There is the 'Programme for International Student Assessment':
PISA is the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment. PISA measures 15-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics and science knowledge and skills to meet real-life challenges.
In this letter to Dr Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment, academics from around the world express deep concern about the impact of Pisa tests and call for a halt to the next round of testing
There have been several surveys on the comparison of foreign language skills, but there is no current, reliable international data on how English is learnt and taught in school systems around the world. That’s why the PISA Foreign Language Assessment 2025 is a ground-breaking survey that will change everything
There have been some different perspectives on world history coming from BBC radio lately:
Is 'Plato to Nato' actually true? How has the myth of the West and its exclusively European origins been built and maintained? A brilliant and rigorous interpretation of history that reflects the diversity of ideas and figures in the West. Using the lives of historical figures from ancient Greece to present day, historian Naoise Mac Sweeney interrogates the idea of the West and its claims to Greco-Roman lineage.
Reflecting on some of the most difficult stories he's reported on, BBC International Editor Jeremy Bowen look at the obstacles that stand between journalists and the truth.
Twenty years ago a US-led coalition invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The UK was America's main partner. For many it remains a war based on a lie. So why did it happen? Why was Washington so fixed on regime change in Iraq? And why did the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, commit the UK to taking part? The BBC's security correspondent Gordon Corera seeks to find new answers to why the war happened and what it meant.
"Dual-language immersion (DLI) programs — which provide both native English speakers and English learners with general academic instruction in two languages from kindergarten onward — are proliferating rapidly in the United States. Although precise counts of DLI programs are not available, recent estimates place the figure between 1,000 and 2,000 nationally, with substantial recent growth in Utah, North Carolina, Delaware, and New York City."
While roughly half the global population speaks at least two languages, only about 20% of U.S. residents can say the same. Dual-language immersion programs, in which academic content is taught in two languages, help children become bilingual and offer a host of other benefits. “The programs are really, I think, a silver bullet to ensure that all students achieve success in school and in life,” says Martha Hernandez, executive director of the language advocacy group Californians Together. Dual-language immersion programs facilitate biliteracy – the ability to speak, listen, read and write proficiently in two languages – by taking advantage of young children’s propensity for language acquisition. Most programs start in kindergarten and follow children through elementary school, and some extend into middle or high school.
"A report by The Century Foundation (TCF) has found that the number of ELs in dual-language immersion (DLI) programmes is falling compared to their English-dominant counterparts. Research conducted over a five-year period suggests more English-dominant students are being enrolled in the schools, causing ELs to miss out on key education."
The number of English learners is shrinking at many dual-language immersion schools while the number of English-dominant and white students is increasing, according to a new analysis released by The Century Foundation and Children’s Equity Project.
Bannau Brycheiniog is pronounced: ban-eye bruck-ein-iog. It’s derived form the plural of “ban”, meaning “peak”, and “Brycheiniog” referring to the old kingdom of King Brychan. Its English translation means “The Peaks of Brychan’s Kingdom”.
Unfortunately, this has become part of the so-called 'culture wars':
The new name, which took effect yesterday, has been imposed without consulting any of the thousands of local residents (or 4 million annual visitors) who so enjoy this breath-takingly beautiful landscape. It is purely the brainchild of an unholy alliance of virtue-signalling politicians and civil servants who appear to be prepared to spend taxpayers' money on the most lame of initiatives, as long as they can be passed off as contributing in some way to the sunlit uplands of 'net zero'.
There’s nothing that imperialists hate more than Welsh people (or Irish people, or Scottish people) doing Welsh (Irish/Scottish) things in their own country. Throw in concern about the environment and you basically have what amounts to a genius marketing strategy, and right before the coronation of the former “Prince of Wales” as King. Note my use of quotation marks, because the last true Prince of Wales – that’s literally his name – Llywelyn Ein Llyw Olaf, died in 1282. These sorts of union-flag-waving English jamborees can make even the mildest Welsh person feel a bit queasy...
Just when we thought it was safe to go back down the pub, the language wars have again broken out. This time it is the mighty ire of the English directed against a Welsh National Park... The most common complaint is that it is “anti-English”. “The Welsh just want to have a laugh at us because we can’t pronounce it,” spluttered one commentator. Certainly the Welsh might enjoy the spectacle, just as English people collapse in giggles every time we hear an American trying to pronounce the word Worcestershire.
The British Empire can be felt today - and there's still much to discuss:
"I get angry when I hear the word 'empire'; it reminds me of slavery, it reminds me of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised."[61]
The British Empire was not necessarily the 'best':
If Napoleon had remained emperor of France for the six years remaining in his natural life, European civilization would have benefited inestimably. The reactionary Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia and Austria would not have been able to crush liberal constitutionalist movements in Spain, Greece, Eastern Europe and elsewhere; pressure to join France in abolishing slavery in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean would have grown; the benefits of meritocracy over feudalism would have had time to become more widely appreciated; Jews would not have been forced back into their ghettos in the Papal States and made to wear the yellow star again; encouragement of the arts and sciences would have been better understood and copied; and the plans to rebuild Paris would have been implemented, making it the most gorgeous city in the world.
The First World War of 1914-1918 was the first mechanised war and the slaughter that was on an industrial scale touched every village, town and city in Britain and beyond. The sheer size of the British Empire meant it was able to meet the demands of this new type of warfare with an almost inexhaustible supply of troops and material, and after four years of carnage, the empire, along with its allies, emerged victoriously. By the end of the war, the British Empire was battered but still standing, whereas the Ottoman, Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian Empires had all collapsed.
India, surprisingly, does not loom large in the history taught in most British schools. This is not simply a matter of children having the wrong idea about the two centuries of exploitation that financed the British empire and many of its wars; often, they have no idea at all. Even the victims — or, more properly, their descendants, the nearly 2bn people of the Indian subcontinent — have only a hazy notion of the horrors inflicted during the colonial period.
The head of the African, Caribbean and Pacific group of nations has ruled out a free trade deal with the UK until at least six years after Brexit and taken a sideswipe at the idea of a new British trade empire. The ACP chief, Dr Patrick Gomes, condemned “reactionary” Whitehall talk of a second era of British colonialism – dubbed “Empire 2.0” – and poured scorn on the government’s trade strategy.
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea,
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight for it two say,
Weather eye and wring oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long,
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
To rite with care is quite a feet
Of witch won should bee proud,
And wee mussed dew the best wee can,
Sew flaw's are knot aloud.
Eye have run this poem threw it
Your sure reel glad two no,
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
The detentions prompted swift criticism from Human Rights Watch, which called the arrests “incredibly alarming. This is something you would expect to see in Moscow, not London,” the rights organisation’s UK director, Yasmine Ahmed, said in a statement. Peaceful protests allow individuals to hold those in power to account – something the UK government seems increasingly averse to.” Met Police say they 'police proportionately' following outcry over coronation arrests
“We all have the right to go about our lives without being watched and monitored, but everyone at the coronation is at risk of having their faces scanned by oppressive facial recognition technology,” Emmanuelle Andrews of human rights group Liberty, said on Twitter.
The operation comes amid growing concern over the increase in the police’s power to stifle dissent in Britain, following the recent introduction of controversial pieces of legislation. Last year, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 significantly “broaden[ed] the range of circumstances in which police may impose conditions on a protest.” Under the new Act, it is an offense for protesters to “intentionally or recklessly caus[e] public nuisance” – including causing “serious annoyance.”
In a statement to CNN, Liberty said this Act “has made it much harder for people to stand up for what they believe without facing the risk of criminalization.”
A little reading can go a long way. It can connect us to others, spark curiosity, boost our self-esteem and support our mental health.
Change your life, 30 minutes at a time!
Sign up to the Road to Reading this April. Each week we’ll share advice, reading recommendations and more, while keeping an eye on your progress to help you along the way. Your reading journey will also form part of a national reading research project, helping us to transform the lives of more people across the UK.
Does a short story every now and then count? Absolutely! What about listening to an audiobook narrated by your favourite actor? That too! Or graphic novels – is that more looking at pictures than reading? No, that’s also reading! You can even include flicking through a recipe book to choose next week’s dinner.
According to research, adults who read for just 30 minutes a week are:
20% more likely to report greater life satisfaction.
18% more likely to have higher self-esteem.
52% more likely to feel socially included and 37% more likely to get greater pleasure out of their social life.
It's been around a long time in the United States - since 1984:
No show better illustrates the elements of humiliation television than the highly popular series The Apprentice. The show won huge ratings by pitting sixteen aspiring businessmen and women in a battle to win a $250,000 job with real estate mogul Donald Trump, whose weekly task was to tell a contestant, “You’re fired.” ... what humiliation TV represents is the rise of a pop culture in which schadenfreude has been so artfully disguised that it gives the illusion of being without political content.
I am convinced that we are witnessing the politics of humiliation. People who grew up with a powerful sense of white, masculine privilege (as well as others who sympathise with that image of power), people for whom that sense of superiority was always precarious and always needed protection, found in Donald Trump a figure for their own fantasy of the restoration of an era now gone.
About four years ago, without asking anybody, I changed my job description. It used to be “New York Times foreign affairs columnist.” Instead, I started calling myself the “New York Times humiliation and dignity columnist.” I even included it on my business card. It had become so obvious to me that so much of what I’d been doing since I became a journalist in 1978 was reporting or opining about people, leaders, refugees, terrorists and nation-states acting out on their feelings of humiliation and questing for dignity — the two most powerful human emotions. I raise this now because the success of Joe Biden’s campaign against Donald Trump may ride on his ability to speak to the sense of humiliation and quest for dignity of many Trump supporters, which Hillary Clinton failed to do...
Humiliation, in my view, is the most underestimated force in politics and international relations. The poverty of dignity explains so much more behavior than the poverty of money. People will absorb hardship, hunger and pain. They will be grateful for jobs, cars and benefits. But if you make people feel humiliated, they will respond with a ferocity unlike any other emotion, or just refuse to lift a finger for you. As Nelson Mandela once observed, “There is nobody more dangerous than one who has been humiliated.” By contrast, if you show people respect, if you affirm their dignity, it is amazing what they will let you say to them or ask of them. Sometimes it just takes listening to them, but deep listening — not just waiting for them to stop talking. Because listening is the ultimate sign of respect. What you say when you listen speaks more than any words.
I’ve seen firsthand the power of humiliation in foreign policy: Vladimir Putin’s macho act after Russia’s humiliation at losing the Cold War; Iraqi Sunnis who felt humiliated by a U.S. invasion force that pushed them out of Iraq’s army and government, stripping them of rank and status; Israeli Sephardic Jews who felt humiliated by Ashkenazi Jewish elites, something Bibi Netanyahu has long manipulated; Palestinians feeling humiliated at Israeli checkpoints; Muslim youth in Europe feeling humiliated by the Christian majority; and China questing to become the world’s dominant power, after what Chinese themselves call their “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers.
When George Floyd was being held down by three policemen, one with a knee on his neck, as he pleaded for his mother and onlookers filmed on their phones, he was not just being restrained — he was being humiliated. Resistance to the daily humiliations of racism has fueled the Black civil rights movement from its inception to Black Lives Matter.
In a much talked-about new book, “The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?” Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel (disclosure: he is a close friend) says “the politics of humiliation” is also at the heart of Trump’s appeal. “Trump was elected by tapping a wellspring of anxieties, frustrations and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties had no compelling answer,” Sandel notes. These grievances “are not only economic but also moral and cultural; they are not only about wages and jobs but also about social esteem.” Sandel explains, “Resentment borne of humiliation is the most potent political sentiment of all.”
It's been around a long time in the UK - since before 2016:
Underlying these discourses was a sense that EU membership represented a form of humiliation for a once great country, infantilising the UK and its people. Leave campaigners such as Nigel Farage created direct parallels between the sense of indignity and powerlessness experienced by many of their target voters in their own lives and that allegedly wrought upon their country by the EU and the same elites who look down on them.
In the article Populism and the Affective Politics of Humiliation Narrative authors Homolar and Löfflmann look at the use of populist humiliation narratives and voter mobilization in the United Kingdom, France, and the USA. They find that populist appeals to victimhood are used to assign blame with elites in politics, businesses, and media for a sense of loss and marginalisation, for national decline from past imagined glories, and to foster political conflict.
Mr. Putin’s success as president of Russia has rested for some time on his ability to mete out daily humiliations to Russians and then act as if he feels their rage as they do, as if he alone knows where to direct it — toward the West, toward Ukraine, anywhere except toward the Kremlin... Mr. Putin likes to perform both sides of the humiliation drama: from the seething resentment of the put-upon Russian Everyman to cosplaying Peter the Great. This allows him to appeal to Russians’ deep-seated sense of humiliation, which the Kremlin itself inflicts on people, and then compensate for it. It’s a performance that taps into the cycle of humiliation and aggression that defines the experience of life in Russia, and now Ukraine is the stage...
In the “family,” ethnic Russians are known as “the elder brother,” but that doesn’t mean they are spared humiliation. Whether it’s the bureaucrats and cops who threaten and bribe citizens and businesses, the farce of participating in fixed elections or the cloying fear that you might be arrested if you dare to speak up against the Kremlin — or if some bureaucrat just wants your business — living in Mr. Putin’s Russia means enduring the daily humiliation of being governed by an extractive class that takes money and lives from its own people. In this system, even tycoons must live with the uncertainty that someone closer to Mr. Putin than them could take away all their wealth tomorrow. The culture of humiliation goes deep into society. Sexual harassment is routine. A 2017 law decriminalized some domestic abuse against children and women. Extreme hazing has been rife in the army...
In his exploration of humiliation, the contemporary English psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes in the London Review of Books that, for the psychic survival of the humiliated, it’s necessary for them to “humiliate others, to make others experience what they have suffered” and “to transform the trauma of vulnerability into the triumph of omnipotent control.” The perpetrator enjoys his sadism; the victim, in order to deal with the humiliation, might learn to enjoy that too and become a masochist, before becoming sadistic to others. Mr. Putin’s manipulation of the cycle of humiliation and aggression is integral to his psychological grip on Russia. That manipulation can look like legislating to criminalize opposition to the war while also appealing for solidarity in the fight against the West. As the impact of economic sanctions rolls across Russia, Kremlin propaganda has called for Russians to show how tough they are: Haven’t they survived great trials in the past? These calls for toughness can resonate — people can learn to define themselves through surviving pain to the point of getting a certain satisfaction from it.
For Russia to have a chance to come to terms with itself, it will be necessary to confront this history and bring it into the public consciousness — via TV shows or public memorials and educational projects. But admitting one’s own role in this cycle of humiliation and aggression is stymied by the very culture of humiliation: The humiliated feel they have no agency, so why should they feel responsible?
