We CAN turn back the clock and make our schools places of excellence. Here's how...
By Peter Hitchens
Last updated at 2:18 AM on 19th April 2009
All the solutions to all our problems are obvious but shocking. They have also been ruled out in advance by the miserable pygmies and parasites who have taken over both sides of Parliament.
The breakdown of order in our State schools is a grave example of this political trap, in which everyone knows there is something wrong and nobody dares do anything effective about it.
This is now a severe national crisis. Like the desperate state of our exam system, it is also a State secret, buried under a monstrous heap of official lies and twisted statistics.
A teacher disciplines pupils
Order has broken down in the classroom (picture posed by models)
A teacher who exposed it by filming undercover was not thanked, or invited to share her evidence with the authorities.
She was disciplined more severely than another teacher convicted of smoking crack cocaine. I know of others who fear to speak out because they do not wish to damage their careers.
The teachers' unions know perfectly well what is happening, though they are really interested only in getting more money for their members and gaining more recruits – since they are nowadays all in the hands of the Sixties Left.
But because they need to let off steam at their annual conferences, we get a yearly outbreak of stories about how schools are hiring bouncers to keep order – or even that teachers are going to work in body-armour.
Of course there is some exaggeration for effect here. But nobody seriously doubts that many classrooms are now so chaotic that even the most determined pupil and the most dedicated teacher must fight to get any work done at all.
What is worse, many excellent teachers are more than weary of having to be policemen first, social workers second and teachers third. Some schools now actually have real police officers on the premises.
This is all completely ridiculous and unnecessary. It could be reversed in a matter of months and put right in a few years.
Only a few things need to be done. Teachers need to be given back the power to use corporal punishment. We should leave the European Convention on Human Rights and other treaties which prevent the operation of commonsense British laws.
The school-leaving age should be reduced to 15. Secondary schools should be divided between the vocational and the academic, with selection on merit.
The law permitting `no-win, no-fee' lawsuits should be repealed. So should the Children Act 1989 and the other social workers' charters which have robbed sensible adults of authority for two decades.
Then we should embark on a Restoration Of The Married Family Act, which would end the many-headed attack on stable married families and restore the lost position of fathers in the home, one of the major causes of bad behaviour by boys.
Divorce should be difficult. Every social institution, every law, tax-break and benefit, should discriminate clearly and unapologetically in favour of those parents committed to each other by the marriage bond.
None of these things is actually outrageous, though if a frontbench spokesman for any party dared embrace them, he would be met with cries of rage and fake expressions of shock and be quickly driven from his post.
There are plenty of people still living who can testify that when such rules operated, millions of British people lived free and happy lives, learned useful things in orderly schools, did not need to be under police surveillance, pass through metal detectors on their way to classes or be watched by CCTV cameras.
Yes, there were disadvantages and difficulties. Who denies it? Perfection isn't possible. But they were nothing compared with the horrible mess we have made with our good intentions.
Who would have thought, 50 years ago, that a headmaster would be knifed to death at the gates of his school, thousands of children would be forced to take powerful drugs to make them behave and the only `powers' available to besieged teachers would be either to keep their charges in for a few hours or force them to go away for a few weeks?
And who would have believed that people would say this was freedom and progress and that Conservative politicians would declare they were happy with this country as it is?
The supposed freedom is a new slavery, enforced by social workers, lawyers, the BBC and PC police. The alleged progress is an accelerating slide back into the Dark Ages.
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