h a l f b a k e r yThere goes my teleportation concept.
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It's recently been suggested that state schools which
exclude or off-roll (officially withdraw in a no-fault kind
of way) children, allegedly to increase their rankings in
league tables, have those children's exam results
included with their own in order to deter doing so to
increase their
status. My first thought here was to
wonder whether the efforts of home edding families
whose children are off-rolled would sometimes
artificially increase those rankings, although I accept
that this only accounts for a few cases. On the whole I
would expect excluded or off-rolled children to lower
the averages.
At the same time, I recall a time when a car stereo was
taken without our consent which we could not ourselves
use due to a lost code. It made me happy that
somewhere out there someone might be getting the use
out of our radio-CD player when it had previously just
sat there wasting space on the dashboard. Likewise, the
ability to inject IV drugs is a somewhat skilful activity
which I couldn't manage myself, even badly, in spite of
having considerable knowledge of anatomy and
physiology, and the psychological manipulation involved
in scamming people is also beyond me, unless herbalism
is a way of doing that subconsciously. There is in fact a
whole range of useful and transferable but currently
officially unassessed skills which people learn when they
get involved in crime.
We currently have universities of crime in the form of
such illustrious institutions as Pentonville and Parkhurst,
but there is also a lot of informal community-based
learning which it strikes me could be organised and put
together into a syllabus of some kind. It's unlikely that
those wishing to benefit from such an education would
be keen on attending exams, so it could make more
sense to assess these on the basis of matching the
individuals to their deeds. Law enforcement agencies
such as the police, probation service and courts could
rank the quality of the activity on an academic scale,
which could then be linked back to their former schools
and used to improve their ratings. Particularly nihilistic
perpetrators might even be deterred from offending by
the thought that it's no longer "cool", but a mark of
academic achievement.
There would also be a kind of supply and demand
relationship with criminology in a similar manner to the
relationship between theology and psychiatry.
[link]
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Those who score highly might be candidates for enrollment in
special outreach programs operating in other countries, to
help provide some positive inflow of currency from abroad,
was that where you were headed, or have I stepped beyond
what you were thinking? |
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I think that the transferability of criminal skills is limited in inverse proportion to the whitecollarity of the crime (and at max whitecollarity, is indistinguishable from capitalism). Theft of a car stereo is about knowledge - ability to identify opportunity for taking and for fencing - rather than about skills. Anyone can smash a car window. Advanced criminal activity is a form of networking. |
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Almost sounds like you know whereof you speak [callum] :) |
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On reflection I think I'd tend to agree. |
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Sounds about right, [Skewed]. |
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One snag is that the most brilliant assets to our
community won't get assessed because they won't get
caught. |
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//Theft of a car stereo is about knowledge//
It is also an indicator of lack of ambition. Why take the stereo when you can take the whole car! And, to echo your point on whitecollarity, callum, why take the car when you can rob the entire economy! |
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//Why take the stereo when you can take the whole car!// |
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Reminds me of a story I heard once (probably apocryphal), guy
came back to find his car gone & his cheap stereo sitting on a
couple of bricks were it had been. |
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Having gained their GCSE, would criminals then progress through A-levels to University (presumably the Vice-Chancellor would be Professor Moriarty)? |
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