Ohhhhh kaaayyy… so to keep the topic on track, how do Brits raise their kids? Send ‘em off to boarding school, maybe enroll them in a cricket game that lasts a few years?
What’s up? Narnia?
Thank you, Cosmic. I was getting bored watching Americans tearing lumps off each other, denying me any right of reply. We have the same problems as the US. Some kids arrive for their first day in school (usually age 5) barely able to talk, unsocialised, and not potty-trained - because they have largely been left in front of the TV all day by their parents (or as often as not, *the* parent). Sometimes they are also malnourished - generally not because they don't get enough to eat, but are fed junk food most of the time. These are, of course, our underclass. Like the plebeians of ancient Rome of whom Cicero coined the word "proletarian", meaning their only contribution to society was their offspring (prole in Latin). Of course Cicero may have been referring only to the very poor rather than the not-necessarily-poor but simply negligent. I have friends who are teachers, who can vouch for the truth of what I've said here..
Up the top end of the social scale, yes, we have boarding schools - maybe 10% of the Brits I know socially went to one. I'm one of the 90% who didn't, though my parents did try to get me into one on a scholarship. We have good state-funded schools, and bad ones. Where you get to go for your education rather depends on where your folks live on the Monopoly board. Nice area = good school catchment area, bad ditto.I went to a 'good' one, which tried in every way to mimic a private boarding school, with all the attendant vices those establishments breed. Result is, I can pass for a gentleman but I'm not The Real Thing, dontchaknow. Oh and we played an awful lot of cricket. I even went on to play cricket as a voluntary leisure activity. One way to tell if someone went to a not-good school is to ask them what games they played as part of the school curriculum. If they played football (soccer) all through the year - you know. Gentlemen play Rugby football in the winter months.
Then I went to college, and then to university. One year I had a vacation job riding a dustcart and emptying dustbins. It was extracurricular education for me. One lunch break we stopped the wagon outside a school, which was a 'bad' school. Everyone in the crew of 6 but me, it turned out, all went to that school. The driver looked ruefully out of the cab window at the kids in the playground and said: "There's the next generation of bin-men, and they don't know it."
There's a huge inequality of opportunity in this country and it's getting more like the US, where class is based on wealth. Money doesn't buy class - only class in the Marxist sense.
I'll be interested to learn how other Brits in this thread see it.
