Here is one I shot today. Does that qualify me as a “Billion Monkey”, aka Brian’s blog?
It does not do justice to the sheer isolation of this place, not to its height above sea level,, nor to the difficulty of getting a roughly un-blurred shot in the high winds that (the four) locals say blow round the clock.
Last week or thereabouts, I put up a picture of Ribblehead Viaduct, and I make the point the educational standards and (more crucially) content are now so degraded in the UK that no certified-competent teenage school-leaver would have any understanding of how this structure has stayed up for 135 years, or why it gets up and then stays up in the first place at all. I should add that the ground here is mostly what we call in the North “Moss”. “Moss” is too small a word for bog or “mire”, unguessably deep even today after Al Gore has heated the earth so as to power his house and his campaign to rule the world. this “Moss” is the source of the Ribble, into which 4,000 Irish navvies poured concrete down to 25 feet, for four years. (Then they set about building it and doing the connecting embankments….then they put a main line railway on the top.)
The Chinese are building a railway across the roof of the world or so we hear, to the Himalayas, but then they may yet be running an education system that still succeeds in turning out a few general-engineering-competent-physicists each year. I calculate that we stopped doing that seriously in about 2002. Now then, Libertarians all (all?) agree that there is no educational shortfall so big in a culture, that government cannot make that shortfall bigger. It is interesting that this entire 100-mile express railway over the rooftops of England got completed in just about the year that gumments here started to get their hands on education. by that time, most of the technology that drove the British Industrial Revolution was very well and widely understood, and beginning to flow “down” to “workers” in population masses, through “night classes”, often sponsored by the companies themselves, and by general self-improvement through the market’s spreading of cheaper books of all kinds due to popular demand (I have in my library, and collect, many of these kinds of late-19th century “how-to” books. One is even called “practical coal mining”.)
The first thing libertarians ought to do is call for the abolition of what passes for the “National Curriculum”. Then, they have to ensire that the engineers and philosphers on whom we will depend can continue to build the 21st/22nd-century equivalents of these 19th century wonders, such as I have put up today. Furthermore, there ought to be erasure of the idea that a “curriculum” should do anything other than impart knowledge of the Western Canon; under this we not only benefit from what has gone before, but we assimilate the best from those of others.
We know it’s the best, because in the renaissance we learned a hard lesson. The building of our Canon involves argument, reason and disputation by many – not any more any slavish reference to “what is written” (by whoever….)
For Life, Liberty and Property
