That’s a bit of a stretch!

Jeeze Unity, I think you’ve been reading too many of sally’s posts on here.

I’d be more concerned about the fact the poster apparently suggests Michael Gove is some kind of ‘expert’ on education.

It’s a cruel hoax from somebody, that’s for certain, and a bit harsh on whoever is the real keynote speaker.

James/Tim

Believe it or not, I’ve had the Speccie’s poster emailed to me a couple of times now, and on both occasions it’s arrived with a ‘doesn’t this remind you of…’ comment.

Neither of the people who sent it to me are Sally, BTW, although I am expecting a ‘told you so’ comment when she turns up.

It’s just a very bad choice of colour scheme, but one that’s well worth ribbing The Spectator over.

Thinking about it, I should drop the humour tag on this to make it clear that this is a bit of rib,

Fair enough. I think Gove’s plan to put Goldie Hawn in charge of British schools is more mockworthy though.

(On which note, I am aware that the Church of Scientology, masquerading as Applied Scholastics, have exhibited at Conservative Party Conference on a number of occasions in recent years. And of course there is the Steiner movement. Anyone starting to notice a quite alarming pattern forming here?)

At least three of the speakers at this conference have Jewish names. And you try to smear them with some invented Nazi association. Just like Ken Livingstone, eh?

What sick minds you people have.

Flowerpower:

Are you sure you’re not American?

It’s virtually impossible to watch that electrifying sequence from ‘Cabaret’ without jumping to one’s feet before exclaiming …….. ‘ja wohl mein fuhrer’

This is a reaction to the image, not a smearing of the contributors. This poster has been around for a few weeks now and plenty of people have recoiled for the same reason as Unity. It isn’t the intended response, the poster’s obviously meant to be lefty revolutionary in some way but offends for all sorts of reasons, including by failing to present any diversity amongst those three glowing children. Except that one may be ginger.

…offends for all sorts of reasons, including by failing to present any diversity amongst those three glowing children…

They’re obviously just rounding. Since there are only three children, and the population of the UK is over 90% white, it would be statistically misleading for there to be any children of other races. This is clearly why the middle child is so sexually ambiguous – to give a representative sample of the male/female split.

Or, possibly, we may be over-analysing a poster. Who knows?

I’m more confused as to why the grown man on the left is hanging out with kids and wearing shorts and matching socks. That certainly didn’t happen at my school!

Gwyn – yes! The age of the boy in the shorts was the thing that my teenagers thought most revolting.

This is very very funny but not as funny as Flowerpower at 7, pure comedy gold.

Daniel,

I think the connection with Goldie Hawn beats it all – that is unless they can get Ozzie Osbourne involved.

Goldie is a lush specimen of ladydom. Ozzy on the other hand and I say this is as a massive fan of the awesome Black Sabbath, is a poor example of a man. Bless him.

School kids still wearing ties with “conventional” sized knots in them?

Not round ‘ere they aint.

It is a dreadful poster.

I see the point….but it’s also the same colours as the Boy Scouts….if anyone remembers them?

And for much the same reason really: Hitler Youth was based on Baden Powell’s idea…

The poster offends on so many levels especially when Gove has promised state funding to Steiner Waldorf schools:

“Wolfgang Treher makes a compelling case that Steiner’s racial theories, especially the repeated scheme of a small minority evolving further while a large mass declines, bear striking similarities even in detail to Hitler’s own theories. He concludes: “Concentration camps, slave labor and the murder of Jews constitute a praxis whose key is perhaps to be found in the ‘theories’ of Rudolf Steiner.”
Wolfgang Treher, Hitler Steiner Schreber, Emmingden 1966, p. 70.

http://www.social-ecology.org/2009/01/anthroposophy-and-ecofascism-2/

http://chaseukinfoarchive.wordpress.com/what-concerns-us/

The ‘boy’ on the left is surely George Osborne …

http://www.politics.co.uk/photo/profile-george-osborne–$7020254$300.jpg

Unity @ 8

Flowerpower: Are you sure you’re not American?

Unity: Another sentence, another stereotype.
I can’t swim either. Does that make me black?

Now you’re clean out of rib-tickling Holocaust gags, can we have some dead trade unionist jokes?

Looks like the Famous Five to me.

Except there are only three of them and there’s no dog……..

“Looks like the Famous Five to me.

Except there are only three of them and there’s no dog……..”

It was inevitable once the Famous Five were nationalised that there would have to be cuts to deal with the budget deficiet. And the misuse of a non-trained dog to solve crimes ran foul of the RSPCA.

Incidentally, I doubt the Hitler youth would have accepted such lax uniform standards (non-standard colours, no badges, socks not pulled up, shirts untucked). You just can’t get the faux-Nazi youth movement pinups nowadays…

Re: 7

Don’t you mean, er, German names?

25.

Actually, all but two have what look to me like normal British names. Messrs Sandstrom and Hultin are presumably Swedish (given the text under their names and the free school movement being Swedish in origin). Have to admit though, I can’t identify the Jews.

Mind you, even if all the speakers were Jews, nothing to stop Unity making the observation, especially since it was more in jest than seriousness.

26 – I think Rachel Wolf is Jewish, and it’s a fairly Jewish name. But yeah, I really don’t see any accusation of Nazism in the post, just some mockery of what is a *terrible* piece of poster design.

Re: 20

William Shockley was a big advocate of eugenics. Should we stop using transistors?

This is silly and pathetic.

As a contributor to, and commenter on, this website I’d like to say that I really have come to expect better standards.

There’s been a lot of low-level tit for tat sniping at Tory blogs recently replacing high-quality posts, which I guess is to be expected given that an election looms, but this is stupid, waste of space, idiocy operating at the level of Tory Bear.

Lib Con should be aiming for better.

IMHO

The brown theme suggests the artist has spent too much time playing FPS on the X- Box.

Yeah, I have to say I half agree with Paul Sagar @29 on this one, well maybe a quarter as I think a bit of general piss-taking is fine once in a while, though I am quite puerile.

I actually did a quickie post on this a few days ago at http://thoughcowardsflinch.com/2010/02/13/school-shorts/, and while the Nazi thing did occur to me briefly, I admit, I decided not to go anyway near it as I genuinely think suggesting such a conscious link in the mind’s of an unknown designer is just a tad offensive.

Thank you Paul Sagar (with whom I’ve been known to disagree). C’mon, Unity, this is plain lame, and it’s not as if there isn’t material with which to castigate the Tories: (less than there ought to be admittedly, but,hey,that’s what you get when the party that’s been in Govt for the last 13 years has itself practised Toryism-lite.

Guys, you really are taking this all far too seriously…

It’s a frickin joke!

I know perfectly well that the designer didn’t intend the poster to evoke thoughts of the Hitler Youth, Boy Scouts, Famous Five, or a bunch of evacuees or a fucking Hovis advert.

What the designer has tried to do is create a poster which suggests that Gove’s ‘School revolution’ is linked to the restoration of traditional educational values and made a bit of rick of it by setting up a slew on unintended associations, particularly through the choice of colour scheme which, I’d expect, is intended to reinforce the ‘traditional feel’ by hinting at sepia tones.

This is all just a case of ribbing the designer, and the Spectator, for not thinking thing through, not an attack on either them or the Tories.

Choosing to highlight the Hitler Youth angle is nothing more than the quickest way of driving home the gag.

Re: 33

It’s a fact of the web that anything you can playfully joke about could, at any moment, be independently replicated dead seriously by another blogger you’ve never heard of.

Nothing wrong with that, it just means that you pretty much have to write “LOL THAT WERE A JOKE” after your punchlines if you want to ensure nobody gets the wrong idea.