A Level Revision

Exams are coming up, and I've started on my revision.  This year, I'm taking History, English Literature and Government and Politics to A2 level (all on Edexcel) and I'm also taking Critical Thinking to AS (this is OCR).

The Plan:

Well, I've got a Politics mock on Monday, so I've got a lot of revision to do today, but luckily over the last few weeks, I've spent about 20 hours making a set of 200 flashcards, and about 60 'Top Trumps' style cards.  (I like to be creative with my revision!)

Of the books that I've been looking at, obviously I've been using the exam textbook provided by Edexcel, but I found that it wasn't sufficient for everything I needed to know.  The school recommended "Political Identities" by Andrew Heywood (who is one of the Chief examiners) and I have found that really helpful, but the best book I've found is "The Politics Book" - it is absolutely fantastic for political thinkers!  Thought the one downside (as with most supplimentary politics books) is that it doesn't class Multiculturalism as an ideology in itself, when the exam board has allocated it a whole topic.  So examples are hard to come by.

One of the more interesting examples that I've found seems to be an example for conservatism, but I'm not sure whether I'd be able to use it in an exam.  It deals with the thinking of the ancient Chinese leader and philosopher: Confucius.  I've found that it deals with an early form of patriarchy - and that the idea seemed to be that the leader is seen as superior and of purer morals, and that as the people can learn from example, a strong leader can teach them good morals.  This appears to be a really good justification for patriarchy and monarchy, but as it is so early I'm going to need to check if I can use it.

As a politics student, I've found that examples of political thinkers are gold-dust in exams, so would definitely recommend this book to anybody taking the same course.

At the moment, I have precisely 19 days until my first exam (scary!).  Managing my school work and paid work is becoming increasingly difficult, so am going to ask to stop being given shifts after next weekend so that I can start working really hard.  On average, I have been revising 7 hours a day (at weekends) and about 2 hours a night on school nights - when I don't have work - and I'm feeling 100% more prepared than I did at this point last year.  I'm hoping everything's going to pay off!

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What you know you know

Thought I should probably start blogging about serious things again, and today I found a book that really caught my interest.  It's called 'The Politics Book' and I found it in my school library, and I've been using it to support everything that I've been learning in politics.  Amongst all of the political thinkers that I've been studying at school: Marx, Hegel, Burke, Locke, Rawls, etc, I found a quote from an ancient philosopher called Confucius.

"What you know, you know, what you don't know, you don't know, this is wisdom."

For a minute I didn't know where I heard this before, but I realised that although we didn't look that far back in politics, we did look at a speech by Donald Rumsfeld (who was the US Secretary of Defense at the time of 9/11).

"There are known knowns.  There are things that we know that we know.  There are known unknowns.  That is to say, there are things that we know that we don't know.  But there are also unknown unknowns.  There are things that we don't know that we don't know."

I found this particularly interesting for two reasons: first, it occurred to me how principles and thoughts, even as early as 500 BC, echo through speeches and thought throughout history.  Second, I find the concept of unknown unknowns fairly ominous.  The idea that there are things that weren't even considered as options is understandable in retrospect, but if you look at the example of 9/11, arguably there were signs that could have been taken into account.  Does this mean that we're missing real signals of things that might happen in the future every day?  Probably.  And doesn't that make you just a little bit paranoid?

I think Confucius had it right, it's the knowing that makes us wise, whether this is knowing that we're safe in our knowledge, or knowing that we don't know and being able to prepare for it.  This is wisdom.  But the unknown unknowns...

"I'd rather kill myself"

This is just a quick one, as I'm mid-Extended-Project at the moment.

I heard on the news this morning that a man is appealing against his extradition to America by saying that he'd "rather kill himself than be extradited."  It's ridiculous.  If everyone could get out of things by threatening suicide, then we'd have murderers running rampant in the streets.  Nobody would pay taxes, because they'd "rather kill themselves."

"I'd rather kill myself than go to school."

"I'd rather kill myself than tidy my room."

"I'd rather kill myself than not win the lottery."

If we all got what we wanted by threatening to kill ourselves, then we'd all be very rich, very lazy, and very spoiled.  Lock him up with nothing to kill himself with, and then there'll be nothing to worry about.  A precedent cannot be set that says that if a criminal starts making threats against their own life, they'd receive a lesser sentence.