In the 1990s Harry Enfield's council house tenants Wayne and Waynetta were characters in a television comedy series who amused some, if not all of us. According to those who want to run things in the United Kingdom, the imaginary land of Wayne and Waynetta and their kin has come alive and is creating mayhem wherever polite society seeks to sustain itself. We can reveal this now because those two great bastions of our society, the government and the media, are pinpointing and exposing a whole catalogue of scandals which they fear may fast bring down the civilisation we have come to cherish. Among the many items on this catalogue are : -
- illiterate, poorly educated child care workers;
- schools failing because the teaching is bad;
- schools failing because the parents are bad;
- young people who riot (for instance the be-hooded children of Wayne and Waynetta);
- social workers of various kinds who encourage, and join in, the rioting;
- school students, who are all sitting for public examinations that are far too easy to pass;
- students studying inferior new-fangled courses in schools and in the newer universities (particularly those newer universities that don't attract students from public schools) which apparently do not provide them with knowledge or skills worthy of deserving appointment to gainful employment;
- money grabbing local authority social workers and teachers who, by working with children and families living in poorer areas where property prices are low, are being paid far too much.
The list goes on and on.
As yet we need not be unduly alarmed because the two afore-mentioned bulwarks of knowledge and rectitude - our government and our media - conscientiously and consistently, not to say persistently, remind us of those things we ought to do and those we ought not to do as well as helpfully proferring final and definitive solutions for how we can put all these dreadful things right. To facilitate getting ourselves back on the moral track the institutions which represent the art of the possible and the might of the pen have gathered a group of hired helpers and given it a mandate to cure us of the fear and dread we are being pressed to feel and to vouchsafe for us, all that they believe we should hold dear for our children and young people. This elite group contains:-
- a number of senior inspectors of various children's services (including Ofsted work contracted out to the private Tribal Group) as well as some academic researchers who are happy to take the government's shilling and make the necessary adjustments to their scripts;
- government appointed gurus who, while making a packet for themselves, claim to have all the answers about how to get skivers back to work;
- child behaviour experts who busy themselves exposing our general failure to get children to behave well both in the classroom and on the street and who can deliver for us with double-underlined, boxed up, sealed and ultimate certainty, children and young people who will never step out of line;
- the high-minded founders of the new "free" schools who make sure that the unemployed,the obese,the nicotine inhaling, the cheap alcohol imbibing, the welfare scrounging feral underclasses living in the nearby council estate are prevented from sending their kids to pollute the atmosphere of fresh and fragrant "free" schools.
Like our first list this one is followed by etcetera after etcetera.
There may be some things for us to learn from all this. Firstly, dare we suggest that one such thing might be that it is possible to conclude that the Wayne and Waynetta legend is situated between fantasy and stereotype, while each one of us is a unique and real person deserving of respect? Secondly would we be unduly opening ourselves to justified ridicule if we were to suggest that the "fear and dread" being drummed up by our government and media together with the concomitant "cures" of their experts rest somewhere between dubious and spurious?
This opinion item first appeared on January 22nd, 2012 on the goodenoughcaring website homepage at http://www.goodenoughcaringcom
