31 December 2009

Signs of the times (2)

'Tough love'

There are often articles in the press about the increasing problems of both pensioners (poverty-struck and surrounded by feral neighbours) and "graduates" of "universities" finding themselves without prospects in life in modern oppressive society.

Now the government (specifically the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) has issued an appalling "guide" on how parents "should" "help" graduate children. Obviously violating the basic moral principle of not imposing on people an official interpretation of how they should evaluate the existential possibilities of their situation, this guide viciously suggests that parents should throw their children out of house and home, to make them earn a living or else claim disability allowance. Oh yes, it actually advocates sending them to enter into an abusive interaction with a qualified sadist (“doctor”) if they show signs of depression!

And allow them to "relax" after qualification but not for too long, says the guide. Don't let the weeks turn into months, and cut their allowance so they will be forced to seek a "job" - or, of course, a disability allowance.

All of these ideas were applied to me, only then it was "don't let the days turn into weeks" and hide my Post Office Savings Book, so I would feel that I had no capital in the world except the coins I saved whenever I was given a bus fare and walked instead.

I never blamed my parents for this; I knew they were under pressure from people like the Principal of Somerville. Dame Janet Vaughan would have had no scruples about slandering me to a local educational authority and telling them to place pressure on my parents and hence on me.

Hence my plan was aborted to get my parents to move to Oxford so that I could live at home while writing my unofficial physics thesis. Thus at the end of the ruined "education", during which I had been prevented from acquiring qualifications, society moved in for the kill and completely ruined the lives of three people, not just the one who had been in its clutches.