Waking up to a problem of your own making

It seems obvious that Britain is broken beyond repair. I can't even think of a plausible solution to our problems. If I was made Prime Minister tomorrow I would have no choice but to implement the following two point plan.

Phase one: Repeal all the laws and hand back total freedom to everyone. Skip the country before the Marxist revolution happens.

Phase two: Wait 60 years until Communism is toppled and freedom returns to Britain.

This current bout of pessimism towards the future comes from reading this article in the Daily Fail.

They wear nappies, drink cola and don't know how to open a book. One teacher's terrifying insight into 5-year-olds failed by their parents

If you haven't read the full article, here's the beef of it.

Here, one teacher - the Mail knows her identity but has given her a nom de plume - describes a day in the life of an affluent primary school. What she says will shock you…

Glancing at the clock, I realise it’s time for me to change Lily’s nappy. Past experience tells me she will make a fuss, so I doubt it will be a smooth operation. Of course, most babies dislike having their nappies changed, but that’s the problem: Lily isn’t a baby, she is five years old.
What’s more, I’m not her mother, I am her primary school teacher. And Lily isn’t the only child in my class who still wears nappies

These children don’t have a medical condition. What they have are parents who think children will learn to use the lavatory by themselves, or that it is a school’s responsibility to teach them.

There is a child in my class who has serious dental problems because of her consumption of fizzy, sugary drinks. That’s bad in itself, but the most worrying thing is that, at age five, she isn’t independent enough to drink from a cup. She drinks these fizzy drinks from a baby’s bottle.

The poor child also has real problems with speech. She can’t pronounce many of the sounds because one needs a full set of teeth to do so.
I rang her home umpteen times to ask her mother to make a dental appointment. Eventually, under tremendous pressure from the school and the welfare department, whom I alerted, she did — and I assume the matter is being dealt with.

The school makes it clear that we expect children to be able to use a lavatory, button their coats and eat with a knife and fork by the time they begin full-time education, but far too many of them just can’t. They’ve never been taught how.
These parents seem to believe that giving their children fundamental life skills isn’t their responsibility. They think that it’s the job of teachers.

Some parents see no problem at all with sending their little ones to school incontinent and unable to grasp even the most basic concepts of learning, with no ability to sit still even for a couple of minutes and a propensity to thump other children.
Every summer, I visit the homes of the 30 children who will join my class in the new school year. In about two-thirds of those homes, I see all the latest gadgets on display, including plasma television sets, games consoles and state-of-the-art computer equipment. What I don’t see are any toys or books.

I make these visits both to introduce myself and to allay any fears that the children or their parents may have about the big step of starting school.
Sadly, in many cases, I really needn’t bother. The parents don’t even show me the courtesy of turning off the television during my visit. Asking what they hope for from school and what their worries are, I’m met with blank stares.

I’ve even had to give up on activities such as painting because many of the children in my classroom can’t hold a paintbrush.
They’ve never done it at home, and they have such short concentration spans that after the first hesitant stroke of brush on paper, they are off, running up and down the classroom.

Tommy, a five-year-old in my class, was a whizz on the computer. He could manipulate a mouse with ease and was adept at opening programmes, but he had no idea how to even open a book.
When I sat down with this little boy and tried to read with him, he tried to pull it open from its spine. He had no idea how to hold a pencil, and when I asked him what letter the word ‘red’ started with, it became apparent that he wasn’t even sure what the colour red looked like. He didn’t know his colours.

As for bedtime, many of the children I teach simply don’t have one. Some of my pupils arrive at school so exhausted from playing on their computers until the early hours of the morning that I regularly have to put them down for a nap in the afternoon.

I love the little ones in my class, and it makes me sad and angry that some of them come to school in the winter without socks on. And let me be clear here: this is not down to poverty. Parents are simply failing to attend to such details.

It is very difficult to work with children when their parents seem to work against you. Teachers who try to instil boundaries and a sense of right and wrong often end up castigated by enraged parents — and, sadly, the senior management can’t always be relied upon to stand up for their staff.

I love my job, and I love seeing children grow, learn and flourish. What is so distressing is witnessing the way so many parents have simply abdicated responsibility over the past decade.

Parents have abdicated responsibility because that is the society we have created. The state has stepped in and done away with it.

Anything we do in out daily lives involves Government regulation and there are an army of social workers, officers and coordinators who can do everything for us. There are no more consequences for our actions and everything that goes wrong can be blamed on someone else.

The state and their schools have created this.

When a school checks children's lunch boxes and bans foods deemed to be unhealthy, it tells the parents that it's the schools job to decide what a child eats. When a school provides breakfast for kids who don't have it at home, it tells the rest of the parents that they don't need to bother giving their kids breakfast either.

Not only are people handed a huge wad of free cash when they have children, enough to see that they don't have to work, the state also steps in and takes responsibility for the child the moment the parents (or usually mothers) fails in the smallest area.

The schools education system has been so dumbed down that they are turning out morons. The state no lonnger beleives that children should feel failure so the schools never put them in competitive situations or push them to acheive; everyone is taught to the level of the lowest IQ in the class.

Now the parents are abandoning their responsibiltity to teach their young because they beleive it's the sole job of the schools.

The Nanny state has so entwined itself in our lives that people are loosing the ability to think for themselves and take responsibilty for their lives and those of their offspring.

So now we have stories like the above and we wonder what the hell went wrong. Some of the comments on the article even agreed that this situation is the correct one. One woman asked why we pay our taxes for teachers if we have to teach our kids ourselves and one man said that schools are supposed to teach life skills, which presumably includes toilet training five year olds.

Like I said earlier, I don't know what will remedy this situation, but whatever the answer is, it will take many years to fix. At least as many years as it took to create the problem.

The trouble is, politicians don't do long term. They never think beyond the next election. They love knee jerk 'quick fixes' and being seen to 'be doing something'. They enact more useless legislation or throw more taxpayers money at the problem; the same actions that created the situation we have now.

Unless something gives, and fast, our once great nation is doomed.