The Guardian: No grammar schools, lots of play: the secrets of Europe’s top education system

In Finland, whose comprehensive school system has sat at the top of Europe’s rankings for the past 16 years, the narrow, heated debates on school governance and structure that obsess the UK – free schools, academies, grammars – do not exist. Schools ultimately deliver academic success, the Finns would agree - and there has been intense worldwide interest in how they manage it (see below) – but they would also argue that groundwork for good school performance begins earlier, long before children enter formal school, and arguably while their future pupils are still in nappies.

Central to early years education in Finland is a “late” start to schooling. At Franzenia, as in all Finnish daycare centres, the emphasis is not on maths, reading or writing (children receive no formal instruction in these until they are seven and in primary school) but creative play. This may surprise UK parents, assailed as they are by the notion of education as a competitive race. In Finland, they are more relaxed: “We believe children under seven are not ready to start school,” says Tiina Marjoniemi, the head of the centre. “They need time to play and be physically active. It’s a time for creativity.” [...]

Carefully organised play helps develop qualities such as attention span, perseverance, concentration and problem solving, which at the age of four are stronger predictors of academic success than the age at which a child learns to read, says Whitebread. There is evidence that high-quality early years play-based learning not only enriches educational development but boosts attainment in children from disadvantaged backgrounds who do not possess the cultural capital enjoyed by their wealthier peers. Says Whitebread: “The better the quality of pre-school, the better the outcomes, both emotionally and socially and in terms of academic achievement.”

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The Guardian: A world without work is coming – it could be utopia or it could be hell

Despite impressive progress in robotics and machine intelligence, those of us alive today can expect to keep on labouring until retirement. But while Star Trek-style replicators and robot nannies remain generations away, the digital revolution is nonetheless beginning to wreak havoc. Economists and politicians have puzzled over the struggles workers have experienced in recent decades: the pitiful rate of growth in wages, rising inequality, and the growing flow of national income to profits and rents rather than pay cheques. The primary culprit is technology. The digital revolution has helped supercharge globalisation, automated routine jobs, and allowed small teams of highly skilled workers to manage tasks that once required scores of people. The result has been a glut of labour that economies have struggled to digest. [...]

For a good while longer, wages will continue to be the main way people come by money, and prices will be needed to ration access to scarce goods and services. But in the absence of any broader social change, pushing people out of work will simply redirect the flow of income from workers to firm-owners: the rich will get richer. Freeing people from work without social collapse will therefore require society to find ways other than pay for labour to channel money to those not on the job. People might come to receive more of their income in the form of state-led redistribution: through the payment of a basic income, for instance, or direct public provision of services such as education, healthcare and housing. Or, perhaps, everyone could be given a capital allotment at birth. [...]

Ongoing political debates illustrate the problem. There are lots of ways a government could boost workers’ pay. It could raise the minimum wage, increase wage subsidies, enact a basic income, or use more heavy-handed regulation to protect industries and force firms to share more of their profits with labourers. Tellingly, workers and trade unions seem least interested in the policies, such as a basic income, that break the link between compensation and work. This makes the building of our eventual utopia tricky; a hefty rise in the minimum wage would benefit lots of workers, but it would also discourage some firms from using the cheap labour they have been soaking up, forcing the jobless to get along in a world in which they cannot find work yet also lack the monetary means to stay out of poverty.

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The Guardian: Theresa May isn’t interested in refugees’ welfare. She just wants fewer of them in Britain

Just look at the statistics. More than 86% of refugees live in the developing world, and the vast majority of them live in the first country they reach. Almost all of the refugees in Turkey, which has the world’s largest refugee population, have crossed the border from neighbouring Syria or Iraq. Lebanon hosts more refugees per capita and per square kilometre than any other; its 1.2 million Syrian refugees also came from next door. The Somalis at the world’s largest refugee camp in Kenya came from the next country along. The three million Afghans in Pakistan crossed just one border too.

So the problem is not that too few refugees are staying in neighbouring countries. It’s that too many are forced to do so. Since the west has refused to resettle meaningful numbers of refugees from the Middle East, or from Pakistan or east Africa, those refugees have been forced to choose between a life of limbo – in places where they do not have access to education, healthcare or work rights – or irregular migration to the west. And in 2015, a significant minority chose the latter, leading to what we have termed the European refugee crisis. [...]

Finally, there’s the implicit suggestion that investment in developing countries should be pursued at the expense of resettlement programmes. Development is indeed essential in the general sense, and in the long term it may reduce migration. But migration researchers have shown it is no silver bullet. As specialists such as Hein de Haas have explained: “Emigration initially goes up with levels of development, and only goes down once countries move into high development categories. It indicates that if poor countries become wealthier, emigration will increase.”

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Bloomberg: It's Time to Kill the 9-to-5

The 9-to-5 schedule doesn't conform to most people's lives, or their workflows. Sitting in a chair for eight hours straight doesn't produce results; many studies have established the benefits of taking breaks during work. And the best hours for productivity vary from person to person. Not everyone is a morning person. One study found sleep deprivation costs employers an average of $2,000 a year per worker; other research suggests cognition peaks in the later afternoon. [...]

Many improvements on the standard 9-to-5 work schedule are measured in time, such as the four-day week or the six-hour day. The case for such an alternative, still rigorously scheduled, is that it's more humane and makes employees happier and more productive.

Indeed, research suggests working fewer hours in a given day or week can improve productivity and health and boost employee-retention rates. This year, a study in Sweden found that nurses who traded eight-hour shifts for six-hour ones took fewer sick days and thus provided better care. Another study found that people who worked 55 hours a week performed worse on cognitive tests than those who worked 40 hours. [...]

In that study, around 500 workers at an unnamed Fortune 500 company were given no set schedules. Some got in later; others left midday. Their schedules varied from day to day. They didn't work fewer hours, just different ones that better fit their lives. The system hinged on ongoing communication about how people worked; for months, facilitators led meetings with employees and their managers about how to get work done with varying schedules.

The employees who participated said their overall well-being improved, a feeling the researchers attributed to their having a sense of control over their lives. The quality of their work didn't suffer, either, the researchers found. 

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The Guardian: 'I'm sorry' for war and fear of terrorism: ex-US diplomat's apology to daughter

Terrorism is a nearly nonexistent danger for Americans. You have a greater chance of being hit by lightning, but fear doesn’t work that way. There’s no 24/7 coverage of global lightning strikes or “if you see something, say something” signs that encourage you to report thunderstorms. So I felt no need to apologize for lightning. [...]

My kids grew up overseas while, from 1988 to 2012, I served with the state department. For the first part of my career as a diplomat, wars were still discrete matters. For example, though Austria was a neighbor of Slovenia, few there were worried that the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s would spill across the border. Suicide bombers didn’t threaten Vienna when we visited as tourists in 1991. That a war could again consume large parts of the globe and involve multiple nations would have seemed as remote to us vacationers that year as the moon. [...]

Nothing required the Patriot Act, Guantánamo, renditions, drone assassinations, and the National Security Agency turning its spy tools inward. The White House kept many of the nastiest details from us, but made no secret of its broader intentions. Americans on the whole supported each step, and later Washington protected the men and women who carried out each of the grim acts it had inspired. After all, they were just following orders.

Protocols now exist allowing the president to select American citizens without a whit of due process for drone killing. Only overseas, he says, but you can almost see the fingers crossed behind his back. Wouldn’t an awful lot of well-meaning Americans have supported a drone strike in San Bernardino or at the Pulse club in Orlando? Didn’t many support using a robot to blow up a suspect in Dallas?

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Vox: White riot

This research finds that, contrary to what you’d expect, the "losers of globalization" aren’t the ones voting for these parties. What unites far-right politicians and their supporters, on both sides of the Atlantic, is a set of regressive attitudes toward difference. Racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia — and not economic anxiety — are their calling cards.

The ongoing surge of immigrants — especially those who venerate a different prophet or have a darker skin tone — is triggering a fierce right-wing backlash around the West. In the US, the anger about Latino immigration has linked up to another racial anxiety: Many white Americans believe their privileged status is being eroded by the past half-century of moves toward treating African American as truly equal citizens. [...]

Prior to Petersen, scholars often thought of ethnic violence in terms of threat (one group turns to violence when it feels threatened by another) or in terms of "ancient hatreds" (long-simmering resentments that have left the groups wanting to kill each other). Petersen argued that while these explanations were correct in some cases, they were incomplete. Clearly, neither theory can explain the difference between Kaunas and Vilnius. Nor did they fit several other case studies in Petersen’s book.

In order to fully understand why ethnic violence happens, he argued, we need to appreciate the role of resentment: the feeling of injustice on the part of a privileged portion of society when it sees power slipping into the hands of a group that hadn't previously held it. Drawing on social psychology, he theorized that one of the underappreciated causes of ethnic violence was a change in the legal and political status of majority and minority ethnic groups. [...]

Far-right party platforms differ from country to country, including on major social issues like feminism and economic issues like the size of the welfare state. The one issue every single one agrees on is hostility to immigration, particularly when the immigrants are nonwhite and Muslim. [...]

Economic factors didn’t seem to matter much. They found little association between the national unemployment level and the prevalence of negative attitudes toward immigration, or an individual’s income and their likelihood of holding such attitudes.

But when they tested measures of cultural resentment — people’s evaluations of statements like, "It is better for a country if almost everyone shares the same customs and traditions" — the results were very different. White European Christians opposed to multiculturalism were overwhelmingly more likely to be immigration skeptics. [...]

Like his European counterparts, Trump has eschewed overt discussion of racial superiority. He claims to have "a great relationship with the blacks" and tweets things like, "I love Hispanics!" He also claims to be an American nationalist standing up against a corrupt elite in hoc to "the false song of globalism." One of his favorite descriptions of his worldview is "America First," a slogan coined by World War II–era isolationists and anti-Semites. [...]

If the Great Recession didn’t cause this, there’s only one obvious explanation: America’s election of a black president. That means we need to turn the "economic anxiety causes racism" theory on its head: It’s racism that causes a certain group of Americans to say the economy is doing badly. Concern about the economy has become, for some, an outlet for anxieties about the country being led by a black man.

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