How much of teenage behaviour is due to the pandemic, and how much is garden-variety adolescence? It’s a difficult knot to tease out
In the old days, I used to follow the news pretty closely, but lately the inevitability of it being bad has turned me off, and I mainly follow dogs on social media that have got their heads stuck in things. I have to reverse-engineer what a cabinet minister might have said from how upset people are on LBC phone-ins.
It is thus that I discovered Gavin Williamson’s belief that children have lost their discipline over lockdown: from all the teachers, everywhere, saying this is totally untrue. Has the education secretary ever been in a school, they wonder? Plainly not, or he’d have noticed that their behaviour has become exquisite. Educationists speculate that they’re just so happy to be out of the house, they must feel as if they have to earn their good fortune with lovely manners. Maybe Williamson’s just talking about the children he encounters? More likely, it’s part of a government strategy to steadily demonise so many elements of society that, eventually, there will be no untoward event that can’t be blamed on someone. Good luck trying that on primary school kids, is all I can say. People who know them are so exorbitantly fond of them.
