CAN you legislate for respect? Tony Blair wants people to work with law makers and the police to combat yob culture. At the BBC’s Have Your Say site, contributors were not impressed. “Would this be the same RESPECT that Tony Blair showed the British nation by dragging us against our will into an invasion of Iraq because of WMD that didn’t exist?” asks Colin, Portsmouth. “There is no way the government can legislate respect,” says Ivana Fahku, from the US. “It’s something that must be learnt from the parents. Things can’t be so bad in Britain that no one is civil, can it?”
Someone signing himself “Mr I hate my country, Bham”, is one of several to mention Big Brother, which, he believes, “almost sums up the British people. Complete lack of respect for others, even elders. Troubled Barrymore is clearly in need of help, yet look how the younger ones treated him. Quick to anger, laziness, misery, ignorance, nastiness and resentment”. But P Paige says: “The problem is not essentially political nor cultural but spiritual. People need to change! How? — with God’s help. When? — now! Pray, pray, pray. Thanks be to God for our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.”
The Almighty also crops up at The Guardian’s Education Talk site in a discussion on the rise in home schooling. “My sister is religious and one family from her church decided to school their children at home. This was because they didn’t want them to be ‘polluted’ by atheists and people with different beliefs,” says SinnerBoy. But he’s worried. “How are these kids going to know how to socialise properly and to deal with difficult situations? . . . Imagine being unleashed in the world, with no idea of how different people carry on!”
A wide-ranging chat about selection in schools at the TES Staffroom touches on Hitler (“ ‘Selection’ was what the Nazis did to the Jews, Poles and Communists etc when they arrived at Auschwitz”, says Wassernixe), private schools (if Labour took inclusion seriously it would abolish private schools), and the education policy Chez Blair. “How do you trust a man who sends his own children to a single sex, Catholic school which is a grammar in all but name?” says Random 175. “And not schools around the corner either.”