Modern Life is Rubbish

There is a letter to the Torygraph today from academics, teachers and children's authors which claims that children are being poisoned by modern life.

Fair enough. After all, broken relationships, splitting families, exposure to adult sexual behaviour, and a prevailing sense that children should just discover values for themselves must make life confusing for children.

Or rather it doesn't:

Childhood creativity is being stifled by a combination of junk food, school targets and mass marketing, a group of authors and academics has claimed.


Oh, right. So, in other words, idiot parents and cynical capitalists. And schools asking children to work hard. As if some of the prep-school and/or Oxbridge educated authors of the letter didn't. Junk food is of course a modern swipe at the working class idiots who really don't know how to bring up children. It is a scapegoat that conveniently allows for socialist preaching on the evils of big business as well. Shouldn't the letter have been sent to the Guardian? I thought they loved "ordinary people are idiots" stuff there.

So who signed the letter? Lots of people, including Jacqueline Wilson, who has made a superb living writing about the poisoned lives of children, and Jonathan Porrit, who has never made a secret of the need for millennial environmental education.

From the BBC website again:

The end of their letter reads: "Our society rightly takes great pains to protect children from physical harm, but seems to have lost sight of their emotional and social needs.
"However, it's now clear that the mental health of an unacceptable number of children is being unnecessarily compromised, and that this is almost certainly a key factor in the rise of substance abuse, violence and self-harm amongst our young people."


Quite so. So presumably they will queue up to denounce the teaching of abortion to 11 year old children, which is currently being proposed:

Gill Frances, head of the advisory group, said in a message to ministers yesterday: "Pregnant young women and their partners need to understand all the options open to them, including abortion, so that they can make an informed decision about whether or not to continue with their pregnancy.
"We are concerned that PSHE programmes very often avoid the subject and do not provide sufficient evidence-based information about abortion, therefore leaving pregnant teenagers ill-equipped to assess abortion as an option." [Thisislondon.co.uk]

[Incidentally I love the implication of this person's view - there simply aren't enough teenagers having abortions!]

So are 11 year old children to be protected from junk food, or are they "young women" with their "partners" who need to have abortions? What a weird world it will be when children can no longer watch adverts for burgers, but go out and have abortions and then play happy familes again with their uninvolved and excluded parents (who are needed to protect them from school targets of course), until the next time the safe and sensible option of abortion is needed. And so on. This is the point: many people, including "advisory groups", would like to make sure children's ethics have nothing to do with their parents, and everything to do with a certain progressivism (the kind that loves to "combat myths", as in the story above,). They would like to guarantee that children are sexually active (there is no indication anywhere at all in the above story that sexual activity before the age of consent might not be a good idea), would like to treat them like sexual adults. But junk food - no way! Exams - far too stressful for the poor little mites! Maybe even leave school and work before 18 - ugh! capitalist slavery. So the objects of this little political tussle are children when it comes to chips, but young people and their partners when it comes to sex. Strange world.

No wonder they're ****** up. The parents I mean.


link to the thisislondon story: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23366118-details/Abortion+lessons+for+schoolchildren/article.do

(hat tip: http://publicinterest.blogspot.com)