Should every secondary school have teachers?
nick cowen, 30 July 2008
While the DCSF’s priority currently is to make all schools “zero-carbon“(an ambition which always somehow reminds me of Pol Pot’s “year zero” objective), this amusing take on today’s announcement that each school shall have the option of having a policeman on hand reminds us what schools were for before the state got too involved. A police blog has noted how this policy isn’t, as the government like to say, “joined-up” with the latest police procedures. It is becoming increasingly difficult to tell whether a new Government announcement is meant to be about crime or about education. In years to come, we can expect the two to blur until schools (or, by then, child management centres) look more like prisons, while prisons will look increasingly like schools. “Zero carbon” prisons will be an interesting challenge for architects!
More socialist nonsense, which will fail because we are human beings and not the placid, flaccid, static, commune-orientated plankton that we are required to be for socialism to work.
The zero carbon aims will generally produce these ends: Carbon will become expensive, until it becomes cheaper for large energy companies to buy their credits from the entitlements of poorer countries. The poorer countries therefore forego cheap, plentiful (but dirty) primary energy (coal & gas), for quick bucks frittered hell-knows-where. If this capacity disappears, so does the means to stimulate industry as in Russia, China, India et al.
The policeman in the school will do this: Fail utterly to detain the trouble-makers and miscreants, but act as a powerful symbol that the school is a riot zone (particularly when stabbed during a 3rd year Religious Education class). The symbol will fuel further the desire of middle-class parents to take their nice children and deposit them in the School of Rational Thinking & Good Manners. This will leave the School of Rainbow Liberalism to get on with the job of teaching their incendiary mix of fictitious World history and sex education.
There is a really interesting PhD thesis somewhere which might explore the timescales required for socialist values to become established in a free-market, versus the time it takes for people to destroy it. It is like a bridge never built, due to the fact the money runs out and everyone throws stones at it when it becomes clear where it’s heading. Somehow, it also leaves the abyss wider than when it started.
Why is this relevant you may ask? Well, what more iconic gesture of Left wing failure can their be than a policeman in a classroom: His presence required because of the systematic erosion of personal responsibility, family values and the primacy of a literal common sense in education.