The Seer. Were the contents of a speech by the secretary of state for education predicted
nearly five hundred years ago? Was sixteenth century sage
Nostradamus somehow mysteriously able to "see" Alan Johnson addressing the 2006 Labour party conference in Manchester? Could the mysterious "Quatrain 62"
phrophesied by Michel de Nostredame so long ago finally have been fulfilled?
Alas! what a great loss there will be to learning
before the cycle of the Moon is completed.
Fire, great floods, by more ignorant rulers;
how long the centuries until it is seen to be restored.
Skeptics may scoff, but there is certainly an eerie correspondence between Nostradamus's prophesy and the events that led to today's
announcement.
The education secretary, Alan Johnson, today announced plans to scrap GCSE coursework in maths and introduce supervision in other subjects in a bid to curb cheating.
In an even more astonishing development, an internet "blogger" called Natalisolentus claims to have actually
forseen this whole "Moon cycle" of events - the slow but inexorable rise of cheating once coursework was introduced, the devaluation and undermining of GCSE qualifications, the repeated refusals to admit there was a problem, and then the belated use of ministerial power to restore the old system of examinations and finally curb abuses that interference by "ignorant rulers" had encouraged in the first place. In fact she claims that (to someone of her extended perceptions, presumably, since the sequence of events seems
not to have been forseen by successive Secretaries of State for Education) it was
bleeding obvious what would happen from the day coursework came in...We live in a mysterious world.
posted by Natalie at 10:18 PM
