h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I picked this up at lunch time and am munching it over, liked the way you linked

pushed for posting time and it takes me ags to write stuff but I have started

Peanut

After posting I had regrets.. One of the problems of exchanging with unknown people through the ether.. As in the "legs" example I gave I have become used to the luxury of being able to feel my way forward in face to face conversation. Some of the posts that you have written would be consistent with those of a very-hard working single-parent with teenagers.. I would hate to think that anything that I have written might in any way impact negatively.

Regards

Cass

well you couldn't technically put meinto the 'hardworking' single parent as portrayed on the politcal scene as I am unemployed

I am a committed and loving parent and I have other family roles and don't consider myself to be a suck on society

Sometimes I bristle at what you say Cass, at the same I don't really understand what you are saying fully and I s'pose that is why I am here

to munch it over, I am fish out of water when it comes to writing though, which is unfortunate as this is a writing site, so you'll have to bear with me

so I am not going to try and tidy this up or hang it together, I'll just burble

Well, my point was that I think that the most important factor was parents commitment to their children not to each other. I should have qualified that also with a parent’s commitment you don’t have to have two.

You assertion on marriage, sounded conservative family values to me, (I might have misread) the days where the vast majority people belong to a typical nuclear family are gone and I don’t subscribe to the idea that marriage is ideal model of child raising that people should necessarily aspire too and is one that should be promoted and supported above others. That is not saying that I think it is a bad model.

From family values, it then a short step to the Broken Society. Broken homes = broken society, so we are told, and if ‘good old fashioned family values’ can be instilled into those that don’t have them, then those sections of society will be on a good step to becoming fixed

Meaningless, defination of family values too narrow, any society worth it salt supports and values ‘family’ not just a certain kind of family and it is a distraction

I see Broken Society = broken homes, child poverty, deprivation and stark inequalities of opportunities. How we fix that in a time of economic crisis well, that would be lengthy (promise me you won’t tackle it all at once )

Myself , pick of the day, I’d start with education, not family values, good quality childcare and a decent holistic education benefits all children, and families, equal access to that levels opportunities, lifts children out of poverty, in their own lifetime and for the next generation, raises expectations all round

Probably a thing that has made me bristle, I live in an area where there are ‘low expectations‘, and actually I don’t think that it is particulary unjustified.

I do though find that parents want better for their children and find it is not on offer. It is not so much about me overcoming my expectations that is the issue. Expecting a decent education in an area of deprivation well, that is really too much, it is something that I can’t possibly compensate for

That’s hard.

Peanut

Thanks for your post.. I know the challenge of trying to turn around one's own life and more generally the life of a larger region in a disadvantaged area.. I deliberately chose to head for Inner London when I started my teaching career knowing from both history and current affairs that it would really be the Front Line of where the ***** hit the fan.

After 37 years of teaching as well as learning from pupils- the flotsam and jetsam of the world between 1967 and 2004- I have many ideas and experiences.

Actually I wonder about what input I have had more generally over recent time, especially when I started trying to focus on more general Social issues. My Guide Entries include a piece "The Rediscovery of Social Man" which I wrote and circulated c2000, including copies to all major parties. I got polite letters of thanks from 10 Downing Street for that and numerous letters, and in fact had quite an active correspondence with Mr Cameron's office when I wrote to him after his election to lead the Tories with some ideas about the need for "Progressive Conservatism" and another look at Disraelian One-Nation Conservatism, after Mrs Thatcher(and New Labour) had revived Gladstonian Liberalism.


I also sent a copy to the BBC suggesting that, if they did not think it suitable for documentary material, perhaps they should serialise "Lark Rise to Candleford" Flora, Thompson's brilliant evocation of the North Oxfordshire society c1900 which are my maternal roots.. The success of Lark Rise has been followed by Cranford, and possibly other things like Upstairs and Downstairs and Downton Abbbey which give us the opportunity to see a more human side to how life used to work.

But if you read much of what I have written you will see that I feel that the post-war stress on the Nuclear Family was essentially an economic, political and administrative convenience. And in attempting to make it artificially viable by a template of social security and lives which locked away wives and mothers in dormitrary estates while their children and menfolk were off busilly engaged in working one way or another they imposed a gender gap stereotype of the kind that Victorian paternalism aspired to achieve, while also creating "teenage years" as years of potential irresponsibility and fun.

My experience of State education in an area like Lambeth, however, was that many colleagues were politically motivated. Perhaps like me they saw these places as places of special potential energy and drive. But unlike me- a lorry-driver's son who had been lucky enough to go to grammar school and get a university education, they had no real belief in "the ladder of opportunity" or what they saw as a "Middle Class culture" that would actually empower their pupils. They wanted to win them over by radicalisation and enlist them in their revolutionary agenda.

One of my songs "The Devil at Loughbourough Junction" describes my experience of demonstrating outside a National Front meeting in a General Election, our school Union branch's participation being orgaised by our Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party Union leader.

The Police knew more than we did, with mounted Police and helicopters keeping an eye on us. Our "leader" was taken to be interviewed at a London Police Station. But everything in fact passed off in English Peace under glorious sunshine.. A few weeks later one of our leader's friends/associates got killed (martyred) by a Police squad when there was an NF meeting in Southall and things got out of hand.

It is not either or. We can not change the whole thing without empowering and educating each individual, as in fact "our leader"- a public school and Cambridge educated person himself- should have understood perfectly. We lorry-driver's sons do not have the luxury of being able to overlook the importance of "rungs of the ladder" that we had to struggle up.

Cass