Let me start this with a rant.. as I'm prone to doing.
Last year in Oz - oh, and I'm sticking with the name "Oz" from now on for astraya, because we are behaving like a pack of munchkins, we may as well be named aptly .. anyway, we named this woman Fiona something-or-other got herself named 'Australian Of the Year' because of her work in elevating and highlighting the rights of children.
problem.
When I was a kid, we were oblivious about 'rights'. We knew we had privileges that we had earned, and these were taken away from us whenever we did anything stupid, wilful or inane. Kids got beat up at school and cried, I got beat up at school and cried.. then had to walk some 5 kilometres home afterwards.
My grandparents on my mums side used to take us kids to the tip on weekends which was really cool, and from the bike parts I scavenged, I built a bike so I could RIDE home after being beaten up. Getting beaten up was part of life for kids then, just as was riding bikes, walking, building swings, falling off swings, walking home with broken limbs after falling off swings etc was.
It was pretty easy really, if you were a lazy bugger, you got nothing. If you did what parents/teachers/old people asked, you got stuff AND they'd let you do other things like go to the movies and the like.
It was a process known as 'Growing Up'.
You started with bugger all and by proving you had learned stuff about being a decent member of society, the adults slowly allowed you to integrate - as a result, all us kids wanted to grow up so we could have cool stuff, do cool things.. and sometimes do cool things with members of the opposite sex.
I went to Scarborough high school, (Long May She Be Remembered!.. the fckn fool government bulldozed the school, sold off the land and now they're having problems because all the new families who moved in have no school to send their kids too - duh!) where the school motto was 'Aspire'. The school had a reputation as being a bad school, where rampaging hoards of drug addled hooligans ran amok, destroying the social amenity of residents and some other rot, but in reality it was a good school with good teachers and a GREAT view of the ocean which contributed to an unusually high truancy rate.
One day the teachers got a bunch of us kids together and suggested we might like to review the rules on school uniforms. Now the uniform was a bit daggy in lower school, but in upper school the students got to wear kewl white shirts which looked great on the girls, so I had no problem with the uniform. This was pretty unusual for me given my experiences with school uniforms in the past. You see I was one of those kids who got moved from school to school pretty frequently and my parents never saw any reason to spend good, hard earned money on getting me a new uniform for each new school, so getting beaten up for wearing the wrong colours pretty much gave me a firm justification for hating such things. But I did not, in this case..
It got me thinking though - wtf?? Why are these teachers (barely out of school themselves) so keen to empower the inexperienced with the task of decision making on such a grand scale? I mean, I said at the time that a uniform serves a multitude of purposes, least of which was to remove class distinction and render all students to all intent, the same. Fool. I was promptly dismissed from the debate, and the cutsie-toe boys and the mincing prima donna girls were to go on to write a new school dress code which basically eliminated black DB's (prissy toe-rags!), black t-shirts (snotty little mummy's boys!!) and nekkidness.. aside from that the 'Uniform' was now a free for all.
To my mind (the mind of a 16 year old I might add) this seemed completely insane. Why were mere kids being asked what we wanted, and then GIVEN it?? We lacked experience, knowledge, a sense of social purpose - we had nothing to lose and everything to gain - we were absolutely the WRONG people to ask! Of course those who were party to the uniform decision were students who exhibited a great degree of confidence and maturity.. which is another was of saying they were precocious spoilt brats, but that's my POINT! Even the dimmest, black t-shirt and DB clad hoon who had a few spare brain cells to rub together behind their monolithic brow was acknowledging this was pretty dumb (great for them, but still nonetheless, dumb).
I remember this as the beginning of the rot.
Fly forward through time with me if you will, some 20 years (crap - has it been that long??!) to the present. I have worked as a lecturer at a college and I see some pretty hard working, kind, mature, wholesome, decent students pass before me, and I've seen some flat footed, lazyassed, non-coms.. students who's mummies buy them new phones afetr every temper tantrum that results in the old one getting busted, students who's daddies drive them to college every morning and then pick them up afterwards. Students who whine and bleat and cry and say it's unfair when you fail them because they failed to turn up to more than 2 classes.. who cry and plead with you, thinking their NEED far outweighs my honesty.
C'mon kids! How would you feel if you'd worked your guts out to present the BEST work possible and you get like a 9.5 and some slack-jawed pinhead sloughs in late and hands over something the dog vomited up and they get a 7? not fair? huh? huh?
well..
So anyway - this Fiona person thinks kids should have more rights.
o -kaaay, lets toy with this idea for a moment.
You're born (plop) you hit the world screaming, knowing nothing - not even how to use those hands that keep smacking you in the face..
Later your eyes hopefully begin to focus, you stop smacking yourself around as much, and you learn to talk and then promptly demand a mobile phone "cause Betty-Boop has one and HER mum thinks it's important.. unless you WANT me to be kidnapped my some freakazoid rapist type and subjected to all the horrors my poor widdle body can handew.." (fckn kid's been watching too much CSI on their own person 62" plazma screen tv). Mummy in her infinite stupidity relents and the kid gets a $900 phone and begins racking up $500 a month phone bills.
Puberty comes, along with all the horrors that can summon inside the fiend, and a car is provided for diddum's 17th..
bang, 18 is right around the corner aaaaand guess what? You're now officially an adult!
You've contributed nothing to society, you have had every friggin right to every friggin thing you laid eyes on, the law would kick yaw muddas ass if she so much as LOOKED at you sideways, but now - all those rights and crap? All gone.
that's it, playtime's over - you're an adult. Oops! you overdrew your account because you never learned the value of money? You're so far in credit card debt you'll have to live to 264 minimum to pay off just the interest, you've been hit with a DD charge and your car's been confiscated and wassat? hahaha - you didn't know you HAD to vote?
What's that now? you're blaming society for it all and changing your name and going bankrupt on a weekly basis to avoid this 'responsibility' stuff. You're binge drinking and humping anything with a wallet in the hope that one of these balding old gits will 'provide' for you, and if that doesn't work then the ol' get knocked up and go on supporting benefits is always a viable option..
Jesus Fiona!
Kids are DUMB, they come that was - free from programming for a purpose - adults train the kids for the respective society and as the kids adapt and learn they are awarded PRIVILIGES (not freeking rights!) and eventually they become adults - what you're proposing might be all well and good for the kids (insert memorable tune: the children aaare our futuuuure) but it's downright WRONG if we're raising these children to be adults!
let's review all this: You're born with all the rights in the world and no responsibilities. Bang, you're an adult.. (insert sound of rights being torn bodily from the hellspawn offspring) - no wonder so many adults these days aspire to be kids! No bloody wonder so many businesses are making gazillions on the "young is beautiful, young is perfect, young is right" industry! No wonder Kewl, Hip, Young Progressive Thinking are taking our companies, industries and institutions and trashing them at an amazing rate..
Bring back the old grey men, the ones who started out as floor sweepers, who rose slowly, with their 'new and innovative' being kept in check by the former, old grey men until such time as they'd proved themselves not only capable of taking charge of the company or whatever, but also waiting until they'd proven they possessed the wisdom, responsibility and empathy to take charge.
Giving kids so many 'rights', and making them aware of it might be a nice thing in theory, but in practice this is doing nothing toward training children to be adults - and personally I think THAT is what we should be doing. It might not always appear to be kind, it might not always be the fun thing, but THAT is our responsibility. Childhood lasts but a short while (hopefully) and adulthood a lot longer (hopefully) ..
My opinion is that all this rights stuff for chillen is downright immoral, and does nothing for the PERSON (can I stress that more strongly, that the kids are 'people' not just kids!?). Kids are the laval form of a person - how about we use this stage to prepare them for their longer period of life as an adult.
Fiona's big push is I feel, the most gross act of injustice, and is absolutely the WORST thing we could be doing for children. Thinkaboutit - what does it mean when you have your rights taken away? It means you've done something wrong! ..and if you have done nothing wrong then it leads to a feeling of resentment. That's what we'll be doing to adults in future generations - training them to be children and making them resentful of being adults.
whatever..
Maybe it's appropriate that Fiona be named Oz of the year. Go ahead m'dear and lord it over the munchkins 'till next year when you'll be forgotten.
your ideas will be old by then, and we all know how bad OLD things are!
2:40 p.m. - 2005-09-26
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