The first of the pandemic babies started school this year and it’s not looking good.
The news is awash with stories of traumatised children, harassed teachers, falling standards, uncontrollable behaviour and serious violence. Did anyone see this coming?
Even more remarkable is the solution that teachers are proposing: Give us more money! Funding, yes funding, is what is needed – for more teacher aides, child psychologists and support programmes.
Sorry, ladies and gents. The money isn’t there because the economy is wrecked just like the kids are wrecked. And the child psychologists aren’t there either, because the children you failed to educate 20 years ago haven’t magically turned themselves into skilled professionals.
As usual in the education debate, the parents blame the teachers and the teachers blame the parents. That, after all, is the great attraction of the school system: it gives everyone someone to blame and the lousy kids are always somebody else’s fault.
Now I’m not one who thinks that ‘the government’ can and should fix everything. But there are laws that cause serious harm and it needs to be pointed out. The amendment of Section 59 of the Crimes Act in 2007 made “the use of force for the purpose of correction” by parents into a crime. This is not just an ‘anti-smacking law’, as it’s so often called. Rather, it effectively makes the family an illegal institution in this country. (An institution makes and enforces rules and, if it can’t do that, then it is nothing more than a group of people who happen to be together.) A generation later, children are out of control – is it any surprise? And parents are being blamed for it, when they don’t have legal powers of correction.
Corporal punishment had already been abolished in the schools in 1987 and banned in 1990. So there was a generation of children who could still behave reasonably well in school because they were getting discipline at home. That generation is now grown up and gone. Today’s children are the product of ‘positive parenting’, apart from those whose parents who still practice spanking and live with the threat of having their lives torn apart by state social services.
Of course, banning ‘smacking’ was supposed to make family life more peaceful and pleasant. But now teachers are reporting children coming to school traumatised by serious abuse and they want child psychologists to help them deal with it. Am I missing something here? If parents can be put through hell on earth for ‘smacking’, why aren’t they being arrested for serious abuse? How is psychology supposed to solve the problem?
My point is: this was already a crisis before 2020. The so-called ‘pandemic response’ traumatised the whole population and now we all have PTSD on top of everything else we were already dealing with.
Could we just bring back smacking and fix this? I don’t know, because the culture has changed. Harm is easier to do than it is to reverse.
I accept that the internet and social media are part of the problem, but I don’t think they’re the heart of the problem. The heart of the matter is relationships – relationships we no longer have because the ‘positive parenting’ generation don’t know how to have positive and deep relationships. We take to social media because we’re lonely. We’re lonely partly because families are all living in different institutions and workplaces and hardly see each other. And that is partly because of the so-called ‘cost of living’, much of which is actually the cost of taxation and the cost of false ‘property values’ imposed from above.
So I don’t think ‘the government’ can solve the problems, especially not by spending yet more money or by employing psychologists to help children learn to accept living with serious abuse. But there are laws that are doing real harm and I would like to see that acknowledged in a public debate.
