There’s a most beautiful day out there… I can see it through the window from the kitchen. Blue sky… couple of little fleecy white clouds just for good measure… trees standing tall and quiet in the windless air… temperature mild, balmy… peace everywhere, the suburbs stretching out around me, everyone happy in their own little patch…
A beautiful sky, a beautiful world, beautiful environment, a sane and sensible, humane civilisation, no wars, no famine, no disease – ah, yes, floods and fires raging elsewhere on the continent but not here… calm and peaceful, healthy, conducive to life here, wonderful…
And amidst this: children squalling and fighting, pestering, interfering, disturbing, upsetting, breaking, spoiling, damaging, filling the air with noise, commotion, unpleasantness, greed, selfishness…..
What? They are impervious to the beauty of the world. They know nothing about it. They take it for granted, such of it as they recognise. They give no thanks for it. They have no gratitude for it… They have no sense of it.
All that matters to them is that ‘he’ took ‘my’ toy… and similar ludicrously, childish, stupid, nonsensical bones of contention…
They are simply not human.
This is a bald though startling fact. It should not be startling, being such a basic ubiquitous fact but it is. It is because we ignore it and pretend otherwise.
Our whole child thing, our relationships with our children, or social structures for dealing with our children, the way we talk about our children, our apparent understanding of our children – it all avoids this truth.
There are or were primitive peoples whose method of bringing up children was to virtually ignore them until they were about 9 years old.
Back a hundred years in Western society children were to be ‘seen but not heard’ and ‘speak when spoken to’ and so on…. There was a definite understanding of the place of children as below, beneath and other than that of people.
And that’s how it should be.
That, effectively, is how it is. Though we disguise the fact.
We have institutions known as ‘primary schools’ which pretend to be institutes of learning but which are in fact primarily jails or holding pens for child minding… somewhere to put the children outside of our society.
They serve to do something with the children while parents are at work, sure enough. But they also serve as somewhere to put the children when parents are not at work and have no such ostensible reason for having the children cared for elsewhere.
These institutions struggle to control the savage unbridled uncivilized behaviour of the natural child. They struggle to push the child into a mode of behaviour that they can deal with: i.e. ‘controlled’.
The whole, sole intent of these places is simply to control the child.
Hence they are at bottom authoritarian, didactic, dogmatic, inhuman, aloof, uncaring, unfeeling institutions without any empathy with children or the world and without any ability to teach – which is their pretended reason for existing.
The institutions, seeking to control this mass of inhuman humanity which is itself outside of the human society becomes itself outside of human society. A fact which is frequently demonstrated in so many way.
At my local primary school they have this term taken to broadcasting overloud, cacaphonic music to herald the ‘five minutes to get to class’ time.
This is such an outrageous assault on the ears I was moved to ask them in the front office if they’d do something to mitigate it and perhaps return to their practice of the previous years, when the music was melodious, acceptable, recognisable and hearable without ear injury.
They said they’d investigate whether or not that ‘ipod’ had a volume control.
A ludicrous approach in the first instance.
And then this morning the music (!) is, if anything, worse.
So this demonstrates in one small event so much:
. The disregard for parents and children.
. The technological inadequacy of supposed ‘educators’ and academics.
. The authoritarian attitude that whatever faults, errors, misdeeds, impositions, improprieties they commit they are well within their rights: they can do as they wish.
. Their total contempt for any individual parent.
. Their total alienation from any concept of caring, or understanding or humane interaction with the people and the society about them.
They are a prison. Staffed by warders. Sinecured warders. And that’s how they manifest.
Of course.