Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing

Not vastly impressed with Stefan Collini's piece on the future of universities in today's Guardian Review, which seemed to consist of a series of throat clearing noises and almost nothing in the way of substance. Perhaps I'm being unfair. Perhaps Collini's book on the same subject is insightful and conclusive, in which case the Guardian extract (presumably) doesn't seem to have done it a lot of favours.

ETA: Acting on a tip off from pater, I've looked out Collini's 2010 LRB piece in response to the Browne Review and it's head and shoulders better than the Guardian piece.

This, from a piece in the Guardian on the mixed benefits of being ambidextrous and its links with dyslexia, caught my eye:

At school I was always just 'cack-handed' and 'stupid'. It was awful; you knew you were always going to be in trouble. I was teased all the time. The nuns at the convent used to force me to write with my left hand held behind my back, and if I didn't they would tie it in that position. I was 20 by the time I was diagnosed as dyslexic; I had never even heard the word before. It didn't make things any better, of course, but it did help me understand myself.

Although I wasn't taught by nuns and didn't have my hand tied behind my back, it still sounds like a pretty accurate description of my primary school years.

While I've largely put the horrors of my early education behind me, my parents still feel very bitter and angry about it on my behalf. My mother still cries whenever she happens across my old school reports, all of whom, of course, she just cannot bring herself to throw out; and whenever I pick up some academic brownie point or other, her immediate reaction is always to wish that she could go back and point out to my old teachers just how badly their predictions missed the mark. My father, on the otherhand, is far more pragmatic: he simply believes that teachers who wrote the reports must have died long since...