Has he forgotten the "post-comprehensive" era?
Ten years ago this week Tony Blair proclaimed the dawn of the "post-comprehensive era".
The "post-comprehensive" era really began with Margaret Thatcher and the unleashing of market forces and consumer choice, says Barker.
In the pre-comprehensive era the "failure" of white boys was the intended purpose of selection: poor white boys were "educated" for their fate of horny-handed toil.
IN AN impassioned speech at this week's Labour Party conference, Tony Blair announced that it was time to "move to the post-comprehensive era", arguing for "a range of schools for parents to choose from", and a system open "to new and different ways of education, built round the needs of the individual child".Specialist schools are the centrepiece of this vision.
In recent years concern has been expressed over the potential impact of pharmaceuticals in the environment (PIE) and consequently a comprehensive Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA) is now a regulatory requirement prior to launch of any new drug.
In the post-genomic era, comprehensive analyses using three systematic approaches or omics have increased our understanding of the complex molecular regulatory networks associated with stress adaptation and tolerance.
In the post-genome era, comprehensive data from "omics" technologies (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) have been extensively analyzed to elucidate the underlying biochemical networks that elaborately regulate cellular mechanisms.
The trouble with this era of comprehensive news coverage is that it's getting increasingly difficult to be adventurous, unless, like Sir Francis Chichester, one is prepared to go to extraordinary, and even perilous, lengths.
Moreover, said Catherine Hoover Voorsanger, an associate curator at the Met and the project director of the show, putting together the exhibition, the first comprehensive investigation of the era, was "a detective story on a massive scale, trying to discover how New York became the city we know today".
