The first good thing that might possibly come out of yesterday’s UNICEF report on the health and wellbeing of children in industrialised countries is that the embarrassment of being rated second from the bottom might help rid our government of its obsession with league tables. The other thing we should hope for, a return to common sense, will at best be a long time coming.
The two nations that have championed globalisation, free market economics and the selfish society, Britain and the U.S.A. are respectively second from bottom and bottom of the list. Thus we are shown once more that the economic policies of the Reagan - Thatcher era have not only failed, been proven to fail and destroyed lives and cultures in the third world, the continuation down this road to lunacy is destroying the souls and communities of nations that claim to have been successful exponents of the global market.
Forget democratic values, family values, Victorian values, middle class values, Christian values, Liberal values and all the other platitudes politicians have embraced, the two leading members of the English Speaking Axis have become nations whose children know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
It is not just toxic twizzlers and too much TV that are destroying the quality of life for our children, the whole structure of our money obsessed society is at fault. Many moons ago when this blog was young, optimistic and positive and squadrons of flying pigs passed overhead every day I commented on The New Apartheid which was increasingly segregating young from old.
Sectors of the media whose job it is to sell young stuff to young people and old stuff to old people must take a large share of the blame but politicians have been quick to jump on band wagons too. Remember “Cool Britannia”?
The world is changing very quickly and we have not understood the changes let alone begun to adapt to them. Technological advance has meant that the system no longer requires masses of people be born into lives of poverty, ignorance and drudgery just to service the needs of the elite. Everybody can have a decent crack at making a fulfilling life for themselves. Yet at the same time society in engineered to deny most people that.
Education systems have lost sight of the life enhancing aspects of education. Schools now merely provide conditioning for a lifetime of mortgage slavery while promoting an intense competitiveness that will result in many pupils being written off as losers by the time they are ten, abandoned to dead end jobs where their resentment will fester.
We abandoned the unfairness of selective education only to replace it with uniform mediocrity. The best pupils with the most supportive parents will rise to the top of the heap of course, but without help from the system.
The majority of children are turned into greedy little consumers, believing their status and worth among their peers can only be measured by what they possess. So the ones whose parents, both working long hours to simply to service their debts, provide neither a loving and supportive home nor the material compensations that modern society accepts as substitutes really have little chance to develop emotional survival skills.
The issue the UNICEF report raises is one of human rights. Do children have a right to be equipped for adulthood in a complex and dangerous world? Do parents have a right to choose a non materialistic lifestyle, safe in the knowledge that schools will protect their children from the bullying and peer pressure that being different attracts?
Last week Government legal expert Charles Falconer said human rights is simply a matter of common sense: But common sense involves thinking for oneself and that is just what the neo - con governments of the free-market global economies do not want us to do.