It’s kids who are suffering
Ican’t point the finger at kids who wag school because I was once one of them. Back then, though, I doubt that regular attendance was just 60%, a number that gives the finger vigorously to the future.
Something is wrong, and it’s not just the truants. Something is wrong, too, in Oranga Tamariki, which Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis has called ‘‘broken’’, and with the role of the children’s commissioner threatened.
There is a link: we look on kids as a problem, rather than at the world we’re busy making for them. We think forming committees will sort it all out. Like it never does. It just buys time.
The rich, richer by the day, don’t have kids that wag. Those kids can see the neatly paved path ahead of them into the professions or business. Their meals are on the table regularly, their beds are safe and clean, and they learn about their specialness just by looking – at a safe distance – at kids who go without such essentials. We can set our little princes and princesses to one side.
We can also set aside the children of new immigrants, whose parents encourage them to aspire and do well, and they tend to do it, even in a new language.
The problem is the poor, becoming poorer, it would seem, in direct relation to the growth of other people’s wealth. It’s annoying that they don’t try harder. Why, parents both earning the minimum wage, which the rich regard as ample, have oodles of small change left over after they’ve paid their painfully overpriced rents in a property they will never be able to afford to buy, and bought groceries.
On top of that, they have no security of tenure. No wonder some treat their rented homes with contempt. Wrong, horrible, but I get it.
Kids aren’t stupid. They see how hard their parents work, making no progress and with no expectations of a better life. If their parents are on welfare, they see that they’ve abandoned hope. Parents on the breadline can offer little more to their kids than love, and even that is sorely challenged by the stress of their daily struggle.
It’s the done thing to lecture these people and belittle them, and some governments enjoy cutting their benefits, which always impacts on the kids.
Miraculously we now have children stealing cars and doing ram raids, becoming gang prospects and bullies, taking to drugs for the promise of an altered reality. Others leave school to earn extra money for their families, a generous motivation that undermines their own future. Still others read the tea leaves and take their own lives.
I didn’t grow up seeing homeless people on the streets and knowing that some families must live in their cars because of a chronic housing shortage. That comes from a chronic, misguided belief that market forces will answer society’s needs.
We bought into it, and it hasn’t worked. If people know they have no chance of a better life they have no investment in helping the world work for everyone else.
Fletcher created problems with its Gib just when builders were trying to provide more housing. The company can do this in a free market. Business is seldom altruistic, and sometimes downright callous.
As for me, I stayed home from school – wagged – a lot in winter. I had no coat, and there was often too little change in my mother’s coat pockets and handbags to pay the train fare. As a result I didn’t get the Higher School Certificate for doing the 7th form. I can honestly say it made no difference to my life.