In the run up to the Convention, we’re going to be running a series of short blogs from each member of the Convention team. Here Claire Preston, our Production Manager, talks about why she’s involved in the Convention.
Claire Preston: Like most women of my generation with children I have given a lot of careful thought about how best to balance the demands (and pleasures) of childcare and work. So it was galling to witness last week’s easy targeting of working women in the search to explain the unhappiness of our children. My involvement in the Convention is driven by a belief that mothers are a long way down the list of what ails young people and indeed all of us.
How a society treats its children is a good measure of its health and sanity and ours is pretty sickly if recent research (see e.g. here and here) is to be believed. Our children are unhappy, disaffected and stressed. The search for who to blame wearyingly often settles on bad parents. But this is to miss a much greater threat. We should be focusing attention on our authoritarian government, its contempt for true democracy and its promiscuous data practices.
A teenage friend of my children was recently describing how, in the Suffolk town where she lives, the police relentlessly break up any public gatherings of young people. This is one case of a much wider phenomenon. Some young people are clearly out of order. But to treat all young people as thugs and vandals is a counter-productive over-reaction. It’s a pattern which the government is repeating in many areas from terrorism, to gang culture, to Baby P. Legitimate public concern is stoked into widespread fear, which in turn is used as a licence to curtail the rights and freedoms of whole categories of citizens – innocent and guilty alike.
The same pattern lies behind the government’s gathering and storing of data. The Climbie case is cited as one of the main reasons behind the creation of ContactPoint, the database on which the government plans to put details of every child in England and Wales. Thankfully this Orwellian nightmare has been knocked back by concerns over how to restrict access to what would be a child abuser’s A to Z. The DNA database is there ostensibly to help solve crime and yet contains samples of over 100,000 innocent children. Form 696 is an initiative that compels licensees of a small live music venues to supply police in advance with a list of details of all performers and information on the target audience.
Not only is this unprecedented control and monitoring alienating young people but voting figures show they have little faith in mainstream politics delivering an answer. Young people are not fooled by our synthetic democracy which pays lip service to engagement while quietly centralising power and skirting parliamentary decision making. Citizenship lessons were meant to build young peoples’ understanding of and belief in our political system. But kids pick up on the fact that Citizenship classes are underfunded and poorly staffed. The message getting through may be rather more accurate than that which the government hoped to impart.
Just possibly, children subjected to this sterile instruction in school and ever-tightening constraints on their freedoms outside it will kick against it in a productive fashion and breathe life back into the openness of our society – but the omens are not good. After all, their parents are mostly taking it lying down. Unless we respond vigorously now, our children will face a much more entrenched problem.
The radical propagandist and voice of the common man, Thomas Paine, who was born in Thetford in Norfolk on January 29, 1737 emigrated to America in October 1774 where he became a journalist and essayist.
After the publication of “Common Sense”, which sold 100,000 copies in 3 months, he continued to inspire and encourage the patriots during the Revolutionary War in the series of pamphlets called “The Crisis” (1776-83).
In Crisis No 1 pamphlet he wrote: “I once felt all that kind of anger, which a man ought to feel, against the mean principles that are held by the Tories: a noted one, who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, “Well! give me peace in my day…. …”a generous parent should have said, “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;”
I thought you’d be interested in this
Pluto in Capricorn Alert
This long, extended stay of Pluto in Capricorn (2008 – 2023) will completely revise the power issues and issues of authority. The last time Pluto was in Capricorn was from 1762 to 1779, which included the founding of our country to gain the freedom against the oppression from the King of England. Now our power issues will once again reveal similar issues that were addressed with “taxation without representation”, the War of Regulation from 1764 to 1771 against corrupt colonial officials, The Stamp and Sugar Act which tried violators in Admirally court where the defendants were considered guilty until they could prove their innocence. The Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights and Articles of the Constitution built from the Magna Carter written to set the parameters and rules of freedom and independence. We will find ourselves in the same boat of addressing the oppressive and corrupt power issues that have been used against people and to revolutionize the checks and balances required for the rightful use of power.
(Thx to Astrobuff)
Hi there very interesting post
I was wondering if you were aware of the ongoing challenges faced by home educators in protecting the right to educate our children without interference from the education authorities.
The government are currently using the quite legitimate and understandable desire to “safeguard children” as a reason to carry out a ridiculously frequent series of reviews of home education and increase “monitoring of home educating families”
http://www.freedomforchildrentogrow.org/
A good blogspot on the issues facing not only Home Educators but all parents really with regards to the constraints an freedom to parent according to our own and our children’s desires is here
http://sometimesitsprudent.blogspot.com/2009/02/prudence-is-criminal-and-will-be.html
http://sometimesitspeaceful.blogspot.com/
A summary of the current problem
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=sO-kmtxGlNM
There is support coming from all sorts of surprising places but more is needed and all parents need to be aware of the reduction in choice in education that this implies.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2009/01/the-coming-war-against-home-schoolers.html
The behaviour of the government on this issue is indicates the general move to take parenting away from parents and put childhood in the hands of the bureaucrats.
I personally am very grateful to live in a country where parents are free to support children in gaining the specific education they wish to gain rather than being forced to accept the education provided by the state (which may not suit their own personal needs). I am currently very concerned that that freedom is at stake.
We live in an amazing time where education can be gained in so many ways and need not be confined to within the walls of a school. How sad if we find ourselves forced to accept the specific school model or worse that we are forced to apply that model in our own homes when so many other creative opportunities exist to support our children’s learning
Elizabeth Mills
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has the following clauses which this Government is duty bound to honour:
Article 12.s States “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks”.
Article 16.(3) States “The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State”.
Article 26.(3) States “Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children”.