I had a sort of Tottenham High Street moment just after lunch on Tuesday. I was passing a sandwich shop near the Spectator offices and happened to see the slogan beneath its name: ‘Live your life, love our food.’ The urge came, right there and then, to torch the place and maybe rough up the counter staff but — maybe this is an age thing — the feeling quickly passed. It was the impudence of the imperative that most annoyed me, although the general fatuity of it grated too. Why would I not live my life? What’s the alternative? And what has it got to do with your food, you presumptuous idiots?
As it happened, I had just bought a sandwich at another one of these sorts of shops, a few yards down the street (you will have noticed that almost every shop everywhere sells sandwiches. Even Boots sells sandwiches. Quite probably Halfords are selling sandwiches now. Everywhere sells food, fast food, where previously they used to sell things). Anyway, the sandwich I bought was described on the label as being ‘classic’. It comprised white bread, cheddar cheese and sliced tomato. That is what it takes to be ‘classic’ today, a cheese-and-tomato sandwich. I noticed on the typically over-chilled counter next to it a chicken-and-bacon sandwich; this was also described as being ‘classic’. We are living through an era of insane hyperbole, of exponential aggrandising, a kind of constant reassurance to us all that everything we do is alive with purpose and import entirely befitting our inherent brilliance, even when it is just a haggard and bereft 50-year-old twat buying a cheese-and-tomato sandwich. We are treated as if we are toddlers, our ludicrous expectations of ourselves indulged over and over again; we are perpetually lovin’ it and livin’ the dream.
It’s even worse for the kids, mind. At least most of us adults can see through this sort of unreality. The children don’t have a chance. They are treated as if they were adults entirely possessed of the abilities to make the right decisions in life even though, when it comes down to it, we know that they can’t really, because they are too young. This occurred to me when watching a procession of wet-lipped middle-aged women sociologists and schoolteachers commenting about how to stop the yoof from rioting in the streets. These kids, they need more self-esteem, they all agreed. No, please listen to me, they do not need more self-esteem: they need less self-esteem. They need to have the self-esteem sucked out of them somehow, because they have way, way too much of it.
Their entire lives, up until this point, have been an exercise in making them feel really bloody good about themselves, even — or perhaps especially — if they are fantastically useless. At school nothing is allowed to impinge upon their self-esteem; they are not corrected when they misspell, they are, by and large, not told that they are falling short of a standard because there isn’t really a standard to fall short of. They are required to learn fewer and fewer facts and instead to interpret stuff, to put their own gloss on things, usually from a position of total and utter ignorance. What they say must be valued, not matter how valueless it might be.
It is, according to one former teacher who wrote to The Spectator recently, a ‘climate of lies’ in which ‘children believe they can get away with anything’. If anything does go wrong with their lives, it is someone else’s fault: their teachers, or the police, or society. And so they are never corrected, never put right. The notion that the adults are there to impart some kind of wisdom to the kids is not accepted; instead it is the old mantra about education not being about learning but being the ‘bringing out’ from within. And so the kids are encouraged to bring out from within all manner of arrant rubbish, and their choices are indulged and each considered equally valid.
This is an overstatement of what is wrong with our schools, but it is not much of one, and it exists alongside the insistence that any form of elitism must be wrong by definition, because all outcomes are sort of perfectly OK.
There was an echo of this idiocy a few years back when the chef Jamie Oliver was sent into a bunch of schools to try to get the kids to eat more healthily. One headmaster, interviewed after the experiment, said that what Oliver had done was all very well and laudable, but that in the lunch queue today the children still chose pizza over healthier options. It didn’t occur to him that they wouldn’t be able to choose pizza if pizza wasn’t on the menu in the first place; to remove pizza from the menu would be authoritarian. The children have a right to eat pizza and ice cream every day; that is their choice and it is a perfectly valid choice even if it is, as the headmaster admitted, the wrong choice. But you must not tell them what they can and cannot do.
So by my reckoning the last thing we want is to raise the self-esteem of the inner city kids who might one day end up smashing down their local JJB sports shop and nicking the trainers. None of the hooded imbeciles I heard interviewed seemed terribly short of confidence or self-assurance or self-esteem; it oozed out of them like pus, along with self-righteousness. They still do not think that they have done anything wrong; they are unfamiliar with the concept that something can be ‘wrong’.
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