John Singleton, “The day the parents became citizens,”
Nation Review, August 6-12, 1976, p. 1044.

And now a newsflash from that bastion of higher education, the Parents and Citizens Association:

They, in their ultimate wisdom, wish it to be known to all concerned, and particularly those who are not only not concerned but also do not give a stuff, that there is a dangerous element insidiously slipping into childrens lives.

And that demon is called television and within that demon lies another even more dangerous element, called advertising. Oh, isn’t it all deliciously evil?

And the eminent members of the P&C wish it to be known that they demand that the appropriate authorities (I always wonder who decides which authority is most appropriate) either: (a) change the standard of programming during childrens hours to whatever suits the P&C; or (b) to drop all advertising which not only brings undue pressures upon the poor parents who have already done all their dough on the pokies and the piss in any event.

And anyway what it all means is that (c) something should be done about it by someone and the stations given over to more responsible and more respectable people such as the Festival of Light, the late rev. Alan Walker (no one has told him yet about the late bit), the P&C or the department of education. The latter of which have got education in this sort of shit in the first place.

Now this may be just an oversimplification, but I have found that most parents and citizens who take the greatest interest in the role that their association plays are indeed not your typical parents and/or citizens.

In fact, they tend to be the same people who run the boy scouts, the girl guides and, not so many years ago, the local branches of the Young Liberals.

In other words, they tend to be absolute wackers without the pride or the decency to go out and get on with their lives while their kids go about getting on with theirs.

Oh no they have to get in there and rah rah and carry on and do their bit for child and country and may the Lord have mercy upon their poor ignorant souls.

But just in case there is a member of the P&C (as the association is so affectionately abbreviated by its devotees) whose mind isn’t yet entirely deadened by the sheer boredom of it all; or alternatively, in case this magazine has any readers who are in a physical position to duplicate even as they fornicate, let me bring the whole issue back to the real basics.

  1. There is only one thing wrong with our whole education system and this is our whole education system.
  2. The whole education system is set up and controlled by those devoted souls in various state parliaments who are themselves about as educated as Paddy’s pigs and I would sue if I was either Paddy or his pigs.
  3. These wackers decide what our children will study, when, where, for how long, and every year they may or may not be good enough to tell us what sort of dummy we have on our hands.
  4. And naturally, as there is no profit incentive in the education system, it is monolithic, incompetent and generally not worth pissing on.
  5. Therefore, it is natural that children who go to state owned and/or subsidised schools (cutely known as private) learn how to pass exams rather than be encouraged to want to learn. Therefore, they get out of school in exactly the same frame of mind as the poor bastard parent gets away from his process line: i.e., they have both/all escaped from jail — escaped! escaped!

And it is only natural that while the poor process worker escapes into the pub and drinks a quiet keg of beer in the saloon before going home to the keg in his very own refrigerator, the kids with exactly the same psychological release go out and throw bricks through windows, and punch shit out of one another, and then go home to watch the most exciting things they can find on TV to further escape the humdrum of today which will be the same tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and so on until they can leave school and get a job on the process line and substitute the piss for the Zorro.

Now in the midst of all this surely someone must be able to see that substituting poetry reading for Bruce Lee will just mean more brick fights and less TV and no answer to anything.

And if you can see that (my, how you’re coming along), then you will also be able to see that cutting out advertising will solve no problems either, because then the station will have no money to buy or produce any programs and therefore the choice will be brick fights or test patterns and I am prepared to take any money you care to lay on test patterns and you may even name your own odds.

Surely, the real answer must inevitably come back this way.

Firstly, education, the inspirational ownership of our childrens minds, should belong to the parent and not to the state. There should be a choice of not only school or no school, but also what kind of school and what kind of subjects; at the sole discretion of the parents and/or the kids.

And even if some parents don’t give a stuff (and some definitely don’t, even I am not that hopeful), wouldn’t it be nice if that gave the P&C something worthwhile to do: like go and talk to the kids and their parents and take over the responsibility (with, and only with, the parents permission) for that child’s education.

Secondly, as schools were allowed to actually compete, we would face a situation not unlike today’s Medibank choice where free enterprise schools would spring up overnight teaching things of some real value (really, what did you learn at school that you can use at work tomorrow that your parents wouldn’t have taught you themselves in a year?? What happened to the rest of those years???).

The schools would be run efficiently with at least two and often three shifts a day with primary (morning), high (afternoon), university (night) so that rental costs would be cut by two thirds at least.

The schools would run for the same periods as any other business (i.e., at least 48 weeks a year). Teachers would work twice as hard, but be paid more than twice as much and be able to teach in schools of their choice.

Thirdly, there would be schools that concentrated on the arts, others on manual crafts, others on science, others would work on the apprenticeship system and so on.

The standards would grow as evaluation of schools became more crucial and parents grew to realise, overnight, that not all schools, teachers or indeed pupils are born equal.

And in the short-term, those who preferred the conservatism of the state-owned and misrun schools, could still have them and their sister universities, but, like Medibank, those who chose them could bloody well pay for them with a percentage of their income or a flat fee to cover the actual real costs.

And when all those darling trendy socialist Balmain parents, with their darling trendy socialist kids, saw what the education bungle costs — not only costs them, but also costs equally those of you who have no kids — then the logic which will have so far escaped them entirely will indeed be inescapable.

But in the meantime, the P&C will continue to push for more controls in their never-ending quest to have Shakespeare toss Spiderman off the bestselling lists. And the P&C will continue to push for more controls over kids TV and kids advertising and prices and wages and art and culture and now even sport and everything and anything else in sight until one day the controls will be just as they want them.

And then, on that day, someone else will decide whether they or their children may in fact even be parents; and that is the day they will truly become citizens.