The lefty schoolchildren of Britain are playing truant to demonstrate against George W. Bush, and the government is on the case. (I wonder. Would they be so severe on demonstrations that the Prime Minister was in favour of? No need to answer that.) If that's what it takes for teenagers to grasp how silly compulsory education is, then I'm for it.
The government today launched the latest wave of anti-truancy sweeps of town centres and shopping arcades - as speculation mounted that some children will bunk off school to protest against the visit of US president George Bush.Teams of police and education welfare officers will patrol known truancy hot spots in England over the next three weeks in the fourth such nationwide operation, said young people's minister Ivan Lewis.
Figures from the last national sweep in May showed police caught 5,182 truants, 2,194 of whom were in the company of an adult.
In the previous operation last December, 7,341 children who should have been in school were stopped, 3,645 of whom were with a parent.
Mr Lewis said: "The message could not be clearer - school attendance matters. Truancy is a passport to a life blighted by wasted opportunities, unemployment and even crime.
Well if you make truancy into a crime, it isn't that surprising that it leads to … crime. But if "truancy" was legalised, it would surely do far less damage, and stop being a gateway crime to real crimes. By making truancy illegal, you put those who do it beyond the protection of the law, and thus make the process far worse.
Legalise all truancy. Not just soft truancy like taking a day off for a demo that your mother will be at as well. No, legalise the lot. I know it sounds terrible, but really, it would be better.
While trying to get an accurate figure for how many people _are_ actually marching today (ho ho), I wondered:
Does someone count as an anti-war protestor if they are actally taking a rare opportunity to bunk off school (to which they are forced to go against their will) with a small likelihood of reprisal? Certainly the majority of "protestors" I saw before the invasion of Iraq appeared to be schoolchildren gleefully grabbing the opportunity to do something more fun than sitting in a classroom.
Looking at the BBC website just now, I saw two pictures of people marching but they were, in fact, the same people. And I love the way a photographer can invent a stage army at the end of Downing Street with a camera angle and 20-or-so Amnesty International members.
The trouble is that legalising truancy ((i.e.making school attendance voluntary) is only half the equation. The other half is giving the children the right to work and earn money as they (or their parents) wish. Otherwise, the children would become free not to go to school but would have no freedom to do the thing which would be most valuable to them - i.e. get a job and earn some money. The result would probably be just bigger gangs hanging around on street corners and even more youth crime.
So we have to face up to it. If we are in favour of voluntary attendance at school, we also have to argue loudly and proudly in favour of child labour. In the current climate in which "child protection" justifies virtually any increase in the powers of the State, that might be a hard battle to win.
Julius
All very good.
It gives me an idea for another sort of posting to put up here, which is stories about working children of the past who didn't have such a bad time of it. Of course many did, but I know that many didn't. George Stephenson, one of the great Railway Men of the nineteenth century, was working in a coal mine (tinkering with the steam engines!) at the age of twelve. Or so I remember it.
