Saturday, March 15, 2008

And Your Point?

...presumably that parents are a feckless lot who simply cannot be trusted to be left alone to get on with it.

OK, I give up. All parents everywhere in the UK must finally agree that the only sensible thing to do is to hand over our children at birth. After all, it's quite clear that the state's care homes and all those state approved foster carers never put a foot wrong.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was Scarlett home educated? I thought how awful it was that when the poor mother was grieving she should be hauled into a police station accused of neglect - as if all parents don't let their teens stay over night with friends!!

D

Anonymous said...

What has this awful death got to do with home educating!?

Very bad reporting from the BBC.

Carlotta said...

It seems that Scarlett and a number of her other siblings were home educated, but it is far from clear what one should conclude from this, a fact of which the BBC journalist who wrote the article actually seems to be aware, at least on some level.

As you say, anon, the piece is a prime example of terrible reporting, an article written in bad faith. The writer knows (on some level) that there is no direct link between home education and negligence - even in this particular case, let alone in the rest of the HE community, though he/she goes on, apparently without compunction, to suggest that it is a problem.

The writer also knows (on some level) that being schooled doesn't mean that children won't be HORRENDOUSLY neglected...(witness all those schooled children hanging out vandalising telephone boxes, beating each other up, gang warfare, murdering each other, etc) so suggesting by secondary implication that schooling and other forms of state control solves the problem of negligence is utterly irresponsible reasoning.

But then the BBC is the instrument of the state, entirely in it's pay. I know I shouldn't expect anything other than that they should seek to constrain the lives of everyone, normalising the ends that people should seek, under the utterly erroneous assumption that they know best for everyone else.

Frankly, if Scarlett and her family wanted to rave it up in Goa, as long as they didn't hurt anyone else, then that is fine by me.

Anonymous said...

well the school wasn't held to be negligent when the nine year old girl went missing...and given that she had been at school, that link is just as valid! Plus, her mother wasn't held to be negligent either.

D

Anonymous said...

It is a piss poor bit of writing even if you ignore the problem of offensive bias. I complained to the BBC and then sent a catty email to the Devon team asking if the writer was drunk when s/he threw it together.

Carlotta said...

Great stuff, Ruth.