One of the things that people feel pleased about in the modern world is the extended childhood.
A couple of centuries ago kids were expected to go out and help earn at quite a young age.
Enlightened us consider this a reprehensible thing, and can scarce think other than those parents of yore were somehow malicious. We demand that children be able to reach ages near their 20th before deeming that they should take on adult responsibilities.
Sounds nice, yeah?
And yet, we now burden them with responsibility for the whole freaking planet, for all people, all life of all species, of all time. Moreover they are not considered to have been born in innocence, but they are guilty by dint of their very birth.
Children once worked on the farm from a young age but at least it was under the instruction and supervision of people parents. Even ignoring parental love there was the fact that an injured kid could contribute nothing that would have them calibrate what they get the kid to do. The family mattered back then.
Now it is all about heaping causes, issues and guilt upon them by their teachers. These teachers are not responsible for bringing up the child. At the end of the year the conveyor belt slips along and the kid goes to the next year. The teacher does not have to pay for the psychologist, help them sleep at night, or explain to them that it is OK for them to go on a holiday instead of worrying about seas washing over their houses and bones bleaching in barren deserts. They don’t have to tell the kids that they are not bad just because they are boys, or that the kid who hand-made Valentine’s card for their daughter is not a ropist in waiting.
The ones who actually love the kids are being sidelined. All is being given to the teachers and the teachers unions. But they don’t give a rat’s for kids. Their eyes are focused elsewhere, beyond their charges, where all their causes converge into a utopian mirage. To them children are just a translucent blur that they are looking though.
Those kids who used to help Mum with the washing or Dad with feeding the pigs were in paradise compared to the purgatory kids are born into today.
I know for a fact the scare of a nuclear holocaust deformed my thinking as a kid back in the 70’s-80’s.
Why study when tomorrow you will be coughing your lungs up into a radioactive puddle while roaming road gangs used the other end as a bike rack.
The incredible harm dome to teenage minds by the neo-gretas and covid pornographers has deformed another generation.
I was a young Mum in the 80’s. I remember the cover of one of Midnight Oil’s albums showing a dustbowl with Sydney harbour in the centre. A crater was where the bomb had dropped. Everything appeared hopeless. My little children, so precious to me, might not grow up to adulthood. Fear, along with conspicuous consumption, was the order of the day. Debt flourished because there would be no “tomorrow”.
It was all a lie, of course. The children are now middle aged, with children of their own. Against the backdrop of hopelessness, I made sure they had a childhood, I paid off the mortgage, and I invested in the future.
And here we are again.
My little bloke grows up in a world free from IPads and TV. He lives an idyllic 1950’s childhood filled with visits from friends, gardening, pedal cars, books, board games and visits to his grandparents farm.
Calli – now I know you know that some Lego glows in the dark ?
Anyway, school and trades/university should be cut.
No kindergarten (actually start school later).
Cut year 10 out.
Take out three weeks of holidays each schooling year – bam – there’s another year.
Make university three trimesters as standard – most degrees can be two years.
(I understand some apprenticeships are now one or two years only (?)).
Make PDY part of the final year of trades and professions.
Basically we could have trained microbiologists starting full time work as professional scientists the year they turn 19. Or you could have a journeyman plumber or carpenter in the same ideal situation. A barrister managing their own law firm by the year they turn 22. An engineer starting work at the end of the year they turn 19.
Also: bring back being able to test straight into various professional qualifications, where the qualification gives you licence to ply your newly qualified trade.
…and yes, you should be able to leave school and start working after you finish school the year you turn 15 or 16 (once again). (But also homeschooling and allowing people to work after they of age to start high school…).
I really didn’t know that. I usually manage to tread on the spikiest sort.
Now, presumably, it will be gender neutral and not hurt so much.
I was a kid in the 60s and 70s. I was never worried about nuclear war, probably because it wasn’t pushed at school. As far as I can recall, teachers stuck to teaching their subject without political messaging. Though I do recall my maths teacher in year 10 stating that, despite not being allowed to mention politics, he would anyway, then went on a rant. Whitlam was PM at the time, so I suspect he might have had a gutful of him, but such was interest in politics at the time, I can’t remember whether that was actually the case. I left school after year 10 to do an apprenticeship and left home once I turned 17. I had a great childhood.
Kids today are not so lucky. They have to deal with a whole lot of political bullshit, not just from individual teachers but from the curriculum. ‘Climate change’, misandry, gender, homosexual and Aboriginal worship, the poor tykes cop it for well over a decade. We witness kids in obvious distress during ridiculous, school approved ‘climate change’ rallies.
Excellent post ML.
I remember when I was a kid, around 10 years of age, and hearing about terrible bombs that could come out of nowhere and kill me, my family, all my friends, and everyone. Our side had them and so did the ‘other’ side.
I told my Mum that I was scared and asked what if it happened. She consoled me saying that both sides were scared to use the bombs because then the other guys would use them.
I now recognise this as MADness.
I still recall the relief I felt at that inescapable logic and I was not bothered by the thought of nuclear weapons again until much later when I picked up a lot more knowledge and had emotionally matured considerably.
A guy I know is/was a barrister but he runs his own building/fitout company.
Pulls apart the lawnmower engine just to fix a stuck valve
True as I’m typing this he called me an anti-vaxer fukwit on the phone tonight
Never look at a bloke in hi-vis and assume anything
MotherLode is right. Raising them is more than sending them to skool
Rickw … hold that as long as you can. It will pay off in spades.
show him the lathe and the Lead Screw and risk a finger
boy will think for himself instead of being lead by the nose
We were thrown out on the street and told to come back for dinner. We had to learn to look after ourselves.
Today’s kids are helicoptered and cocooned. Bombarded with woke ideology designed to enslave and weaken them and gradually depopulate us while being as unaware as the boiling frog of what the agenda is.
Reality they are told is a political and social construct. Wokeism teaches that you can see things however you like and that no view is better or worst than anything else, except those that don’t agree with wokeism. It is an exclusionary, evil ideology rooted in a bastardisation of eastern philosophy bounded by marxism, masquerading as good while squatting its anal orifice on the moral high ground.
It is every parent’s obligation to educate their own kids about the brainwashing that goes on at school, on social media and in the legacy mainstream media.
They told me when I was a kid that we had to ban the bomb or we’d all be blown to buggery.
I didn’t believe them. I recognised the marchers as gullible nitwits. It wasn’t difficult.
Much more recently than that, M.L.
When I went to high school in the late 60’s/early 70’s, in working class families it was common for kids to leave school at 15 and get a job. They were expected to pay board once they were earning – often a nominal amount but the principle was considered to be important.
Only 5% of the school population went to university back then, and then there were a larger group who did vocational training from age 16 (School Certificate) or 18 (HSC). They went to Tech or Teachers College or nursing training or entered cadetships or apprenticeships. There were many pathways available for skills acquisition without involving university, and they often made it possible to earn as you learn – usually not much, but better than nothing.
For the life of me I can’t see how the current system, where kids are shoehorned into university and kept dependent and immature into their 20s is superior.
F
It’s not.
A former The Economist editor had the idea for a fairly basic school leaving exam which if passed would allow you to leave school at any age and seek employment. Run it at 6 moth intervals. The kids who don’t like school have the incentive to pass soon. The kids who want to stay on can do so.
No that different from the old Junior Certificate in WA in the 60’s. Pass and you get to leave school at 15. I like the “any age” idea though.