Violence in schools - defending political territory will ensure ineffective action

Reports in Melbourne's Herald-Sun and Brisbane's Courier Mail about the officially recorded incidence of violence in schools should surprise no one (see below). The trend has been there for years. Indeed, it has been there since the Sixties radicals gradually infiltrated all the major institutions of our society and either parasitically infused the host institution with their poisonous philosophies or captured it entirely. Education, the media, the law and the public service all fell to the radicals, leaving pockets of foolish dissenters whom they have little trouble keeping silent, or discredit when they manage to make themselves heard.

The victory is now so complete that those formerly called radicals are now often the respectable grey suits (male and female) of the new ruling class, enjoying the choicest fruits liberal society has to offer. The victory is so complete that many of the people who toil in these conquered territories think zombie-like that the mentality and teaching of their overlords (if they are aware of the detail of the teaching) is infallibly correct, and that all other forms of regarding the world are incorrect and should be eliminated.

Melbourne's Age newspaper, for example, obviously cannot conceive of another universe where a coherent manner of thinking actually exists in opposition to their own. An impossibly nightmarish thought! Who could believe that a journalist of the standard of Tracee Hutchison could seriously earn a gig in the opinion pages of the weekend edition of a newspaper that fancies itself a journalistic heavy weight? But she's there each weekend with her Sixth Former's likes and dislikes, and "I am Woman" ringing in her ears.

Once upon time our society believed that the natural and obvious form of management was hierarchical (in pyramid form), that each gradation upward of the management hierarchy assumed people of increased ability and work effectiveness, that management levels continually checked and assessed the level below it, and that when failures were perceived remedies were applied which sometimes required removal and sometimes discipline. Such a concept of management was accepted, its properly exercised authority unquestioned, and few thought it contradicted the essential (metaphysical) equality of each member of the particular institution's hierarchy. It was all simply commonsense.

Paired with this concept of management were views of morality and culture without which the hierarchy would not work. Most people thought that reason and the Christian religion demonstrated that there were eternal truths of right and wrong behaviour, that there was an inner judge of one's behaviour, and that virtue (particularly the Cardinal virtues) were indispensable to one's self-regard and regard of others. The Christian religion - a revealed faith, not a theory - not only confirmed the deliverances of reasons about objective norms of behaviour. It also spurred one on to charitable action - concrete actions of love and fellowship, not useless rhetorical outbursts of one's most cherished political concepts. Above all this, there was the eminently sensible and compelling idea that God was there to reward virtue and punish vice.

(Nobody has demonstrated more vividly than the atheistic PC-class the notion inherent in the human psyche that wrong-doers - for the PC class those whose thinking deviates from allowable orthodoxy - should be punished, and punished severely.)

For most men, adherence to this objective moral framework meant at least the following principles, a carry-over from ancient (Christian) chivalry, and without which manliness was unattainable.

1. Tell the truth

2. Have courage in the face of evil

3. Protect the weak (particularly women children and the elderly)

4. Keep one's promises

5. Pay one's debts

Bullying was utterly repugnant to a man conscious of the rights and responsibilities prescribed by faith and reason.

Awareness of one's individual rights and duties means also awareness of the cultural context of one's actions, because rights and duties are necessarily carried out in a community of people. But community is not just an abstract notion; it is more importantly a group of people living successfully in a set of concrete circumstances, circumstances that have developed and adjusted over time.

Those enduring circumstances - meaning those conventions, customs, and social and political arrangements - that have endured over time constitute that community's culture. And because those customs etc have been the outcome of the arranging of actors within the framework of objective moral standards, they are infused with the natural (moral) law and are thereby sanctioned. Such sanctioning gives a prescriptive quality to the customs, usage, and conventions until they lack coherence with the overall framework. How this happens is a subject for a further comment.

While such customs etc constitute a kind of unwritten constitution, a written framework - the statute law and common law - necessarily reflects that unwritten scheme of customs, conventions etc. For the same reason, such written law is infused with the natural law. (The distinction I'm making here is separate from the issues surrounding a formal document that some want to call the Constitution of a nation. This is an important issue, but separate from that discussed here.) Those familiar with Edmund Burke's writings will immediately recognise a brief outlining of some of his key ideas here.

I'm hardly claiming anything controversial when I say the Sixties radicals execrated this conservative view of society. Whether they adhered to the many varieties of Marxism or Millian liberalism they had this in common: the belief there was nothing beyond the material. No God, no objective morality, no intelligible order in the world. Man's will and reason were paramount. I refer the reader to my entries on conservatism and politically correctness for further explanation.

If society rejects the framework of the natural law, Burkean ideas of how society is constituted, and the prescriptive nature of custom and convention that is sanctioned by the natural law (this was Western society before the Sixties revolution), then you are going to have an education system radically different from that arising out of the former.

When school teachers tell a teenage boy there is no moral limit to his actions other than the pain or pleasure they give him, on the one hand, and, on the other, possible harm to others, what do you think he is going to do?

When school teachers tell a teenage boy that people of faith are either intellectual oppressed or the oppressor, how do you think he is going to regard them? Contempt hardly says it, as experience of the last fifty years demonstrates all too well.

When school teachers tell a teenage boy that there is no restrictions on the things he can say based on a series of reasons (too involved to repeat here) provided by the great liberal theorist, J.S. Mill, to what extent do you think he will curb his tongue?

When school teachers tell a teenage boy that he is enjoys a radical freedom and equality and has no obligation to obey an authority which he has not chosen from himself, and has no obligation to obey laws that are not self-legislated, then how do you think he is going to regard authority?

If there is nothing wrong with pornography, killing the unborn, if there is no such thing as deviant sexual behaviour, how do you think he is going to behave when he is prey to his sexual drives? Or how he will regard the girls he comes into contact with. Google "date rape" to find out.

What happens to a teenage boy when there is nothing to believe in, except the faddish causes dreamt up by the morally empty class that has educated him?

I could go on.

When Sixties radicals gained the upper-hand and the general media began to act as their mouthpiece, ordinary "uneducated" people of the Depression and WWII generation were heard to say that if these "educated idiots" had their way it would mean the ruin of society. The upwardly mobile progressives merely laughed at their ignorance, laughed at the inability of people who had been through a world depression and a world war to offer an intelligible reply to their rhetoric.

There's no way the Australian Education Union will admit that that ignorant uneducated generation was right. There is less chance they will give up the territory they captured forty years ago without a no-holds-bar fight.

Violence and bullying sweep our state schools

School suspensions skyrocket in Queensland

Spike in school suspensions means we must listen to teachers

comments: gerardwilson@dodo.com.au