The hard and soft approaches
In the fight against youth crime, manifest yobbery, entrenched scallywaggery and incipient hooliganism, it seems there is a growing consensus that we have to out-tough the toughs.
There’s two separate pieces of evidence to back this up this morning. The Sun have recruited prizefighter Ricky Hatton to their ‘SUN JUSTICE’ campaign. Because a man who gets punched in the head for a living is just the kind of figure you need to consult on the complex issues that surround youth crime.
‘I don’t think a slap on the wrist is enough,’ is Ricky’s considered opinion. I thought punishments for assault, murder etc were stiffer than that but Ricky must know better, he’s in The Sun and everything. Thanks, Ricky. Let’s keep beating the shit out of another human being in the ring where it belongs, eh?
Next up is the Centre for Policy Studies who suggest ‘former soldiers should be retrained as teachers and used to bring military style discipline to tough inner city schools’. Somebody obviously watched Dangerous Minds with Michelle Pfeiffer and thought, ‘That’s a good idea’.
A report by think tanks says the fact that ex-soldiers had a macho image could help engender respect - particularly among boys.
So how does this work then? Does sniper turned geography teacher Mr Deadeye regale morning assembly with tales of how he once slotted a towelhead from two klicks away? It remains unclear how ex-soldiers will be more equipped to enforce discipline any better than any other teacher. Unless the Department of Education employs those lads who made a greasy puddle of Baha Mousa and give them carte blanche on some kind school-based covert op.
They could become a kind of latter-day bogieman, I suppose - ‘behave yourself or the boys from the Duke of Lancaster regiment will get you’. It’d be cheaper than organising a full-blown Battle Royale in any case.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against soldiers entering the teaching profession. I just wonder if an ability to strut about the place looking hard would be enough. I’d argue you’re just introducing an additional challenge for unruly pupils to escalate their bombardment. Imagine the sense of achievement they’d feel by reducing an ex-marine to tears.
Instead of responding to, and trying to outdo, the machismo of Johnny Knobhead and his spotty mates, we should be preying on it. Put pussification on the national curriculum. Recruit former drag artists as teachers. Make the boys in the class wear filly aprons in Home Economics, take photos of them and put the pictures on the school website.
Get ‘Four Poofs and a Piano’ to teach music. Make So Macho by Sinita the official school song and enforce its singing before registration every day. Don’t chase truants, instead start disgusting but plausible rumours about them in their absence. Put a truant’s mobile number along with a promise of lewd acts on the boys’ toilet wall. No one will dare skip school again.
Make the boys do games in their pants. Employ a flamboyant, overly-energetic gay man as the games teacher who makes lewd jokes about soap when his class are taking a shower. Start compulsory drama classes and make the first production a Shakespeare play performed in the traditional style where all the female parts must be played by males. Make the hardest nut play Juliet. With passion.
Slowly reduce the humiliation and sexual unease as behaviour improves. I’d put good money on the Ofsted inspections being spectacular.
Update: Jamie:
My uncle was thirty years in the army (admittedly in the Army Education Corps), rising to major at retirement rank, then went off to teach in a not too bad school… where the kids made fucking mincemeat out of him.
Posted on February 15th, 2008 at 10:47 am
I always used to joke that there should be weapons training in comprehensive schools on the grounds that the public schools got an unfair advantage with the OTC.
It was, however, a joke.
Still, as one’s middleage approaches it does tend to get harder to distinguish satire from reality.
Presumably the CPS is imagining (fondly and wetly) a situation akin to Michael Ironside’s lecture to his class at the beginning of Starship Troopers. Except that his lesson was that ‘violence has resolved more conflicts than anything else’, which nicely makes explicit the implicit message of having soldiers as teachers.
Still, if returning vets were encouraged to teach, and given the legal force of the Disability Discrimination Act in matters of equal employment rights, the kids might at least get a balanced picture of what war was actually about.
Rochenko - Starship Troopers isn’t fiction: it’s Anglo-American foreign policy writ large (and a model of UK Citizenship teaching). With added giant bugs from outer space.
NB: Satire
Hang on, Anglo-American foreign policy is inseparable from the concept of giant bugs from outer space. You know, things which don’t share any of ‘our values’, which cannot be negotiated with and therefore must be destroyed.
always used to joke that there should be weapons training in comprehensive schools on the grounds that the public schools got an unfair advantage with the OTC.
Back in the early 80s, when I attended a comprehensive, unofficial weapons training did take place behind the sports centre with shuriken made in the metal workshop classes.
Heh. Army basic training breaks the ‘bad boys’ (or at least used to) because you really would get a kicking if you stepped out of line too many times. Sure, the shouting weeded out a few in the first day or two, but after that it was usually just the threat of extreme violence from either your sergeant, or your fellow squaddies after lights-out.
Unless you can prevent the kid’s going home at night, and don’t actually mind them getting keel-hauled occasionally - an ex soldier won’t ‘help’.
*kids!
Demon: Things have moved on. When I went to a comp. in the early nineties, we used to buy our throwing stars.
If it is demonstrated that ‘masculinity’ is somehow a significant factor in good teaching, then I think that we should find out what happened to all the Welsh rugby playing teachers that once seemd to populate English schools.
And we are to have Michael Ironside teaching - you may as well have the one who can scan.
Apropos of nothing… if and when I’m eventually made God Emperor of Earth, I promise to introduce repressive legislation to the effect that every new film must include a scene where Michael Ironside exclaims “They sucked his brains out!”
There’s not a single movie that wouldn’t be improved by that law.
(that law — The Mass Media Redemption Act — would also stipulate that every new album must include a sample from Blade Runner)
I’ll back that legislation, as long as the Blade Runner sample is ‘Wake up! Time to die!’
I’ll be a fair God Emperor, Justin; artists will have a degree of control over which Blade Runner sample they use. For instance, if they decide that “My mother? Let me tell you about my mother…! [sound of gunshot]” is more appropriate to their interpretation of Schubert, then I’d be OK with that.
if and when I’m eventually made God Emperor of Earth
This title is held by my cat and she’s not about to abdicate.
There’s a truly awful coup d’écat joke to be made here. Fortunately I’m above such things.