School

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In Turkey they are banning school children from using Farcebok and Twitter while at school. Naturally there is uproar. It’s Orwellian! It’s oppressive! It’s against their yooman rites!

Little Turkish children will soon be on your TV screen saying ‘Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I’m being repressed’.

Um… what are they at school for? To learn stuff or to diddle about on social media? We didn’t have all this stuff when I was at school because it was *mumble* years ago but back then we could have been in trouble for taking in a pocket chess set or for spending a maths lesson devising coded messages.

Okay. I wasn’t always doing the code thing with my mate of the time, ‘Piggy’ Angel. I also spent a lot of time trying to see up the maths teacher’s short and surprisingly (and disappointingly) well fitted skirt. I was paying attention in class! Maybe just… not to the actual lesson.

Hey, I was 15/16 at that time. I had boy hormones then. These days I am a bit more restrained.

All the schools I went to have been demolished now. So have most of the places I’ve worked. As if there is a God who just misses, every time.

StillI I consider myself very lucky indeed not to have been at this school.

Losing social media privileges doesn’t seem quite so harsh in perspective, does it?

 

 

25 thoughts on “School”

  1. I remember a boy at my school getting the belt for doodling in his jotter from Mr Dunlop, the maths teacher. That’s probably now considered to be on a par with medieval torture. It might seem harsh, but Mr Dunlop resisted stretching the boy on the rack and cutting off his writing hand in the woodwork department.

    On a more serious note, Turkey’s government has new powers to block websites “without prior judicial authorisation” (not just in schools.) and blocked Twitter and YouTube last year due to the number of posts concerning government corruption.

    Chances are they are training the schoolchildren to get used to such bans so they grow up to be compliant drones. I think that’s the Orwellian angle.

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    • Oh they will grow up to be compliant drones… mostly

      There will always be the underground using TOR and VPN to get past the idiots Government put in charge of the bans. All this power is built on a foundation with a flaw in it. They’ll never fill the crack that will one day bring it all down 😉

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  2. A suitable analogy for your generation would be the carrying and use of transistor radios or cassette players at school. As soon as our father bought a cassette player when they were still very new, my brother and I composed a fart tape. My brother still has it.

    There was never a need to share its wonders at school – our friends came to our house to listen – and if possible – contribute.

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  3. You were lucky you had ‘female’ teachers.

    The all-boys school I attended had just male teachers. There were however ….. dinner ladies ……

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  4. I was bullied every day at grammar school I think I was picked on because of other things that were happening at home and not being able to react that I was walking around depressed and suicidal so was an easy target, in the fifth year I had my arms trapped in a desk while being punched in the face, I tried to leave then but was made to go back after two weeks, it was definitely a factor in me trying to attempt suicide at 16, it’s happening at home and at school so what was the point of going on not one teacher ever did anything to stop them
    still to this day I would love to be able to torture that groups of bullies, just for personal pleasure and exercising personal ghosts, I know I should have let it go and move on but they can sue me after I’ve taken a scalpal and performed some surgery on them you know cutting tendons in limbs removing their tongues blinding… er too much info? I guess that’s what you get being a near shut in, need some fresh air
    at least I’d have a smile on my face 🙂

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    • Man, you can’t think that way. Forgiveness is the only way forward. a) You aren’t going to do those things so, b) you’re only hurting yourself by hanging onto grudges.

      I’m sure some of them will be mortified themselves looking back at what horrors they were.

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        • Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

          Not all school bullies turn into adult psychopaths. In fact, psychopaths present themselves as charming, honest and upright, so I imagine the chances are that most school bullies grow up.

          I was a bit of a nerdy swot at school, yet grew up to be a gambling alcoholic (reformed by the grace of God.)

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          • I’ve been through several iterations and certainly cannot claim to be without sin. Some of those incarnations were pretty callous.

            Yet surely forgiveness requires at least some sign of contrition? If the perpetrator laughs in your face and just doesn’t care, isn’t damnation the only answer?

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              • I agree, but it depends on what you think ‘God’ is. And payback immediately externalises God, which is one POV, but it is not my POV. I don’t know if a book even exists that fully elusidates my God POV, that I can being a pithy quote from as evidence for this argument or that.

                Mostly I don’t trust KJB as the man was a complete and utter prick with regards to tobacco:

                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Counterblaste_to_Tobacco

                Why the hell would I trust his commissioned words framing what God is about?

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                • It was his scholars that translated it, rather than him. Many monarchs down through the ages in all countries seem to have been pilchards.

                  “I don’t know if a book even exists that fully elusidates my God POV.”

                  That must be perplexing. I use the KJB because it appears honest, although I’m not sure if Saul really had that conversion; don’t mean to criticise him if he did. The thees and thous are important; the modern translations mean we don’t know if people are talking to one person or to all people. I like the archaic language and many common sayings come from it.

                  It is also more tasteful. When talking of having sex, it uses the verb “to know”. Adam knew his wife, for example. The New International Version, very popular now, is not only less accurate than the KJV (no thees and thous), but cuts a few parts out and instead of “to know” says “had sexual relations with” which sounds trashy. And it has a copyright!!

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  5. At my high school it was survival of the fittest. However, we had Ms Daniels the French Teacher, a nice wee maths teacher woman with bosoms and a girls gym teacher who wore unfeasibly tight track suit bottoms which may have been sprayed on.

    To balance things we also had a geography guy who was fond of belting people and used Second World War practices to keep us in order, a technical teacher who was mostly inebriated and another techie teacher who spent all of his time making stuff for his wife’s shop.

    Those were the days. We obviously didn’t have Facebook etc. or telephones but we could walk, go to people’s doors and ask them to go out to play etc. which would be football, building dens and dams and cycling.

    I’m beginning to feel like the oldest person in the world! Birthday just over a week away. Oh dear.

    We have allowed the establishment to gain more and more power over us. It looks like that nice Call me Dave chap is going to take as much as he can and more and more and more. Just great. We deserve what we get.

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    • That’s my past too, apart from the teachers. I only ever got belted when I deserved it – and I accepted that because I’d been stupid enough to get caught. I suspect I might have grown up in the only school free of child molesters.

      The only really feared teacher was the English teacher and she never hit anyone. I learned from her how powerful a few words can be. She could reduce a muscle-bound teen to a quivering wreck in two sentences! Nobody failed her class in the years I was there. Nobody dared.

      It’s gone too far the other way though. Now, teachers aren’t allowed to defend themselves against violent children. Some balance is needed here.

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  6. See how the noose tightens – how smooth the move from ‘think of the children’ with control over smoking to ‘think of the good children’ with control over the internet.

    All that abuse that happened in that school; would the bastard teachers have gotten away with it for so long if camera phones and social media were around then? The teachers were too big to fight back against physically but technologically, it would be a much fairer fight.

    Schools already have rules about these devices and access to social media on school property. Turning those rules a Law will have the unintended consequence of making ‘criminal’ the only career path on offer to children in the future.

    The question then is, for the purposes of evaluating the unintended consequences that will surely follow, is that a good or a bad thing? Governments should practice what they preach and respect diversity because the internet and it’s content is the most diverse thing man has created… so far 😉

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    • Criminalisation of the innocent is rarely an ‘unintended’ consequence.
      As we are gradually finding (and as the likes of David Icke have been saying for years) there are paedos in high places, protecting their own.

      There are no coincidences, and accidents only really happen when I have something sharp and no idea how to use it.

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      • But for the great unwashed, criminalisation of the innocent is perceived as an ‘unintended’ consequence in hindsight because it’s never presented to them an an ‘intended’ consequence – politicians don’t do that; their goal it to be elected.

        I’m think here of the 2007 smoking ban. At the time, I never saw it as anything other inconvenience for other people (I only have to go to pubs for work entertaining – I didn’t my free time in them after I left my teens). I accepted the bollocks about the dangers of smoking because that was what I’d been taught in school. It was only through reading you and Frank Davis and plenty of others on the internet, that I got the “Oh Fuck!” realisation, turning hindsight into foresight, if that’s not too pretentious.

        Maybe that’s why I’m a little passionate about opposing any internet restrictions. Especially for children, who have grown up communicating through this technology, I think they have a lot to teach us (adults) about the possibilities it holds. And like smokers, to the Righteous, children can smell a little ‘evil’… at least in my household of teenage boys 😉

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  8. I am waiting *looks at watch* for the calls to ban the London Underground *taps foot and looks at watch again*…

    ‘Smoking is obviously banned on the tube but it doesn’t make much difference. According to studies, a single 40 minute journey is the equivalent of smoking two cigarettes due to the concentration of dust particles in the air.’

    http://www.shortlist.com/cool-stuff/25-things-you-probably-didnt-know-about-the-london-underground#gallery-9

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