Teachers can confiscate phones.

STOP PRESS: Job vacancy for Mrs Colonel Muamuamamamama Gaddafi in UK Education.

The proposed Education Bill for England will give teachers the legal right to search pupils, confiscate their phones and to look at and delete anything they deem warrants it.

I am at my wits end with the utter nonsense that is perpetually spewed out by the authoritarian mind set.

Teachers already have the right to confiscate things from children. But this proposal goes a little further than that. This proposal wants to establish the precedent in writing that if a person is a teacher (a foot soldier of the state; a sycophantic conformist who's job and personal esteem reside in their compliance with the authoritarian regime) then they "should" randomly transgress children's rights to assert and inculcate their subordination and vulnerability to the hierarchy by humiliating them and subjecting them to irreverent and offensive search procedures. The bit about the phone is irrelevant but serves as the object of the purpose to distract from the real intent. Following that is the idea that the authority can then pry into the child's personal life (via the content of the phone) and deface, vandalise and destroy their very inner secrets.

This is so utterly self contradictory and perverse that it beggars belief.

To keep this simple the only way to "teach" children is by example. It is offensive and a crime to tell children to respect other people when you have no respect for them. I know it is the way of our culture and it has to change. If teachers had respect for their pupils they would never need to confiscate stuff. If children find something else more interesting than the education they are being given then it is up to the teacher to be a little more engaging (see: Educating Children). The trick is not to force children to listen to boring garbage. In British culture even the police are not allowed to stop and search anyone with no reason. It is a mechanism of a dictatorial and controlling hierarchy and our culture asserts that it disagrees with that. It is a heinous crime to pick on the most vulnerable in our society to exercise such appalling behaviour. It is more disgusting that the children are already in an enforced imprisonment of the school.

If you think I am being unreasonable consider whether a child would chose to desert a nurturing, supportive, caring family environment. If the society is genuinely embracing children with respect and support for them and providing a fruitful education why would any child wish to leave that safe and supportive environment to expose themselves to the barren wastelands outside of society? The answer is they wouldn't. The conditions that would lead a child to running away have to be seriously self evidently destructive and cruel. That is the culture of our schools today. If the authorities are afraid that children today are less interested in school then they must look to the service being provided and not continue to pursue this Dickensian and draconian oppression of children to make them fit the authority's prejudicial view of what they want children to be.

It really isn't difficult (if you are genuine and respectful and honest) to assert that mobile phone use in the classroom is not a good idea. If someone continues to use their phone in the classroom it is not difficult to ask them to stop and in an extreme case to deal with that particular case. But a new law allowing teachers to search children with no reason (other than that they are a child and could have a mobile phone or a bomb hidden about their person) is a disgusting degradation of our already decaying culture.

I suggest the authorities grow up and learn that respect is something they should be giving to other people and especially children. I suggest that the authorities should stop acting like their own fictional, paranoid and demonic picture of children. It is the authority which is treating children in a way that they are suggesting children behave. It is the authority that is afraid of the children and so they want to turn the tables and make the children afraid of them. According to their logic we should offer Colonel Gaddafi an exit strategy from Libya in the form of a highly paid salary as advisor to the Education Authority in Britain.

I can't honestly say that this new legislation shocks me or that it is the worst thing that our government is doing. Overall it is predictable and pretty mild next to the majority of stuff they do. But I can say that not one inch of oppression is acceptable and that we all owe it to humanity to stand against oppression whenever we encounter it. So this is my stand: Sod off you irresponsible, intimidatory, control freaks and stop buggering up humanity just because you got buggered when you were little.

P.S.  Thank you to Anorak for the delightful picture of McDaffi Duck!