The Best Dog

There are some days when the only response is a reminder that there are dogs. I know that to each of us dog-owners, our dog is absolutely the best dog. But Zazie really is The Best Dog. Wishing all the best dogs, not to mention the best cats, and their owners, a moment of peace. 

Grant us Grace

Today is one of the most beautiful I have seen here in Luxembourg, from the dawn's first silken stirrings to this afternoon's cerulean skies, a tracery of tree branches on the horizon. 

We went this morning to the Luxembourg American cemetery, which opened in December 1944 and is now home to the graves of 5070 servicemen, as well as General Patton. Most died between January and May 1945, during the Battle of the Bulge. On the simple white crosses or stars of David that mark their resting places are their names, their rank and their home state, as well as the day they died. It is like so many military cemeteries in this area stretching north through Picardy, a place of contemplation, ringed by trees. There is a monolith as you walk in, 'In Proud Remembrance of Achievements of Her Sons and Humble Tribute to their Sacrifices.' 

I wonder what they would have thought, those many young men who gave their lives to fight fascism, of our turbulent world today. Inside the monolith is a small chapel, and the words inscribed there 'Grant us Grace Fearlessly to Contend against Evil and to Make No Peace with Oppression.'

This reminded me of listening to a recent episode of the Battleground podcast, where the team interviewed veteran war reporter Robert Fox, also an associate fellow at King's College Centre for Defence Studies, about Ukraine. He also spoke about how we make concepts of duty and service more attractive to students as they leave school and university. We have lost a sense of threat, but perhaps events of recent days have revived that across Europe. 

What do we do in education? First, I think we have to engage and help our students address the key questions of today - what is really happening in Gaza, in Ukraine, how do we know, what can we do, what should we do?

As educators, our duty is to equip the children in our care with the critical thinking skills to reflect, to explore, to develop the ethical framework, the valor, the fortitude so that they are equipped to contend against evil and withstand oppression. I think of my nephew, who has spent the past year in Ukraine as a volunteer and I wonder what impulse propelled him as a 19 year old to make his first visit there eighteen months ago, and then to return, and then to stay. If you met him, he would not strike you, I suspect as a particularly militant person. But something impelled him and I am sure that he is not alone. 

In today's Sunday Times, there is an article about young men falling behind women - for the first time - in pay. In the 16-24 age range, boys and young men are doing worse than women in education and in the workplace. Both my nephew and my younger son are in the middle of this age range, and have spent their teenage years deluged by social media that has made mainstream the bizarre and damaging views of characters like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson. We are seeing a widening gulf between young men, veering to the extreme right, and young women, veering towards progressive views and visibly succeeding in education and their careers.

Visiting the Luxembourg American Cemetery today, I walked past the graves of young men who died at the same age as my two boys, in their 20s and the last thing I would want to see as a mother, is either of them or any of their peers conscripted, under arms, on a front line anywhere. But equally, I have no desire to see our world dominated by authoritarian, totalitarian regimes intent on supporting oligarchs, fostering kleptocracy and exploiting the majority as units and drones in an attention economy. And I think of all those parents across Ukraine and Europe mourning their lost children, and I do not want their suffering and pain to be cheapened and dismissed by world leaders intent on lining their own pockets at a cost not just to their own countries but to our whole world. 

The attention economy

Having read Zena Hitz's Lost in Thought last year, as I was heading into 2025, the biggest change that I wanted to make to current habits and inclinations was to spend less time on social media and much more time on reading and writing. This change is also driven by the way the algorithm seems to be sending in my direction a lot of Trump/Musk related commentary, and my desire to spend as little time as possible on any platform operated by Meta. 

So far this year, I would say it is paying off in terms of productivity: 25 days in, I have managed to meet my two daily aims of spending 10 minutes per day responding to a prompt word, and writing 165 words of the current WIP. I have shared the occasional Insta post of a bear in a swimming pool or a dog sitting on a cat with one or other of my children, but checking screen time, apparently it is so far this year, 25% down on last year and that is dominated by reading and research. 

The other element in all this is the inexorable infiltration of AI into our lives. At the moment, it feels as though we are in a cusp zone. The last one for me was the time pre-internet and post-internet. We were living in China in the mid-1990s, got our first dial up connection there and then returned to the UK and made sure we subscribed in 1998 when we renovated and moved into a flat in Brighton. Right from the start, I loved the internet. But it was also a time-sink and a distraction. I was also first conscious of it as a danger when Number One Son, aged about 5, well able to read and obsessed by dinosaurs, inadvertently discovered a strange corner of the internet featuring elderly people engaged in dubious activities and offered up to consumers as 'dinosaur' p*rn. I remember a deep mutual sense of 'eurrghghgh', and it meant that I was a pretty strict mother when it came to access to computers and phones. 

I think even then, quarter of a century ago, I was conscious that technology was commoditising individuals. It was crude, it was obvious, it's become much more subtle, pervasive, but it's more powerful than ever. Yet, it seems to me like all bubbles and crazes, from tulips in 17th century Amsterdam through to the current furore over Trump's crypto grift, sooner or later there will be someone who calls 'Naked Emperor'. But will they get our attention? And even if they do, how will we respond?

I've just finished a very enjoyable primer, Julian Baggini's How to think like a Philosopher, which in 12 chapters, seeks to get us reflecting on the why and how of developing critical thinking. At the end, Baggini has written a glossary which includes a definition of the attention economy: 'The contemporary consumer environment in which organisations are constantly competing with each other to gain our attention, usually to monetise it. They're doing well because we often give ours away cheaply.'

Although perceiving oneself as a commodity, and one's attention as an asset or product may be uncomfortable, this has consolidated my own view that my attention, my focus is something of value. If others are putting a value on it and hoping I will share it at low cost, then it is up to me to manage my attention and protect it from the oligarchs and corporations that want to exploit it. I as an individual need to put a higher value on that attention than the market wishes to pay. 

This leaves me wondering whether this is a reductive way of seeing an individual. At one point, the algorithms may have been coded by humans, but now we are in a place where human thought is too slow and AI, quantum computing, and whatever else lies along the LLM road are far faster at developing new ways to manipulate us, to grab our attention and elicit some weird human response. The 'influencers' of social media may have made their pacts with their sponsors and platforms, and some are surfing the tide with some semblance of integrity and authenticity, but ultimately, I think they are just as much creatures subject to whim and algorithm as the rest of us consuming the content. 

As an educator, what I want now is to make sure that my colleagues and the students I work with have the time and space to reflect on some questions that I think we all need to answer. And these questions head back to the fundamentals that Baggini wants us to spend time thinking about, questions about our worth, our value and our values, and how we navigate a world where we are increasingly seen as exploitable and available.

Small goals

We were up early this morning (for a Saturday), and out as the sun came up. It was -2, and the farm road that we climb most mornings was icy from run-off. By the time we were through the woods and at the chicken-wire fence at Findel airport, the fog had already rolled in and this view was completely hidden as we walked back down the hill. 

I've read my first couple of books of the year. My current WIP is regency-set - I am not sure I would call it a romance, more a social comedy, as I am not sure at all that my heroine and hero will end up together. My heroine is a bookish kind of girl, and has been reading Mrs Opie, a bestseller of her time. I have read other novelists that would certainly have found their way into the library of a family of the middling sort in 1818, but I had not tackled Mrs Opie before. I embarked on her 1804 novel, Adeline Mowbray, on Tuesday, and finished it early on Friday morning. Well! 

The book intrigued me because apparently it was loosely based on the life of Mary Wollestonecraft, who had her first child with Gilbert Imlay out of wedlock because she did not believe in marriage, then did marry the philosopher William Godwin, but sadly died giving birth to a daughter who grew up to elope with Shelley and write Frankenstein. Mrs Opie frequented the same circles as Wollestonecraft, who died in 1797, although they do not appear to have been much more than acquaintances.

The novel has been seen as both a critique of Wollestonecraft and her circle, and as something of an exposé of how awful men are. Would I recommend it? I found it page-turning, ridiculous and compelling. There is a good deal of swooning, falling into insensibility, and the hero has a protracted and quite detailed death from TB. On the whole, the depiction of both men and women is hardly flattering. Adeline has to contend with her mother who is a complete turnip, falling for one of the least persuasive fortune hunters in literature, and then with all sorts of men and mainly women turning their backs on her because she has refused to marry her lover, Glenmurray, author of a treatise on why marriage is no good for society. When Glenmurray dies, he compels his (pretty scummy) best friend to marry Adeline, a union that unsurprisingly, does not work out well. 

I am really glad to have read AM, and I will read another, later Mrs Opie, called Temper, apparently the first novel she wrote where (spoiler) the heroine does not have a tragic ending. But I did feel quite battered by the time I finished the book. Compared with Austen or Fanny Burney, Opie veers to the Grand Guignol, the characters express high-flown sentiments in overblown language and there is little intentional humour, although overall, I found the book quite funny. 

I've also just finished a fascinating book about AI in education by two US writers, Dee Lanier and Ken Shelton. This is definitely a specialist read, but in terms of looking at the dangers and opportunities presented by AI use in schools by teachers and students, this was one of the more interesting and nuanced pieces of work I have read. It takes a look at AI through the equity and justice lens, and identifies all the areas in which LLMs are particularly problematic, notably the development of algorithms and the use of data sets that are pretty much tech-bro generated and hence limited in cultural and contextual perspective. I would say it is the most worthwhile book I've read about AI in the past 6 months, well worth a look for those of us in education. 

Finally, have hit my small goals - 10 minutes of free writing based on a prompt word, 10 minutes of drawing and 165 words a day for current WIP. Feeling positive about next week...but it is back to school, so let's see if the pace can keep up with a proper working week.