Read on Twitter
There’s an unpleasant pattern emerging of ideologically driven projects implemented with zero care for those who disagree and a cavalier lack of attention to possible negative consequences - the current Brexit strategy, the hostile environment, the A level fiasco.
It is tempting to ascribe this to laziness (it’s all too complicated we can’t be bothered) or incompetence (we’ve no idea what we’re doing).
Or maybe it’s deliberate.
Or maybe it’s deliberate.
Not deliberate in the sense that negative consequences were purposefully intended but their possibility (at least some of them) was recognized or at least conceptualised but nothing or not enough was done in advance to mitigate them.
The end justifies the means. And when the end dominates it becomes of less than secondary importance if the omelette making process breaks a few eggs.
The end becomes strangely fetishized. As if its achievement has a power in of itself. Hence the very weird attachment to defending (at least initially) policies that seem very misguided indeed.
The A level fiasco is an unfortunate but good example. There’s nothing wrong per se with the standardization objective. But if this end is pursued at the expense of all other objectives (eg individual fairness) then it risks disaster.
The much better approach would have been to prioritise both standardization and individual fairness. Yes, to some extent these objectives would have conflicted with each other. This, of course, is life which requires constant judicious compromise.
As the A level fiasco demonstrates, being an outlier or a minority isn’t always a question of being in a pre-defined x or y category. In a policy world in which the end always justifies the means many more people will find that they are treated as the outliers. /ends
PS I’m shamefully RTing this because I think it’s true - the pandemic is magnifying pre-existing realities.
