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

[fpb.livejournal.com]

She is mostly right, but wrong in the essential. A riot is an admission of defeat. It is the declaration that the excluded minority of functional illiterates and lifelong unemployed has no relation with the country. It is a declaration of war without a hope of victory and without a program. And all it will achieve in the long term will be to harden the position of the majority. Even the let's-all-talk-and-solve-this-together that she seems to be advocating will not work, because the gang culture is incapable of talking constructively - all it can say is "give!" It has never been brought up to express itself, think constructively and work with long-term purpose. It has been spat out of the schools without any ability to deal with the world as it is except in a parasitic way. But the majority, which belongs to the middle-class culture, which does know how to work the system, how to set themselves long-term goals and achieve them, will use any let's-talk structures for its own advantage; at best to discipline the minority, at worst to deepen their exclusion. The minority know just enough to know that they are excluded, but not enough to do anything about it. And their rage is mostly visited against their own immediate neighbours and colleagues; thus grinding them even further in the dust. There is, in short, NOTHING constructive to be got out of this situation. I say this without joy and without pleasure, but the only thing that can be done immediately is to use force to suppress the riots and punish as many rioters as possible. Unfortunately, even that will be difficult, because the smug idiots who claim to be governing this country have cut the number of police and soldiers, and have not done anything at all to understand the constant growth in jail population except stop building new jails - which means that the jails are overfilled as they are - Britain already has the highest jail population per total population in Europe - and that if a suitably large number of rioters are punished, they will explode. The smug, self-regarding BASTARDS who have polluted this country for decades have made it monstrously difficult to deal with the very issue they have ultimately caused, by allowing the unchecked growth of an uneducated underclass whose sole relationship with the country is parasitic.