Kids rule

Childhood obesity is a case in point. The Australian Parents’ Jury has denounced certain ads that encourage kids to buy fat-filled food. Yes, perhaps they should be banned. But can’t parents say NO any more? Do we all have to accept that American cuisine - however vile - will be used as a bribe for kids? Surely if we want healthy, fit adults we would all be better off if parents could get kids eating healthy food.

Look around you, and you will see many kids out of control. The “kids” can be 20 or 30, but they don’t know what’s good for them. Young children tell police “you can’t touch me”. There are incidents from Bondi to Brisbane of kids smashing cars and bashing people for thrills. Skin cancer rates have risen, because young people won’t take precautions. We are spending millions keeping police on beaches to enforce the peace - something we have never had to do before. Hospitals tell us that drugs and drunkenness take their toll, from vodka to “ice”. Savings have fallen dramatically and the under-40s are crippled with debt to buy the toys they crave. And young men everywhere are liable to cause trouble, get shoved into jail and cost us all in increased taxes.

We really have less idea what to do with young men’s youthful energy than any other generation. Most of the time, the media carelessly do their best to stir up racial tension and trouble between people and stir up trouble between parents and children. Almost nobody helps to reinforce the authority of parents.

Teachers tell me horrifying stories of children whose parents are afraid to say no to them. “You can’t make me do that” they say to the teachers. When I taught at an elite girls’ school, a mother begged the school to stop her daughter working 20 hours-a-week in a shop. Children stay away from school, sometimes because it suits parents to have them do chores or mind younger kids. Teachers seem powerless to force them to attend. “Hello, little boy” a teacher friend said. “Have you come to school to learn to read?” “No” was the reply; “only poofters read”. We can’t seem to make kids read and many adults can’t read at adequate levels.

My teacher education students, in the main, have been well schooled, and badly educated. (Well-educated people rarely want to be schoolteachers.) They have had too many years of writing about what they wanted and what amused them and they can copy notes. But they just don’t KNOW enough. And they don’t have the first-rate computer skills to educate students growing up in 2010. I have to threaten blue murder to make most of them watch Global Village on SBS-TV because I think it will educate them. Most students are happy if the university’s TV goes on the blink or the Powerpoint fails. “Oh good” they say. “Now we can go home”. Any excuse is a good excuse not to learn. And these people want to be teachers!

So much more needs to be done to get schools to focus on children learning. John Howard’s new plan to re-skill Australians wouldn’t be necessary if schools worked better in the first place. Too many schools seem to have lost the plot completely. Public school teachers in particular seem to have lost the will to get kids learning (apart from the selective and upper middle class schools).

Public schools in New South Wales are a battleground: on one hand we have a feeble Department of Education, weighed down with bureaucrats on expensive salaries, all scared of doing something that’s not policy this week. On the other, we have a militant teacher union, jam-packed with ideology, far removed from the concerns of teachers in distant localities. A huge proportion of teachers don’t have adequate Internet access at school. Many poorer schools mainly function as holding areas to keep children off the streets, if they can manage to keep them there.

There has been too much emphasis on fun and entertainment in school. Too many teachers feel they have to be entertainers. My students, when on their practical assignments, apologise if they have to drill number facts or enforce spelling. We have to bow down to all the correct ideas of the day and not offend anyone. God help any teacher who wants to talk about the benefits of British colonisation, instead of its many wickednesses!

We need to do the following:

1. reinforce parents’ authority. Until we do that we will have young people out of control;
2. work much harder to keep dads in families as people actively bringing boys into intelligent manhood. Dads play a vital role with daughters, too. We can’t have authoritative parenting for most kids until we put fathers back in the picture;
3. parent education is necessary to tell parents what they can and should do with their children. Part of this will be teaching parents to say “no”;
4. we have to find ways of working intelligently with police and local communities to show kids more constructive ways of growing up;
5. give teachers more authority over children, so they learn the skills they need; and
6. dismantle the state education bureaucracies and put schools under the control of parents and local communities.

We have to invest in our future, instead of wasting money on useless wars overseas. The effects of educational underachievement for students themselves and for society as a whole are too profound to be ignored. It all adds up to an enormous pot of trouble that we are brewing for our children and grandchildren.