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and many other areas of public education that have been scuttled in recent years. Public schools have become the whipping post of the government, and the real issues of overcrowding, underfunding, and not funding at all those programs that target the lower socio-economic urban areas, which need it most. There have been out-of-control kids in the past, call them unruly, if you will, and there have been miserable failures of people who call themselves parents, but the numbers have grown with population expansion per capita across the board, and the funding, the incentives to keep people working for the benefit of our children and their futures have been severely undercut. Teachers who really had the heart to try to make it all work, and to work on behalf of individual students, have given up. I know...I've been there.
To hear people reminisce about "the good ol'days", when parents were parents, and kids were better behaved is just bullshit in my book. Our society as a whole was repressed, things that happened within the home, such as abuse, were more readily ignored. There never really was a "Leave It To Beaver" American society...it was all just a cover-up since it was easier to live with denial than to act. Now the numbers of parents, children, low socio-economic and/or extended families, children in foster care or in places where people really just don't give a damn, only waiting until the kid reaches the age of majority so room can be made for more, is so much larger in population than ever before in this nation that it boggles the mind to think that taxpayer money will be wasted so Ruth Kelly can show those bad parents just what's what. And with that, the domino effect begins as those kids take the brunt of further outrage, more disdain, disregard, more emotional and/or physical abuse from their parents and/or peers.
You can put a curtain between what Ruth Kelly envisions and what really happens within the constellation of the family targeted, but it won't stop the the derailment of the crumbling of the public school system or undercut the real reasons these kids are in trouble and failing in a system that is failing them.
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