Strange Notion Research Articles

Controlling the Masses: the Reinvention of a ‘National’ Curriculum

AbstractEducational policies and their curricula are inevitably political in their intent and design. The reintroduction of a supposed ‘national’ curriculum for British education reveals a strange notion of nationhood which retains privilege, and indeed accelerates it through the lure of (mainly) spurious competition to meet predetermined and externally defined standards. Art education does not escape this: it reflects the larger picture. Through comparing the educational policies and practices of Victorian education and art education with our own, this paper hopes to reveal commonalities and differences, and what these disclose about current values concerning the individual and the ‘nation’.

Limits of Reasonable Planning

In the last half-century, strange notions about planning have taken hold in the technological community. Their origin can be traced to the socialist idea of total planning, but engineers and planners are usually unaware of this. The present paper attempts to clarify these notions by seeking the proper framework for planning. This framework is based on the concept of order. Human social order is governed by two kinds of laws. The first are general laws of conduct independent of purpose; they form the basis of the general, spontaneous order and permit statistics. The second are the command-like laws that govern the order of organizations created for the pursuit of purposes or objectives. Planning applies only to this last order, the statistics of the first being a necessary input. To apply the command-like laws of planning to the first order is a senseless idea. Whenever attempted, it only produces distortions that upset both kinds of order.

Humility: Whence This Strange Notion?

Humility: Whence This Strange Notion?

You might as well ask Picasso...

have too often assumed that they needn't communicate directly with the public, or, if they do, that the onus is somehow on the public to sort it all out. A strange notion, we think, but one that surfaced once again—this time at the Roche symposium (see page 24). The meeting was tame enough until Dr. Niels Kaj Jerne, head of Basel Institute of Immunology, let fly with this remarkable statement: Scientists should communicate to the public what they are doing . . . through scientific publications . . . . You may say they [the public] will not understand. Why don't they [scientists] do it in a different way? others don't understand, that's their problem. You cannot popularize science. You might as well ask Picasso why he doesn't paint differently .... It took some 24 hours in coming, but the resulting flak from fellow scientists, I'm glad to say, was formidable. Sample: If ...

Invariance Principles of Nuclear Physics

Space inversion (P), time reversal (T), and chargeconjugation (C) are discussed. Some mixed operations obtained by combining P, C, and T are described. A discussion of isotopic spin invariance or charge independence and other related operations is presented. The extension of these ideas to the heavy unstable particles and the related notion of strangeness'' are mentioned. (W.D.M.)

EDUCATION OF THE PUBLIC IN HEALTH

To the Editor: —May I offer a different point of view of the subject of the education of the public in medicine and in health, discussed respectively inThe Journal, June 11, and in Hygeia for July? Both editorials referred to the peculiar of one newspaper health columnist as to what constitutes good exercise. As I acknowledge the mania I beg to correct the editorial misunderstanding about that. I have never so intimated, nor even admitted, but have often insisted in my column that somersaulting is not exercise. Both articles commented on the notion that disease is entirely a matter of the infecting organism and the individual's natural resistance to disease and that factors which may lessen his natural immunity have little or nothing to do with the case. I acknowledge paternity of this strange notion, too. But I submit that the editorial states the thought clumsily.

The Origin of Man

THE reference in “Dodsley's Annual Register for 1767,” mentioned in NATURE of January 12 (p. 336), is to James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, whose speculations as to the simian origin of man excited so much ridicule amongst his contemporaries. Boswell reports a saying of Johnson in 1773:—“Other people have strange notions, but they conceal them. If they have tails they hide them, but Monboddo is as jealous of his tail as a squirrel.”