Fatty Johann is shocked that being a waster doesn't always lead to a well-paid job. Naturally, the solution is for everyone else to hand over their wallets and let the government build some kind of 'welfare system'.
See? That's the kind of bold thinking which explains how we ended up with the hard working kids of today as compared to our skivving ancestors.
Or something.
Still, Fat Boy manages to samba round the other elephant in the room. Yes, he was an idle, self-obsessed little brat - rather than now, when he's a very big one - but he managed to pull out of it and become a media-luvvie. And?
The privileged and the pampered have always been able to indulge in self-destructive lunacy confident that their background would protect them from the consequences. What's new since the 1960s has been people like Hari trying to re-brand dysfunctional insanity as morally superior to those conformists squaresville losers, who waste their lives doing actual 'jobs'.
If there's one thing more than any other that afflicts 'disaffected yoof', it's that they've bought into the myth pushed by spoilt rich kids like Hari that screwing up your life makes you a heroic rebel striking a blow against The Man.
See? That's the kind of bold thinking which explains how we ended up with the hard working kids of today as compared to our skivving ancestors.
Or something.
Still, Fat Boy manages to samba round the other elephant in the room. Yes, he was an idle, self-obsessed little brat - rather than now, when he's a very big one - but he managed to pull out of it and become a media-luvvie. And?
The privileged and the pampered have always been able to indulge in self-destructive lunacy confident that their background would protect them from the consequences. What's new since the 1960s has been people like Hari trying to re-brand dysfunctional insanity as morally superior to those conformists squaresville losers, who waste their lives doing actual 'jobs'.
If there's one thing more than any other that afflicts 'disaffected yoof', it's that they've bought into the myth pushed by spoilt rich kids like Hari that screwing up your life makes you a heroic rebel striking a blow against The Man.
9 comments:
If there's one thing more than any other that afflicts 'disaffected yoof', it's that they've bought into the myth pushed by spoilt rich kids like Hari that screwing up your life makes you a heroic rebel striking a blow against The Man.
I skimmed through the Fat Boy's blatherings - and think that there is also an undercurrent of the educationalist/liberal myth that disaffected, disruptive trouble makeing pupils are 'bright'. ie brighter than average.
I think thats bollocks.
Of course maybe the school I attended was atypical.
But then thats the purpose of much propaganda. You are encouraged to feel that what you experience in everyday life is the atypical, outlier example.
Somewhere else in the real world of the MSM, TV drama, advertising is this liberal, multicultural paradise where everything is superbly functional. Its just your school/college/uni/workplace etc etc where a few bad apples are causing problems.
Lurker
"...the educationalist/liberal myth that disaffected, disruptive trouble makeing pupils are 'bright'. ie brighter than average."
They are convinced that this next lump of suspiciously smelly stuff will contain a diamond in the rough, and only their skills are up to polishing it...
Well, no, he doesn't say that at all; he explicitly points out that, of the kids who dropped out, some were intelligent, some weren't. The entire point of the article is that the reason why kids rebel against authority is not that they're stupid and not that they're intelligent. But hey, Lurker skim-read it and now Julia can be sarcastic towards Hari for something he never wrote or implied but Lurker claims he might have picked up because he couldn't be arsed reading it properly. Feh.
I disagree with Hari about pretty much everything, but I'm with him on this one. The teachers who are able to keep discipline at school are the ones who have a connection with the kids. The ones who try just plain discipline by itself are doing it all the time, precisely because it never works. That was exactly my experience at school, and I was one of the good ones.
I can see the point about not wanting to reward bad behaviour, but I can also see the profound stupidity behind insisting that every single child must have an identical amount of resources spent on it in case one is deemed to be "stealing" from the others. This is bollocks on stilts. Different kids need different amounts of teaching. If you were running a firm and you hired someone with 20 years' experience and a kid straight from school, would you insist on sending them both on exactly the same training courses to ensure you were being "fair"?
Plus, of course, you're missing the rather obvious point that when you spend resources on making disruptive kids less disruptive you are in fact rewarding all the kids in the class. That's what "disruptive" means.
"Plus, of course, you're missing the rather obvious point that when you spend resources on making disruptive kids less disruptive you are in fact rewarding all the kids in the class. That's what "disruptive" means."
Simpler to just remove them. Disruption sorted, and the others get a valuable lesson: being a squeaky wheel doesn't guarantee you'll get more than your fair share of the grease!
"...and now Julia can be sarcastic towards Hari for something he never wrote or implied.."
Oh, I found plenty to be sarcastic about! I always do, with a Hari article. He must be far and away the worst journalist the 'Indy' has, and god knows, that's a strong field!
So if there's plenty he did write for you to be sarcastic about, why add something he didn't?
> Simpler to just remove them. Disruption sorted
No, not sorted; moved. To some other school and onto our streets and into our workplaces and onto welfare for life. Yeah, that's a far better idea than that a school actually educate the kid.
> ... and the others get a valuable lesson: being a squeaky wheel doesn't guarantee you'll get more than your fair share of the grease!
But this simply isn't how children see things. Seriously, you've found a school where the kids who get taken out of the main classes and given remedial lessons are objects of envy? Is it on Earth? No matter how sensitively teachers might approach these things, they're always viewed as punishment classes for retards.
I was merely responding to the comment made by anon above - it might not have been something Hari brought up in the article, but you can't deny that it has been a theory of educationalists?
As far as removing them goes, my preference wouldn't be to another school. It would be to a specially-staffed unit where they could be assessed and those who can be helped are helped. But I think we need to stop assuming that that's 100% of the total. Some can -and should- be written off.
And yes, some disruptive and ASBO kids have hundreds of thousands of pounds in resources squandered on them - remember 'Safari Boy'?
Of course, to a certain group, this will be seen as 'winning'...
Yes, but at no point does Hari even obliquely allude to that sort of crap. He's not talking about sending kids on expensive junkets; he's talking about having decent teachers who understand that there's more to it than just telling kids stuff and shouting if they don't listen. He is exactly right about the difference between teachers who understand that you have to have a personal connection with the kids and those who don't. He is exactly right that kids respond very badly to adults who have contempt for them (or who make their contempt for them obvious).
> It would be to a specially-staffed unit where they could be assessed and those who can be helped are helped.
Right, and this would cost nothing for some reason, would it? Because, in response to this —
The rapper Plan B has talked about how his educational misery-go-round was only ended when his school set up a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) – a calm place where he could be taken out of lessons to go to be given one-on-one attention by sympathetic and consistent teachers who wanted to hear why he was having so much trouble.
— you complained about the cost. It looks suspiciously similar to what you say is your preferred solution. Except that PRUs are set up in schools so use existing infrastructure, but you say you'd prefer a separate specially-staffed unit, which will require an extra building, more staff, and another layer of bureaucracy. You've clearly given this one a lot of thought.
You should listen to Plan B's first album. You'd be surprised at how much he agrees with you.
I should add that the people in charge of making decisions about which kids to "write off" would be teachers. I had never previously picked up from your blog that you had such massive faith in their excellent judgement. You want to give teachers the power to consign eleven-year-olds to the welfare or criminal classes for life? Genius. We could have a whole generation of kids denied education for wearing their ties wrong, for not liking games, for complaining about being bullied, for being known to smoke outside school, or for persistently and impudently having had the wrong colour of recent ancestor. I saw all those kids marked as trouble-makers for no good reason. Do you even remember school?
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