I have never been sure which is most insufferable – the term “postmodernism”, the intellectual fashions that grew up around it, or the supposed culture it purports to describe. Probably all three equally.

Paulo Freire wrote, towards the end of the 20th century:

There is a lot of fatalism around us. An immobilizing ideology of fatalism, with its flighty postmodern pragmatism, which insists that we can do nothing to change the march of social-historical and cultural reality because that is how the world is anyway. (1)

These are some very basic principles. There are others, but these are mine. The context in which I offer them is the protests against the proposed government cuts in education spending and massive rises in student fees. Over and above these principles it is important to never lose sight of the question of who and what education is for.

Paulo Freire referred to education as “that specifically human act of intervening in the world”. As such it cannot (and should not seek to) escape matters of ethics, politics, and ideals.

My local village pub is a little Labour enclave in a Tory stronghold. If our rural Westcountry constituency ever returned anything other than a Tory to Westminster it would be proof that the universe had changed. Not being a Tory, therefore, my vote is of negligible relevance for anything other than statistical purposes – that is if I use it. However, whenever I tell them in the pub that I don’t vote they round on me as if it mattered.

Eduardo Reck Miranda (born 1963) is a Brazilian composer of chamber and electro-acoustic music. His interests in science and music are evenly balanced.

He studied in Brazil, England, Scotland and France and is currently Professor in Computer Music and Head of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR) at the University of Plymouth, Devon, England. His music has been played in many countries, and his research in the field of human-machine interfaces is known globally.

No one knows whether John Henry ever lived. People’s heroes like Robin Hood, Captain Swing or Joe Hill have a way of remaining shadowy despite the enormous amount of research focussed on them. Some, of course, definitely did live. Hill did – Joseph Hilstrom, Swedish longshoreman and Wobbly, who probably wasn’t as lily white as labour myth paints him. Others probably didn’t live at all. John Henry may have. If so he was black, born into slavery, maybe in Alabama, and he took on the new technology of his day, the steam drill.

"Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened" - Jean Baudrillard

I imagine there can be very few people who don’t know where they were and what they were doing when they first saw the film footage of 9/11. In the 1960s, similarly, it was said that everyone could recall their movements at the time of President Kennedy’s assassination. The death of Princess Diana was another legendary happening, but without a doubt 9/11 was the most gruesome of such events – the kind which have mythic proportions even before the print dries on the newspaper headlines.