Britain Etc.

Just processing lots of people through often meaningless degrees is not enough, of course. If Britain is going to do well in the twenty-first century, it needs to produce the right kind of knowledge workers, to recognise the skills and abilities that will be most sought after by the global economy.

‘Knowledge’ is a misunderstood word, perhaps. Being able to learn and recall bits of information is important but there is no shortage of people who can do that. And in our Google age, knowing facts may become less critical.

The Canadian author of the book Wikinomics, business strategist Don Tapscott, recently argued that what he called ‘the old-fashioned model’ of education, involving remembering facts ‘off pat’, was designed for the industrial age. ‘Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the Internet is,’ he said. ‘Children are going to have to reinvent their knowledge base multiple times. So for them memorising facts and figures is a waste of time.’ It is important to have a solid foundation of facts one can call on without relying upon Wikipedia or Yahoo. But it is only the foundation. Knowledge is a hierarchy with memorising facts at the bottom.

In 1956, American University examiner Dr Benjamin Bloom published a book entitled Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain. It was not the snappiest title, but the book was seized upon for its ideas on how to compare achievements in learning and is still used in teacher training today.

So ‘knowing the facts’ is the first step on the knowledge ladder. Then comes ‘comprehension’: understanding or interpreting the meaning of instructions and problems. These are still rudimentary knowledge skills. Next is ‘application’: taking that knowledge and comprehension and using it in a new situation. After that we have ‘analysis’: understanding what it is about the material or concepts that works so we might reproduce it in new situations. We are approaching the summit of the cognitive pyramid now, and educationalists differ on the description of the final steps. Bloom puts ‘evaluation’ at the very top — the ability to present and defend opinions about information based on evidence, the bedrock of academia. But his model has been revised in recent years, taking into account the most valued knowledge skills. The new taxonomy has at its peak ‘synthesis’: the ability to take elements of the previous steps and use them to create new knowledge.

Synthesis is the pinnacle — people who can synthesise are virtual gods in the knowledge economy, the most sought after talents in the globalised twenty-first century. British success in the new age is going to depend on workers who have knowledge and understanding, but also the ability to analyse and evaluate and synthesise information and ideas from multiple sources all at the same time. They will be individuals unrestricted by a single narrative.

And what do such people look like? They are eclectics, curious magpies taking intriguing shiny bits of knowledge into their nest and shaping them into something new. They are probably doing their homework while conducting three keyboard conversations and surfing the web and listening to music and switching between obscure television channels and chatting on the mobile. They are members of the NetGen. They could be our children.

M is for Murder

Morse stood for a few minutes, gazing down at the ugly scene at his feet. The murdered girl wore a minimum of clothing — a pair of wedge-heeled shoes, a very brief dark-blue miniskirt and a white blouse. Nothing else.

The first time we meet Chief Inspector Morse, in the murder mystery novel Last Bus to Woodstock, he is investigating the brutal killing of a hitchhiker, Sylvia Kaye, whose body is found ‘cruelly streaked with blood’ in an Oxford car park. Thirteen novels and thirty-three television programmes later, it becomes clear that Matthew Arnold’s sweet city with her dreaming spires is Colin Dexter’s malevolent city with her shocking murders. Through the books and episodes the corpses pile up, scores of gruesome deaths suggesting a propensity for lethal violence in Oxford at odds with its international reputation for civilised and genteel scholarship.

The city, though, does have a murderous past. In the 1340s, immediately before the Black Death visited its own fatal curse upon Oxford’s population, records suggest that for every 900 inhabitants, one would be bumped off during the course of the year. If the same homicide rate were applied to the citizenry today, Morse would have at least three bodies each week to gaze upon. However, figures for contemporary Oxford show that an ambitious detective these days might only get the chance to solve a murder once or possibly twice a year.

Murder exerts a primal fascination upon us. Such is society’s obsessive interest in the grisly, macabre and distressing details of what happens when one human being deliberately takes the life of another that our folklore, our culture and our daily routines are smeared with the blood of crime victims: the whodunnit on the bedside table, the psycho-noir flick at the local cinema, the frontpage splash of the paper on the doormat.

Shortly after I first joined the BBC in the mid-1980s, the new head of current affairs John Birt expressed concern that the corporation’s news bulletins were overdosing on murder in the search for ratings. Editors were urged to reduce the body count. His argument was that the preoccupation with untimely and violent death painted an inaccurate portrait of British society and risked unnecessarily alarming our viewers.

The death of Sylvia Kaye had figured dramatically in Thursday afternoon’s edition of the Oxford Mail, and prominently in the national press on Friday morning. On Friday evening the news bulletins on both BBC and ITV carried an interview with Chief Inspector Morse…

So what clues can we muster to solve the mysteries of murder? Let us begin by asking whether a murder has actually been committed. We may, like Morse, have a body with a smashed skull and a bloodied tyre-spanner nearby, but classifying such crimes is rarely straightforward.

Murder has a strict legal definition that concerns the slayer not the slain. In England and Wales ‘the crime of murder is committed, where a person: of sound mind and discretion (i.e. sane); unlawfully kills (i.e. not self-defence or other justified killing); any reasonable creature (human being); in being (born alive and breathing through its own lungs); under the Queen’s Peace; with intent to kill or cause grievous bodily harm. In Scottish law, murder is defined as ‘the unlawful killing of another with intent to kill, or with wicked recklessness to life’. One may be able to prove that Colonel Mustard killed Professor Plum in the Billiard Room with the candlestick — but was it murder? Within the prerequisites, caveats and legal arguments, there lies opportunity to demonstrate that no such crime has taken place. In England and Wales, for example, only 30 per cent of homicide prosecutions result in a conviction for murder. Detectives may launch a great many murder investigations, but until such time as one has nailed the murderer, no murder has been committed.

As a result, although this chapter is entitled ‘M is for Murder’, our inquiries will require us to keep an open mind on motive and offence — assembling clues that relate to killings of all kinds. What is beyond debate is that we are investigating a crime that has, at its core, a corpse.

Let us examine the body.

How old is the victim? The most likely age for a person to be unlawfully killed is, actually, in the first year of life. In England and Wales, infants under twelve months face around four times the average risk of becoming a victim of homicide. The offender is most likely to be one of the baby’s parents — mothers and fathers are equally likely to kill their infant. Mothers, however, are offered special legal protection from a murder charge. Since the Infanticide Acts of 1922 and 1938, English law has recognised that the death maybe the result of her mind being ‘disturbed by reason of her not having fully recovered from the effect of giving birth’. However, less than a quarter of women accused of such crimes are convicted of infanticide — a significant proportion are sentenced to life imprisonment for murder.

The risk of being murdered falls sharply over the first two years of life and, although the press often dwell on the violent deaths of children, the chances of becoming a homicide victim during childhood are described by the Home Office as exceptionally low. The dangers do start to rise sharply, though, when we enter the teenage years, peaking and plateauing in our twenties and early thirties. During this period, homicide is the third most common cause of death but, should we survive until our thirty-fifth birthday, the risks start to tail off. By the time we collect our bus pass, the Grim Reaper has probably got other plans for our demise.

The typical homicide victim, then, is relatively young and probably male: seven out often of those killed at another’s hands are men.