Every child should have authoritarian parents, because then they’ll grow up to be libertarians.
-Oddball Australian journalist Paddy McGuinness, as recounted at his funeral this week by Bill Hayden.
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A long time ago, when I was a wee nip of a lad, my parents would keep me quiet by turning on the television and having me watch such classics as Sesame Street. Little did they know that what I was watching was not suitable for children! I know that now, because the early seasons of Sesame Street have come out on DVD and they have been given a parental advisory, no less.
And rightly so. You wouldn’t want your kids to turn out like us dreadful Generation X old fogeys, after all! January 27th, 2008 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I am prepared to believe that there may be some things (though not many of them) that are of such public benefit that they should be provided at the general expense. That is not to say that I think that if something is good it should be compulsory. Let alone that if it sounds like a good, that is justification for its being compulsory. But when you are dealing with the state, “free” does not mean ‘free as in free speech’, nor does it mean ‘free as in free beer’. It means ‘compulsory’. If the government is advertising free beer, it wants everybody drunk; prepare to have your head held under if you don’t feel like a tipple just now. Hence this Guardian headline, a classic of pusilanimity against spin: Plan to give every child internet access at home The actual story is somewhat, er… more nuanced:
A sub less versed in the cult of the benign state might have abstracted that as: “Big business bonanza: Parents must pay for children to be watched at home by online officials.” January 5th, 2008 | 62 comments - (Comments are closed)
Further to my recent post about new measures from our Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. Foreign readers may be surprised that we have a department for children schools and families (sic). I, on the other hand, am alarmed: even the name indicates the totalitarian intent of the New British state. Prompted by a clip on TV news, I have now found the full text of Ed Balls’s speech given to the Fabian Society yesterday. Didn’t the resolution to announce new policy to parliament, not outside bodies – in this case a para-Party body – last a long time? It bears close reading: Excerpt I:
Phew – not necessarily locked up in schools then, but on probation otherwise (as will of course any employers be – they’ll have to have enhanced CRB checks, of course). This is enlightening as to what Mr Brown means when he talks about a Bill of Rights and Duties, “building upon existing rights and freedoms but not diluting them – but also make more explicit the responsibilities that implicitly accompany rights…”. It confirms what many listeners will have guessed: you have the right and freedom to do exactly what the big G tells you to. This is the traditional line of Calvinism and Islam, is it not? Don’t you love that “our young people”? Völkisch, nicht wahr? Excerpt II:
So not only will whether you do something state-approved be checked, but what you do will be subject to state advice and monitoring and made from a menu provided by the state. For the uninitiated Connexions is a formerly semi-independent, and notionally voluntary, database surveillance scheme for teenagers set up under the Learning and Skills Act 2000. November 6th, 2007 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Exciting news for British schoolchildren. Early leavers ‘will not be jailed’ (PA). Except of course they will be under control orders, in effect; incarcerated and enslaved part-time. “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance,” ran the old slogan. This policy is pretty clear evidence that what’s offerred to many in the state school system is not education. If you have to force people to take something, then it is not plausiible that it is of use to them. There is no problem selling education and training to those who want it. Even very poor parents in London often find money for extra lessons or private day-schooling on top of the taxes they pay to imprison other people’s children. The prison function of the system reduces its value to others. Put aside for the moment whether it should be paid for from taxes or not. How much more cost-effective would state education be if it were voluntary, and the classes were full of eager participants and even the grumpiest teenagers present were those whose parents or peers had persuaded them it was worthwhile? How much better would the curriculum be if it had to attract an audience by being interesting or useful, rather than prescribed by bureaucrats? How much better would teachers feel about their work if it didn’t include the roles of commissar, bureaucrat and gaoler?
Since if you are at school you are barred from employment without the permission of the authorities, I imagine they will pay the fines with the proceeds of robbery and prostitution. Well done, Balls! November 5th, 2007 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is like a compass-that-faces-south… always wrong but useful nevertheless because as long as he is dependably wrong, he can still be used when plotting a course. His latest pearl of wisdom is the solution to reducing the numbers of children acting irresponsibly by engaging in violent crimes: Stop holding them responsible. His logic is hard to fault. If you deem than a child cannot be responsible for their actions, clearly they cannot therefore be irresponsible… voila… less children acting irresponsibly. In fact by definition no children can be said to have acted irresponsibly because the very notion of judging responsibility is disallowed. In a political and law-enforcement culture in which ‘that which is not measured never happened’, I can see the attraction of this approach. But then again Britain’s welfare state treats everyone regardless of their age like an irresponsible child, incapable or unwilling to look to their own pensions, medical care, etc. etc, so perhaps there is a bigger meme at work here.
… the Archbishop says, and then promptly weakens the seriousness of what they do by suggesting a child can cause the death of someone and get away with it, whereas an older person cannot. So how is that not weakening the seriousness of what the child has done? Also I am curious, how is taking away responsibility going to encourage more responsibility? Perhaps the following is what the Plod will be told to do:
Oh, and mothers too, they also should not be held responsible for some reason. It is all down to too many bad movies and Britain’s ‘gun culture’, whatever the fuck that means in a country which probably has less civilian guns in total than almost any single US state other than the very smallest ones. I wonder of God’s Idiot would describe a nation without much in the way of musicians or musical instruments as having a ‘musical culture’? However would we manage without the Church of England to guide us, eh? November 3rd, 2007 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The plans by the state to extend the period of educational conscription in Britain could well be the issue that helps radicalise future generations in a most useful way, at least if you see the world the way I do.
I am also delighted to see someone in the mainstream media making the self-evident point that state education is indeed conscription. The absurdity of trying to teach children who are determined to not be taught is evident at sinkhole schools across the country so why the state thinks digging the same hole deeper is going to solve anything is not obvious to me. Still, never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake as there is a clear upside to all this. What the government intends to do will engender disaffection and hostility to the impositions of the state at an early age, and without doubt mischievous political activists will fan the flames by pointing out to the internet savvy blog reading schoolyard conscripts of the future that they are not wrong to feel angry and they are not wrong to refuse to cooperate. Excellent. July 30th, 2007 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
Alice Thomson has writen an interesting article called Be a ‘bad’ parent and let your children out in which she decries the enervating risk-averse trends in which parents, with the encouragement of our political masters, try to supervise and regulate every aspect of their children’s lives. The comments are also quite interesting. One of them , calling herself ‘Mum’, bristles at the suggestion Thomson makes:
Well ‘Mum’, I do not have any children either but I am very happy you were not my ‘Mum. Moreover I, like everyone else, am fully qualified to have on opinion on how children should be raised because believe it or not, I and everyone else was once a child. I agree totally with Alice Thomson and think it is time people stopped indulging their neurotic need to control everything and just let children grow up without panoptic supervision. June 6th, 2007 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
I would like to suggest that Jonathan’s “Missing the point over grammar schools” below, itself misses the point. I am as in favour of grammar schools as anyone. But I do not think Cameron’s decision is any more than another piece of political pragmatism (read my comment on Jonathan’s piece for the rationale.) I agree the new Tory policy does nothing significant for education. But I suspect Jonathan’s policy prescription – compromise vis-a-vis properly voluntary schooling it may be, is doomed. Introducing vouchers now would be worthless and the Tories are sensible, therefore, not to tie themselves to that. Not least they would risk discrediting vouchers: vouchers could be a move in the right direction, but not yet. This is why. Here is a sensible lefty, Jenni Russell, reporting in the Guardian’s bloggish Comment is Free:
However good the school, however motivated the pupil, there is no choice to be had. There is a chemin-de-fer, directions predetermined, signals to be passed at the prescribed speed. No entry to university at 16, Mr Brown. No ignoring unutterably tedious and repetitious schoolwork and passing the exams at the end on the basis of your own reading. Step off the lockstep elevator once, and you are out for ever. (Mr Fry, the University regrets that we require a clean Criminal Records Bureau certificate.) All Britain’s education is under the supervision of a suffocating bureaucracy, that serves itself and its conception of proper development. There is small choice in rotten apples; the sadly pocked sharecrop goes to uniform damp barrells. Who is to blame? The conservative defenders of both grammar schools and ‘family values’, that is who; and the utilitarian industrialists who now complain workers can’t read or count. It was they who sought to save the population from indoctrination by radical Local Education Authorities, so delivered the entire population into the hands of pseudo-progressive educationalists by creating the National Curriculum; they who worried that universities could not be trusted to set sufficiently ‘practical’ exams, and did the same with syllabuses. My modest proposal for English education: Scrap the National Curriculum. Do not replace it. Scrap league tables and DoE “Key stage” testing. Do not replace them. Scrap rules on school admissions and allow schools to exclude or expel pupils as they choose. Scrap the QCA. Do not replace it. Scrap the Teacher Registration Regulations. Do not replace them. Scrap the office of the Access Regulator. Do not replace him. Wait five years, continuing to run and fund schools otherwise the same, which means a mix of Local Authority, central government, voluntary aided, and private schools. Only then, when people have got used to making their own decisions again, consider vouchers. May 17th, 2007 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Nice piece in Wired magazine by Clive Thompson coming to the defence of video games, frequently a target for the culture scolds (“Quake made my boy a killer!”). This gives me the perfect excuse to remind readers of this fine book, Killing Monsters, which shows the beneficial side of playing such games for children’s development. Come to think of it, children – and not just boys – have played rough-house games since the dawn of time, so I do not quite see how computer games represent a major step towards cultural depravity. As a boy I played all manner of war games, not to mention staple favourites like chess. Of course, in the case of chess, there are other considerations. April 10th, 2007 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
Had the defendant actually murdered the children whose images have (presumably) given him so much furtive pleasure, would he be any worse off now?
190 years tops. With good behaviour he could have been out and about in, say, just over a century.
So he gets what amounts, for all practical purposes, to a death sentence for possessing vile and twisted photographs. I wonder if there is a historical parallel here? Or does it set one? March 1st, 2007 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
Labour MP Tom Watson is undecided as to whether or not vein scanning and other biometric technology being forced on Britain’s schoolchildren is a good or a bad thing. Perhaps you can share your views on the matter with him. Please note that Watson told me a couple of years ago that his view on ID cards was actually changed by the persuasive arguments he read on various blogs, so this is a man who is willing to listen to reason. November 2nd, 2006 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
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