Leaving private schooling. You say adversity… I say… June 16, 2011
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Culture, Economy.trackback
Here’s an interesting insight into our society. Boy’s parents divorce, financial troubles ensue, boy’s parents unable to pay private school fees on time. Boy’s barred from private school. Subsequent court case sees the judge upholding the barring and demanding that parents pay outstanding fees.
While I have every sympathy for the child and indeed anyone who must leave a school and go to another, in terms of understanding how friendships have developed and now must be made afresh – and I know of a nine year old whose parents due to the economic situation have been forced to move from one part of the country to another and consequently take him out of his old school and put him in another, is it me or does the following seem a little over the top…
Judge Collins said the person most affected by what had transpired was Daragh. She recounted a conversation with a “respected and wealthy” Irish businessman whose parents had to take him out of a fee-paying school when he was 15, but who did not let it defeat him. She hoped that Daragh would be able to turn into a “fine young man” despite the adversity he faced.
It’s an example of both the lack of self-awareness and the insularity of the Irish middle-class. The class that has f**ked up this society for decades to come; the class that has spent the past few weeks mourning first Garrett Fitzgerald (a complete failure as a politician, despite being a ‘nice man’) and then Brian Lenihan (ditto). The class that thinks the minimum wage/social welfare/public sector pay it too high, but who are took lazy to think through the consequences of cutting any of these. The class who, so long as they’re looked after, is comfortable with any economic outrage against the rest of their ‘fellow citizens’. The class that bristles at the mere suggestion of strike or collective agency by workers, but a class whose members shelter behind fictions like ‘limited liability’ and who members are almost to a man and woman comfortably ensconced in well established ‘professional associations’ (unions by anyone else’s definition, but we’ll spare their blushes). The class that constitutes the biggest obstacle to a fairer society and the class who’ll drag this society into the abyss rather than surrender their privileges. The class who constitute the driest fascist tinder waiting for a spark, any spark.
Poor aul Daragh. Frankly, I’m slightly annoyed that the tax I pay is spent subsidising private schools for little shits like him
In fairness to him he’s not responsible at 14 for his parents actions. But I agree the tax point is irritating.
It’s nice to know that in Judge Collins’ eyes state education is the equivalent of the blacking factory where Charles Dickens spent his childhood. Any betting on how long it is before you get the ‘why should I be penalised for lashing out on my children’s education’ response to the thread. The answer to that of course is that you can lash out what you want but you shouldn’t expect it to be subsidised. Particularly when a kid will generally do as well in a state school even if the same snob cachet isn’t there.
I’d just watched Prime Time’s expose of the conditions in institutions for adults with intellectual disabilities.
Adversity?
It might be a bit hard on the kid, but if leaving private school counts as adversity, then there just aren’t words to describe what I just watched.
(Off-topic, but the most disturbing part of PT was the fact that the victims of over-medication, neglect and a denial of services that we encountered on tonight’s show, had previously been brought to media attention years ago. I can’t get over it.)
On the subject of both intellectual disabilities and education, the cuts in special needs assistants are really hitting schools at the moment. It’s a classic example of one of the guiding principles of this state whose ethos has been praised so much in the wake of the Fitzgerald and Lenihan deaths. Actually maybe it’s always been THE guiding principle, “hit the weakest first, what can they do about it?”
Here’s the link to PT for those interested:
http://www.rte.ie/news/av/2011/0616/primetime.html
I went to a meeting for those involved with the special needs community yesterday. The main speaker was Richard Boyd Barrett and I think it was linked to the Enough campaign.
Currently, there are SENOs (special education needs officers) reviewing the allocation of special needs assistants to children with special needs. One lady told a story where a SENO told a teacher that when a child with a special need ran out of a classroom, the SNA should not attempt to get the child to return to the classroom. Also, the regulations are clear that the SNA cannot be left alone with a class. The solution provided by the SENO to this problem: Build a bigger fence for the school.
There’s a trick that the officals in government departments play on the public whereby they start a scheme expand it beyond its original scope to meet an important need, and then when they want to cut it, they tighten up their inclusion criteria. They then claim that they’re only stopping a scheme from being abused. Read this to see what I mean.
http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.education.ie%2Fservlet%2Fblobservlet%2Fpub_sna_vfm_june_2011.pdf%3Flanguage%3DEN&h=c86b6
Alternatively, see what happened with the domicillary care allowance (DCA).
I have major problems with the NSA scheme, but what’s happened is that SNAs were given to children who probably strictly didn’t require an SNA for care needs (rather for educational and behavioural needs) and when the SNAs are removed, those needs will not be met. The result will be that children with special needs will not receive the education they are entitled to and various departments and agencies will continue to claim that it’s all somebody else’s responsibility.
Currently, there are SENOs (special education needs officers)”
Even before the crisis, the joke among school principals was that “SENO” is pronounced “Say No”.
Of course that should say “there are”.
Original now corrected for you
Laim smullen
Private School are increasing in demand certain rich parts of the country including one I can’t remember that charges £16,000 per year is oversubscribed. This such not
to surprising because during the last recession in the 1980s there was a boom in privates schools it is worth knowing that they were so oversubscribed that it lead
to the founding the institute of education(1969) and Bruce collage(1984)
portabella collage
Least of all don’t forget our own elite third level courses and collages
The Royal Collage of surgeons charging £37000
http://www.rcsi.ie/
smurfit business school charging €29,500
http://www.smurfitschool.ie/
in 1990 the k-club was founded along with a whole string of golf clubs.
The comment at 1.10 in that video is hilarious!
Ah now.
The way I read it is that the judge thinks it’s tough for someone who’s 14 to get cancer, have their parents split up, have their house sold, and then be forced to move school away from their friends.
Regardless of his being in a private school, or what happens to others, that’s a bit of a crap situation to be in, and it seems pretty heartless to – as Budapestkick did – call him a little shit. It’d also be pretty heartless for a judge to pass comment on this case without some vague, one-line expression of sympathy for the person who’s been shafted (albeit nowhere near as much as others, of course).
Still, all this provides just another argument to go further than just cutting state subsidy, and just ban fee-paying schools.
I agree with you calling the boy a shit is inappropriate. And I have no problem with the judge expressing sympathy but… The anecdote about the man who left who went on to be a successful business man is surely freighted with assumptions and the term adversity seems over the top. The nine year old I mention above faces difficulties moving from one school to another, non fee paying I should add, but I wouldn’t consider it adversity even though he’s losing the friends of years etc etc.
I know what you mean. Still, I don’t really know if the judge is even thinking of the nature of the schools, and more just been uprooted from the places and people you know, which can be tough, especially if things at home aren’t exactly fantastic.
Imo, CMK has hit the nail squarely on the head.
I have a problem with the judge’s sympathy and the mythological story attached. In the situation and the attendant myth is the underlying assumptions that govern the midden class at individual level which in this case manifests itself as a reflection on that class as a whole. What we are witnessing is sham adversity – manufactured within an understood priviledge that automatically attaches to people of certain money levels, income levels, or people with certain educational attainment. People on the receiving end of austerity don’t receive an ounce of sympathy from this very same self-congradulatory class. Why the dichotomy?
The midden class has made a virtue out of their dependence on a complex society they have no control over, and which they know they have no control over. Being good servants, they need to both justify their existence to those whose money and power largely govern our societies (not politicians) and they need to become blind to the excrement they create by enjoying what material priviledges they do obtain. Who doesn’t know that our use of basic commodities in the West are often won by intrigue or outright war and theft?
Yet, day in day out, the midden class quietly pushes its exrement outside its doors, always making-believe that their waste vanishes and the source of their wealth is won solely by their native intelligence. Only by creating physchological blindness in themselves can they believe they have influence beyond their dependent state, and only through blindness can they divide themselves from which their priviledged consumption can derive. Daren’t blame the bosses, blame the victims.
It’s raining yet again, and I’m thoroughly pissed off. Probably why I’m coming down on the midden class so hard. Probably most don’t have a donkey’s about what’s happening around them.
MDAM, chill there, the land needs a bit of moisture, rain is ok today. And to your other points…yes. On the whole middle class thing though, and I’m saying this from a position of agreement with the whole class war situation, I do think we need to be careful on the Left in terms of defining what sectors of society comprise the middle-class. Are we using the marketing categorisation, a marxist definition of the bourgeois class, the annoying and often repeated “public servants, IT workers and academics” shorthand, a blanket post-code based tarring of Dublin southsiders, a private-schooled West-Brit categorisation etc. We gain nothing by lazy shorthand (not accusing anyone specifically of that BTW). There are socialists who have sent their kids to provate schools, there are socialists who live in leafy mansions in Ranelagh and wouldn’r know one end of a shovel from the other. The boundaries between working class and middle class are open to debate, certainly there is clarity at either end of the spectrum but in the middle there is a massive grey area, and one which is fracturing along class lines. One of the potentially positive outcomes of the economic crisis will be the raising of class consciousness, the realisation by some or many of the previously aspirant middle-class that in fact they are not amongst the few who will be living within the gated communities when push comes to shove, that they are not part of the inside clique, that their own material interests do not coincide with those of the bourgeoisie. We need to be a bit careful in our rhetoric, not in terms of denying the class war, far from it, but in terms of a narrow and workerist definition of what comprises the working class, in order not to alienate those that we ultimately seek to attract to a Left inclination in the battle for hearts and minds. None of which has much to do with the subject under discussion above of course, but hey it’s a grey rainy day out there…
Point taken LATC. But in my own feeble defense, this is why I’m using the term midden class, as no such class exists. Rather, a mindset exists. Those of such a mindset may take all the offense in the world because nothing will change this mindset imho. It is a captured mindset – a mindset turned in upon itself – a mindset that likes where it is and is willing to let everyone else suffer to enjoy its own consumption. A warped mindset that blames the victims while unable to envision holding the perpetrators to account unless their system should fail them.
Giving the post some context, re: little johnny having to make new friends in a new school. Today children will die of malnutrition, many will go to work for nothing – no educational opps. Probably some military person somewhere is willing to push a button today and blow a collateral child to oblivion.
Irish children have had to leave this country because of the political/economic situation. Others will not obtain a decent living for their entire lives. Families are making decisions between eating and medical care.
And it’s been mostly raining here mostly for nigh on 45 days. I’m thinking of digging the garden under and going for aquaculture. But then we’d have a drought. Mindsets, eh.
cheers
MDAM, I probably should have addressed my comment to CMK’s original comment. And as I said, I’m not disputing the vadility of the points which either yourself of CMK have raised about the barbarism that’s explicitly part of that middle-class political position, far from it. Your point that “middle-class” is a mindset is a good one in the context of where the class struggle is at the moment for those who identify themselves as being part of that group, the coping class, the Sindo readers etc. I’d contend that most of those people are simply deluded, and I don’t mean that in a sneering way, only that they are being conned into identifying their interests with a master (capital) who is more than happy to divide and conquer and spit them out when they cease to be of further use. We should attack the mindset but not the hypnotised victims of it. Largely. There are always expections.
LATC, I agree that the Left needs to be careful when it comes to the language of class. Particularly here where 90+ years have been spent building and maintaining the myth that there are either a) no classes in Ireland; or b) the more recent adapation, that ‘we are all middle class’.
Whether the falling living standards of the aspirant middle classes will spark increased class consciousness and, consequently, political activity motivated and guided by class awareness, we can hope but I think it unlikely to any structurally significant degree. Rather we may have a more frantic clinging to the bourgeoisie as things get worse, gambling that whatever crumbs are left will make their way to those who’ve eschewed the Left by continuing to believe that all we ever needed was a positive go-getting attitude etc and our problems are resolved. Some people will never want to mine down into the structures of society and will forever vacillate between one superficial political outlook (FG/PD/GP 1997-2010) to another superficial political outlook (FG/Lab 2011- ).
Where progress is possible for the left is to get a significant minority of society mobilised for radical change through building alliances – a long process but one I think that has at least begun here with the launch of the ULA, for instance, and hopefully we’ll see the WP and other Left outfits pick up over the years to come.
The Left can’t be all things to all people; there will be losers if Left wing values were to govern this society; worrying about the political intentions of those with most to lose (the upper middle classes), while understandable given theiry power and influence, will retard progress towards a more humane, just and hopefully socialist society.
Finally, why are the Labour party fixated on the ‘middle classes’ in a society where the median income in 2007 was 20,000 euros, probably less now? The middle classes are a small minority in this state. Is Labour’s fixation with them a kind of aversion therapy lest the party unconsiously lapses into socialism?
CMK, yes, I agree with what you’re saying there. My only caveat was that by using very loose terminology, or class categorisation which is open to radically different interpretation as to precise meaning depending on whether one is using it as someone of the Left or someone of the self-defined middle-class, we can lapse into lazy shorthand and alienate people who are in fact working class but haven’t realised it, or indeed choose to reject it for the moment at least. Perhaps it’s more visible in the fairly socially mixed rural environment like where I’m living, the fuzzyness of the separation. I’d take issue with you using income as a measure of class for those reasons also, it’s far too narrow. On the winners and losers thing, again it sort of depends on how you measure the loss or gain. I’d argue that there’s no loss or gain, only a redistribution, and that what an idividual appears to lose is more than offset by the collective ownership and access to that wealth and its social use. Anyhow no big argument, and thanks for taking the time to respond.
This is good (via Chris Dillow)
Chris Dillow? It’s more like Chris Morris. Really really incredible stuff.
I genuinely thought that was satire until I looked at the URL…
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde on the Death of Little Nell, ‘you’d need a heart of stone not to laugh.’
Indeed, Chris Dillow used precisely that line when Tweeting it…
She says: ‘Danny has begged me to ask the school to let him stay and pay back the fees when he’s rich and famous.
This is hilarious. I have always admired the self – confidence of the middle class but this takes the biscuit.
And then there’s the Sophie’s choice stuff, where one kid goes private and the other [shudder!] goes state. And then they have to rationalise it.
You know, you can’t beat the sense of entitlement some middle class folk have.
+ 1
I can take their self-confidence, it’s the self-pity that’s hard to bear.
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