Sunday, May 01, 2005
Methinks The Man Needs Help With His Brain
A senior representative of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) might, quite possibly, be more stupid than the thickest of his pupils. He believes that parents should have to undergo compulsory lessons on how to bring up children. Great idea! Only, however, if I'm allowed to give Mr Gray training in how to do his job. I will, for example, teach him the merits of capital punishment, which I will do by means of demonstrations. Obviously, for him to truly understand, I shall have to demonstrate on him. I hope he appreciates the effort I'm going to to help him at his job.
Being serious for a moment - is this what life in Britain has come to? Where parents can't be trusted to bring up their own children without supervision from an agent of the state? My question to Mr Gray would be this: do you think you're parents should have been forced to attend compulsory parenting classes when you were born? And if not, why inflict it on me?
I am my parents first, and indeed last, child. They had all the usual troubles bringing me up that every parent has. I wouldn't go to sleep at the right times, wouldn't eat the food I was given, and all the myriad other little traumas that a new addition to the family causes. However, they certainly did not need help from 'experts' (and what a gloriously misleading term that is) to tell them what to do. Why? Because if they had problems, they had family and friends who they could turn to when they needed to. Yes, they were lucky. No, not everyone does have that luxury. Conceivably, therefore, it might be fair to say that better information could be available to those who need it. What is emphatically not needed, however, is the insistence upon attending classes with self-appointed 'experts', on the pain of having ones child benefit allowance removed.
However, don't waste all your anger on Mr Gray. Clearly, the man is a pillock of the first order, and I hope every day is a shit day for the rest of his career, and he is booed when walking down the street, but he's not the only one responsible for this. BBC Radio Five Live interviewed him yesterday, and in the midst of the interview, they played a clip which was a reporter asking people in the street if this was a good idea. The majority of those that were asked seemed to agree. Bloody hell. Well, all I can say is, if the British have become so useless that they can't bring up their own children without nanny checking over their shoulder, they deserve it. And don't expect any common sense from the NAHT - they voted unanimously to approve the proposal. So people who hate Labour should think twice before cheering the NAHT for booing and catcalling the Schools Minister today. They're equally loathsome.
Being serious for a moment - is this what life in Britain has come to? Where parents can't be trusted to bring up their own children without supervision from an agent of the state? My question to Mr Gray would be this: do you think you're parents should have been forced to attend compulsory parenting classes when you were born? And if not, why inflict it on me?
I am my parents first, and indeed last, child. They had all the usual troubles bringing me up that every parent has. I wouldn't go to sleep at the right times, wouldn't eat the food I was given, and all the myriad other little traumas that a new addition to the family causes. However, they certainly did not need help from 'experts' (and what a gloriously misleading term that is) to tell them what to do. Why? Because if they had problems, they had family and friends who they could turn to when they needed to. Yes, they were lucky. No, not everyone does have that luxury. Conceivably, therefore, it might be fair to say that better information could be available to those who need it. What is emphatically not needed, however, is the insistence upon attending classes with self-appointed 'experts', on the pain of having ones child benefit allowance removed.
However, don't waste all your anger on Mr Gray. Clearly, the man is a pillock of the first order, and I hope every day is a shit day for the rest of his career, and he is booed when walking down the street, but he's not the only one responsible for this. BBC Radio Five Live interviewed him yesterday, and in the midst of the interview, they played a clip which was a reporter asking people in the street if this was a good idea. The majority of those that were asked seemed to agree. Bloody hell. Well, all I can say is, if the British have become so useless that they can't bring up their own children without nanny checking over their shoulder, they deserve it. And don't expect any common sense from the NAHT - they voted unanimously to approve the proposal. So people who hate Labour should think twice before cheering the NAHT for booing and catcalling the Schools Minister today. They're equally loathsome.
Comments:
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It's an absolutely absurd idea.
I did like this one quote from the article, about children picking up swear words from their parents.
"When she had raised this with one mother, the woman had said "we use the F word all the time - but we don't swear."
Sounds like my parents.
I did like this one quote from the article, about children picking up swear words from their parents.
"When she had raised this with one mother, the woman had said "we use the F word all the time - but we don't swear."
Sounds like my parents.
It reminded me of a story I've heard in several places. It concerns a little girl, about five years old, who lived on a road, at the bottom of which a house was being built. Her curiosity piqued by the noise, she went and started to hang around the building site. The builders adopted her as a sort of living mascot, and at the end of the week they gave her a paypacket containing a small amount of money. She went with her mother to put the money in the bank, and the cashier asked her if she would be building a house next week, too. The little girl replied, "I will if we ever get the fucking bricks."
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