‘What am I meant to do, go and say sorry like a little bitch?” said the 15-year-old boy sitting beside me in a quiet room halfway through the school day. He had refused to apologise to his classroom teacher for his disruption of her lesson. It had been insidious, low-level nuisance stuff: he’d been swinging on his chair, answering back and wouldn’t stop talking.
I’m a senior pastoral leader within a comprehensive school in southwest England, so students are often sent my way when there’s a stalemate. What was depressingly clear was that this child’s refusal to apologise was connected to the fact that his teacher was a woman, and saying sorry would mean that he, a male, would lose face.
This isn’t TikTok, Twitter, social media – this is male teenagedom. Half the point of education is to whip this attitude out of them – or at least teach when it’s appropriate. No blubbing when told to march toward the machine guns lads, you’ll lose face by letting the side down. It is OK to have a little tear when City finally score a goal after that 20 year drought.
That people who don’t know this are running the education system is what is wrong with the education system. The whole job you’ve got there is to sort this out.
TThe kid has discovered that ;authority; xan’t or won’t do anything to him.
I have a sneaking regard for that view. They don’t sned you over the top into the guns because they care for you.
Yeah, fuck all those kids who want to learn, let the animals do what they want, I mean what could possibly go wrong?
Perhaps you should have a butchers at the vids of inner city schools in the USA Tim.
What are the odds this teenager is another one of the many benefits of diversity?
So she’s making the case that women are unsuited to teach and keep discipline in boys?
@JuliaM The current crop of female teachers.
I distinctly remember a couple of lady teachers in my Youf who you really didn’t want to cross swords with.
They could, and would, dissect you with just their tongue if you trespassed on their very clear rules of expected behaviour.
The average drill sergeant would shed a silent tear of joy, and possibly take notes, with some of them.
Floggem Grikath?? But that was in the good old days!!
Addolff,
This is why the school leaving age should be 14. Kids like this don’t want to be there and are wasting everyone’s time including their own. They see no benefit to being in school. And this is true for most kids, who are just there serving time, having a laugh, rote learning a load of shit they’ll never use again. Maybe 20% will go on to be academics, engineers, scientists who need their post-14 education.
We need to bring back capital punishment in schools.
Opps. Corporal. Of course, I meant Corporal…
Oh, and as to:
As I don’t have access to the paywall, can I ask if the response was “Yes, you say sorry, like the little bitch that you are.”?
Tim,
No blubbing when told to march toward the machine guns lads, you’ll lose face by letting the side down.
The youngsters may be completely ignorant, thanks to their comprehensive education, but if there’s one thing English youth have learned well is not to join the army, because the government isn’t on our side and we are not a real country anymore.
WB @9.41, couldn’t agree more, but our masters have decided that the only way forward is education, education, education, no matter that as you say, it will be of little to no benefit for the vast majority of kids. Good for all those who want to be teachers rather than getting a proper job though.
PJH, you were the right first time – some of these little bastards have never had someone say ‘no’ to them who meant it.
CofE drip fails to discipline muslim adolescent is my guess.
Expulsion and repatriation is the solution.
Cue Labour,
The Tory education system has failed these youngsters. We will provide more resources.
85% of UK primary school teachers are female, as are 74% of secondary school teachers…what could possibly go wrong?
At 15 years old and with that attitude it won’t be too long before his cellmate is showing him the real meaning of being someone’s little bitch.
You can connect this with this article in the Torygraph. Which shows equal ignorance & stupidity. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/08/14/idle-britain-fertile-ground-violence-resentment-crime/
For both topics, this the default state* of male humanity. Civilised behaviour has imposed on that & to a degree, unnatural. Human males are aggressive hunters. That’s natural for them. The military know this. They regulate & keep the troops occupied doing something. Or idle hands…
No matter how much they might wish it males are not going to become females. Without a couple of bricks, anyway. Or possibly a subscription to the Guardian.
* Worth looking at history & the feared London Mob of the C18th. These kid’s direct ancestors.
Idle hands… This relates to something I’ve mentioned before.
In 1901, 20% of the population was under 10, and in school. In 2021 only 10% of the population is under 10. Oh noes! What to do with all those surplus teachers? We don’t need them, get rid of ’em.
Ha. No way. We’ve got to protect our phoney baloney jobs ladies and gentlemen. 20% of the population is now under *20* so we keep our jobs by expanding the school population.
I hate to be obvious but could we not arm schoolmarms with submachine guns?
I’m with Western Bloke, it’s wasting everyone’s time people like him being in school beyond 14 or 15.
As it happens we had a plumber in yesterday and his mate had just finished a music tech degree course. I don’t have the heart to say to him he’d have been better off learning to be a plumber at 16 and doing music tech as a hobby.
Yeah, fuck all those kids who want to learn, let the animals do what they want, I mean what could possibly go wrong?
If you’re serious about your kid getting an education, you don’t send them to school – public or private – in the first place. You home school.
Schools in ‘Merica are, first and foremost, daycare centers. Academic test scores confirm this. They are there to warehouse kids until Mom and/or Dad finish their working day. Disruptive kids aren’t suspended or expelled because teaching and learning are not the highest priority of the system.
I can’t imagine it’s much different with you wogs.
The youngsters may be completely ignorant, thanks to their comprehensive education, but if there’s one thing English youth have learned well is not to join the army, because the government isn’t on our side and we are not a real country anymore.
It will be interesting to see the recruitment figures in the coming year or two. Now that everyone can clearly see the two tier policing that shows them the state hates whitey and the stark differences in response to the riots, how many whites are going to join the army and fight for the state?
I predict even fewer than already are. Which given that the vast majority of the army is still White, is going to cause them a problem…
The police as well…
Good.
@Chernyy Drakon
<i)Now that everyone can clearly see the two tier policing that shows them the state hates whitey and the stark differences in response to the riots, how many whites are going to join the army and fight for the state?
I predict even fewer than already are. Which given that the vast majority of the army is still White, is going to cause them a problem…
The police as well… Good.
Yes, it’s going to be so much better when the blokes with automatic weapons and cells are from Somalia, Algeria, Iraq and so on.
Unless you think the government is going to just stop having soldiers and ‘police’?
CD – The RAF ordinarily used the “first past the post” system in recruitment so that positions were given to candidates who passed the various stages of selection such as aptitude, medical and fitness tests. However, this changed after diversity targets were set, to increase the number of female recruits to 20% and ethnic minority recruits to 10% by 2020, and for 40% of the force to be female and 20% from an ethnic minority background by 2030.
[…]
White men seeking to join the Royal Air Force were described as “useless white male pilots” in leaked emails that expose the pressure placed on recruitment officers to improve diversity.
NB they haven’t gotten rid of the diversity targets or even admitted they were wrong, despite having to pay compensation for racist discrimination against white men.
All the RAF has copped to is being too enthusiastic about Diversity, so the mindset hasn’t changed at all. I wish them the very best of luck in their future wars, because they will need it if they ever attack a country that can fight back.
@Steve
If they do decide to drag us into war against Russia in Ukraine, then they will need all the troops they can get. I can’t see the White population being too keen to get slaughtered. Maybe they will do a citizenship for service scheme like Russia does? (Sign up to fight in Ukraine for Russia and get Russian citizenship – pay is reasonable after combat bonuses as well).
On the other hand, given how really everyone clapped for COVID…
I don’t know any more if they’re going to drag us in. Ukraine seem to be losing badly. It’ll be a tough sell to the western public, not that our politicos give a toss about public opinion.
@Interested
That would put the final nail in the coffin of the idea that the state is on our side.
I would hope people would start to realise then and take appropriate actions.
Personally it wouldn’t matter to me. I’ll just move abroad. Not far off deciding to do it now.
Interested – Yes, it’s going to be so much better when
That’s the thing. Nobody expects it to get better in the foreseeable. All the good options have been taken away from us by the Conservatives and Labour. Shite, intit?
CD – If they do decide to drag us into war against Russia in Ukraine, then they will need all the troops they can get.
One of many strange things about the Ukraine war is how disconnected Western/NATO rhetoric is from reality. I.e. we keep hearing politicians and military people saying we’re in a “pre war” situation etc etc.
But nobody’s doing anything to prepare for war. Eventually increasing the amount of money we waste on defence to 2.5% of GDP – someday – won’t move the needle at all. We know that if we got involved in a major war tomorrow, the British armed forces would run out of missiles within a few days, while the USA might last as long as 4 weeks. Nobody’s addressing that either. We know we don’t have anything like enough air defence, because we have seen the rate at which AD is attrited in Ukraine – no plans to fix that either…
Everybody wants to be Winston Churchill, but nobody’s seriously rearming, except tragic Poland, which always rearms just in time to be horribly defeated by its bigger neighbours.
So either we’re not going to fight Russia, with our ridiculously small number (140 approx) of Challenger 3 tanks, or the war will go nuclear in the first 48 hours.
Either way, I’m out.
I can’t see the White population being too keen to get slaughtered.
Ukraine is in mortal danger of being rammed full of Africans and Asians as soon as the war ends. Their Western partners will demand it and so will their new Western owners, BlackRock. Because much of the white population of Ukraine, and to a lesser extent Russia, has already been slaughtered or crippled for life in that shitty fucking war.
Maybe they will do a citizenship for service scheme like Russia does? (Sign up to fight in Ukraine for Russia and get Russian citizenship – pay is reasonable after combat bonuses as well).
I’m sure arming the foederati will work out for them this time tho.
@ Dennis
The British Public Schools (the top end of what Americans call “Private Schools”) are generally pretty good at educating children especially in comparison with the average middle-class parent with no training in education. The English State schools (what Americans call “Public Schools”) vary horrendously thanks to Anthony Crosland and Anthony Wedgewood Benn (the ci-devant Lord Stansgate) who replaced the many-centuries-old Grammar Schools with the observable failed US system of neighbourhood schools [*after* all the fuss about “bussing” from Human Rights campaigners] and are, if not quite universally certainly on average far worse than the 1940s/50/early60s Butler tripartite system.
Our Public (“Private” in American) schools are still massively worthwhile – I get regular updates with, occasionally, a begging letter from my old school showing the wonderful benefits received by kids receiving Bursaries [not the same as my Open Scholarship but they assume that I will empathise} that are funded by Old Boys – so I have seen evidence that a *good* school with specialist teachers is valuable for those in the top quartile academically.
Bullies should be punished by the schools.
The boy should be punished for his lack of respect for women.
The sad fact is in adult life he will probably be rewarded for being a bully.
John77 ; there seems to be a massive bullying and child abuse problem in UK private schools. Plus the UK system does favour private school pupils unfairly.
Surely the private school system has a excuse to inflate their actual standards, just as public education systems.
I found this about private schools in the UK.
https://www.alexrenton.com/blog/fear-lies-and-abuse-the-private-school-cover-up
I was never sexually abused as a child, although I was bullied by other children. I went to state school. But I am still glad I never went to private school, if they are just places for child abusers to abuse the kids.
Here is a another Guardian report on child abuse in private schools.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jul/27/alex-renton-private-school-abuse-radio-series-in-dark-corners
I think there is a right wing worship of the private school system, even to the point of allowing evil child abusers to abuse innocent children.
I am still glad I went to a state school, rather than a private school.
I suffered enough from peer to peer bullying, but I would have struggled to deal with being a victim of child abuse
We had a long discussion on this very blog when hte revelations about sexual abuse at my ld school, Downside, came out. Which were much, muchm woirse at the sister school, Ampleforth. And truly horrific at Ealing, another in the network. And just about nothing at Worth, another.
In the years I was at Downside there simply wasn’t any. Just nothing. A few years before I went there a teacher was fouind trying it on woith one pupil. The headmaster came down like a ton of bricks, he was drummed out of teaching anywhere residential in England. Other potential abusers got the message and just didn’t turn up at the school.
Some years after I’d left one abuser did get inside the system. And as it works out when there’s one word gets around that abuse is possible so others turn up.
The Downside problem, the legal one, is that they destroyed papers about this. Not that abuse was rampant. At Ealing it was rampant, at Ampleforth common enough.
So “private schools” or “boarding schools” means abuse isn’t true. Sure, it makes it more likely because it’s residential. But a good headmaster or system can keep it out.
Thanks for the reply.
I cannot find stats on the comparision on the difference of rates of child abuse at private or state schools in the UK. There should be data on this. I found data saying child abuse was more common at private schools than state schools in the USA.
But a York University study seems to say private school is not as useful as people claim.
https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2020/research/private-school-development/
@ Mary Scotland
My personal experience is that bullying is rife in State schools and relatively rare in private schools. I learnt to fight the hard way in the state school I attended from a few days before my fifth birthday to a few weeks before my seventh. The private school I attended thence until I was 13 had a “no bullying” policy created by the boys and encouraged by the teachers. My public school had a few would-be bullies but most boys would stop it if they saw it (admittedly the last time another boy tried to bully me my friends just watched because they were confident that I could cope and one of them took the would-be bully up to Matron). My elder son (who is a lot cleverer than I) said he did not want to go to Public School and was horribly bullied at one of the state Primary Schools (the first one where he was in his age group for PE and Music, and three years up for all the academic subjects was fine until some bureaucrat insised on moving him) and the local ex-Grammar School Comprehensive – in both cases tolerated (I think encouraged) by a teacher who resented his superior intelligence.
Sexual abuse – if it had existed we should have known/heard about it. Most of the rumours are due to Americans thinking that “fag” means catamite when it actually means servant”
I used a fraction of my City income to pay for my children to have first-class schooling, as day pupils. They’re now studying at Oxbridge, and are likely to become more productive citizens than I ever was. And no, there was no child abuse.
However, most of what I was paying for was the home environment of their fellow pupils. There’s very little a school can do when pupils don’t want to learn, or are ill-equipped for learning, and it drags down the rest of their class.
I attended private school throughout the 80s. Never heard a single whisper of any abuse, nor has any ever been alleged since, at either school I attended. I think by the 80s the pedos and psychos had been largely driven out of the private school system. The worst we had to put up with were the teachers who were rather red faced after lunch hour, having spent it in a local pub (there was strict demarcation – teachers went to one pub, pupils to another, so blind eyes could be turned by all concerned)
One piece of anecdata: an older friend recounted to me her state school days in the ’60s. She noticed a teacher regularly requesting a “well developed” 15-year-old “help” him in the art cupboard after lessons, and she would come out looking deshevled and shaken. She confronted him and persued it to whatever disciplinary process they had in the ’60s, and he was removed from the school. So it’s not just independent schools. After all, the bank is where the money is.
‘I’m sure arming the foederati will work out for them this time tho.’
Think that’s the way it’ll go in the UK, Steve?? If it does, no doubt Oz’ll be stupid enough to copy you!!