One good Radio 4 idea-discusser reviews another. (I like Laurie Taylor. For one thing, he reviewed the Dictionary of FN in the Times Higher. He didn’t think much of it, but he did think some of the jokes were funny – that’s good enough.)

I’m also put off by the assumption that anyone who doesn’t wholeheartedly join Bragg in his latest popularising endeavour is something of a spoilsport or a dangerous elitist…No one can doubt Bragg’s populist spirit. One of the chief pleasures of In Our Time on Radio 4 is the sound of him trying to persuade the assembled academics to speak more plainly about their specialist subject. Whether the topic of the day is quantum mechanics, Goethe,

This is good bracing stuff.

At Wellington College, one of Britain’s top public schools, headmaster Anthony Seldon is piloting an initiative that may eventually see lessons in happiness added to the curriculum in both the state and independent sectors. What an unhappy prospect…The problem is that Wellington is opting to teach happiness through positive psychology which, in my view, can amount to little more than self-help with a veneer of academic respectability.

And one thing neither the world nor education needs more of is self-help with a veneer of academic respectability. It’s had lashings of that, via for instance the totem of ‘self-esteem’, and look how well that turned out – producing throngs of people with all too much self-esteem … Read the rest