Incoherent Ramblings

The BBC are at it again.

Ban on Valentine’s Day cards at school

Let’s go to the horse’s mouth and see what the Council have to say about it to begin with (though of course the BBC chose to add this at the bottom of the article):

He said: “Ashcombe is a primary school and they believe that children under the age of 11 are still emotionally and socially developing and therefore cards declaring love can be confusing.

“Any families wishing to send cards are asked to send them in the post or deliver to home addresses by hand.”

The Mail gives this quote from the headmaster to sum up his position:

‘Some children and parents encourage a lot of talk about boyfriends and girlfriends,’ he said. ‘This often leads to children being upset when they are “dumped” and other fuss which interrupts their learning.

‘The school believes that such ideas should wait until children are mature enough emotionally and socially to understand the commitment involved in having or being a boyfriend or girlfriend.

‘For this reason, we do not wish to see any Valentine’s Day cards in school this year. Any cards found in school will be confiscated.’

Seems reasonable – cards can still be exchanged, just not in school. I’d also say the argument that pre-teens are too young to have any idea about love, let alone declare it to classmates, seems a sound one.

Wait, what am I saying, it must be PC gone mad!

Says a parent:

“It’s a tradition, I can remember when I used to receive cards from boys in school. It’s a lovely thing to do.”

Yes, it is a ‘lovely thing to do’ when you do get cards. When you’re a picked upon pre-adolescent without the emotional capability to process such things, and everyone else in your class gets a Valentine’s card, and you don’t (or just get a joke card accompanied by barely disguised sniggers), it’s an awful experience.

Her argument goes along the same ridiculous lines as a hypothetical ‘Well I can walk up stairs perfectly well, it’s a lovely thing to do. Why do we need to install all these pesky ramps everywhere, clogging up the street?’. Sometimes – I have to break it to you – rules are put in which might slightly inconvenience the many in order to greatly improve the lives of the few. Is that a bad thing? Is it so terrible that if your

“six [year-old] … had a little girlfriend since nursery”

you now will have to take him round to the girl’s house to deliver the card rather than have him take it to school, so that those kids without that kind of relationship with the opposite sex don’t feel excluded?

Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe also criticised the move.

She said: “It’s only a bit of fun once a year and it doesn’t mean anything to kids that age.”

This is Ann Widdecombe, expert in child psychology, is it? How the fuck do you know it doesn’t mean anything to ‘kids that age’. Have you spoken to all of them? She continues:

“I just think it is rather silly. Haven’t they anything better to worry about at that school?”

Ah, you’re probably right. The headmaster has probably spent the entire last 12 months solely focussed on whether to allow Valentine’s day cards and how best to stop the fun of all the little kids. Rather than, you know, observing that the tradition has in previous years caused some emotional stress to some of the pupils and deciding that this year, overall, it’s better to have a blanket ban. A decision which might have taken 15 minutes out of his day.

The Mail, of course, have a similar line. And the comments are what you’d expect:

Mail readers reply

So no-one’s fussed either way about the environment, LizH is downmodded for agreeing with the school, and Tony makes a gay joke. Sigh.

Mark

Start of an occasinoal series of posts about how journalism seems to work in the 21st Century. Inspired in no little part by Private Eye, Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe and Anton Vowl’s Enemies of reason.

BBC News provides an RSS feed so that readers can stay up to date with their stories. All well and good. But very often the short link title is very different to the published headline and both are often different to the actual content of the article.

Take the following story:

Pupils forced to listen to Mozart

So the article’s lead paragraph heavily implies that playing classical music is a more effective deterrent to classroom disruption than not playing it, yet the actual article doesn’t back this up in the slightest. An executive summary of the article might more accurately be

Excentric headteacher with an obsession with William Blake poetry has slightly new idea for discipline at his school.

The RSS link title is even more misleading -

‘How Mozart is the ultimate deterrent for naughty pupils’

‘Ultimate deterrent’! ‘ULTIMATE’! ‘DETERRENT’! That means it’s the bee’s knees, the dog’s bollocks of ‘deterrents’. But notice how both quoted words are never vindicated in the actual answer; there’s no mention of any other forms of discipline for comparison, not even by inference. We’re not told that this school has found a marked improvement in classroom behviour, nor is the school compared to similar schools with a different discipline policy.

There’s also no concrete evidence to back-up the ‘deterrent’ angle. We can I’m sure agree that the style of discipline is unusual and seems well thought out and, actually, quite a good idea (I think the aim of making detention a way to try to instill the joy of learning is an extremely admirable one) – but it can only be a ‘deterrent’ if it has been shown to actively make kids more reluctant to risk a trip to detention. This, of course, is what the BBC is trying to make us think in the way the article is couched. We’re supposed to imagine these kids so abhored at the idea of listening to Classical music (to rhyme with ear-rape) that they’ll do anything to avoid the horror of The Magic Flute, even if it means behaving in class!

But there is nothing in the artical that suggests anything of the kind. No statistics of ‘repeat offenders’ as we might call them, showing how the figure has gone down since the introduction of the policy, no soundbites from pupils saying how they ‘hate dis classical shit, innit?’. Nothing. As I said, you could replace the entire article with one sentence:

Excentric headteacher with an obsession with William Blake poetry has slightly new idea for discipline at his school.