How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [58]
The initiative is being developed in response to a report that found some two-year-olds were unaware they had a name, let alone what it was. And that one in ten of all children in deprived areas didn’t know a single nursery rhyme.
Hmmm. I’ve given this some thought, and I can’t see the problem. Nursery rhymes are cruel and terrible things full of stories about dismembered sheep and the bubonic plague. You have Simple Simon, who was obviously a retard, Hickory Dickory Dock, which is just rubbish, and Wee Willie Winkie, who ran through the town in his nightclothes, peering through the windows of children to see if they were in bed. Clearly, the man was a paedophile, and the less two-year-olds know about such things, the better.
In fact, I applaud any parent who hides these sordid and frightening stories and encourages their children to play Grand Theft Auto instead. But I very much doubt the parka army with its clipboards will share my views. Nor do I expect it will concentrate its efforts in areas where children are in real need of help. In the same way that airport security people blunderbuss their anti-terrorism efforts across the board, which means they are just as likely to jab a digit in the back of Harry Potter as they are a sweating Afghan with wires poking out of his shoes, social workers are just as likely to target the local vicarage as they are the sink estate.
Indeed, they’ve already said as much. Someone called Jean Gross, who is spearheading the government’s drive to make children learn nursery rhymes by the time the umbilical cord is cut, says that such problems also affect middle-class families, especially if their under-twos spend long periods in mediocre childcare while both parents work hard to pay off a big mortgage.
I find this a bit terrifying because I remember, when my children were young, having them examined by someone who didn’t know them, didn’t know us and could summon, with the stroke of a ballpoint, a government machine that could at worst take them away and at best give them a problem with a Latin name that they’d spend the rest of their lives trying to overcome. And all because they didn’t know Humpty Dumpty was not an egg, or a fatty, but a civil war cannon. I actually know one couple who, quite wrongly, had their child taken away. And could have it back only if they lived in secure accommodation with twenty-four-hour surveillance. It remains the most barbaric example of a useless and dangerous system that now is set to get even worse.
When it comes to the rearing of a child, there is no definitive right and wrong. Social workers – whom I admire for the most part – will continue to be too cautious in some cases and too heavy-handed in others. Mistakes will continue to be made, which is fine if you are a shelf-stacker or you pick vegetables for a living. But when your mistake devastates a family, it is absolutely not fine at all.
If we go back to the children I encountered thirty years ago in that cockroach-infested house, it’s entirely possible they are all now in jail for selling ketamine to toddlers. But it’s also possible (just) that they are university professors.
And let’s finish with the example of a young girl whose father was an abusive alcoholic and whose mother became so fed up that she shot him dead in front of the child. Every rulebook in the world would say she should be taken into care. She wasn’t. And she grew up to be Charlize Theron.
Sunday 4 January 2009
The world will never be safe until Scrabble is banned
News from the dusty bit at the back of the toy shop. In the past twelve months, sales of Trivial Pursuit have tripled, Monopoly is 13 per cent up and Scrabble is twenty-three times more popular than it was in 2007. Naturally, the sort of people who like long walks in