Blairite education: the gift that keeps on giving.

[fpb]

Four years and two months ago I argued that the catastrophic failure of contemporary British schools, and especially Tony Blair's utter unwillingness to deal with the real problems, was pouring out enormous numbers of young people (I estimated one twelfth of the whole generation) who were functionally illiterate, utterly unable to function in any significant manner in a modern society, excluded by nature... but very clever with computers. I underestimated this last issue, but I did point out that the stupid computer classes so eagerly championed by Blair were nothing but free periods with internet, in which each child played with the machine as they saw fit. They could not spell or count, but man could they play with graphics and surf the net. Then, one year and eleven months ago, I singled out a Harriet Sergeant article that told the same story and defended its importance and significance against inverarity, who managed, like many liberals faced with unwelcome messages, to find a "racist tinge" in it.

Now we see the results of everyone's chronic incapacity to deal with reality and facts on the ground. The police, paralyzed by PC, have nearly forgotten that their place in life is to use force - any force necessary - to maintain or restore order: in the face of viciously destructive rioting carried out mostly by black boys, they see the skin colour and fall back. From one end of England to the other, the story is the same: rioters loot at will, almost unhampered by any show of force. The police brag of having arrested a few hundred looters and charged a few dozen. That noise you hear is the laughter of thousands upon thousands of rioters.

What happens when hundreds of thousands of young men find that they are wholly excluded from national life - since they are too ignorant to read the papers, too innumerate to be gainfully employed, and carry a chip on their shoulder to boot - and effectively have no future? Now we have the answer. I have never been less happy to have been proved right. There is only one possible upside to this: we shall no longer hear from smug, out-of-touch ministers bragging how Britain is a "happy exception" in the landscape of international turmoil and crisis. When I heard Vincent Cable of all people saying that, I felt like tearing his throat out.

Comments

BOTH LINKS GO TO THE SAME PAGE

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

Surely the second should be

http://fpb.livejournal.com/418833.html

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

What do you think of this blog post:
http://pennyred.blogspot.com/2011/08/panic-on-streets-of-london.html

I was struck by the lines, "Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out" since "judgmental handwringing about 'lack of parenting'" was brought up in the comments on your link to the Sergeant article two years ago.

I hope you are personally all right

[joetexx.livejournal.com]

I am getting alarmed at the reports of the scale and extnt of the rioting.

When I checked Stormy Petrel this AM my recent comments and the entire Mussolini entry wre not there. Then I noticed I was not logged in. Everything is now back but it was disconcerting because never before had being logged in had anything to do with what you could actually see on the screen.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

[avus.livejournal.com]

May you and all your hold dear stay safe. I'm happy, too, that you have family nearby. It's hard to know what's happening from this side of the pond, but in our experience, in the States, too often violence provokes more violence. May you be spared that.