Tom Morris

Polly Toynbee has an article in the Grauniad condemning faith schools. Good stuff.

Check the comments though. The Guardian has had a bit of a problem with comments, since they attract the most ignorant people to the forefront. They say things like:

Ms. Toynbee is entitled to her opinions, but I'm not so sure she's entitled to tell parents how they should raise their children. Religious schools are popular simply because they provide the best education, the teachers are outstanding, the parents supportive and the children well-behaved.

Now, now. She is entitled to tell parents how they should raise their children. It's called an opinion, and it's quite shocking when someone has one.

What we are seeing here is actually a group of people buying in to the phony choice being offered by the government. Let me give you a tip: there is no choice.

How is this choice? If you want a non-religious education in my area, there is less places that offer it than I have fingers. And that's in the whole district. If you pick any particular place in the district where you might, say, live, then the likelihood of finding a non-faith school is so trifling as to be ridiculous.

Even the word "Community" doesn't save us, since the local "Community" primary school is a Christian school.

Sorry, but how exactly is it choice if three-quarters of the schools are religiously-oriented and three-quarters of the population aren't?

The reactions to Polly's article have been populist and democratic. That is not a good thing. If 99% of the public want to break in to my house, impale me and then eat me, that doesn't give them the right to do so, even if they are in the majority.

Faith schools take money from the majority of people who are faithless. They are popular for reasons unrelated to faith - like their success at examinations. The continuing policy of faith schools is democratic in the worst way (ie. the mob getting their way, and their way being set by the Church) and anti-democratic in the worst way (by giving a dumbed down education where people learn about creationism rather than science, thus producing a public incapable of using their brain).

The real question in all of this is simple: does anyone on the Guardian comment pages have a brain, or were they all educated at faith schools?

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I know, I know. I'm slow on the ball. What is Boot Camp going to do?

It's not going to get me to use Windows any more than I do. I need Windows for two things: Microsoft Publisher and games. As of next month, I can eliminate the first of those.

I don't play many games. Sadly. And when I do, I play them on my PC. I boot out of Linux and use Windows for the duration of my gaming.

What will Boot Camp do? It's done one primary thing. Everyone like me who's bought an Intel Mac woke up to find a few weeks back that they can now dual boot. This is going to sell a lot of Intel Macs.

It's going to lure Windows users to Mac. Macs are very competitive price-wise with the equivalent Windows machines. If Apple had gone the AMD route rather than the Intel route, they'd be in an even better position.

Here's what the game porters should do: offer boxed Windows versions of games with a special "Mac version coming" label inside. You go out and buy a game, run it on Windows dual-boot, then once they've polished off the port, you can download a small application which moves all the data from the Windows partition on to the Mac partition. This means that the Mac gamers can play all the games when they come out, but without having to shell out for the game twice. It'll also help populate the Mac market.

As for applications? I can't see any real need for that kind of thing. Apple are well sorted for non-game applications, and don't need any assistance from Microsoft.

What should Apple do with Boot Camp? Team up with a bunch of Windows geeks, and include a CD with Leopard which de-shittifies Windows. It would clean the OS up, install a set of reliable and user-friendly virus, spam and adware checkers, as well as Firefox, Flash and QuickTime. That would add a lot of value - not only would Macs run Windows faster, but they'd run it more securely out of the box.

This is good for Apple, bad for Microsoft (they'll get a couple of XP sales, but it's not going to do anything for Vista adoption, since XP has become a commodity to run on a Mac) and good - in the long term - for free software. The availability of commercial-grade free software for the Mac seems to be higher than for Windows. More people using it can only be good.

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