Re: The joy of actual numbers, was Democracy

On Tue, 5 Nov 2024, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

On 05/11/2024 01:18, rbowman wrote:

Being the new hire I saw a lot of the D section. They were ineducable. To
put it plainly they didn't give a shit and their parents didn't give a
shit. They were marking time until they turned 16 and could get working
papers. To further clarify, there was one black kid. The rest were run of
the mill white trash. I did have to relieve the black kid of his straight
razor. The white kids knew better than to play with their toys in class.

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I have seen similar.
In the context of their lives and their parents lives education is completely meaningless.
I had one such schoolmate in my class at primary school. His dad was a pig farmer. All he wanted to be was a pig farmer. But he was in his own way a nice gentle well behaved kid. He just didn't see the point of learning Latin...
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The headmaster, an ex WWII  tank commander, took a drill sergeant approach, whacking him over the head until he had memorised 'amo, amas, amat' correctly.
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To an extent it worked.
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The problem is that this class of boy responds best to the sort of physical punishment we are no longer allowed to indulge in.
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Your class Ds belong in the Army.  There they will learn whether they like it or not, and some may in time learn self respect.
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I have long thought that long term unemployed should be made to join a sort of army, where they are separated from their backgrounds, taught self discipline and how to strive, and anything else they are capable of learning - and would in time become extremely valuable as a civil rapid reaction force to deal with the aftermath of floods and hurricanes etc.

I'm not personally a fan of the military, but I had a neighbour once who was a major in the military. He was always so frustrated by criminal youth programs in sweden and that they always fail to produce results.
He used to say, give them a year with me in the military, and we'll straighten them out.
Somehow I believe he was 100% correct.