Margaret Thatcher is to blame for the abominable rudeness with which parents and children nowadays treat schoolteachers. So said Pat Lerew, president of one of the main teaching unions, earlier this week, and while it is preposterously unfair of her to hold Lady Thatcher personally responsible for the lack of respect in which teachers are now held, it is certainly true that some of today’s parents who were themselves children during the 1980s have absolutely no idea how to behave. The worst among this Eighties generation are marked by a hideous egotism, and by an inability to understand that anything beyond their own dreary consumerist appetites might conceivably be worthy of respect. They work with admirable energy to enrich themselves in a dull, material sense, but they have nothing but scorn for teachers, who are unsuccessful in economic terms and who, if they confer any riches at all, bring these in currency which is not immediately tradeable at the new out-of-town shopping centre.
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