But that wasn’t the dichotomy I was presenting. People are being actively denied any agency over their own destiny. They’re either being prodded and pushed along a certain path, or they’re being left to drown. Sometimes both simultaneously, which is obviously a bit pointless.
Funding might be an issue, but given that any kid now has the world’s store of knowledge laid open for his perusal on the Internet, you could open a school in the middle of a field with kids sat on treestumps and still deliver a reasonably effective syllabus. Schools are awash with cash, at least in my home country. It’s just being mis-spent.
Good. We have some common ground then. Yes, of course you need the resources. But before that you need the will to actually do it. The genuine troublemakers are very few - out of a class of 35 there might be three or four. Get them out of there and the job gets a lot easier for the teacher, who is otherwise spending the entire lesson trying to get those few scumbags to calm down.
Worth adding, perhaps, that I’m not a great believer in school; I certainly don’t believe that school=education. The last thing any kid wants is to be told to sit down, shut up, and listen to some adult droning on about The Wars of the Roses or somesuch. Far better to give the kid a zest for life that he will direct towards finding out about The Wars of the Roses when he’s older.
In other words the little bastards are put into the same classes where other kids (and the teachers) are trying to make the best of things. I think we agree on principles if not on terminology.
That isn’t what I was suggesting. The idea that we are all ultimately responsible for our own actions, and for the consequences that arise from them, needs to be inculcated at an early age, and the idea needs to be backed up with actions. This is the underpinning of any Free society.
Bad parents who raise bad children should be hit with the full consequences of their decisions: their children will be denied mainstream education and moved to special schools, and they will foot the bill, from their social-security payments if necessary. Teenagers who end up in jail for shoplifting or GBH or whatever should pay every last cent of the costs incurred by their prosecution, imprisonment, and victim compensation. If that put certain individuals into conditions of dire poverty, so be it. It shouldn’t take very long for others to realise that raising antisocial little brats, or becoming a career criminal, is a lot harder than making choices which are both personally rewarding and better for society.
At present, criminals are rewarded for being criminals, and bad parents are rewarded for being bad parents. All of them are patted on the head and told that it’s not their fault and that “society” (ie., the people who go to work to subsidize their lifestyle via taxes) is responsible. This needs to stop.
The counterpoint to that is that some people are so damaged that they have no idea what good parenting or good behaviour looks like. They’ve never seen it. Somewhere along the line they need to have access to resources that helps them sort themselves out. But it needs to be done voluntarily. You can’t herd the bottom-feeders into parenting classes run by be-bangled social workers who are most likely bad parents themselves, but you can try to get through to them that there is something self-destructive in their thought patterns and behaviour, and try to establish social structures that provide the missing memes.
In the UK at least, such things do exist - eg., social workers ‘embedded’ inside poor communities who teach proper parenting techniques in a very informal manner - but without any strong incentive for people to pay attention, they won’t. And they don’t.
give me a break.