Let’s use more nuts to crack some other nuts #2341

House of Dumb features thoughtful criticism of a man who finds it hard to join the herd when that herd gets all down-their-noses at an everyday misunderstood matricide.

Well…taking a position where you face down the Guardian, the Daily Mail and the Mirror all at once either demonstrates the kind of raw courage the SAS look for in their recruits or here’s a man who doesn’t mind cooking his own light suppers for a week or two. Oh, and the suburbs might twitch their lace curtains at him for a while as well. In the chip shops and kebab houses of the inner city, however, I suspect he’ll lose very few of his devoted friends.

“The belief that children are "devils", that they are feral beasts who if they aren't smashing up bus-stops are murdering their mothers, reveals far more about adult fears than it does about actual young people.”

Isn’t the definition of the liberal as someone who accepts the paleontological history of our species - that we’re essentially meat-eating and foraging pack animals from the scrublands of East Africa - yet who denies the possibility that the aggressiveness and potential for violence that for a couple of million years kept blunt-toothed, slow-moving, clawless omnivores alive and flourishing amongst various ambush predators from the savannas to the Arctic Circle did anything other than disappear amongst everyone (except for a few throwbacks) the moment that the ink was dry on first edition of The Social Contract? Really, Mr. O’Neill, where did all those instincts and hormones and genes to mount a counter-attack against lions or polar bears disappear to in the era When Periwigs Ruled the Earth?

For the most part, children who kill are unstable not evil; they are profoundly confused rather than consciously cruel. Yes, they sadly must be removed from society, but ideally for help and education, not in order to be punished or to suffer public ridicule. 

What sort of therapy cures you of human nature, I wonder?

I confess, too, that I suspect him of a little bit of logical confusion when he asserts that removing a child from society (by putting him in prison) holds him up to public ridicule - unless they’re filming a reality TV series down at Tofu Borstal for Boys Who Want to be Girls, or wherever.

The lib meme of that old violence thing; it’s just so everything up until 1762 just keeps on being funny:

It was police and judges, for example, who took the disastrous decision to try the 10-year-old killers of James Bulger for murder in an adult court, riding roughshod over the idea that children under 14 were doli incapax – incapable of crime. It was the judge in that case who decided to release the names and photos of the Bulger killers, because they had committed an act "of unparalleled evil and barbarity". It was a commentator for the erudite Times who said that those two clearly very disturbed 10-year-olds were a "reminder of humanity’s most ancient and bestial instincts". 

“…humanity’s most ancient and bestial instincts". And there’s the rub. In Libworld, humanity is a social construct and there are no “ancient instincts”: It’s all superstructure that functions to keep profit margins high and the toffs supping Champers at the Ritz.

Or something.

But seriously folks; what does O’Neill expect The Man to do nowadays? The, ahem, authorities haven’t got the will or the understanding to uphold whatever has worked since Adam was a lad (partly because they reject any book with Adam in it); including the sometimes-reasonable doli incapax. They’ve lost any sense of proportion and discrimination because they’ve thrown wisdom out along with God knows how many babies with the bathwater of all that excessive deference to authority that they wanted to eliminate in the 1960s. In so doing they ditched all the successful socializing (moralizing!) mechanisms upheld by the legitimacy conferred by ancient custom and tradition throughout history down to what every schoolboy knows  - especially not to slaughter Mummy and little kids.  And they did it on purpose. The permissive society trashed millennia-old mechanisms for rearing children not to be sociopaths by breaking the connection (until then held to be central to Western morality) between a moral choice and its consequences.

It acid-bathed the family by easy divorce (mea culpa, my friends: I can’t type this part so easily because of this beam right here); dissolving the moral and economic links between sexual intercourse, child-rearing and fatherhood via child-related welfare payments; and it infantilized parents themselves through an education system that never finds fault or points the finger of blame at any individual or corrects misbehaviour.

Certainly, it’s foolish to treat those too young to understand cause and effect and moral responsibility quite as if they were Jack the Ripper, and we can hope though not expect that imprisoned children might one day have their immorality replaced with morality, but the statist ‘youth’ snuck into the woodpile in the first place thanks to O’Neill’s pals’ mindset.   

How else do you explain this piece Hobbesian  set a sledgehammer to crack another sledge-hammer statist war-of-all-the-bureaucracies-against-all-the-other-bureaucracies?:

Schools which fail to teach pupils to read and write should be fined, an independent panel investigating the causes of last year's riots has said.

About a fifth of school leavers have the literacy skills of an 11-year-old or younger, leaving many with no stake in society and no reason to stay out of trouble, the riots communities and victims panel said.

Introducing fines, which would then be used to help bring children up to the required standards, would help ensure the risk of future riots on the scale seen last August was "significantly reduced", it said.

Got that?

Western morality = bad.

Individual responsibility = bad.

Nuclear family = bad.

Blame for and punishment of misbehaviour = bad.

Parental choice in education = bad.

Bureaucracies intended to replace anything nasty with tea and sympathy and understanding = good.

Riots = embarrassing after fifty years of social liberalism.

Solution = let’s punish our own libtard schools by using more dictatorial government power!

Letting parents take their children away from the violent jungles that so many inner city comprehensives have become by allowing other, non-tropical rainforest schools to exist just isn’t on the menu.  

The panel also identified "500,000 forgotten families", citing poor parenting, a sense of hopelessness among young people, no clear path to work, reoffending and a lack of confidence in the police as key reasons behind the riots.

Say, does anyone out there know how reoffending can happen at all in our enlightened world of ASBOs and suspended sentences and community service orders?

Anyone? Anyone at all?

So what actually works? Well, how about more of the same?

Councils across London are working hard to build strong and resilient communities but the key to success lies in more joined-up services with responsibilities and funding available to make it work.Responding to today’s report by the Riots Communities and Victims Panel, London Councils – the body representing the capital’s 33 local authorities – said that boroughs need more freedom to ensure there is more sharing of information and funding for local schemes such as projects to tackle youth re-offending and early intervention work.

Brilliant. What could possibly go wrong?

Picture from here.

Grange Hill: Sodom or Golgotha?

Julia points out that nothing now stands between State school pupils and brutal violence from their schoolmates other than the winsome, deeply loving, morally good and all-knowing virtue at the heart of human nature. You know; that purity of soul that makes all people, and especially schoolchildren, universally benevolent.


Dumn Jon, on the other hand, shows us how we have nothing to fear, because the same whack-job ultra-Left carpet-chewering cultural embolism is totally on the case, aware that the Crucifixion did not redeem all Mankind's sins after all, and so Billy Bunter and the Famous Five will have to be nailed up too.

Pattern forming.

Please draw a picture of one of the following famous people:

Miss Snuffalupagus.

Or draw a picture of how it would feel like to be an African slave bound for the West Indies or America.

Melanie Phillips.

Or at least just bloody keep quite for one single minute!

Ranting Stan.

Or just be grateful for what you've got and that you're not a little child at school in Africa or India.

Now children, can you calculate how many billions of pounds and how many years it's taken the British Government to change an education system from an envied model for the world to copy into a crime-riddled joke?
And whose idea was it?

Snuffy's Back!

To Miss With Love, the great teaching blog is back and Snuffy's on top form.

Welcome back, Miss Snuffleupagus.

Give it some!

Any fule kno

This is from the BBC:

Schools 'need not expel under-7s'

The vast majority of excluded pupils are boys - often with special needs

Schools can avoid excluding very young children through techniques to manage behaviour that includes running off, biting and swearing, inspectors say.

I actually know quite a lot about this, coming from a family of teachers and having been a Special Classroom Assistant and later tried - and failed - to join my ancestors’ chalky ranks.

There have always been troubled and troublesome children.

Britain has never been a paradise for kids, even back in the day when the Welfare State hadn’t produced its third generation of fatherless and marriageless ‘families.’

My mother was the deputy head of one of those marvellous special schools that deal with this kind of problem.

I often spent time in these classrooms as a schoolchild too young to be left alone and sometimes later in my school holidays that didn’t co-ordinate with Mum’s term calendar.

There were always those wild kids who had no ‘off’ button nor a ‘slow’ button, either, and who had to be gently talked into moving and acting and talking at subsonic speeds, and they went to the special school – staffed as it was with specialists who had learned (and in some cases actually developed) techniques for dealing with the hyper ones.

Mum taught those suddenly, insanely violent but otherwise quiet ones whose tiny, malnourished figures would suddenly blaze into Tasmanian Devil-like whirlwinds of swearing, biting, gouging aggression as some genetic or historical demon compelled them to fight.

Mum taught kids whose parents just had no idea about anything, and who hadn’t taught them the rudiments of self-control or self-preservation, and sometimes the English as a second language ‘Asian’ girls who’d be bright as the sun, thirsty for knowledge and who’d suddenly disappear to you-know-where, to my mother’s horror.

Then there were the literally lousy and the oxygen-starved at birth mental slow-coaches and the should-have-been-in-Borstals, and even the odd ‘gifted’ child who had grown bored at the local grammar school and cut up rough as there was nothing but mischief to absorb the blows of their quick, inquiring minds.

And last there were the quiet ones whose grief and silence my mother would never explain to me at the time. I’d venture a guess today.

So many different little hellions from different little hells, and Mum’s school and most of her colleagues deal with them; cajoled and herded and quieted and soothed and taught them, and some o them went on to mainstream schools and jobs and marriages and away from the fathers and stepfathers and bottles and needles and neighbourhoods that had made them ‘special.’ Some did not.

But it worked.

Apparently, these schools went from combination LEA dumping-grounds and hotbeds of 1960’s idealism to craft workshops (but never factories) of limited, human-scale success. Think of that; slow evolution, trial-and error, building on experience and cutting away what fails and strengthening and building upon what actually works! I ask you, is that any way to build a good society?

It was still working in the ‘Noughties when I visited a special school for what was then part of my lead up to teaching practice.

This special school had a wire-enclosed playground and security like a political conference, and the teachers were still, 30 years later, bringing damaged and difficult children to knowledge and, despite frequent and spectacular tantrums, teaching them some of it. Some lessons were pretty basic like ‘How not to hit someone back,’ but still the lessons seemed to be going in and there was much good work on display – way above the finger-painting and plasticine dolls you might expect.

And I spend twelve glorious hours per week, paid at another school in the lower juniors in a not-nice part of the city looking after one troubled child.

He went into fugues as if no-one was there, and it took concentration and trickery and humour to bring the mind back to the empty-faced boy. But when it came back, he was ready to learn.

Sometimes I was with him as he mixed in with the other children in routine classes, and occasionally it was alright. But sometimes our work – with me supervising him and encouraging his efforts to keep up – distracted the others. Sometimes I had to take him out to cool down.

And all that disrupted the main lessons and the twenty-something children and the teacher and other classroom assistant who had to put up with him.

And ordinary schools have handfuls of ‘students’ on schemes like this, and they take up so much of the non-specialist teachers’ time and energy that I wondered then how much of a chance the others had to learn as we talked my customer down.

So we get this.

Ofsted chief inspector Christine Gilbert said: "Exclusion of children aged under seven is still very rare.

"Ofsted inspectors found that almost all children in the schools they visited knew how to behave properly.

"Only a small number of children found this difficult but, with proper guidance and support, the need to exclude them can be avoided."

I worked with teachers of such dedication and skill in both special and mainstream schools that if any schools could have integrated these children with the rest, then these were the ones.

They’d’ have reduced the numbers playing the system and getting special treatment, too, if corporal punishment was still on the menu.

Some kids seek attention and want their own support assistants and play on their untouchable status. I’ve seen it happen – the envy of kids obliged to play outside when they see their special needs classmates kept in the warm and helped and befriended by special adults.

‘Inclusion’ is the buzzword – the New Labour and progressive LEA project that has done much to close or diminish special schools chasing the rainbow of keeping the special children’s needs and problems mixed in with the rest. I saw some of these intensively cared-for children blossom within main schools and get on – but all the while reducing the time and energy left to the rest of the staff to spend on everyone else.

Here’s a secret; sometimes specialist schools work and after a period of intense effort and then consolidation they send their charges back to conventional schools and off they go. Sometimes specialist schools do in fact work and keep their pupils in all the way and give them the best start that they can. Sometimes – often – keeping the hard cases and the walking wounded in with the rest just eats up money, time, and the other children’s lives.

I wasn’t good enough to become a teacher (I must lack my parents’ knack of lighting up enough minds often enough and well enough or something) but I think that after years of being ill-educated and then better educated and then very well educated I know how important some basic level of peace and quite is to everyone’s school day.

I’m going to stick my neck out here and suggest that the thinking behind Ofsted’s report is ideological here, and wrong.

Just like the bright sparks who came up with comprehensive education and the Initial Teaching Alphabet and abandoning academic subjects and standards and chasing corporal punishment out of British education it’s possible; just possible, that Ofsted’s jokers now want to finish what the educational Left has started and close the centres of excellence that the specialists like my mother and her colleagues worked so long and so hard to build up.

Because ‘special’ means different and different means unequal and unequal is wrong.

Throw another generation of the fire – it’s getting a bit too privileged in here.