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Pastimes : Let’s Talk About Our Feelings about the Let’s Talk About Our -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (5148)	3/8/2009 9:32:27 AM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5290

To Hell with 'Niceness' Monday, March 2, 2009 by Kenneth Minogue The question about our own time I want to explore is: why have the British (and to some extent other Anglophones) allowed family and school life to collapse so extensively? The collapse has not happened on all levels of society, but it is widespread enough to affect everyone. The statistics, for what they are worth, are remarkable. According to a Channel 4 Dispatches programme in January, a poll conducted for the teaching union NASUWT suggested that 97 per cent of teachers had disruptive children in their classes. Almost three-quarters (74.4 per cent) claimed to have problems with physically aggressive children, while almost half (45.5 per cent) noted that the disruptive behaviour of a minority was a daily occurrence. ...before the watershed 1960s... children had defined places in a classroom and learned rapidly the decorum necessary for school life. There was no question of choosing whether or not to behave, because there was an order of conduct enforced by the teacher and it applied to everyone. The teacher was "an authority figure", and like all authority figures inspired a certain amount of fear, part of which depended on the possibility of physical punishment. Such punishment was seldom used, but it was part of an understood world. As a supply teacher in a variety of primary and secondary modern schools around Brixton, south London, for 18 months in those days, I only once had occasion to call for the cane, which was sent (with the caning record book) straight up from the headmaster's office. As I raised the cane over the offender's hand, a chorus came from the class: "Mustn't raise the cane above your shoulder, Sir, LCC regulation." These were children who had not yet been accorded the absurdity of rights, but they understood very well that they lived under a rule of law. ...the niceness movement has powerfully changed family life. Sixties' liberation detested the frustrating conventions by which (to put it crudely) sex had to be traded for commitment. Commitment is painful, especially to individuals with little talent for controlling impulse. Many restrictive conventions were abandoned so that the young should be free to follow wherever their impulses might lead. Divorce became easier - yet the number of couples getting married dramatically declined. This left many of the resulting children in an unstable world, especially if they belonged to what was euphemistically called a "single-parent family...Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues. Niceness presents itself as benevolence, but is often merely an evasion of hard decisions that the realities of human nature require...Cont. stephenhand2.blogspot.com