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Some of you may have seen the three part series, “Our Mothers, our Fathers”, screened on Saturday evenings on BBC2 recently. The three short films give a brutally honest and moving account of the moral dilemmas faced by ordinary young Germans during the Nazi regime. Each episode charts the brutalisation of German youth and the […]

Teachers of Modern Foreign Languages might be right to expect a little more enthusiasm and dedication from their students in the future, if recent figures published by the Institute of International Education are anything to go by.   The figures show a large increase in the number of European Master’s courses taught in English – with […]

Is the variety of exam levels and fluctuating sitting ages in the British education system healthy? Would a simpler, more uniform system benefit students and teachers alike? Tricky questions to answer, but worth a try. There is a huge amount of paperwork involved in registering as a teacher in Scotland, if one has qualified in […]

The announcement yesterday that Russell Brand’s views on drugs, Caitlin Moran’s Twitter feed and the thoughts of Dizzee Rascal will be added to the OCR exam board’s English A-level reading list was met by the oh-so-predictable media storm. Arriving as a result of the education secretary Michael Gove’s proposed A-level reforms, OCR teamed up with […]

Currently the world is experiencing the worst economic crisis since what is referred to historically as The Great Depression – a fact many a newspaper or television report will have mentioned over the last couple of years. So, how did it compare? Hopefully this article will be able to give you some idea. The beginnings […]

The end of hostilities in Europe was celebrated all around the world. In Britain, over one million people took to the streets for parties, and crowds gathered in Trafalgar Square to sing, dance and booze. The young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret mingled with the cheering public. In the USA, President Truman dedicated the victory to […]

The drought which devastated the Great Plains in the 1930’s was the worst climatic event in modern American history, deepening and prolonging the economic destruction wrought by the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Its engineer was called El Nino, and given the manhandled state of our economic and environmental world today, it should be recalled. […]

As students, we strive to learn and gain the benefits of academic knowledge. On a purely pragmatic level, one such benefit is the ability to possess a degree of material wealth with which to make our lives that much more comfortable, and hopefully more interesting. Or at least, that’s the theory. Today we may have […]

In a time of Economic struggle, even traditional brands and retailers have to adapt or die. Can you imagine, for instance, a world without Marks and Sparks? Well, yes and no… Marks and Spencer’s, founded in 1884, has enjoyed 120 years of steady, managed growth, surviving two world wars, depression, post-1945 austerity and, it seems, […]

Clerical reaction to the declaration of war in 1914 differed from one country to another according to the national attitude to religion. The hierarchy of the Church of England initially showed no enthusiasm for war, with the Archbishop of Canterbury regarding the outbreak of hostilities as “a return to barbarism.” French Catholics called for national […]