NOVANEWS
Creating The Generation We Want
The amount of meaningless drivel coming out of the British media in relation to the recent riots has reached epic proportions. The hang’em flog’em brigade is in full voice, closely followed by regressive calls for conscription, and worst of all, the unimaginative and punitive US ‘solution’ now hanging like a sword of Damocles over our collective heads.
Of course in the US the small strand of uber rich is even richer than here in the UK, and this minority certainly gets richer at a phenomenal pace. The low income families in the US are possibly in a worse mess than the low income families in the UK. Violence is higher, gun crime is endemic, and politics has failed, so it’s great idea to speed up the process of decimating our own society by instigating the oppressive and failed measures of another society.
We need the confidence to pursue a new approach. 11 years of full time education has yielded poor results, and the education system has failed a large proportion of young people. Prison only teaches offenders to be better criminals. The prison system has never worked. If it had worked in the past we would not need it now.
Many parents have thrown in the towel. Feral children haunt every neighbourhood. Foul- mouthed and lazy parents are a menace to society, inequality, poor education and meaningless punishment systems are the norm.
Imaginative and progressive solutions are being stifled at birth, and the answers do not lie in history, they lie in a fresh progressive approach which tackles the layers of systemic failure head on, and in parallel. It took 4 people – a white front line social worker, a young black mother working in equalities, a disenfranchised woman caring for her elderly mother and myself – 10 minutes to work through the following solution:
From the age of 2 all children would go to small neighbourhood pre schools at no charge – with no get-out clause for anyone rich or poor. They would get 3 meals a day plus a snack to take home. Parents would then be free to work, the resultant tax income contributing to the cost of extra schooling. If parents chose to fulfil the prophesy of multi generational laziness their benefits would be replaced by vouchers which could only be spent in one place. Training for parents would be available.
Simultaneously, older children missing the initial introduction to greater equality and wider socialisation would be filtered into age groups, and at key teenage years boys and girls would be educated separately to save them from their own hormonal confusion. There would be a progressive and staged education system delivered by hands-on experienced trainers, quite possibly from the armed forces – who are exemplary trainers, but who currently train for the wrong thing – but also from all walks of life.
The emphasis would be on setting boundaries, understanding discipline, being an instrinsic part of the community, and leaning how to learn. Tick boxes would be abolished, practical skills encouraged. Individual assessments would guide young people towards jobs for which they show a natural aptitude. A vast system of apprenticeships would have yearly graduation points where income would increase with performance. Monthly wages could start from 14 years of age where learning would dovetail with employability. Those with a more academic preference and ability would be similarly channelled, but with more emphasis on learning and opportunities for free university places.
Those entrenched in disrespectful and destructive behaviour would be channelled to appropriate terms of ‘boot camp’ style activities, and filtered back into the mainstream system when appropriate. Older children would learn good parenting skills.
The ultimate aim would be to leapfrog ahead of the game, reigning in the tendency for bad and disrespectful behaviour in the current generation, and preventing it in the next. Mopping up bad parenting has to be a crucial step, but overcoming the root causes of our ills is essential. Clamping down brutally on those whose life options are rapidly diminishing is not the answer. Facing up to and taking radical imaginative action toward a progressive and more equal society is.
If society delegates these most important decisions to a government which can only see punishment as the answer to a generation of increasingly disenfranchised young people, then society is failing itself. We need an open and frank debate.
See: COEXISTing with the generation we want
