Total lack of any sort of discipline in today’s children

I, and many others, saw nothing wrong with selection and keeping the Grammar School, with some tweaking of the selection system so that people with money could not get private tuition to buck the system.

However, the real elephant in the room is not the education system itself, it is the total lack of any sort of discipline in children nowadays. Recently, I had a young child in my shop giving his mum some real grief. I said to him, ‘Oi, shut up’. He replied, ‘You shut up’. I must say it really took all my self-control to stop giving him a clip around the ear, which is what I would have got in my younger days. Only yesterday I was told by a reliable source that a teacher at a secondary school was assaulted by a 13-year-old, the police were called and the pupil assaulted the teacher again in front of two police officers. I am sure that the job description of a teacher does not include being assaulted while doing their job and perhaps some left-wing socialist ‘woke’ teachers may be to blame for their colleagues getting assaulted for promoting children’s ‘self expression’. I have heard of teachers only staying in their jobs to pay their mortgages and who would leave tomorrow if they had the chance. A retired teacher visited a secondary school at 9.30am and asked a teacher friend how his day was going.

He replied, ‘Not too bad, I have only been told to “eff off” six times this morning’. And we wonder why so many youngsters are appearing in our courts?

Then we come to youngsters on our roads. I am seeing, on a daily basis, people riding bicycles past my shop with no hands on their handlebars, looking down on their phones and texting whilst oblivious to the road ahead. I am seeing kids thinking it is ‘big’ to pull wheelies in traffic. Many people say that the kids coming out of school on their bikes are a nightmare, racing each other and riding like idiots. Then we have those who take off their mirrors, who will not wear any sort of protective clothing, not even gloves on their bikes. Our motorcycle training instructors would like to show their pupils pictures of people’s hands who have slid down the road without gloves to reinforce the message but it seems they are not allowed as it may shock them. Far better to see someone else’s mangled hands than your own, in my book, but yet again a sad reflection on the woke society we are living in, where common sense has gone out the window.

Then we have the issue of excessively loud two-stroke motorcycle exhausts that make us all cringe. But of course the parents are not strong enough to enforce some basic road safety or noise pollution rules. There seems to be an idea that parents cannot give their children a slap for being naughty. Well, that is the case in Jersey but as far as I know not here and some discipline in the home would be a good start, followed up by some real discipline in the schools.

TREVOR HOCKEY

Trev’s Motorcycles.