Civitas Blog

Many years ago I was told that most schools did not teach cookery as the children (?girls) would learn it at home anyway. Children obviously don´t learn at home now. Instead of schools having to take over yet another responsibility, why not put it back where it belongs, together with respect, discipline and manners - with the parents at home.
Rita Kleppmann

The whole thing is sinister and preposterous. Preposterous because habits of eating are rarely changed after a certain age; because, as an earlier correspondent has suggested, they are the product of the home and finally because whatever the government pretends is going to happen in our overloaded, overcrowded comprehensive dumps, the reality will never reflect it. Is it really to be supposed that establishments which currently fail even to teach the old core subjects are likely to do any better with this one? Now for sinister - it is sinister because the government is attempting to subvert the home. That many homes are now inadequate is no excuse. Their inadequacy is itself the direct result of socialism: the something for nothing, all must have prizes, "we're all guilty" mentality, which has destroyed the incentives toward civility, decency and achievement. A truly free and classically liberal society would not let the state run schools in the first place. Those schools would either reflect the religious and social "moeurs" of their patrons - the parents - or strictly confine themselves to imparting academic or vocational skill. Morals, manners and faith are properly the exclusive province of the family and whatever religion it chooses to practise. Through the grotesque and often premature discussion of sexuality; through presuming to impart politically correct "manners"; through an utterly skewed agenda of moralism, the state is using schools as the instruments of a new totalitarian settlement in which the state has assumed the functions of the church for a homeless and uncultured people.

I am, at the moment, a full-time mum. I was once a full-time secondary school teacher. I *think* I can speak for many of my ex-colleagues when I say that teachers are getting very tired of government initiatives which use the classroom as an attempt to cure many social ills; from obesity to sex and relationship education; teachers are becoming responsible for not just the academic education of our young people, but moral and health education too.

It's simply not working. Morality and healthy living can really only be taught properly in a home environment, teachers can only really consolidate what is learnt in the home. Healthy living, relationship education and so on should be taught/modelled from birth onwards. Only parents can do this.

If the government are truly concerned about the health of our youngsters then they must abandon economic policies which have failed the vast majority of people in this country. That is to say, they must do their best to make sure that families can, once again, live on one wage. This is the only way in which time-poor parents can do the job they so very much want to do.

There is nothing overtly sinister in the idea of cooking lessons....

The more worrying underlying trend is that of perennially displacing responsibility from individuals, who should be the real targets of intervention, as is the way of modern Liberalism.

This general practice means a catalogue of expensive “education programmes” have been created; ineffectual because it is utterly, patently obvious that the targets are all very well educated in the issue. The potential danger here is that this appears like another.

Are we expected to even contemplate the notion that a teenager does not understand apples contain more vitamins than crisps? Just as education is helpful to remind savvy, streetwise teenagers that sex leads to pregnancy? And they are too young to buy alcohol legally? And drugs can harm? And spending more than income causes debt? Et al.

This idea smacks of more liberal posturing - appearing to act but evading the unpleasant truth that in ways - small and large - some members of our society make fully conscious decisions to behave in pernicious and irresponsible ways. Thus responses to “raise their awareness” lead not to self-reflection, but exploitation of the fact responsibilities for their cogent choices are displaced on to others (the “irresponsible” crisp manufacturers, off-licence owners, supermarkets, parents, teachers, banks, Uncle Tom Cobley and all).

I believe it would be more effective to target the exceptions as exactly that, who need firm discipline and boundaries exerted; to reinstate “awareness” of causation – action and consequence. However, rather than the defacto assumption being lack of “awareness”, it might be lack of “will”.

Unfortunately, for the pervasive leftist mindset, it is evidently more palatable to make hollow broad-brush gestures towards a mass, who are largely very capable of reasonable judgement.

I remember music lessons at school which totally turned myself and most of my fellow classmates off the subject because we were forced to study classical, folk etc. when all we were interested in was rock music.

Forced cookery indoctrination will similarly turn today's generation off the subject for life. You can bet recipes will be dull, fat free, vegie, and bland when all the little monsters want to learn is how to make a pizza.

Look for obesity to rise as a result.