The Happy Prince

Jude, Given your recent conversion to moderate centrist positions on most political issues, I find your suggestions about CAFOD quite bizarre. What are they saying? If they're promoting education about climate change, they're just as much friends of 'Dave' Cameron as they are left-wing. Non-scientific scaremongering on climate change might ideological but it isn't left-wing. Most measures suggested to tackle climate change, so far, are pretty right-wing in that they hit poor people much harder that rich people. "I also think poverty should be looked at in economics at school. Comic relief's slowed-down tv images with tear jerking music serve no purpose other than to create emotion." Agree with you on both of these things.

Would you protect them from the Daily Mail and the Express? It's a serious question, because they're both newspapers that would agree with your position, but which are filled with the most pant-wetting scare stories every edition about how everything, but everything is going to the dogs. Sanctify the family, demonise the society seems to be the rule. Cheers, Mark

Having got a general flavour of the Cafod stuff, I wouldn't see it as left-wing. There's nothing left-wing about fair trade, for example. It doesn't challenge the economic power of capital. It doesn't increase the economic power of poor farmers in the third world. It promotes helping poor people as a lifestyle choice for rich liberals. That's not, in itself, a bad thing but if continued in the long-term, it's just another way of the poor world being forced to rely on the munificence of the rich world for ever and ever. I don't think it's bad but it doesn't solve anything and it's a fundamentally right-wing way of tackling third world poverty. That said, if you're arguing that it's a bad idea for kids to be taught this kind of stuff in schools, without being given a less partisan view of how economics works to put it in context, I'd say you're right.

can't protect them from anything; they'll only protect you from the truth - your fault! Wouldn't make you a close friend in your kid's life. When the power of love overcomes the love of power, we'll find peace. - Jimi Hendrix

Well, I agree with most of your criticisms but I also think that Cafod's views are part of the mainstream political debate. I wouldn't necessarily object to the materials on the weblink you've provided being used in schools. It's just that: 1. ideally, the kids should get some basic education in economics first - and economics wasn't taught in my school before A-Level. and 2. Cafod (or Oxfam or the CBI or a trade union - all of whom could do interesting and useful workshops in schools) should be introduced as some people who represent a particular interest. I think Tim is right about this: "The idea of cossetting kids from the world or refusing them access to any view that you do not wholly share, seems at best draconian and at worse, deluded." the problem is if the ideas of an interest group are presented to kids as being 'the truth'. That doesn't help kids to think for themselves or to get a full understanding of the issues.

Private schools just perpetrate the them and us society. Lets have excellence in all schools. I await your inevitable conversion to the left-wing cause with relish.

I don't think ignorance can ever be used to circumvent fear. Ignorance promotes fear and lack of understanding. Which is what the Happy Prince is about. Oscar Wilde was a socialist. Even if you could sequester a child successfully they would have to confront the real world eventually. Children have to learn to choose what to believe in. To choose you must know the alternatives. If they live a cosseted middle-class life they should be aware of this and be thankful for what they have and be sympathetic to those who haven't been so fortunate. There's no happiness in fearing ideas; there's no happiness in fearing other human beings.

Where are we on this: http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/12777/Mums+in+fix+over+Maddy I happened to be reading the Sunday Express this week - not something I do very often. I have to admit that - while I understand that parents want to protect kids from knowing about scary things - I found this an absolutely amazing attitude towards the McCann case.

When I was a kid in the 50's we were told that when the A-bomb explodes in our neighborhood during school hours, all we had to do was "duck and cover" by hiding under our little desks. No one actually bought that, but we did practice it a few times just in case. People were talking about building bomb shelters and stocking up on canned goods and checking under the bed to make sure there were no Communists hiding there. Then for a few days in 1962 all the neighborhood kids practices marching and trench warfare (with brooms and sticks) because war with Russia was on the horizon. Then it dawned on us we'd probably all be dead anyway, so we stopped and the Cuban missile crisis went away before we had to go to war at age 12. And that was during the supposedly "innocent years" of I Like Ike and the Kennedy Camelot. "You don't need the light of the Lord to read the handwriting on the wall." Copies of Warsaw Tales available through www.new-ink.org

I don't mollycoddle my kids at all, although I do prevent them from watching the news. My 9-year-old is old and worldly enough to discuss most topics with, and like BBF I've discussed drugs, alcohol, etc. plus the basics of sex and peer pressure, global warming/poverty/war, etc. I'm trying to cultivate both his natural curiosity AND an open-communication relationship with him. God knows I left home at 16 without a *clue* as to the real world; I wasn't sheltered so much as benignly neglected, so I had to find out most stuff as I went along, including banking/money management and how to get a job! I'd like to avoid that with my kids, insofar as I'm able. But I draw the line at the news, because it's shit.

I think the CAFOD stuff is fine, and that christians are at their best when trying to promote a social conscience and highlighting global inequalities. But I'd want to protect kids from manipulative high-powered evangelists and, at your end, those with a very twisted take on sexuality who are trying to deny contraception to impoverished third-world parents who don't have the choices that we do i.e. to pay lip service to the priest and get their condoms with the groceries at Tesco.

"But I draw the line at the news, because it's shit." What's wrong with the news?

"What's wrong with the news?" Jude has answered the question most succinctly. The way TV news is presented, after the third day of swamping the airwaves with hysterical overanalysis of why and how little Madeleine went missing, my reaction was, sadly, 'Who gives a fuck?' I just don't watch it when I can possibly help it. There is a certain amount of prudent pruning of the information I give to my kids; as they get older, the more detailed it gets. Both my kids, who are 5 and 9, know about the 'birds and the bees'; however, when I caught my son and his friend googling 'sexing Billie Piper', I decided that it was time for a more in-depth look at sexual reproduction. I found a good science website with lots of information and 9-year-old-accessible language and we went from there. I was relieved to see that he got bored with the whole thing after that. No more 'sexing Billie Piper' googles. Hopefully it'll put him off it until he's at least 38. Ditto with environmental/global warming stuff. I try to keep the hysteria/scaremongering out of it and focus more on awareness of the environment rather than how it's all going wrong. I let them watch the Discovery Channel and as many natural science programmes as they want. But all kids are different. Some make it through life quite happily knowing only the little that was taught to them (the majority of my high school class seems to fall into this category, especially the ones who NEVER LEFT the hometown); others are hungrier for knowledge and exposure to experience. I would think the middle ground between sheltering and exposing sees most parents through rather well.

Children do need to be proetected in any way we can.Mass media in the UK floods them with terrifying images.,things they can do nothing about merely be frightened by.The effect of being exposed to too much anxiety could actually make them anxious adults.Surely what we are aiming for is happy grownups who are kind creative and interesting.Children need to feel safe.No scary news,no gore fest video games . They have to feel safe in school.Special schools were closed because of the "political"idea of inclusion.So the kids with extreme behaviour are not adequately contained and spill over into everyone elses education.I'm trying to raise my kids to feels safe but have enquiring,critical,and even sceptical minds.Small daughter said recently that Big Brother was "like stalking" attagirl. Yes programs on nature and science and a discussion of the news but not just being flooded by it.Round here kids in state schools often top up with tutors,music lessons etc.One things the private schools do offer is child care 8 to 6 for working parents, lots of after school clubs etc.And as far as being ivory towers there are always Malfoys even at Hogwarts ,but normally they are less likely to carry knives.

Protection from the horrors and distortions of the news media may be wise, but the notion of "protection" can also be used as a cover for a kind of indoctrination by omission. Children are separated from the day-to-day world and all its complications and raised to feel superior to and essentially different from their peers. By their very nature private schools reinforce this mind-set. Britain has forever suffered from an endemic them-and-us disease, having been "protected" from the true nature of society, middle and upper-class kids leave their private schools and go on to university (and privileged Oxbridge selection, too, often) looking on the majority as a foreign species. This poisonous bit of brain-washing is then re-codified into the culture for another generation.

I'm still a bit baffled by the news thing. Not completely. I can understand why you wouldn't want primary school age kids to see graphic coverage of, for example, the war in Darfur, before they're old enough to have some sort of understanding of what's going on. I'm less clear on the general criticism of TV news. Particularly as, in the UK, we have a variety of sensible, serious news programmes on terrestrial TV. I think once kids reach their teens, watching BBC News or Channel 4 News or Newsnight is a very good way of finding out what's going on in the world. I'm particularly baffled by Jude's idea that the internet is a better source of quality news coverage. There is good news coverage on the internet for people who know where to look for it. But as an impressionable young person, I think you're far more likely to read something mad and believe it to be true by looking on the net than you are by watching the 10 o'clock news.

The innocence of the child is a Victorian invention. Prior to that, no-one in most households gave a flying fig what children did or didn't see. Children were not given the privileged status that they currently. At best they mucked in, at worst they were a hindrance. I was not an innocent child. My friends and I talked all of the time of all manner of disgusting, unpleasant, blood-thirsty, sexually inappropriate and otherwise worrying subjects, cribbed from dirty paperbacks, grumble found under hedges and, on one memorable occasion, someone's Dad's Porn video recovered from behind the pans in a kitchen cupboard. Had the internet been around, we'd have certainly searched it for the most unwholesome and disturbing things we could find. We had to make do with violent videos and the above mentioned grumble. Roy Chubby Brown did the rounds on copied C90s, as did outlandish stories of sexual exploits and more believable stories of crime, violence and unpleasantness. When I was about sixteen there was a schism in my circle of friends, and a couple decided that they'd try to join, at the very least the BNP, but they were really looking to join Combat 18, the probably fictional hard-right bully boys. God knows what drove them to that: A bad curry one night? Too many viewings of Where Eagles Dare? A childhood copy of the Boy's Bumper Book of the Empire? They were pricks, and I'm fairly sure they still would have been pricks regardless of what media they were exposed to. I knew that they were pricks at the time. Mainly because 1) I read the NME and knew that racism was certainly wrong, all the best bands said so, ditto for sexism and homophobia (the NME was still in it's progressive left wing phase) 2)I'd had the benefit of a left-ish input throughout my secondary schooling, with that explicit anti-fascist focus so commonly decried, and 3)My parents didn't really tell me what I could and couldn't read, so I formed my own opinions based on what I read, be it mucky books smuggled in, George Orwell or indeed Biggles. I still can't come to an accommodation with a lot my Dad thinks, especially about people of other ethnic heritages. God forbid that he'd been my only source of information, or the gatekeeper to my own independent exploration of the world of knowledge. If he'd policed what I read, and consequently what I thought, I would have kept a couple of friends but allowed some unpleasant views, and probably actions, to go unchallenged. Incidentally, like many of my generation, I learned most about sexing from illicit viewings of foreign films on Channel 4 late at night. So in a brilliant two for one offer, my adolescent self got to see breasts, nubbings and pubes and also got to understand the finer points of European film-making, existential dread and non-linear narrative. Even now, in the bed room I'm a little bit Nouvelle Vague. Cheers, Mark

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BBF said "My 7 year old son has views on many things already-God, alcohol, smoking, fast food, advertising, death. He has formed these views by listening to stuff at school, listening to me (poor fella) and drawing his own conclusions. Occasionally I put an alternative view to him and he considers it on its merits. I explained to him about AIDS the other day and he took it in his stride. The idea of cossetting kids from the world or refusing them access to any view that you do not wholly share, seems at best draconian and at worse, deluded." ....which pretty much says everything I was going to say. My 6 year old daughter talks to us about death, religion, poverty, and has knowledge of specific topics (Madeleine McCann etc) too - and why not? Things like Comic Relief, whilst not always getting everything right, introduce kids to the notion that there are people not o fortunate as they are out there, which can only be a good thing; it certainly doesn't induce a guilt complex! Cosset children from reality and they grow up into cossetted, ignorant adults who then believe everything they're suddenty exposed to.

Tom you do get Malfoys everywhere,in any school.I wonder what you think the true nature of society is?The media often suggests that the whole country is one giant sink estate with small pockets of sickening fat cats.It isn't true is it but the reasonably comfortable middle isnt exciting not good copy.If going to uni is so rewarding why are some people training afterwards as plumbers?What is stupid about the UK is the lack of really good vocational training and apprenticeships.If a kid starts earning at 19 rather than at 22 or 23 he or she would have a financial leg up over graduates.Uni is no longer ticket to print money. I went to visit a girls IND school recently.My guide was going to be a paramedic.Useful and not well paid. At secondary level anyway private schools and selective school pupils do a lot for charity.This is an opportunity that seems to be missing in giant comps,the chance for the less lucky to feel good and generous,to be a giver not just a receiver.

I think that the child's intelligence should be respected, in that you allow them their own opinions and reading material. However, I do think that parents have a duty to protect their children from material that is potentially harmful- to themselves or others. A good example is when I dabbled in witchcraft- my mother accepted it. She also accepted my dabblings in Christianity- but drew the line when I started getting urged to be baptised by a Jehovah's Witness friend, the point being that she could recognise the cult-like influence (and possibly damaging) influence that was being extended to me and as a parent it was her responsibility to protect me as best she could. I'm sure she would also have drawn the line if I'd started trying to summon demons, not because she believes in them but because it could be damaging to me if I did. Now I'm old enough to get baptised if I want, but choose not too because of the shielding that my mother gave me. On the subject, I think that it is acceptable to bring up a child in your religion, as long as it is not forced- "Go say your prayers!". And I think the internet is probably the worst source of information: whatever you believe will be reflected in the information that it churns back, because so few sources of the internet are unbiased. People, and generally not children, tend not to actively research an opinion which opposes their own.

I guess I'm of the position that my kids are both intelligent people, and because I maintain very open communication channels with them, they feel free to ask me anything they feel like asking; this often includes things they've heard from their friends (and often I have to 'correct' these particular tidbits, things like sexing etc.). Since I don't watch the news, they don't watch it either, but they do hear things. We've discussed Iraq and Darfur (I used to have some Sudanese clients when I was a caseworker, so my son knows exactly where they're from and why the are refugees), and occasionally my son 'accidentally' turns on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, so he's also been exposed (albeit in a fictional sort of way) to the gorier and darker aspects of human existence. He is very interested in these things, and I try to satisfy his curiosity as best as I can. Bukh, the problem I have with the news (even the vaunted Beeb news channels) is that *all* news channels have the tendency to supersaturate the viewer, usually, as Jude rightly points out, with a heavy dose of hysteria. I like *information*, and I can make up my mind as to my views on any given subject without the 'benefit' of three hours of talking-head 'analysis'. I do, however, like the Beeb's investigative reports, and don't have a problem with the kids watching these. I used to religiously watch '60 Minutes' on Sundays at my grandparents' house when I was about ten. The nightly news sucks, though.

I think there is a point that with the advent of 24 hour news, quantity does often override quality. Not that there's a shortage of potentially interesting things happening that could be reported on but there's a shortage of exciting things happening that can be reported on cheaply. We get more talking heads because it's much cheaper to have some people waffling on about something at great length than it is to do serious undercover investigation or to send reporters to actually report on things. That said, I find some of the analysis very helpful. I've got a much clearer understanding of economic issues, for instance, once they've been broken down by Evan Davis. I'd agree, though, that it terms of something like the Madeleine McCann abduction, there's a limit to how much you can analyse before it goes beyond being informative.

I'll say my tuppenceworth on the Madeleine McCann story. The parents seem like extremely nice caring people - BUT - how the fuck can they leave a small child alone for any length of time???? Things can happen with small children in a heartbeat. I know it's against the law (to leave them alone) in this country, I don't know what the position is in Portugal. As for the news I used to be a news junkie, but then I'm addicted to drama. I grew up with it, it's what I know. From 5.30pm it would be Channel 5 News with the ineffably beautiful Lara Lewington talking about something or other at the end of the news. I used to 'come' intellectually, just watching her. Then straight over to Beeb Beeb Ceeb 1 for the National news, after that at 6.30pm the local news. Then at 7pm the ineffably gorgeous John Snow to talk about stuff on Channel 4 News. In my opinion the best news coverage on television. Oh I also like watching the ineffably gorgeous Irish/Asian guy, Krishnan Guru Murphy. He obviously will be shoehorned in to John Snow's job when he retires. Now? I tune in just to get the gist of who's murdered whom, and thanks to my wizard present (a set-top box) from bruv in Oxford, I tune in to a Freeview music channel. And in the evening watch re-repeats of CSI on Five US, with the ineffably gorgeous bow-legged William Peterson.

My point was that, emotionally speaking, private schools disadvantage the children attending them. Hardly sour grapes.