rather than detachment

Source: Hubblesite.org

I just read the latest post on Solid Gold Creativity, entitled Possibility 3, which includes a story about a singer who, in order to achieve a great interpretation of a Schubert song, discovered - with help from a coach - that he needed to 'stop taking himself so Goddam seriously'. He needed to lose himself in the material, to give himself up to it, to submit to its demands. This language is not too strong: on the contrary, it is precise. The craftworker aims for a moment to become one with his/her material. This is exactly what I mean in my analysis of craft when I argue that the craftworker's identity is completely bound up with their work, and that consequently their work truly and uniquely reflects the person they are. We talk of a singer 'interpreting' the song, with the connotation that every interpretation is unique (for better or worse!). But even to say this plays down the active role of the material in shaping the identity of the craftworker too - every piece of work they produce changes them, makes them the person they are, becomes part of their lived experience and their identity.

In the same way, we can say that teachers are formed by their students, provided they allow themselves to be so formed, provided they don't take themselves too seriously.

For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry

The wonderful Spitalfields Life blog does it again! I know of this poem, written around 1760 by Christopher Smart, but I had no idea that he probably wrote it while confined inside the St Luke's Hospital for Lunatics, where he was first described as 'curable' and later as 'incurable'. This institution, according to 'the gentle author' of the blog, stood where the CoOp and Argos are today, on Old St.

The post tells the sad story of Smart's life, and publishes the whole heart-warming poem.  The gentle author wonders whether Smart, known to many as 'Kit', might have seen an image of himself in Jeoffry which may have helped him rise above the 'tyranny of his circumstances'.  Certainly we can all relate immediately to the poem.  The blog post is at: http://spitalfieldslife.com/jeoffry-2/

Paul Bommer, a friend of 'the gentle author' of Spitalfields Life, has produced a beautiful and witty poster, parts of which are shown here, illustrating every line of the poem (see http://spitalfieldslife.bigcartel.com/product/for-i-will-consider-my-cat-jeoffry/).  If anyone very generous wants to give me the perfect Christmas present, this is it!

Note that Bommer has put the cat into a frame alongside a bust of Montaigne (the main inspiration for Optimistic but Sceptical).  This is a coincidence, but absolutely appropriate, for one of Montaigne's most famous quotations is:  'When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.'   He was clearly also a close observer of cats, and would I'm sure have been very amused by Smart's poem.  There's an interesting book to be written on humanists and cats: or perhaps a bigger one on the different animal companions preferred by different kinds of philosopher.  Did Diderot have a cat?  We know Nietzsche was moved, possibly to madness, by the sight of a horse being whipped.  Did Kant take a dog with him when he went on his walks in Konigsberg at exactly the same time every day?

Any more information on this vital question will be very gratefully received, and published here.  In the meantime, look up Spitalfields Life, read For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry, and glow inside....while shedding a sad tear for Kit Smart.

  

Justice for celebrities!

An Australian colleague told me yesterday that when arriving for a tour of Australia years ago, Frank Sinatra was rude and contemptuous to an immigration official. When it came to leaving at the end of his tour, the highly unionised Australian immigration staff refused to process his passport, causing him to be delayed for days. Finally, according to my friend, he had to be flown out of the country in a military plane, from a military airport. If any of the highly unionised production staff at the BBC consider themselves to be public sector workers, perhaps they might consider boycotting any future programmes involving Jeremy Clarkson, thus keeping him off the airways altogether, for the benefit of everyone, and in the interests of popular justice. Just a thought.

Metaphors for our time

In my last speculation I drew attention to William Morris being memorably compared to a bell that rang true however you struck him.  The immediacy and physicality of this metaphor, carrying with it suggestions of sound (the double meaning here is pure poetry) as well as of touch, got me thinking about the possibility of more contemporary comparisons.  After all, few people nowadays actually engage in striking bells, and fewer and fewer even hear real bells very often.  So how might Morris's character have been described so succinctly using a modern metaphor?

'His customer service was always of the highest quality'
'Whatever the problem, his code was bug free'
'You never got to the end of his game'
'There were never any leaves on his railway'

I'm afraid this could easily become the sort of parlour game that Victor Meldrew would spend his life playing - I always have to control my VM tendencies, but I mean it seriously: are these solid, real life, physical metaphors thinner on the ground in the digital age?  Or am I just stuck in an unimaginative time warp?

The value of quotations

This post comes from thoughts while ironing a shirt this morning and listening to Thought for the Day on Radio 4.  A wonderful epitaph tribute was quoted about Sir Robert Shirley, who died in 1656: 'Sir Robert Shirley built this church, whose singular Praise is this: to have done the best of things in the worst of times'. This is indeed a heart-warming tribute - Shirley's times were undoubtedly hard for everyone in the country, whatever their circumstances, during the years of the civil war, but this expression somehow transcends the horrors even of that period, and ends up being about Shirley as just another man - one of us indeed - and so somehow also manages to inspire any of us also to rise above the challenges of the times we live in. This chain of thought led me to one about a similar quotation that has stayed with me ever since I read it in Edward Thompson's biography of Morris (these sentiments tend inevitably to be expressed following the death of the individual concerned). This was said by Robert Blatchford in the Clarion, the high-circulation socialist newspaper in his obituary of Morris written in 1896: 'However you struck him, he rang true'.

As any reader of this blog will know, I like quotations, and in a rather unsystematic way, collect them. I think this is for a number of reasons: a good quotation encapsulates in a memorable and concise way an important thought, so it can be a useful practical tool for thinking; and paying attention to quotations embodies the idea that the thoughts of people in the past are potentially relevant to contemporary living, and so imply the unity across time of humanity - we are no different from our forebears, and our most important problems and challenges were theirs also. They are tools for reflection, and so potentially of great value to anyone with a professional or indeed craft attitude to their activities.

Suggestions for more inspirational quotations welcome.

Grayson Perry exhibition: the Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman

Notes taken during my visit to the exhibition: names of pieces, and direct quotations from GP, are in italics

Sometimes our very human desire for meaning can get in the way of having a good experience of the world


Ceramic works that appear to be metallic, or made of wood

Examples of one culture's early and uninformed view of people from another culture: eg white settlers by native Americans

The Rosetta vase


Hold your beliefs lightly


Quote from Beuys: In places like universities, where everyone speaks so rationally, it is necessary for a kind of 'enchanter' to appear


Like a world war 2 mine washed up on the beach encrusted with the boiled down essence of empire in the form of tourist tat


The map of truths and beliefs


Maps of imaginary lands: perhaps someone today should devise a satnav app for moral guidance


An accompanying display of badges excavated in Bosch's home town showed that much of the surreal iconography in his paintings derived from the popular imagery of the day

Grumpy old god: Alan Measles is unimpressed with the 21st century. He sees the facebook generation distracted by their smartphones and obsessed with celebrity. The multimedia collage of modern life makes it hard for an upcoming god to establish himself without a web presence


Gateway guardian figures, often scary


Sheila-na-gigs


Herms were also sited outside houses for good luck where the genitalia would be anointed or rubbed by passers by


Wear, damage, dirt, repair, corrosion and decay are a large part of the language of authenticity


Billy and Charlies: I love fakes for they make us think about what it is we see in the authentic


Roman cameo fragments


Ralph Simpson and Ralph Toft earthenware plates, late 1600s: graphic boldness and relaxed fluency.

Craftsmanship is often equated with precision, but I think there is more to it. I feel it is more important to have a long and sympathetic hands-on relationship with materials. A relaxed, humble, ever-curious love of stuff is central to my idea of being an artist....in celebrating craftsmanship I also celebrate artists, well most of them.


Model boat with skeletons, Mexico, 1980s


The tomb of the unknown craftsman: it takes the form of an iron ship sailing into the afterlife. In the central reliquary is an example of the original tool which begat all tools, a flint hand axe 250000 years old.

Added much later: here's a link to the notes from my second visit to this exhibition: http://jayoptimistic.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/tomb-of-unknown-craftsman-2.html

Stanislav Lem

Stanislav Lem has recently been memorialised interestingly by Google, as hinted at in a post from last week. The Google interactive animation did indeed display many of the traits of Lem's writing: whimsicality, humour, machines with human characteristics, rather flat human characters, exactitude in matters of science and scientific procedures. I've not heard any account of why Google chose to highlight Lem in this way - I quite like the idea that he tends to be a secret enthusiasm - certainly I've not met anyone else determined to read everything he wrote.  I've tried to get hold of all his stories over the years since I came across him after seeing the stunning Tarkovsky film version of Lem's novella Solaris as a student in the early 70s, but it's hard to be sure what his total output has been - he has certainly been prolific. I've done quite well, but every time I'm in a second hand bookshop I'm half hoping I might find another collection, or another short novel.

A repeated theme of Lem's, one he returned to over and over again, is the idea of non-human entities behaving like humans, or acquiring the characteristics of humans, for better, or more often, for worse.  In Lem it is often the humans who are dangerous to non-humans, rather than the other way around.  There is the short story about a mining robot on the moon which fails to report back after a mission.  The human cosmonauts track it, finding it smashed at the bottom of a sheer cliff, and gradually realise that it decided on a whim to go for a climb.  Chris's wife's alter ego in Solaris is in the process of becoming more and more identical to her, and implicitly begs the question: from a moral point of view, shouldn't she be treated like a human, like his wife, even if she clearly is not?  What is the difference between a creation of the planet Solaris and Dolly the sheep?  Neither have been 'born' in the normal sense, but both demand recognition based on how they appear to be, and on how they behave, rather than their origin.

These stories might be termed 'hard science ficition', but Lem also writes in a genre which harks back to Swift and Voltaire: I'm not sure if there is a special academic term for this genre, but I think of them as satirical parables, often featuring a rogue celebrity scientist and space traveller called Ion Tichy.  His adventures often start as conventional science fiction but plunge into surreal comic episodes poking fun at scientific conferences and demonstrating the enormous collective self-centredness and lack of imagination of earthlings.  Another series of such pieces takes the form of spoof reviews of fictional scientific and literary works, including some apparently written by Lem himself. 

My favourites include Solaris, the most memorable moral and philosophical work of science fiction I know, and The Invincible, the depressing and at times terrifying record, expressed in an admirably downbeat 'ship's log' style, of a futile encounter on a distant planet between visiting humans more or less of our time and a type of entity that once again defies categorisation, this time as either animal or mineral.  Whatever the answer to this conundrum, they are potentially lethal, and impossible to negotiate with.  The humans eventually work out the genesis of these 'creatures', which is impeccably plausible in scientific terms, if not how to deal with them.  After episodes of extraordinary mutual violence, there is a stand off, and the humans leave, realising that there is absolutely no point in staying: this is one planet they will not be able to colonise, though their 'enemy' can hardly be said to be even aware of their existence.  Lem seems to be once again expressing a message about the limits of human experience and the dangers of hubris: we are partially familar with the natural world on this planet and think we understand it, though how much is debatable.  But 'the natural world' extends in reality to other worlds too, where it certainly expresses itself in ways beyond our ken - this should be a matter for awe and humility, he seems to be saying.  We should be more aware of our cosmic insignificance and the accidental and serendipitous nature of our very existence.

Stanislav Lem 1921-2006 b.Lvov, Poland (now Ukraine) 

'The world appears to me to be put together in such a painful way that I prefer to believe that it was not created ... intentionally'.   An Interview with Stanislaw Lem by Peter Engel. Missouri Review Volume 7, Number 2, 1984

Upmarket binge drinking

From the same issue of Prospect:

Lord Byron writes to Thomas Moore from Piccadilly, 31st October 1815:

Yesterday I dined out with a largeish party, where were Sheridan and Colman, Harry Harris and his brother, Sir Gilbert Heathcote, Kinnaird and others, of note and notoriety.  Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogethery, then inarticulate, and then drunk.  When we reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling; and to crown all, Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a damned corkscrew staircase, which had certainly been constructed before the discovery of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves.  We deposited him safe at his home, where his man, evidently used to the business, waited to receive him in the hall.

Amanda Foreman's biography of Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, makes it clear how much drinking was endemic to the culture of the ruling political classes in the early nineteenth century, and particularly the Whigs, of which Sheridan was a leading member.  Is it still true today, I wonder?

Binge drinking, a great British tradition

A brilliant 18th century primary historical document collected by Prospect magazine:

Thomas Turner, a grocer in Sussex, writes in his diary, 22nd February 1758:

'About four pm I walked down to Whyly. We played at Bragg the first part of the even. After ten we went to supper on four boiled chicken, four boiled ducks, minced veal, sausages, cold roast goose, chicken pasty and ham. Our company, Mr and Mrs Porter, Mr and Mrs Coates, Mrs Atkins, Mrs Hicks, Mr Piper and wife, Joseph Fuller and wife, Tho Fuller and wife, Dame Durrant, myself and wife and Mr French's family. After supper our behaviour was far from that of serious harmless mirth; it was downright obstreperous, mixed with a great deal of folly and stupidity. Our diversion was dancing, or jumping about, without a violin or any music, singing of foolish healths, and drinking all the time as fast as it could well be poured down; and the parson of the parish was one of the mized multitude....About three o'clock, finding myself to have as much liquor as would do me good, I slept away unobserved, leaving my wife to make my excuse...

This morning about six just as my wife was got to bed, we was awaked by Mrs Porter. My wife found Mr Porter (the parson), Mr Fuller and his wife, with a lighted candle, and part of a bottle of wine and a glass. The next thing was to have me downstairs, which being apprised of, I fastened my door. Upstairs they came and threatened to break it open, so I ordered my boys to open it, when they poured into my room. Their immodesty permitted them to draw me out of bed, as the common phrase is, topsy-turvy. Instead of my upper clothes, they gave me time to put on my wife's petticoat; and in this manner they made me dance, without shoes or stockings, until they had emptied the bottle of wine and also a bottle of beer.'

This is the kind of material that should be used much more in history lessons.

More historical documents of excess in the pipeline, suggestions welcome.