timlondon

My daughter came home from school this week with a contract for me to sign. I don't recall seeing a draft. I was not involved in the negotiation. It changed terms and conditions on a service which I was already receiving and from which I could not withdraw. There had been no indication at the beginning of service provision that such terms and conditions could be imposed without consultation. In any other area of life, it would be quickly voided. It was, of course, one of these new School Agreements and I signed because my wife, who is of the pragmatic 'choose your battles and bugger high principle' school of thought, pretty well told me to.

In fact, it is just a piece of paper. And that is the problem. Without debate and struggle, such social contracts are so much fluff. No-one was going to haul me out of bed at 5.00am to put on rough stripes and be sent to a labour camp for failing to meet its clauses. The worst that could happen is that some snotty official would feel that they had an edge of high ground in a dispute if they could point to some breach of some clause in a paper that I had signed. That sort of thing cuts no ice with me but many will be suitably cowed.

So why the ressentiment? Well, apart from the dubious methodology in the context of my understanding of political philosophy, most obviously, the personal insult. Because some parents would appear not to be trusted to fulfil a series of conditions that , in fact, seem broadly fine by me (there is no quarrel with the general standards in the Agreement but merely with their formalisation) and would have been accepted as friendly guidelines at any time, I am now being obliged to affirm with my signature (which is part of me) what comes naturally. The insult is that the authorities quite clearly do not trust me and they do not trust me because they do not know me. Indeed, not only schools but doctors, the police and banks do not know me and so they do not trust me.  I am insulted because my honour is placed equal to that of the irresponsible parent, the malingerer, the petty criminal and the fraudster.  It may seem thoroughly eighteenth century but I have been slapped across my cheek with a metaphorical glove and I cannot demand satisfaction.

But there is more. I am not out of control, society is. Society is out of control because these authorities cannot manage the conditions that, collectively, they have partially created and certainly refused to analyse and protest about in the last thirty years The authorities' solution is regulation and regulation becomes a matter of paper. The 'grande illusion' is that if you have written something down, it becomes a fact in the world and a truth - the classic weakness of all those who think the world can be managed by intellect alone and who are really rather scared of it. So, faced by disorder, authority seems determined to 'file us away' as if signing that bit of paper will really change conduct where it is needed. Worse, it has chipped away further at my own rapidly diminishing regard for authority and I will certainly be advising my children to remain vigilant, cautious and even resistant in its presence. It, not me, cannot be trusted in the long run of history.

My daughter made a separate but interesting point. She is a good, well-behaved kid with a critical faculty that many should envy. The school (indeed both my kids' schools) have started instituting the sort of small-scale rule changes that drive matters back towards the environment I grew up in. Many of these are harmless enough and I think many teenagers want and need boundaries to rebel against so one is doing them a favour by creating borders against which they can struggle. So I have no problem with these rules even when they are on the edge of ridiculous. But the fact of the rule changes started to get her thinking about the bargain between her and the school and, since the rules were imposed from above without consultation or warning, her instinct was cynical - and rebellious.  Her respect for authority has not been increased because authority appears to be acting without reason and in an arbitrary manner. Form is taking over from substance - again!

Much of this agenda is the last fling of the expert classes against two phenomena that they cannot cope with - the first is the desire of Middle England to have something done so long as it isn't what needs to be done (essentially the return to social conditions before Thatcher ripped the country apart) and the second is that many of these kids are much brighter and more clued up than they are. If you want respect from kids, respect them - police the parks, make the rules rational, provide something in return.

Anyway, I've got that out of my system - the current choice between the Tory Party of Ancram and a running-scared Cameron on the one side and a Brown who seems to have discovered Thatcher (albeit for cynical political reasons) on the other suggests that we are going to get a lot more of this stuff dumped ineffectively on the only sections of society who actually are maintaining traditional family standards.

Tags: family, politics
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: cranky

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