Parents Face Economic Naughty Step

"The parents of children who regularly skip school could have their state welfare entitlements cut, Prime Minister David Cameron said on Friday as he launched an assault on educational failure. He said the government was determined to bring "rigour", order and respect back into the classroom, saying "we cannot deny the reality of the past few years", where standards and discipline had eroded away.

"We've got to be ambitious if we want to compete in the world," Cameron said at the new Norwich Free School. "When China is going through an educational renaissance, when India is churning out science graduates any complacency now would be fatal for our prosperity.

"Every year that passes without proper reform, is another year that tens of thousands of teenagers leave school without the qualifications they really need."

The government set up a social policy review following the riots and Cameron said it had been asked to consider stripping parents of their state handouts if their children are regularly missing school. Cameron said urgent classroom reforms were needed to produce a new generation of "good citizens", in the wake of last month's riots."Restoring discipline is also about what parents do," he said in his speech. "We need parents to have a real stake in the discipline of their children, to face real consequences if their children continually misbehave.

"That's why I have asked our social policy review to look into whether we should cut the benefits of those parents whose children constantly play truant.

"Yes, this would be a tough measure -- but we urgently need to restore order and respect in the classroom and I don't want ideas like this to be off the table."

He said that despite figures showing ever-improving student pass rates, the business community was less impressed with the aptitude of youngsters entering the world of work."

Adapted from Yahoo News /AFP Here

So to recap: The Prime Minister, himself the product of private expensive education, is in charge of the Government that has utterly failed to make education work for big business. As a result he now blames the parents. And obviously, only poor kids bunk off school, never Eton-ites.

Therefore the best way to punish these poor parents is to make them even poorer by removing their benefits. By making already hard lives even harder, this will undoubtedly encourage a healthy respect for the state and authority. This in turn will please big business. Did I miss something? I mean apart from the utter detachment from reality?

Or how about Mr Cameron, we just do away with the silly 'education' system that exists merely to churn out obedient workers? Perhaps we can go further and do away with the system that needs them in the first place? In the words of Pink Floyd - 'We don't need no education!'

SussexSocialist