Barry Beaven

“Man is doomed to repeat his mistakes time and again because he learns only from experience.”
― Mark Lawrence, King of Thorns

“After the publication of a report in 1967 by Bridget Plowden, an amateur educationalist, describing primary schooling, Britain’s education system had become an ideological battleground. Masked by a scattering of platitudes about improving schools, Plowden recommended the destruction of traditional education. Children, she wrote, should no longer sit in rows of desks but instead gather in groups around tables to encourage self-learning. She also recommended that the eleven-plus examination, a three-part test (English, maths and intelligence) taken in one day that irrevocably determined a child’s educational fate – either to blossom in a grammar school or be consigned to failure in a secondary modern school – should be abandoned. Grammar schools should be replaced by non-selective comprehensives that mixed children of all standards. With cross-party support, successive Labour and Conservative governments implemented her recommendations.”
― Tom Bower, Broken Vows: Tony Blair The Tragedy of Power

“From a psychological perspective, there can be returns to focus or concentration when people ignore signals below a certain threshold (called a “salience effect” in psychology) or when they believe in momentum—that success leads to success.”
― Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters

“If there was ever a candidate to be patron saint of computers then it would be Alan Turing. Mathematician, war hero and tragic victim of homophobia.”
― Ben Aaronovitch, False Value