‘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

Britain – shit place to be poor

Think tank Reform have published a condemnatory report showing up UK society as the most unequal and least least socially mobile of all Western developed nations.

[Live here? You're unlikely to escape...]

According to the report, despite the successes of the UK economy over the last 30 years, we have merely gone from being the ’sick man’ to the ‘divided society’ of Europe. Not very catchy, but then they are academics.

The report certainly makes depressing reading: inequality is up; child poverty is up; and severe poverty is up. At the same time income growth has accelerated for the richest 10%. The share of total income for these top 10% is apparently now at comparable levels to the 1940s, which rather mocks the idea of progress to a fairer society.

Life chances, they say, are increasingly determined by background rather than aptitude, citing studies that argue that kids from wealthy backgrounds consistently outperform kids from poorer backgrounds. This is a result of an unfair two-tier education system, which means the children of the richest get the best start in life.

I was 16 at the millennium, and the report says surprisingly little about my generation. However, it has always been clear to me that British society is deeply divided. Here in London the inequalities are stark, as anarchic town planning puts leafy suburban idylls right next to the kinds of places where you put your ipod away and hope your phone doesn’t ring. Class divisions extend right down to choice on public transport: poor people ride the bus while rich people ride the obscenely expensive Tube.

One of the biggest lies ever propagated by this Labour government was that “we’re all middle class now.” In reality we’ve all been ground into various rough gradations of proletariat, in the most Marxist sense of the word. British society is at its most divided for 60 years, and inflation continues to push up prices faster than employers are willing to raise wages, making life even harder for the poorest. This has resulted in record profits for corporations, while the average person is struggling to make ends meet.

Thatcher’s dismantling of the post war economic consensus, continued by succeeding Conservative and Labour governments, sent the UK economy into overdrive; but it also took away a significant safety net for the most disadvantaged. Privatisation destroyed key industries that had provided lower class employment as the lifting of exchange controls turned London into a Mecca for finance. The British economy lost its manufacturing base in favour of financial services, which gave greater rewards to fewer workers. The government happily trotted out GDP and growth statistics citing them as evidence of a wildly successful economy, when really it just meant that the rich were getting rich beyond their wildest dreams.

Few of the economic gains of the various booms since the 1980s have trickled down to the population at large in the UK, even with the supposedly more redistributive Labour party at the helm. Indeed, since gaining power in 1997, this Labour administration has done much to dismantle the mechanisms for social mobility, like introducing top up fees and abolishing assisted places to public schools. At the same time, educational standards in state run education have dropped as a result of thoughtless centralisation, a culture of league tables and an obsession with assessment by examination. No matter how much money they pump into the system, it seems to become more dysfunctional with each passing year.

And that money has to come from somewhere. According to Treasury estimates the tax burden is set to rise from 34.9% of GDP in 2003-4 to 37.5% in 2011-12. But these increases in public revenue will not come from taxing our rich multinational companies and non-domiciled residents. Instead, as the recent furore over the abolition of the 10p tax rate has shown, Labour have continually increased the tax burden on the poorest sections of society, while giving away massive tax breaks to the richest, for whom the UK is an effective tax-haven.

What’s clear is that this massive scale exploitation of UK society is likely to continue as long as people remain convinced that it doesn’t affect them. This is the true lie behind the claim that we are all middle class. Your average Joe thinks that because he’s got a crippling mortgage for some 1 bedroom hovel in Hackney and he wears a suit for work that he is somehow middle class. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are all working class now.

Spot the difference

Filed under: politics , Labour, news, politics, poverty, UK