Education, education, education?

So the great pendulum of ‘who-to-blame-for-unruly-children’ has swung back in the direction of parents this morning. Eminent academics at Cambridge have discovered that parents are spoiling their children and as a result, said children are running riot in classrooms across the country, with poor teachers unable to control their charges.

The story is an old one, and so is the process of blame-laying. Time and time again these sorts of stories hit the headlines. One week we can blame the teachers for not having sufficient backbone to deal with the children they face across their desks (we could blame the teachers’ parents for this one, I guess, for giving them too easier a ride whilst they were growing up). Next it will be the turn of diet to take the swing of the pendulum-of-blame. It may be the diet we feed them at home (too many chocolaty breakfast cereals and not enough fruit), or the slop apparently lazy dinner ladies serve up, accompanied by turkey twizzlers and about as much nutritional content as a piece of cardboard (though that may admittedly contain more fibre than the average toddler’s diet).

Or, like today, it will be the turn of parents to take the brunt of the criticism for a nation of hyperactive, over-indulged youngsters hell-bent on destroying the education system with their selfishness.

So is it not time we found another story? One which encompasses all of the culprits, but puts them on the stage, under the spotlight, illuminated by their contextual circumstances? We have teachers, rushed through a training system following graduation from a university degree where they were awarded proportionately higher grades for a lower standard of work than their predecessors ten years ago, because the university system is under pressure to pump out ever more 1st Class degree results because students are after all paying for the privilege these days (or rather, their over-indulgent parents are paying for the privilege).

Or how about a food industry controlled by supermarket giants pushing the boundaries of mass production to ever greater extremes, in order to put the cheapest produce on their shelves as the highest possible price for the sole purpose of driving up their profit margins?

And what about one of the poor farmers who might be locked in a vicious circle, producing perfectly round apples, with no blemishes or irregularities, discarding copious amounts of perfectly acceptable fruit each week, because the supermarket will refuse to take them. Hey, next week they may even refuse to take the farmer’s produce at all if there are too many slightly too elliptical apples in the crates, and where does that leave the farmer?

A farmer who may be a parent, working ever more crazy hours to try and bring in a decent enough living to support the family. A farmer who probably has to do a weekly shop in an out-of-town supermarket giant, because all the local shops have closed down under the monopoly that is food retailing these days in Britain. A supermarket which is pumped full of sweets, processed ‘foods’ aimed at kids, toys and plastic-fantastic distractions of all descriptions to tempt their children (who they have to drag round the shop with them because they can’t shop during school hours because they are working and they can’t afford childcare after school because their income is barely keeping apace with the cost of living).

And talking of keeping a pace – what about that poor dinner lady, struggling to put nutritious meals on the table for several hundred children each day, for less cash-per-head than the average prisoner is allocated for their meals. It took Jamie Oliver to shout at the government to make a change in that system. But why should it have needed a celebrity to make them sit up and listen – why couldn’t they have taken notice of parents who had been complaining about the state of school meals for years? Or to the head teachers and dinner ladies who tried repeatedly to get across the ludicrous situation they found themselves in, only for it to fall on deaf ears? Government don’t listen to us ordinary mortals.

Let’s return to the poor teacher or even the university lecturer, struggling to make ends meet on a salary which reflects an out-dated notion of teaching being a vocation, reward enough in itself, not requiring adequate financial recompense. Struggling with ever more paper work and marking which eats into the evenings and weekends, taking them away from valuable time they could be spending with their children.

Children who pester, and pester, and pester.
Because that is what children do.
And the parent gives in and buys them a treat for being so good and letting the parent get on with their work.
And so the child is being spoilt.

Ok, so the report is highlighting super-spoiling, as in the case of a child who having broken a game-station in a fit of rage, was then bought a replacement by the parent. But what do headlines like today’s do to those of us who do occasionally give in to pester-power, because that is the only way to cope in a society where value is measured only by price-tags, and progress is assessed only in terms of profit-margins, and children are not stupid – they hear the message pumped at them constantly through the television, they see the message hidden in the glossy images seen all around them in magazines, comics, billboards and on the back of cereal packets (even the ones that don’t contain chocolate).

Consumption, consumption, consumption.

If that is the message the world is giving them, how can we blame the parents for giving in?

I blame the government, for giving in. For rolling over in submission to the supermarket giants, the advertising industry, the global brands. If the government gives in so easily to the pester power of these corporate giants, what message does that give to parents?

And they tell our children that they shouldn’t be swayed by their celebrity idols, they should listen to their teachers instead for guidance and education. What, like they listened to the teachers about school dinners? They surely didn’t listen to a celebrity instead, did they..?

Education, education, education?
Yea, whatever….

What in heaven's name...?

I walked in to the living room this morning to find my kids at each other’s throats as usual. Not an uncommon start to the day, but there did seem to be a heightened sense of tension on this occasion. As I arrived on the scene legs and arms were disentangled, small fists full of hair were released, and a whirlwind of small bodied appeared at my feet desperate to get their version of the story out first. A lot was clearly at stake.

Poppy it seems had gone to the window and staring out at the bleak rain-drenched scene requested that God intervene to stop the downpour so we could all get to school without the need for umbrellas (her Tweenie one is broken, so she had a vested interest in God turning in a positive result).

Sadly, as is so often the case, God’s intervention did not appear instantaneously and Poppy therefore turned her back on the window, stomped back to the settee and promptly declared God does not exist. Now her theory is of course nothing new, indeed very eminent social theorists have staked their reputations on making precisely the same pronouncement – I’m thinking here particularly of Steve Bruce’s scholarly best seller ‘God Is Dead’. But he didn’t have 7 year old Lily to contend with.

So I had walked into a scene which has been repeated in different guises for centuries past, and will no doubt continue to be so repeated for many centuries to come. Lily tearfully defending her right to believe in God, Poppy declaring God was defunct. In our case it ended in the youngest administering a kick to the eldest and all hell breaking out…

…and so began many of the wars we currently see raging across the world I guess...

Growing old with Gere..?

We had rather a late night last night. One of those rare occasions when the kids are packed off to my mother-in-law’s for a sleepover. A few years ago an evening to ourselves might have been spent down the pub, a few games of pool, many pints of beer, followed by a night of passion and a late lie-in with bacon butties and copious amounts of tea.

But age is catching up with us. We went for a sedate meal, drank a couple of bottles of wine and were in bed fast asleep before midnight – desperate really to make the most of a night of uninterrupted sleep.

For poor Bill however it was not to be an uninterrupted night of sleep. Eating rich food and drinking too much sauvignon blanc so close to bedtime left him tossing and turning and resorting to sitting in front of the cricket at four in the morning, lamenting the slow rate at which his aging body now digests food and drink which his younger body could have brushed off without so much as a belch.

So this is what the future holds – even those nights when we are footloose and kiddie-free we will have to indulge in measured moderation for fear of the repercussions on our aging bodies.

This morning I dragged my own aging body, creaking at the knees and woozy in the head to the kitchen to make that life-restoring first brew of the day. Bending down to get the milk from the fridge I had to do a double take. For on the bottom shelf of the fridge, sandwiched between a wooden board and some cling-film was Bill’s Silver Spoon. Now I’m not talking teaspoons here, this wasn’t some absent minded placing of the spoon in the fridge with the milk. But The Silver Spoon – ‘the most influential and successful cook book in Italy’ according to Amazon (my Italian ex-brother-in-law apparently disputes this claim, but my good friend from Naples, a keen chef, would side with Amazon).

Anyway, we are digressing from the point (another sign of an aging and rambling mind?). There it was on the bottom shelf, chilling nicely next to the cheese and crème fraiche, and I decided that this must definitely be the first sign of dementia. Putting your cookbooks in the fridge is surely up there with using denture glue to clean your teeth? (Which is what I saw my Grandmother do once during the onset of her Alzheimer’s).

Of course not all signs of aging are necessarily problematic. Bill visited the hairdressers this week and was told by the hairdresser that he had a lovely thick head of hair and it was unlikely he was ever going to go bald.
‘That’s as maybe,’ he replied, ‘but my wife’s waiting for me to go grey’.
(There’s something about grey hair, don’t you think?)
‘Ah!’ replied the knowledgeable hairdresser, ‘the Richard Gere look. Yes, a lot of women want their men to go grey like Richard Gere.’
‘I guess so,’ he replied.

There was a pause.

She snipped around the nape of his neck then progressed the conversation with another observation: ‘Only not many of them actually do, do they?’
‘What?’
‘End up looking like Richard Gere?’ she said.
‘I guess not.’

Very wise that hairdresser, clearly not losing her marbles yet. Unlike me and my sweet William.

The cookbook by the way was to flatten some pork belly. Gordon Ramsay’s idea apparently. Now there’s a man bordering on madness, and those wrinkles…