Hurrah! Let's hear it for the Welsh Methodists!  BBC Last Choir Standing, two of the four finalists are Welsh.  Never mind trying to sing Bohemian Rhapsody or Tamla, stick to Cwm Rhondda, Aberystwyth and Myfanwy.  Oh, and btw, the Welsh winning the first gold medal in the Olympics for GB.  One culture superior?

As you were.

Philidor, with great respect (not least for your sterling defence of civilised values in the face of tweedy onslaughts at TOP), I think you underestimate the willingness and ability of posters here to argue reasonably and in detail. This isn't the same place as TOP.

Oh dear. We are rubbing each other up the wrong way. I find your habit of saying you don't want to discuss something, then discussing it, slightly disconcerting but, hey, each to their own. You must be allowed to express yourself in your way, and me in mine.

I'm sorry you find my manner of expressing myself "highly disingenuous" "selective" "specious" "devious" and "extremely tiresome". I find your way of expressing yourself childish (all that flouncing! Get a grip sir!) arrogant, unfriendly and intellectually shallow. But we're both over the age of eighteen so there's no harm done is there? Me telling you on the internet that I find you childish, arrogant, unfriendly and intellectually shallow isn’t going to force you into the depths of depression? I certainly hope not. I suspect you rather enjoy the attention. 


Thanks! I've a weakness for poking UKIP members/fellow travelers with a stick. It’s all good clean fun. But you're completely wrong about my impression of this forum. It's so obviously packed with sharp, well-informed (and funny) people. That's why I thought linkage between the British left's retreat into relativist, obscurantist, mush, with the attack on teaching children to read a musical score, might fall on fertile ground. I still think it might, particularly should young Barrett stop running in and out of the thread like a housewife getting in the washing.

Roger wilco. I would have done already if young Barrett hadn't been running about like Tigger. But when a chap's called "highly disingenuous" "selective" "specious" "devious" and "extremely tiresome" by a childish, arrogant, unfriendly and intellectually shallow poster he's got to respond, or Tigger feels he's free to bounce about.

Gosh, I'm really sorry to see all this.  Richard may have appeared unfriendly to you Phil, but on the evidence of posts here he is certainly not childish, arrogant or intellectually shallow.  Believe me.

And I don't think you are devious: quite the reverse, if anything.

Please, please folks cool it.

(Relativism in education is no doubt an issue, but the mentality behind its more sentimental and uncritical manifestations can be called "liberal" rather than "left".  And your identification of the "right" with education as producing wage slaves is not fair to pre-Thatcherite Torys.  If a chap was bright enough to understand Greek, Theology, Philosophy, or Anglo Saxon, then he should be given a scholarship.  He would do sod all towards the emancipation of the working classes at All Souls, but the approach was not as philistine as you suggest.)

Sorry if that wasn't clear. I wasn't making the distinction, and I assume others weren't either. I feel strongly that learning notation should be mandatory at GCSE level. Given the restriction in teaching hours, making something non-essential probably comes to the same thing as excluding it, I'd have thought.

As I understood it the original article was saying that while learning notation was still an integral part of the GCSE syllabus, it was nonetheless possible to pass (and indeed even get an A) by carefully avoiding the questions that required it and doing extremely well in the remainder. It nonetheless seems a rather perverse way for anyone to go about getting a Grade A.

I suppose in a way that isn't totally different from, say, trying to get by in GCSE English by not reading one of the set books but doing brilliantly on the questions on another. But it does mean that knowing the musical notation part of the course isn't a necessary condition for a top mark   - which I assume it used to be(?).  

Oh <hh-type-sniff>