The work-shy teacher who is a taste of what’s to come when the snowflake generation runs Britain

SOME 80 years ago, the American government produced a pamphlet encouraging people into work.

It explained that being idle was just about the worst thing imaginable, because it meant the loss of self-respect, pride and hope. By contrast, it went on: ‘Let’s look at what work does for us. Work keeps us from going nuts.’

I sometimes wonder what would happen if our Government distributed such a pamphlet today. How long would it take for people to demand an apology? How long before the first online petition passed 10,000 signatures?

For one thing, there is that incendiary world ‘nuts’, which would have mental health campaigners steaming with outrage. But even worse, surely, is the emphasis on hard work.

You might wonder what on earth is wrong with hard work. What’s so bad about putting in the hours, knuckling down and getting something done?

Well, just ask Eddie Ledsham, of Wallasey, Merseyside. For as the Mail reported yesterday, the 22-year-old has just left the teaching profession after being unable to cope with what he considered as a nightmarishly back-breaking workload.

As he admitted in an online video, he had been warned by his tutors that his first year in the job, teaching eight-yearolds at a school on the Wirral, would be tough. Alas, not even this prepared him for the ‘astronomical’ burden to come.

Shocked

As he explained, he had so much to do that he found himself thinking about it ‘on the train to and from work’. Because he stayed late to devise his lesson plans and mark pupils’ work, he sometimes did not get home until 6.30pm. (I know — 6.30! No, that is not a misprint.)

But even that was not the worst of it. ‘If I went to watch football with friends, I’d have to shoot off as soon as it finished because I’d have work to do,’ said an outraged Mr Ledsham.

‘The times I’d go and see my then girlfriend, I’d have to sit and do marking while she cooked or something.’

When I first read the story, I wondered if Mr Ledsham was being serious. But he appears to be genuinely shocked that he sometimes had to work after watching the football.

Still, since Mr Ledsham is only 22, perhaps he can be excused a little naivety. But I think his story is part of a bigger trend, reflecting the values of a generation who have been taught to shun the world, rather than to embrace it, and seeing themselves as victims, rather than as doers.

You have probably read about the emergence of a ‘snowflake’ generation in our universities, who take offence at the slightest provocation, demand ‘trigger warnings’ before classes and campaign to have supposedly racist statues torn down.

But these students have not sprung into life from nowhere. They are the products of a wider culture of self-indulgent victimhood, not just in our schools, but in millions of homes. And now, of course, they are growing up. They are not just schoolchildren with scrubbed faces, or students suffused with moral indignation. They are now becoming parents themselves, passing on their sense of entitlement to the next generation.

And if you doubt it, consider another story this week. It concerned parents in East Sussex who were infuriated by a council campaign to cut down on poor school attendance.

Under the heading ‘ Get a Grip’, the council warned parents that there were ‘ no good reasons’ for missing school, apart from a ‘ genuine medical condition’. If children had a ‘ headache or cold’, the council said, they should still go to school, adding that ‘your child is still able to go to school when they feel tired’. And it offered tips for parents on ‘being more organised’, from getting breakfast ready to setting an early-morning alarm.

All good advice, if a bit obvious. But clearly it was not obvious to everybody, since the council was disturbed that school attendance figures were ‘simply not good enough’.

Apology

Personally, I think the council should be applauded for laying down the law so bluntly. Parents who keep their children at home because they are looking a bit tired are doing them a gross disservice. Life is about coping with setbacks and annoyances; it is about keeping going when you feel ropey.

Yet some parents see things differently. Ella Lewis, a mother from Seaford, even set up an online petition — that favourite recourse of the social-mediaobsessed snowflake — demanding the council scrap the ‘Get a Grip’ campaign.

In her own words, she and her comrades were not merely ‘shocked’, they felt ‘ blindly attacked and undermined’. And in classic snowflake style, the petition demands the council ‘make a public apology’.

By now there can be no institution in the land that has not been asked to make a public apology for something or other. For the campaigning classes, an apology, however insincere, is the Holy Grail.

In that supreme snowflake newsletter, The Guardian, somebody demands an apology for something almost every day. Britain once led the world in making things; we now lead the world in making apologies, or least in asking for them.

All this is the product of a culture that shrinks from challenges, disdains hard work and tries to wish away the harsher realities of life.

It has, I suppose, become a bit of a cliche to moan about the ‘all-must-have-prizes culture’ of today’s schools. And yet only last month it emerged that Highgate School, in North London, had indeed abolished its annual prize-giving ceremony.

According to the head of its lower school, Stuart Evans, it was ‘not right for pupils who were not prize-winners to sit through an event where prizewinners are being singled out’.

Presumably Mr Evans also objects to ceremonies such as the Oscars, where nominated actors and actresses have to watch their peers being applauded, or the Booker Prize, where short- listed authors watch the winner being singled out for acclaim.

You might think that learning to cope with disappointment is a crucial part of growing up. You might think that coming second, or third, or even last, is something that all children have to get used to eventually.

Similarly, you might think children need to learn how to go to school despite a cold. And you might even think that, yes, sometimes grown men need to go home after the football to catch up on their marking.

There was a time when people found pride in soldiering on. They told stories about explorers, soldiers, mountaineers and adventurers who had risked their lives to defy overwhelming odds.

Tough

Yet I worry we are raising a generation for whom soldiering on is inconceivable. They expect to be mollycoddled at every turn, shielded from harsh realities and unsettling opinions in the ‘safe spaces’ of schools and universities.

But the world itself is not a safe space. It can be tough and unforgiving. Being offended, being disappointed, feeling tired and working hard are all part of being human.

If we insulate our children from those realities, we are simply setting them up to fail.

For though Highgate School might have scrapped its prizegiving to avoid upsetting the little darlings, you can be sure that in other countries — and especially in the rising powers of Asia — the spirit of competition is alive and well.

And if things go on as they are, then one day an entire generation of little Britons will be left watching miserably as their foreign counterparts walk away with all the prizes.

Mind you, I suppose there is a good chance the British wouldn’t even be invited. After all, the organisers wouldn’t want to hurt our feelings.