‘orrible stinking kids

The continuing saga of our war with youth reached new heights of absurdity today with reports from The Daily Mail that a 3 year old girl in Wales has become the youngest pupil ever to be excluded from school.

Apparently the child was sent home from the reception class of her school in Caerphilly in South Wales after attacking a classmate.

demon children

‘She was given a temporary exclusion for assault on a pupil, disruptive behaviour and breaching school rules,’ Caerphilly Council told reporters, apparently without irony.

How can you hold a three year old responsible for those actions? I don’t think that when I was three I even had a fully developed concept of school rules. Three year olds are naughty, that’s just the way it is.

And it’s not like the end of the world or anything if two three year olds get in a fight. You grab one in each hand, tell them off, and tell them to make up. Nine times out of ten they’ll be best mates again in 15 minutes.

Do you think that this kid understands why she’s been excluded? Probably not. She’s probably just buzzing because now she gets to spend the day sitting in watching Bratz videos and playing with my little pony.

When I was a kid – not that long ago! – you only got suspended or expelled if you did something really bad. Getting suspended or expelled from primary school was almost unheard of. But from the reasons Caerphilly council gave above, I could have been suspended every day!

What do they hope to prove by excluding kids before secondary school age? The law doesn’t even count them as criminally responsible, so why can they be held accountable like this in school? Surely a worse punishment would be to make the child go to school and actually do some work, at this age I guess something like tidying up the sandpit.

There is a ridiculous breakdown in discipline, I think, but not amongst the kids, it’s amongst adults. Adults haven’t the confidence to deal with children when they are disobedient, they are only able to heap praise on them when they succeed. There’s a carrot, but no stick.

I guess teachers are scared that if they discipline children they face recrimination from parents – probably a justified fear. Many parents are so protective of their dreadful little oiks that anyone who upsets the kid is sure to be accused of ‘harming their emotional development’ or some such bullshit.

And most children know that if they get a smack then they can now go to the police.

Which doesn’t leave much in the way of discipline, except that imposed through state-affiliated hierarchical structures. Does the state have a monopoly on discipline? Are the police really the only people allowed to hit our kids? Is formal institutional punishment then only legitimate form of child discipline? How fucked up does it sound when you lay it out like that?

Filed under: Uncategorized , news, schools, youth

jobless again

After a portfolio enhancing three weeks writing for the Southwark News, I’m back in unemployment land again.

And I’m fucking skint.  You don’t get paid for these work experience stints, and I ran out of money from my last paid job a while back.

The whole work experience thing is a scandal at the heart of journalism.  How can any normal person, without privileged circumstances, get enough experience and qualifications to actually get a job as a staff journalist?

Of course they can’t, not without either real hardship, or considerable outside help.  The patterns of journalists’ social backgrounds show this very clearly: just over half of journalists working on national newspaper titles  were educated privately.

It wasn’t always this way.  You used (I am told) to go to your local newspaper and, in exchange for a low-paid – but yes, paid – job, they would fund your training to the industry standard NCTJ level.

Wow.  Imagine that!  An employer actually investing in someone!  How things have changed…

Now journalist candidates are, by and large, responsible for investing in their own training and spend thousands on getting the right qualifications.  Even then, when they have successfully completed their media law exams and reached a hundred words a minute shorthand, they still have to go and put in weeks of unpaid work before an editor will even consider giving them a staff job.

It’s not like it’s particularly glamorous is it?  It’s not like being a movie star or a singer.  I mean, name one journalist you would fuck.  I don’t see Andrew Gilligan cruising round with a honey on each arm.

The least newspaper publishers could do is make sure that contributors are published a fair rate for published work, whether the author is a qualified journalist or not.  Surely if it’s good enough to print it’s good enough to pay for.

That said, if there are any editors out there looking for a particularly foulmouthed columnist, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.  I’ll even knock out the first one on a sale or return basis…

Oh, and I actually once wrote a real article on this subject too

Filed under: Uncategorized

richard godwin is rubbish, I am better

Somethimes a writer pens such an awful piece of ripe, stinking, self-serving bollocks that it is the solemn duty of other writers to rinse it as much as possible in the hope that we can bully the perpetrator into never, ever writing anything again.

Today Richard Godwin, music critic on my favourite bastard-Tory newspaper The Evening Standard, committed such a crime.

He’s writing about a recent stag do he went on where, basically, they rode around Cornwall or somewhere on bikes, got pissed a lot, then went to see the Eden project. But oh! How he tells it!

Godwin can’t decide whether he’s Chaucer, Dickens or Shakespeare; but he does his best to sound like all three. The trip is a ‘jaunt’, his friends are ‘fellows’, ruckus is ‘ribaldry’, drinking alcohol is ‘imbibing’, and jokes become ‘japes’. It’s like the Famous Five Go Mad in the West Country. Enid Blyton couldn’t have done it better.

The flowery pomposity of the language reminded me of Reader’s Digest. You know, that bit where the old biddy readership gets to write in with humorous tales of their exciting lives. Two of the most annoying bits are where he uses ‘Thence” and then “Alas” to fit his two of his sentences into their paragraphs. I swear on my life, I honestly thought we were living in the twenty-first century. The way Godwin tells it, I saw the whole episode in sepia.

I don’t think that there is any excuse for this kind of writing, it betrays a really bad understanding of our modern language, an ignorant carelessness even. People just don’t talk like that, and as journalists we should be trying to reflect the new paradigms of modern communication. Okay, so there were some long words there, but I honestly couldn’t find better ones to fit so I’ll let myself off.

So far I’ve just stuck to slamming Godwin’s style, but I think there is some deeper shit behind it. Insisting on writing like a Victorian diarist reveals something about a person: they want to sound clever. They think that inserting a load of long-up, convoluted words in to their writing will somehow lend it credibility and authority. It doesn’t. I’m sure that Godwin is a really clever bloke, but he basically writes like a ponderous old fart.

Aaaagh! I feel I could go on for ever, but I’ve got to go to the shops so I’ll wrap it up.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps that’s the house style at the Evening Standard and poor Godwin’s been forced to write like a knob. In which case, Richie I’m very sorry. By all means have a go at the standard of writing on my blog, I’m sure I’m crap too in my own way.

Filed under: media , evening standard, media, writing