World Socialist Radio - The Magic Gadget IRL (2026)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

The Magic Gadget IRL by The Socialist Party of Great Britain

This episode reflects on life before smartphones and social media, describing how children in the 1990s experienced the world directly, without digital pressures such as FOMO (fear of missing out), sexting, cyberbullying, and addictive “attention economy” features designed to maximize engagement. It highlights growing concerns about the mental health impacts of ubiquitous device use among young people and discusses recent policy responses such as Australia’s ban on major social media platforms for under-16s and widespread bans on phone use in schools, though evidence of real benefits remains mixed. It also notes how pervasive smartphone ownership even among very young children blurs safety with surveillance, and that regulatory efforts may simply push kids toward less regulated, potentially worse online spaces.

Taken from the January 2026 edition of The Socialist Standard.

World Socialist Radio is the official podcast of The Socialist Party of Great Britain. We have one single aim: the establishment of a society in which all productive resources – land, water, factories, transport, etc. – are taken into common ownership, and in which the sole motive for production is the fulfilment of human needs and wants.

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Featuring music: ‘Pushing P (Instrumental)’ by Tiga Maine x Deejay Boe. Source: Free Music Archive, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0

Pathfinders: The magic gadget IRL (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

30 years ago in 1996, some were learning to use email, home computers and the embryonic worldwide web, but most families still shopped in the high street, looked up numbers in the phone book and watched ‘terrestrial’ telly together in the sitting room. Kids who wanted alternative amusement ended up hanging out with mates on park benches or outside supermarkets in the winter cold. Gay teens had no local community of peers to turn to. Neither did those with hobbies, or growing-pain problems. For them, the world in real life (IRL) was limited and limiting.

But, IRL, there was also no FOMO, no sexting, no doxing, no doomscrolling, no cyberstalking or cyberbullying, no revenge porn or ‘nudifying’ of classmates, and no pro-suicide chatrooms. Smartphones and social media (SM) have revolutionised the childhood experience, and not necessarily in a good way, as BBC Radio 4 reported (7 December): ‘Alongside the widespread adoption of smartphones has come a tidal wave of adolescent anxiety, depression, loneliness, and a spike in suicides’. Now Australia has banned access to ten of the biggest SM sites for under-16s. Communications Minister Annika Wells explains: ‘Teenage addiction was not a bug, it was a design feature, and on 10 December there are going to be withdrawal symptoms. […] With one law, we can protect Generation Alpha from being sucked into purgatory by predatory algorithms described by the men who created the feature as “behavioural cocaine”‘.

Many countries now ban phone use in schools. Australia started doing this back in 2020, with support from teachers and parents alike. All claimed a degree of success. However the bans were not well coordinated, and subjective reports of greater engagement and improved mental health may be the placebo effect at work. A Birmingham University study looking at 1,227 students in 30 secondary schools found no evidence of changes in grades, amount of sleep, class behaviour, or even time spent on phones.

Australia’s latest action, with popular support, could trigger a global cascade of similar legislation. SM firms already face a landmark US trial this month. China, with basilisk totalitarian vigilance, uses spyware to restrict SM use and game playing by its youth, with a 40-minute daily limit for SM and 3 hours gaming per week. The UK 2023 Online Safety Act (OSA) instead demands that SM companies take ‘reasonable steps’ to protect children. Good luck with that. SM lawyers will have a field day.

It’s not just teens. Ofcom estimates that 1 in 4 UK children aged between 5 and 7 have a smartphone. Parents say they buy these phones for safety reasons to do with the child being contactable and trackable. But satellite-tracking a five-year-old is not the way to keep them safe. In truth, overworked adults managing multiple jobs and kids may well find the magic gadget of infinite games and videos hard to resist, given that it shuts their child up like nothing else and besides, if all the other kids have one, their child runs the risk of being victimised for looking poor.

Radio 4 interviewees speculate that the Australian ban could be a useful research opportunity. That’s if it works, but it probably won’t. One 13-year-old got round the ban in less than five minutes. And if one kid can do it, they all will, because of peer pressure, and because the industry wants to lock them in, not out, and because it will regard regulatory fines as the paltry cost of doing business. The new OSA age-verification rules for porn sites are also probably doomed. There has been a huge increase in downloads of VPN apps which hide the user’s IP address. With a conservatively estimated 240,000 online porn sites, Ofcom regulators face an uphill struggle to ensure compliance. So far they’ve taken action against just 70, leading insiders to argue that the new rules are effectively unenforceable.

And then there is the law of unintended consequences which produced this generational mental health crisis in the first place. Regulating the top SM sites might end up funnelling users to even worse places, like regulation-exempt gaming chatrooms, notorious as extremist rabbit-holes.

But, one might argue, why pussyfoot around imploring SM firms to take responsibility, why not just ban smartphones for kids altogether? The UK’s Education Select Committee last year recommended exactly that. But capitalist governments have bigger things to worry about, and unlike China, are generally leery of voter blowback for ‘nanny-statism’.

Even so, some young self-styled neo-Luddites are opting to downsize to ‘dumbphones’ that have no social media, with a view to clawing back their free time. As one manufacturer puts it, SM entrepreneurs are obsessed with monopolising their users’ engagement time, whereas users should be saying ‘What about me? What about my time?’ He continues: ‘The problem is not the device, it’s the business model: the attention economy. Every free app, every social media platform, every browser, is trying to maximize engagement so they can make money collecting data and categorizing people into different groups so they can sell it to advertisers’.

Unfortunately for neo-Luddites, dumbphones offer a near-zero margin, so tech firms ‘have little incentive to cater to dumbphone users, whose revenue potential is relatively miniscule – that is, if they can even make the economics of manufacturing the devices work at all’.

It’s a tragic indictment of capitalism that social media started by connecting people, and is now arguably complicit in global disinformation and child abuse. Now, encouraged by Trump, SM firms are even ditching their fact-checkers. Perhaps Gen Z parents, having seen the damage for themselves, will refuse to allow their Gen Alpha kids to go through it. The bigger long-term tragedy for Gen Alpha, whether they’re on social media or not, is that their future IRL will be one of relentless capitalist exploitation and wage slavery. If we really want to stop not just child abuse, but human abuse, abolishing capitalism IRL is the only way.

Paddy Shannon

(Facebook review, page 20)

The changing world of children (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thirteen million of the population of Britain are under 15 years old. When Socialism is established, that quarter of the population will cease to be financial dependants and will be owners of the means of living like everyone else. Questions about education and upbringing in Socialism frequently assume that children are still to be at the disposal of adults and will have arrangements made for them. It may not be like that.

The idea of childhood itself has altered repeatedly in different social phases. “Infancy”, which now refers to very young children, formerly meant the entire pre-adult period of life; the word is still used with this meaning in law. Adolescence was a legal division in ancient Rome, covering the period from puberty (14 for males, 12 for females) to the male majority at 25. Only in the 20th century, however, has it come to mean a physical and psychological development between childhood and adulthood. In the Middle Ages and the early capitalist era such a stage was virtually unrecognized: they were children, then they were adults.

Thus, in Tudor times upper-class boys matriculated and were sent away to universities at thirteen or fourteen. The law permitted the marriage of boys at fourteen and girls at twelve. Shakespeare’s Juliet was thirteen, and a character says early in the play: “Younger than she are happy mothers made.” Children of what are now called tender years were flogged; the Verney Memoirs has a letter expressing concern for a delicate three-year-old—“Let me beg of you and his mother that nobody whip him but Mr. Parrye”. In the working class, Defoe noted with approval in the early 18th century that children of four and five all over Britain earned their livings.

Childhood is a physiological condition, but its duration and what is expected of it are social decisions. The question “What is man?” needs a rider: “What is child?”

Work and School

The first moves to control child labour in factories, and thereby create a new conception of childhood, were made by “enlightened” members of the capitalist class during the Napoleonic Wars. One of them was Sir Robert Peel, the father of the Tory Prime Minister. G. M. Trevelyan in his English Social History indicates the nature of this enlightenment: “No doubt the good Sir Robert, who himself employed 15,000 hands, was in part anxious to restrain the unfair competition of his more unscrupulous rivals.”

At the same time, economists argued the need to withhold children from work and send them to school. Adam Smith put forward a scheme for parish schools which would provide the basis of economic activity and progress. Ricardo and Malthus both favoured education as a means of inculcating habits which would lead to family limitation, and therefore an increase in economic well-being. An anonymous pamphlet of 1856 called The Education of the Masses, Can it be Accomplished? talked more specifically of making labour-power “a much better and more trustworthy article than has hitherto been furnished”. In introducing the Elementary Education Act of 1870 W. E. Forster said: “Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our national prosperity.”

Childhood was defined by developed capitalism as from birth to twelve, then fourteen and after; during this time the value of labour-power would be formed and the child purposefully conditioned. Adolescence appeared as the period between that childhood and marriage, which was now delayed several years. Alongside these changes, the spread of scientific ideas and of modern popular culture installed fresh images of childhood. The decline of the social importance of the family in this century has weakened former prejudices and sanctions; in general, children today are better cared for and less restricted than ever before. Yet, as with the majority of society, the result is frustration because means and conditions are absent.

Moulding

The often-quoted claim of a Jesuit that a child raised by him up to seven years old would be his for life has been responsible for a lot of muddled thinking about upbringing and its effects. Much of what small children learn is the acquiring by imitation of social techniques. Getting food, conversation, movement, etc., are absorbed almost unwittingly from the circles in which they live. “They are very often ignorant of the possibilities of any other sort of behaviour; and the process of learning is probably as nearly effortless as any which can be studied.” (C. M. Fleming, The Social Psychology of Education.)

Responses are also learned this way: how to win admiration and to get one’s own way. This leads to the identification of learning in children with “socialization”, or conditioning them to perform as those in charge desire—the modern version of the Jesuit theory. Fortunately, it does not work. To connect the upbringing of children with the class struggle may seem far-fetched, but this is the operative factor. While their “nature” as children is laid down by and to suit the needs of capitalism, it conflicts with the notions of self- and group-interest formed in a working-class environment. The size of the gap is shown by the numerous attempts at supplementary conditioning made through youth organizations—which in turn fail, for the same reason.

Earnest radicals have often tried to oppose the “socialization” of capitalism with alternative theories of upbringing and youth organizations which try to impose a different point of view. In the nineteen- twenties and -thirties a “Left Scout Movement” was attempted called first Kibbo Kift and then the Woodcraft Folk. The founder of the latter organization, Leslie Paul, wrote later: “Despite the socialist dressing we gave to everything, and believed we believed in, every kind of future reform or revolution paled beside our concern for the content of the actual life we were living at that moment.” (Angry Young Man, 1951.) That is precisely it. For children, the proposed indoctrination is a disposable surface item; the activity, learning by doing, is what adds to the development of reasoning powers.

Games people play

Children learn rôles. Childhood itself is a rôle; if it is deemed to continue to, say, fourteen or fifteen a boy or girl will act younger at that age than if he or she is named an adolescent or an adult. The rôles are what society expects and therefore makes known to children, and their carrying-out is part of social technique.

In the last thirty years the male and female rdles practised and accepted throughout capitalism have altered. The long hair inaugurated by pop groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stone., at the beginning of the nineteen-sixties was a sign of rejection of established masculine looks, while girls took to male trousers. Established ideas of distinct characteristic behaviour of the sexes have blurred; women make sexual demands on men, instead of the opposite. When co-education in state schools was spreading in the ’fifties it was often said to have the effect of making boys womanish, but that is no longer heard.

Previously there was no problem. Boys were conditioned from their earliest consciousness to be virile (“Be a big boy, now’’) and girls feminine. The classic toy for girls, held to be a demonstration in itself that the differences in behaviour were inborn, was a doll. However, in the last ten years one of the most popular boys’ toys has been the “action man’’, which is simply a male doll with changeable clothes. Insofar as children learn male and female rôles from what they see round them—mother doing housework and cooking, father going out to his job—the difference remains. But it is also clear that this is not destiny but a social arrangement; and the old version of it cannot be inculcated in the future.

Besides observation and instruction, children learn by play. This fact was taken up by educationalists a generation ago in "the play way”, trying to adapt play to be a means of conditioning. On the other side, before the 1914-18 war an American named Stanley Hall produced the “recapitulation” theory of play; it argued that children re-enacted the stages of man’s development—gathering, hunting, tribal wars, even (in “swapping”) the growth of commerce. Play ranges from simple imitation to the acting of fantasies, and the need for it is not confined to children. Social convention and the work-ethic say that it should be, with the result that adult occupations such as acting and professional sports are commonly regarded as evading work. Living in capitalism, we see man estranged from himself.

Something new

Again in common with adults, children need stability and affection. In memoirs of the Oneida Community (My Father's House, published in 1937) Pierrepont Noyes related how the elders of the community censured the showing of affection on the grounds that it denoted possessiveness; and the stress this put on the persons he knew. Individuals who are handicapped in this way can and do have problems ot relationships with the rest of society, which often emerge as delinquency.

However, underlying individual relationships is the structure of society as a whole. The parent-child relationship expresses material circumstances, laws and social concepts that arise from or are linked with wage-labour and capital. The protectiveness of parents is a mixture of affection with the knowledge that in the capitalist world the pursuit of a natural impulse, or a misjudgement, can be punished in the all-important material sense. This in itself makes the child a subject instead of an individual; the parent says "Do as you’re told, or it will be the worse for you” because that is how a class society operates.

Certainly, in any society children must learn. Rather than ask how it will be arranged in Socialism, it can be pointed out that capitalism prevents them learning now. Children will learn through their own activity, play and curiosity; the “problem” of literacy in capitalist society is for governments to try to instil it while keeping the social factors which obstruct it. The best-known of “progressive” educationists, A. S. Neill, insisted that children learn when and because they want to, but Neill was unable to operate his principles within the general education system of capitalism.

We look forward to the emergence of socialist man, the fulfilment of the capacities which are stifled and distorted in capitalist society. Socialist child should not be overlooked; equally, he and she will be an altogether different creature.

Robert Barltrop

Halo Halo (2025)

The Halo Halo! column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some names of Father Christmas/Santa Claus across the world: Finland: Joulupukki, ‘Yule Goat’; Russia: Ded Moroz, ‘Grandfather Frost’; Norway: Julenissen, ‘Christmas gnome’; Japan: Santa-san (Santa Kurōsu); China: Dun Che Lao Ren ‘Christmas old man’; Mongolia: (Övliin övgön), ‘Grandfather Winter’; Georgia: tovlis babua , ‘Grandfather Snow’; Armenia: Dzmer Papik ‘Winter Grandfather’.

A band produced a song in 1970 and sang, ‘teach your children well’. Should we presume that parents in the countries listed above taught their children that there was a Santa Claus, a Tooth Fairy and an Easter Bunny whilst knowing full well that these were all made up fictional beings?

What have the children living in these places got in common? Gift receiving obviously, but by the age of eight or so no longer believing that such persons, as they have been taught, actually exist. They may have been disabused of this belief by a peer who has sussed this out and wants to disillusion others for whatever motive. Once the deceit is discovered, and the knowledge that presents come from those who have to sell their labour power in order to afford them, then the hunt for gifts stored somewhere in the house before Christmas becomes likely. Admittedly, knowing about wage slavery and capitalist exploitation is likely to come a little later in life.

Knowing about Santa generally means that there is an unspoken agreement on the part of both children and parents to maintain the illusion. The fantasy that there is a being in the sky who monitors all behaviour at all times, known as god, usually takes youngsters longer to find out the truth.

Santa can be used to modify the behaviour of children: if you’re naughty Santa knows and he’ll cross you off his list to bring you nice presents. So behave! Compare that to the threat of gods who demand unconditional ‘love’ and ‘worship’ or else they will cast you into hell to suffer all its torments forever and ever.

Children may eventually come to the conclusion that this is just the reality of life and not blame parents for fibbing to them about Santa. But at what point do children come to realise that being taught that they are getting Yuletide presents because of a virgin birth that supposedly occurred two thousand years ago is also twaddle, baloney, humbug and tosh?

Do primary/junior schools still force the very young to wear tea towels on their head at Christmas and act out a meaningless scenario which they are too young to understand? Turning children against religion may be a positive factor from that event though when the resentment against getting a star part is compared to only being asked to be a sheep or a donkey.

Which is more harmful to teach susceptible young minds? A belief in a jolly bearded guy who can fly through the sky in a sled pulled by reindeers or the deception that there exists an insecure, controlling, vindictive being who demands constant idolisation and validation?

DC

Children in labour (1988)

From the October 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The traditional view of child labour is summed up in a Low Pay Unit pamphlet:

"Child Labour" conjures up images of the pauper apprentices of Tudor times and the rag and dust sifters and mill children of the early industrial revolution. Its heyday was during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when industrialisation drew upon the labour of children in new and more wholesome ways than had been customary in the family economy of earlier years.

(Working Children 1985)

Newspaper reports in recent years however. suggest that child labour is neither a thing of the past nor confined to delivering newspapers, baby sitting or similar chores normally associated with children's work. "Scandal of pin money Pupils'' was the headline in the Daily Express on 12 December 1977; "Slave Labour ", screamed the Daily Mirror, 20 October 1982. In April 1973 The Times reported that three schoolboys, all aged thirteen, were employed in a factory operating highly dangerous, defective power presses for 17 pence an hour.

Child labour does of course have a long history. In an agrarian economy, where there was no distinction between employment in the home and other labour, men, women and children each had a task to perform tending crops and providing for everyday necessities. Children also played a role in industrial labour. The daughters and sons of artisans frequently helped in the manufacturing process or were apprenticed in the trade of their parents. Children of weavers had a staged career of tasks given to them according to their age and abilities, ranging from fetching and carrying to treading cotton, winding bobbins and spinning. Life for these children was hard and often involved long hours of work.

In the late sixteenth century children orphaned due to the death or poverty of their parents became the responsibility of the parish in which they lived. A system arose of apprenticing orphans to local craftsmen or placing them in special workshops to learn a trade. This was administered by local justices whose main concern was to rid the parish of any unwanted burden. The treatment of orphans varied from employer to employer but cases of cruelty and sadism were not unknown.

With the coming of the industrial revolution the parish workshops evolved into factories and the exploitation of children as slave labour was common. The practice of apprenticing orphans continued as late as the 1840s, when boards of guardians in Staffordshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire were found to be

. . . still getting rid of pauper boys of six. seven and eight by apprenticing them to colliers with a guinea thrown in "for clothes".

(E.P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class)

Child labour in modern times is seen as one of the unacceptable features of capitalism. Apologists for the system moralise about it but at the same time seek to convince us that a society in which a majority are economically coerced and treated as mere factors in the profit-making machine is the best the human race can hope to achieve. Workers are employed because they produce an economic surplus over and above their wages, which are inevitably very low for a large section of the workforce. According to the Low Pay Unit, figures for April 1986 show that 17 per cent of full-time workers were being paid less than £2.40 an hour, while over a third were receiving less than £3.00. Of the women who work part-time, 50 per cent were earning less than £2.40 an hour and 75 per cent received less than £3.00 an hour. In total, around 2 million women part-time workers and 1.6 million full-time workers. both men and women, received less than £2.40 an hour, including overtime pay. (Low Pay Unit: Britain's False Economy. 1987.)

When confronted by the exploitation of child labour socialists reply that the only answer is to end the system where a majority of men. women and, in many cases, children are treated as economic units. This can only be done by establishing, by democratic political means, a world-wide system where the means of production are owned in common and production takes place solely to meet the people's needs. In such a society the exploitation endemic in employment will be replaced by voluntary co-operation to produce the things people have democratically decided they need. All will have the right to take part in decisions about what is to be produced and how production is organised. Let's take a look at what the alternative — doing "something now" — has achieved in the last 180 years in the area of child labour.

One of the earliest pieces of legislation was the 1802 Health and Morale of Apprentices Act. Its aim was to limit children's working hours and its main concern was with pauper apprentices. It sought to abolish night work and limited the working day of apprentices in cotton mills to twelve hours. There were also provisions made for school on Sunday and proper clothing and sleeping arrangements. [To]  make sure that employers complied with the act, four independent factory inspectors were appointed to enforce the law among the 3,000 textile manufacturing establishments of the time.

Apart from the low standards set by the act, its major flaw was that enforcement depended on magistrates who were in most cases mill owners themselves. Similar problems affected another act passed in 1819 and sponsored by Sir Robert Peel, which outlawed employment in cotton mills for children under the age of nine. As it had no independent inspectorate it was largely ignored by mill owners.

Next came the Factory Act of 1833, which was based on the evidence of the Sadler Committee of 1832 and the Factory Commission of 1833. It outlawed the employment in all textile factories of children under the age of nine; between nine and thirteen no child was allowed to work more than 48 hours a week; for those aged thirteen to eighteen the limit was sixty-nine hours and anyone under twenty one years was prohibited from night work. Such was the concern to [missing text]

In 1840 a further factory commission investigated employment in the mines, discovering even worse conditions than those existing in the mills. Small children were used to operate ventilation traps which involved sitting in the dark, sometimes thirteen to fourteen hours. Other children were used to hurry coal down shafts, pushing great loads for miles with their heads while bent double. Soon after the commission published its report in 1842, the Mines Act was passed which prohibited the employment underground of children under ten and women. It also restricted the number of hours and types of work performed by children.

An important turning point in controlling child employment came with the Elementary Education Act of 1870. This provided elementary education on a national basis and set up an administration system of local school boards to keep track of attendance. The 1880 Education Act made school attendance compulsory for the first time and a child could only leave school at ten if he or she satisfied the attendance requirements. Children with poor attendance records were not allowed to leave until the age of thirteen. Prior to the 1880 act. the Factory and Workshops Act of 1878 had extended the 1833 Act to all factories and raised the minimum age of employment to ten. which also limited the hours children under fourteen could work to half the normal working day.

In 1920 the International Labour Organisation and the League of Nations met in Washington to draw up a convention on the employment of children binding on all ratifying nations. In Britain it was embodied in the Employment of Women. Young Persons and Children Act of 1920, which tied together past legislation and provided a list of types of employment which were prohibited to children under a minimum working age.

Subsequent acts such as the Children and Young Persons Act, 1933, the Factory Act of 1961 and the Infants Children and Young Persons Act. 1963 form the basis of modern child labour law. The most important aspects of these acts are the prohibition of child employment in industrial undertakings, a minimum age of thirteen for part-time employment, restrictions on hour and times of work done by children and the provision for local authority bye-laws which can set higher standards than the minimum requirements. There exists a wide variation between local authorities as to the extent of provisions under these bye-laws and the degree of care that is taken to see that they are enforced.

As with the nineteenth century act the major problem with more recent legislation concerns enforcement, responsibility for which falls mainly on three bodies — the Health and Safety Inspectorate. Local Authority Health Officers and the Education Welfare services. All of these bodies have other tasks apart from discovering the illegal employment of children and all are massively understaffed. It is estimated that the Health and Safety Inspectorate has only 750 general factory inspectors to cover 730,000 manufacturing establishments. Much of the education and welfare surveillance work on child labour is done by educational welfare officers through voluntary overtime, patrolling the streets outside normal hours of work.

Due to this understaffing routine inspections are more frequent in large firms or those where the risk of accident is considered high (for example, chemical plants). Less visible firms may never see a factory inspector. As a result "back street firms" — most likely to employ child labour illegally are least likely to be visited. In addition, educational welfare staff have no specific right of entry. As the Inner London Education Authority states:

The more serious kinds of illegal employment in factories, restaurants and building sites tend not to be detected because educational welfare staff have no specific right of entry.

(Working Children, pp. 12-13)

In 1973 an attempt was made to reduce the uncertainty surrounding the legal protection given to working children. The Employment of Children Act received the Royal Assent on 23 May of that year but as yet it still remains on the statute book and has never been fully implemented.

It is therefore not surprising that child labour is still widespread in modern Britain. A survey carried out by the Low Pay Unit and Open University in 1982-3 estimates its extent. Interviews of 1,700 children in the London, Luton and Bedfordshire areas found that, apart from newspaper delivering, children were employed in a wide range of jobs including retailing, catering and cleaning. Close to one in ten children in the survey had more than one job and half of these had more than two. While newspaper delivery accounted for one third of all children working, shop work accounted for one in five and farm work and cleaning both accounted for 13 per cent. A variety of other work performed by children included hotel and catering. painting and decorating, sewing machining. modelling, clerical work and work in street markets. More than one in five children were employed in manual jobs, cleaning, furniture removals, construction labour and garage work. The findings confirm that a majority of these children were in one way or another working illegally. An analysis of the data for London found that four out of five were illegally employed, either under age, working illegal hours or working in jobs they should not have been doing.

It does not require a degree in economics to appreciate that children are forced to work because of the financial position of their families. The survey indicated that there was a definite relationship between the socio-economic position of the families and child labour. The highest proportion of working children in the survey were from manual working class backgrounds (51 per cent) and the unemployed (52 per cent).

Neither is it any mystery why employers use child labour. It is of course a source of cheap and easily disposable labour power and savings can be made not only directly on wages but also indirectly. Children are invariably paid "cash in hand", do not appear on employers’ records and therefore are not subject to national insurance contributions. They are not members of a trade union even where the company is unionised. Neither have they any of the rights of adult workers, such as the right to claim unfair dismissal, the right to an itemised pay slip and, as they pay no national insurance, they have no right to sick pay. Furthermore they are not classified as employees under the Health and Safety at Work Act. If injured at work children have no right to compensation unless their parents can prove in court that the employer has been negligent in some respect. Since most children are employed illegally, taking such cases to court could result in the parents being deemed parties to such negligence.

Despite the large number of health and safety regulations applying to the employment of children, a large minority of those surveyed reported having accidents while in their current jobs. One third of all boys and 29 per cent of girls reported some accident or injury. The main causes were heavy weights, broken glass, slipping or falling and injuries from materials and machinery. Of all the children at work only 19 per cent of boys and 18 per cent of girls were given uniforms or any kind of protective clothing by their employers.

Apart from accidents, the health of working children suffers in other ways. In 1970 a group of teachers in Tynemouth conducted a survey of pupils to discover why so many were falling asleep in class. They discovered that of the 390 interviewed over one third were working illegally and many of them were being grossly overworked and underpaid. As the Low Pay Unit pamphlet suggests, these findings illustrate the fallacy of the view that employment is good for children's health and education. An official of the National Association of School Masters stated:

Children are late to school, fail to do their homework, fall asleep during lessons and are unable to take part in any out of school activities such as sports because they have to report to work.

(Working Children, p.32)

The exploitative use of child labour is not a thing of the distant past. Reform via legislation has failed. The enactment of new laws may give the illusion that something is being done but this is merely a surface appearance; the problem remains because its root cause has not been treated. Doing something now may sound appealing but the reality is that nothing changes because a system unfit for men. women and children remains firmly in operation.

Ray Carr

Blogger's Note:

Sadly, the original text was garbled in places. It looks like there was a typesetting/proof-reading mishap. I couldn't see any notices of corrections in later Standards.

Who needs schools? (1986)

From the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is September. The prison gates must be unlocked and the young people who must be taught a lesson or two are being returned to their place, to be instructed, shouted at, forced to memorise the often irrelevant — to have games played with their minds. When it is enacted by the master class that all children between the ages of five and sixteen shall be subjected to schooling they are doing our class no favours: they are endeavouring to catch early the impressionable minds of the young.

How valid is the analogy between school and prison? The more detached from the prison walls of the school one becomes the stranger it might seem, but to the children being schooled (not educated the two are different) the relationship between school and denial of freedom is all too clear. Schools are places where children, coming in with the innocent belief that they are at liberty in the world, are taught the firm conviction that to behave freely is a crime. They must learn to know their place.

Capitalism sends those who do not know their place to prison. It is done "for their own good". Children are told that schooling will be for their own good. In prison you obey orders or you are punished. And in school. Do not question orders. Do not question the right of the person giving orders to give them. They are dictators appointed by the state; the tax paying capitalist has invested good money so that the orders will be carried out

The prisoner is stripped of individuality and made to wear a uniform. So are school kids. In both cases, uniforms make identification and discipline easier. In prison you become a slave to routine. When a bell rings you eat, you exercise, you work, you slop out. In school, children learn to jump to the dictatorship of the bell: "Why are you outside after the bell has gone? It went five minutes ago. When the bell rings you must be in your proper place". Chimpanzees can be taught such bell-obedience: in a human being it is a descent, not progress.

In prison it is assumed that the prisoner can never be equal to those with authority over him. In schools, however clever the pupil becomes, the teacher will always be superior and one will teach while the other learns and never shall the roles be reversed. You are sent to prison for breaking socially-made rules called laws. Often this means you have stolen food because you are broke, an act which would not be criminal in a world without property. You are sent to school to learn how to accept the wisdom of insane socially-made rules. The "rehabilitated” prisoner, like the properly “educated" school student. is released in the hope that they will be a decently exploitable wage slave.

The function of schooling is to create little human commodities: neatly-packed, subservient embodiments of labour power, there to be exploited as wealth-producing wage slaves. A well-schooled young worker will be fit to go out into the market and sell themselves. The skill of the teacher is not to bring out from a child what it could be. but what the capitalist social system requires it to be. Eighty years ago the Report of the Consultative Committee to the Head of Education on Higher Elementary Schools was candid in explaining the declared needs of employers for which schools should cater:

. . boys and girls in their service should possess habits of discipline, ready obedience, self- help, and pride in good work for its own sake whatever it might be. (1906 Report)

The Report complained that

Employers are said to be dissatisfied with much of the elementary education given, because the instruction, in so far as it is carried beyond the simplest elements, tends, if anything. to make a boy a little above his job.

The present recession has provided educational authorities with the ideal opportunity to make schooling more than ever a job-based process. It is all very well teaching children to express themselves freely through dance, say the traditionalists, but what good will that do them as training for a life behind the check-out counter in Tesco? The investors in Tesco need wage slaves who can add up (we can’t have Lady Porter short-changed. can we?) and not poets, dancers or inventors. So at school the child is taught to regard big ambitions as dreams for the back of the mind: the real objective must be to become a purchasable labour-power commodity.

Capitalism cannot cope with childhood. It needs children, because they represent the reproduction of labour power — new profit-makers for the future. But children must be censured for being childish. The great, civilised struggle for maturity must be entered as soon as possible. To be mature means to be as stupid as the others who have been conned by the system. A child is a dangerous being: not yet conditioned, not yet afraid to see the world as something to be shared. So schools keep children out of society's way. just as prisons keep others away until they are prepared to conform.

Workers need education but not schooling. Education means learning to know what is happening and why. In social terms, there can be no doubt that the working class needs to learn what is happening in the world and why. In this way we shall see the capitalist system as the cause of our problems and then the solution will be not far off. But working class self-education is very different from what passes as education in the capitalist school. From the earliest days socialists have rejected that schooling designed, not to expose social reality but to indoctrinate working class kids to “ honour the Queen, obey your superiors, and run away from every policeman" (Justice, 30 June 1894). It was not education for life, but propaganda for submission.

Many reformers of capitalism have engaged in several campaigns to humanise the education system: to make it useful, or at least better, for the working class. At the beginning of this century the Social Democratic Federation campaigned for free school dinners. It was in opposition to this piddling reformism that revolutionaries left the SDF. refusing to plead for bit-by-bit changes to the exploitation system. As with many reform campaigns, this one was never successful but parliament did grant free school milk which was subsequently withdrawn.

Immense reformist effort went into abolishing the old grammar school system. This fight was nominally won but comprehensive indoctrination has hardly changed the essential nature of the oppressive schooling process. Parent governors have been introduced even student governors — but they would be the first to concede (and often complain bitterly) that their views count for little in relation to the state s dictatorial control of schools. Another campaign has been to abolish public schools for the children of the privileged. Eight Labour governments have made noises about them, but not one has made a single move to abolish them.

When Neil Kinnock was shadow Education Minister he became a darling of the Labour Left by promising to put an end to privileged schooling. It will be worth watching his efforts in this direction if he becomes Prime Minister. The fact is that reformists have played around with the form of schooling. but none has proposed to revolutionise the function of education. This cannot be done in isolation from a socialist transformation of society, for it is only when commodity society has been transcended that commodity-based schooling can be removed. There have been a few inspired and brave efforts at establishing non-conventional schools ("free schools") within capitalism but they have had an uphill struggle within a social environment which cannot cope with freedom.

A socialist society will not need to mould children into servants of an omnipotent production process. In a world where the producer’s quality of life and the quality of the product will be equally valued there will be no requirement of a person but that they learn to live well, for part of living well is to live creatively and to give as well as to take. In a society of production for use the experience of education will cease to be a process which takes place in an institution under compulsion.

Whether the word "school" will survive or not we cannot forecast but that any socialist school would be unrecognisable in comparison with those of today is a matter of certainty. There will be no teachers who are not learners also; there will be no end to education but the satisfaction of human needs — a process which will not stop at eighteen or eighty. In chapter five of William Morris's News From Nowhere there is one great vision of what education might be like in a socialist society. It will be for the workers (and that includes children) who establish socialism to decide how to educate themselves and it will be for each generation to reexamine methods of learning and to assess their worth in the light of what it has produced in their elders.

The ultimate condemnation of capitalist "education" is that it has played a key role in producing capitalist-minded people. A society of people who love nations which they do not own. hate foreigners, are willing to kill in wars, offer themselves as victims to the profit system and obey those who abuse them, is a society of badly educated inhabitants. In a book called The School That I'd Like, compiled as a result of essays on the title submitted by school kids for a competition run by the Observer in December 1967. one girl of fifteen wrote that

I am tired of hearing that the hope of my country lies in my generation. If you give me the same indoctrination . . . how can you expect me to be any different from you?

Steve Coleman

Unwillingly to school (1950)

From the August 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Hardman is Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Education. On July 1st he opened his heart to a meeting of teachers at Dorchester; the Observer thought it important enough to accord a splash heading “New School Time Table.” Stressing as he did the urgent need for “co” ordination between hand and brain, and the high importance of inducing “delight” in the pupil while acquiring culture in its best sense, the words of the Secretary were a signal advance in the right direction; at least the ghost of Robert Lowe who flung his brutal “Board Schools” and scornful words in the face of the Working Class in 1871 has been well and truly laid; it may be hoped the Dorchester audience of Prime Minister Lord Rosebery’s “captains and guides” grasped the full significance of Hardman’s speech.

But alas! even today the gulf between the aspirations of the advance guard in education and the possibilities of fulfilment yawns discouragingly. That gulf can only be bridged, when a New Society (Socialism) has swept away the inevitable evils that must frustrate educational effort under the Capitalist System, in spite of the good intentions on the part of reformers.

It would be folly to deny that there has been a notable diminution in the lads and lassies who creep unwillingly to school; there has been a welcome and growing comradeship between pupil and scholar; there has been a definite, if slow, distrust of the Examination Myth—Hardman himself gave a sour glance at it.

But after all. Education in the long run is governed by political considerations; it was by no odd freak of history that in ancient Greece the Spartan youth was trained to a super-Fascist "hardness,” while the Athenian youth (of the privileged classes, of course), was trained to enjoy Homer and Aeschylus; tradition counted, it is true, but the outstanding fact was that Sparta had no walls, and no sea barrier.

Fifty years ago, Margaret McMillan, the pioneer of Nursery Schools, wrote an enthusiastic Clarionette: “You teachers do love the Grind.” They did, and unfortunately even on the plane of mere amelioration, a lamentable number still do. In the last War, a London school found itself sharing the dubious hospitality (morning and afternoon shifts) of a Secondary School in a South Coast town. An elderly member of the latter staff proudly expressed his determination (a siren wailing applause) to carry through "his” Final Somethings, come weal, come woe. "I’ll stick to the deck, said he, so they stuck him on deck with glue,” as an irreverent youngster of the London School afterwards remarked to his colleagues.

A pitiful handful of school reformers are gallantly striving to keep alive private schools where the child is the centre of the picture, where Wordsworth’s “blind authority beating with his staff the child that might have led him” no longer applies. Happy kiddies! but, with relatively large staffs, etc. these schools are expensive, and therefore for the children of the well-to-do only; further. Government grants are a far-off contingency when “a daily act of public worship” is laid down as part and parcel of grant-earning. This type of school is different.

There has been a spate of loose talk about "equality of opportunity” since the last Education Act, a new version of the old Napoleonic bilge about marshal’s baton and private’s knapsack. It is pretty apparent that the vast mass of pupils attaining Grammar School status will never attain the prize dangled at the top of the greasy pole; the unwholesome preoccupation of youngsters to reach a prescribed goal, the abiding dread of failure, failure itself, entails sheer tragedy for many a sensitive plant in Shelley’s garden. Face the fact, too, of the working-class parents scraping and sacrificing to come somewhere near the school’s requirements in clothing alone; face the fact of much prized “traditions” which are a veritable hot-bed of snobbery, spite of good intentions; face the fact of a child gradually sensing a growing divergence in speech between himself and relatively uneducated parents. It is easy to brush these things aside, to attribute exaggeration to a sketchy outline of potential child torture.

It may well be asked here: what is the remedy, granted the picture is even moderately true? The S.P.G.B. has no hesitation in replying—that only by removing the causes of evil can a final remedy be accomplished. Quinine is a benign alleviator of malaria—elimination of the foul pools with their disease carrying insects is the recognised scientific remedy. The evils inherent in the Capitalist system which, spite of pietistic mouthing, elevates material success to a major virtue, can at its best endeavour but alleviate the worst horrors of infant torture which marked the period of mine and factory hells. And it is worth calling to mind that there were Christian apologists in that period who affected to believe that "wholesome toil ” was a good thing for the pitiful little broken and disfigured scraps of humanity.

The achievement of Socialism will and can be only accomplished by the Working Class; the main appeal of the S.P.G.B. is therefore to that class, but it may not be irrelevant to point out that everything in the educational garden of Eton and Harrow and their kind, as far as pupils are concerned, is not lovely; bullying, even if not of the order of Tom Brown’s schooldays, is not unknown—"worse remains behind.” Socialism would be a happy change for many a sensitive school- tie kiddy.

Hardman means well—as does his chief, ex-schoolmaster Chuter Ede, despite a lapse occasionally into the hectoring Trade Union leader when condescending to speak to his late co-workers. But fine words butter no parsnips, indeed buttery sentimentalism adds to the rough pack of the unthinking worker a new element of dangerous slipperiness; Sir Peter Teazle’s “O damn your sentiments ” seems to meet the situation.

To Working Class fathers, the S.P.G.B. makes this special appeal: even if you fail to realise completely the dire meaning of wage-slavedom for yourself: if you have but imperfectly grasped that Capitalism entails a harassed and inhumanly overworked wife, at least give a thought for your children, your bidden guests. The joy of life, childhood laughing as it goes, faces “ in which sweet records meet, promises as sweet ”—these can be a realised aspiration under SOCIALISM alone.

Augustus Snellgrove

Proper Gander: Lessons from Adolescence (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

A little over a year since Mr Bates vs The Post Office reminded us that TV drama can still have an impact, Netflix’s Adolescence has also shaped debate in Parliament, online, in the media and round the proverbial water cooler at work. Adolescence has been particularly resonant because the issue of violence from young males which it raises feels both more emotive and widespread. The story centres on a 13-year-old boy who is accused of stabbing a girl from his school. Each episode covers an hour at intervals after the murder, with the first showing Jamie’s arrest at his home. Episode two follows the police’s initial visit to the children’s school, the third is a conversation between Jamie and a psychologist some months afterwards and the last episode looks at how the rest of his family are managing over a year later. The performances from Owen Cooper as Jamie and Stephen Graham as his father Eddie are particularly gripping, with Graham also co-creating and co-writing the series. Impressively, each episode was filmed in one continuous take, which must have involved intricately structuring and choreographing the scenes to get the camera and the actors in the right places at the right times.

The drama gives less emphasis to the details of the murder than to the circumstances around it, gradually bringing out the combination of reasons behind Jamie’s actions. His family isn’t portrayed as dysfunctional apart from his father’s anger, described as a generational trauma passed on to Jamie. His own anger is shown sparingly and as being fuelled by online culture. The ‘manosphere’ to which Jamie is drawn, of emojis, incels, influencers and abusive messages has led him to a view of women which leads to his crime. The script tends to understate the causes: Jamie is outwardly ‘normal’ rather than obviously aggressive. Online discourse isn’t explored in detail, other than several brief scenes where aspects of the ‘manosphere’ are mentioned, hinting at its links with far-right ideology. The meanings behind kidney bean emojis and ‘taking the red pill’ explained by the teenage characters would have been new to many viewers. An effect of this is to tell parents that they may not have understood the nature of online cultures their children are being tempted into, and how this can almost casually slide them into violence. In some ways, this is a modern version of past moral panics about the influence of horror comics, video nasties and computer games on young people, although this feels more serious, given today’s climate with the rise in knife crime and misogyny.

Much of the discussion sparked by Adolescence has concentrated on ‘toxic masculinity’, rather than another factor in what influenced Jamie. His school is depicted as a grim and tense place for children to learn in, taking into account that the scenes there are set only a few days after the murder. The teachers are depicted as policing behaviour more than teaching, while the regimented routines and drab walls aren’t much different from those of the police station or detention centre seen in other episodes. Our society’s institutions and environments encourage and reinforce alienation, with Jamie representing its extremes.

Adolescence isn’t a case study, although because it’s fiction perhaps it can be spoken about more openly than real cases. Its release was certainly timed well to contribute to a broader debate. In the same month, former England football manager Sir Gareth Southgate, giving the BBC’s annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture, said that today’s young men need more wholesome role models rather than ‘callous, manipulative and toxic influencers’ online. Also in March, the Centre of Social Justice published its Lost Boys report which describes an increasing divergence between the future prospects of boys and girls, with girls now more likely to later have higher qualifications and higher-paid employment.

Various right-wing vloggers (and Elon Musk) opined that Adolescence is liberal-lefty propaganda which demonises white males and distracts from the proportion of stabbings committed by black youths. Their dislike of the drama is presumably due in part to its criticisms of the ‘manosphere’ they represent. Right-wing commentators were also more likely than those on the left to say that it is being used by the government to justify legislation about regulating online activity. The Online Safety Act 2023 passed into law under the previous Conservative government, and its implementation is still in progress under Labour’s regime. The Prime Minister met with the series’ creators and backed MP Anneliese Midgley’s call for it to be screened in schools with the aim of helping to deter teenage boys from misogyny and aggression. Secondary schools are already obliged to include ‘Relationships and Sex Education’ on their curriculum and updated guidance to cover sexual violence is being planned. Even if the state’s approach of embracing the programme and saying they are taking action over the issues it raises is sincere rather than cynical, it’s still a better PR move than ignoring or disputing the drama.

Adolescence has, at least for a few weeks, connected together various attempts to address concerns about some young males. But to what extent can tightening up legislation about online activity or showing the series in schools or promoting different role models counter misogynistic violence? The context of the problem remains. Titling the drama ‘Adolescence’ points towards the root of the issue being with younger people, especially boys. However, the real cause is found with the social conditions which shape adolescence. Therefore deeper social change is needed, although this risks being ignored among the piecemeal reforms and proposals.

Mike Foster

Blogger's Note:

Mr Bates vs The Post Office was reviewed in the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Problem children (1949)

From the October 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

The clouds of glory formerly trailed by children on their advent to the world have lately darkened into clouds of approbrium. The child delinquent is a problem of our age. It is symptomatic of a social disintegration which concerns socialists as closely as supporters of Capitalism.

Socialists, of course, approach the subject from a standpoint vastly different from that of the orthodox investigator, who wishes to preserve a moral code and set of standards incompatible with a modern industrial society. Socialists are glad to see them questioned, but we know that some belief and conscious purpose to change society must grow up in their place if they are discarded. Few adults have any such conscious purpose and the children in their revolt against authority are merely reflecting the behaviour of their elders who in this instance subscribe to the tenet, “ Don’t do as I do. Do as I tell you.”

We know that to abstract the delinquent from his social environment, to give him psychiatric treatment, to make him the subject of educational experiments is a waste of time. But we cannot doubt that those who do this are genuinely concerned.

Currently in progress we find a conference at County Hall called expressly for scientific investigation of child delinquency and the Child Health Section of the B.M.A. also concerned with this problem at their meetings in Harrogate. The national .and local press is full of letters from teachers, magistrates and parents, many of whom think to find the solution in a return to the old doctrine of “spare the rod and spoil the child”

At first glance some of the things that worry them may appear propitious for us. Children to-day it appears have no respect for the church, their teachers or parents, and that old bogey, the policeman, is a figure of fun. But this is merely destructive and is no basis for a conscious adult revolt against the system. The children's rebellion is not and cannot be a conscious one since the power to reason is undeveloped. Children act instinctively and imitatively. In fact they are as they always were, neither angels nor devils, but, like every human being, an inextricable mixture of qualities. Idealists believe with A. S. Neill in the inherent goodness and good sense of children but this view is just as one-sided and just as much a religious conception as the church doctrine of original sin. The goodness and badness and all the other characteristics come out in response to the external stimuli of the environment. We cannot alter the inherited personality, nor do we expect what is called a change of heart. To subject the child to a changed environment in order to effect a cure and then to return him to the same old jungle is an illogical procedure which ill accords with the scientific pretensions of the psychologists. We do not need new reform schools, but a new society.

The behaviour of all children, delinquent or not, is patterned on that of the adults with whom they come into contact and a reaction to the world as it impinges on them. Victorian children of wealthy families, restrained by fixed habits, cumbersome clothes and fear of punishment meted out by parents and teachers similarly restrained, were able to release their energy in a nursery far from the ears of Papa and Mama. The children of the new industrial working class and the agricultural labourers had no vitality to spare after their undernourished little bodies had completed a working day as long and strenuous as that of their parents. In a social pattern as complex as ours, however, there are many more colours than black and white. The old, simpler demons have gone, but so many intangible fears lie behind our everyday life that there is no security anywhere. In “Ape and Essence” Aldous Huxley says “ . . . fear is the very basis and foundation of modern life. Fear of the much touted technology which while it raises our standard of living, increases the possibility of our violently dying. Fear of the science which takes away with one hand even more than what it so profusely gives with the other. Fear of the demonstrably fatal institutions for which in our suicidal loyalty we are ready to kill and die. Fear of the great men whom we have raised, by popular acclaim, to a power which they use inevitably to murder and enslave us. Fear of the war we don’t want and yet do everything we can to bring about.” Here are some of the contradictions of our society and we can agree too that ". . . fear casts out love. And not only love. Fear also casts out intelligence, casts out goodness, casts out all thought of beauty and truth . . . in the end fear casts out even a man's humanity.”

Where in all this can children find that security so necessary to their balanced development? With their parents they jeer at authority in all its forms. Living in overcrowded rooms the human frailties of the parents themselves are painfully apparent and an early model for the wrangling, spitefulness and apathy which school teachers so loudly deplore. The schools themselves are a reflection of this unbalanced society in which technical progress has so far outstripped all conception of the art of living.

Unfortunately the protest against all this has little direction. People may want a change, but they merely want the same system with themselves the possessors of power, wealth and privilege. The juvenile depredations of the delinquent child grow into the adult depredations of the spiv, the swindler and evader of the law. But always this struggle against the moral bastions of society is not to overthrow them but to get inside them. Once inside, the old lag turns copper with a vengeance and fiercely upholds what he previously flouted.

The Labour Government, by trying to plan the unplannable and to run Capitalism in the working-class interest, has made confusion worse confounded. Small wonder that most people turn aside to snatch what pleasure they can from the cinema and speedway or ballet, opera and the arts. The children educated to take their place in this ostrich society and to become mere parts in a machine, can hardly be blamed for irresponsible behaviour. But neither can we regard them hopefully since this is not the material to shape itself easily into Socialism, that most responsible of all societies.

Socialists must show that this is yet another problem which must be tackled at the root. We must conspire with events to show that a majority of people with clear understanding of what they want can be the arbiters of their fate. Then the children will respond to that adult self-discipline and restraint which springs from a sense of purpose and confidence in the dignity and ability of man.

P. T.

Blogger's Note:

Huxley's "Ape and Essence" was reviewed in the December 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Suffer little children (1949)

From the October 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Monday, 15th August, at King’s Cross, a crowd of irate men and women roughly handled an eighteen year old girl who was alleged to have thrown scalding water into the face of a two-year old girl. One can well understand their indignation. No one in his right mind can see a helpless child misused —or can he?

A few years ago, between the years 1939 and 1945, children were being killed, maimed and wounded by the countless hundred. True, people were indignant. They threw up their hands in horror—cursed the men whose vile duty it was to release these missiles—and went home to knit comforts for their compatriots who were performing the same deeds upon children of another country.

And when the war was over, hundreds of children on the continent of Europe, orphaned or completely divorced from their families by the war, lived like wild animals in bombed cities. Their world was a jungle. They learned that scrounging and stealing, sharp practice and prostitution were their only means of livelihood. Italy supported many such misfits. Who can see the film “Sciuscià” or read Giussepe Berto’s “The Sky is Red”—of young boys locked in barrack-like prisons, or of girls, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen or even less, selling their immature bodies for a handful of food or a bar of soap—without wanting to weep or vomit?

Into these conditions come the mealy mouthed social workers. A recent “March of Time” film proudly announced that several hundred of these children had been reclaimed “ in the glory of God.” For what? To learn the virtues of hard work and honesty, of religion and cant: to be convinced that it is both righteous and correct that at some time in the future they shall be the instruments by which a further generation is pitched into the degradation from which they themselves have risen.

But is there really need to look to the exceptional circumstances of war? Take a stroll round the mean streets of any industrial area and view those grim three-storied buildings that masquerade as schools. Listen to the lessons imparted therein. How are kids to know that French workers are more than sub-humans living upon snails and filthy postcards; that the Germans (or are they Russians to-day ?) do other things besides rob, plunder and devour their young? How are kids to realise that when mother says “she can’t afford it” to their simplest demand, it is an indirect result of the humility and toleration that they themselves are taught? An ageing schoolmaster once told the writer that when he came down from college he too had high ideals, but “you’re beating your heads against a brick wall.” He did not recognise that just like a miner or a factory hand he is employed to train children as cheaply as possible.

Education! The word itself derives from the verb “educe,” which means to “draw out.” The teacher’s job is not to draw out potentialities but to cram in— to cram in the bare amount of facts and the abundance of fantasy that will keep the worker fit and happy in his position of slavery.

And when school is over for the day, what then? Football in a side street, a game of cricket in the park, or down the market with Mum learning how to save a penny here and there and how to ask for two separate pounds of potatoes to get a double “ turn of the scale.” Of course, there are some wonderful institutions for kids. They can join a youth club and learn “citizenship” or the Air and Army Cadets and learn how to kill. Yes, truly wonderful institutions!

Suffer little children! Whether it be individually at the hands of some poor warped mind or en masse as the children of a subjected class, suffer they must in this system of society, whether the conditions be boom, slump, war or peace—and the road of escape will not be found in the classroom. The experiences of the factory, the dole queue, the army, the battlefields provide your education. The world is your university. Wake up and use it!

Ronald.

Violence at School: Contradictions in the classroom (2003)

From the September 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every ruling class has a two-faced attitude to violence. When the members of a ruling class think their interests require it, they will use violence of a most extreme kind, dealing out death and injuries to “enemy” soldiers and civilians, and destruction to “enemy” cities. The American and British invasion of Iraq is a recent example. In its own territory, however, a ruling class will often aim at preventing physical violence. The more non-violent its own home society is, the fewer interruptions there will be to the steady production of surplus value for the ruling class – the more peaceful will be the labours of the waged and salaried workers for the benefit of the owning class.

Children, of course, learn much more from example (when they see how adults behave) than precept (when adults tell children how to behave). So they will probably grow up to be more docile workers in capitalism’s factories and offices if they are not beaten at home or school. That, at any rate, is how the British ruling class sees it, and thus there has been a “statutory ban on the infliction of corporal punishment in schools” (Times, 18 December 2002).

Shortly afterwards the same Government which had kindly stopped teachers hitting children joined with America to attack Iraq, with the result that some thousands of adults, and children, were killed or badly injured: like Ali Abbas, the boy whose family was killed, while he was left with many burns and no arms. It is also the same Government that locks up families who have come here without official permission – such as the Kurdish Ay family, a mother and four children, who were kept imprisoned for over a year before being forcibly sent out of the country (Independent on Sunday, 22 June, Times 15 August). (The father of the family, sent back to Turkey despite Turkey’s repression of the Kurds, has not been heard of since.)

 

The banning of corporal punishment didn’t please everybody. Some devout Christians felt that the Act took away their religious freedom. A number of “independent schools providing a Christian education based on biblical observance” (Times, 18 December 2002), supported by parents of children at the schools, went to court to establish their right to continue beating their pupils. They argued that the law took away their religious liberty to hit children, and so broke the European Convention on Human Rights, which established that “everyone has the right to freedom of . . . religion”. (Why shouldn’t children claim to belong to a religion that outlaws physical violence? And shouldn’t their right not to be hit take precedence over adults’ “rights” to hit them?) The schools asserted that “physical discipline” was “an integral part of the teaching and education of their children, whether in school or in the home”, and “citations from the Book of Proverbs were provided in support of the claimants’ beliefs, those being regarded as biblical precepts”. The Court of Appeal rejected these arguments, so the Christian schoolteachers will sadly not be able to thump their scholars. They won’t be able to bring back the days the present writer can recall – when the Scripture teacher lost his temper with a boy who could not remember the next verse in the Bible passage the class was supposed to memorize, and attempted to knock it into his pupil physically – “The next verse, you blockhead, is ‘God is love’!”, whack! “God is love!” whack! – and so on.

But of course teachers are in many ways the first line of capitalism’s propaganda army: at least they are the first organized part of that army that many of us come across. So they cannot avoid the many inconsistencies and contradictions which are inherent in capitalist propaganda. I remember standing in the school playground in the thirties, in the rain, facing the flag on Empire Day, while the headteacher explained to us how lucky the other countries in the British Empire were that Britain was ruling over them. Then, when the war broke out in 1939, the head explained that we had to go to war to prevent one country ruling over other countries. What was very good when “we” did it was all wrong when others did it.

At the same time the teachers (although they would have indignantly refused to accept that they were part of “the working class”), were – as workers – under the constant strain of having to produce results in order to justify their salaries. One “Assembly”, at the beginning of morning school, when we had a religious service, as required by law, ended with the headmaster praying piously “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us . . . Amen”. Then his face became red with anger, and he shouted – “I saw some boys out of my window yesterday playing round my car, and they deliberately scratched it! Who was it? Who was it? I’ll get them!” When the miserable miscreants had been terrorized into owning up, they were sent to the head’s study to be caned immediately after Assembly, and the head clearly had no idea that there was any discrepancy between praying “as we forgive them that trespass against us”, in theory, and his rampant desire for revenge, in practice.

It is strange that it is only the more vulnerable members of the human race, children, who are supposed to gain from being beaten. Why did not these Christian schools claim that the headmaster could beat the house-masters, and the house-masters beat the ordinary teachers? Or why shouldn’t all the teachers beat the parents who haven’t paid their bills on time? It is quite true that texts from the Book of Proverbs advocate the beating of children, but there is no reason to stop there. If these Christian schools insist on following biblical instructions, why don’t they insist on their right to execute from time to time some unfortunate eccentric old woman, on the ground that the Bible (Book of Exodus, chapter 22, verse 18) says “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”? Not to mention another half-dozen denunciations of witches and witchcraft in the Bible. And don’t say there aren’t any witches: how could the Bible mention witches, and lay down what ought to happen to them, if there weren’t any?

Alwyn Edgar

Right of assembly? (1990)

A Short Story from the August 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

My old schools, like most of their kind, indulged in daily, compulsory religious indoctrination. This went by the harmless sounding name of assembly.

All children know that adults are capable of mistaken ideas and most children learn at an early age how adults use “little white lies" to manipulate and deceive, but the experience of assembly soon revealed to me their capacity for downright malicious brain-washing.

Through junior school and the early years of “comprehensive" silent, questioning submission seemed the only possible course.

Let us pray—What's in a few meaningless words?

Let us sing—What's in a song? 

Let us believe—I can lie with the best of them.

Adolescence made me restless. The pedagogues had been exposed: their lies wouldn't wash anymore.

The fourth year meant elevation to the Upper school. Assembly remained the same except in one respect. Protest was introduced in the form of a tall sixth form student with a huge mop of fair hair that made him stand out in any crowd.

Let us pray—We all bowed—The mop straightened his back and stared straight ahead.

Let us sing—We all hid behind our hymn books—The mop' stared straight ahead.

Let us believe—We are pretended— The mop seemed to say "just you try and make me".

Inevitably, I soon adopted this blatant, but silent protest: perhaps because it seemed to best fit in with my sentiments: perhaps because its honesty appealed to me: perhaps because the mop was my brother.

By the fifth fom this protest had become a matter of daily routine. Besides I enjoyed the disapproval on the teachers' faces. However in that year a pupil we called Spud developed a protest that put my own to shame.

His protest was simple, but brilliant. The idea was to take raucous sarcasm to the limit that the teachers would accept.

Let us pray—Spud shouted out those meaningless words.

Let us sing—Spud sang out of tune for all to hear.

Let us believe—Spud seemed to say "I can be just as ridiculous as you".

Spud's subtle protest was effective. By provoking laughter (in pupils and teachers alike) he demonstrated the absurdity of school assemblies to many more people than silent defiance ever could.

JN

In a Tiswas over Blue Peter (1995)

TV Review from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

How capitalism moulds the minds of children should be of concern to any socialist. For it is in childhood that most people develop a value system which is, to a greater or lesser extent, that of the prevailing system of society. As anyone who has observed children in the playground or on the street will testify, acquisitiveness. competition, selfishness and aggressive behaviour are developed within the first few years of a human’s existence by capitalism in distinction to, and at the expense of. co-operation, mutual self-respect and community solidarity. It is in the formative years that a child learns what "human nature" is supposed to be and what "common sense" is. This is because capitalism requires unaccepting, competitive thoughts and behaviour traits— it is, by its very nature, a competitive. aggressive and ruthless system with little room either for "sentimentality" or critical thinking. It is the "I’m all right. Jack" society, with the moronic “sod you!” philosophy and value system, and children soon learn this well enough.

Commodities aimed at the children’s market reflect this process very obviously. The life of a child in capitalism now seems to be one of never-ending competition; not just in exams, but to kill the most aliens, collect the most pots of gold, be the toughest warrior or the prettiest and thinnest girl in the class.

Before television, it was comics that played a vitally important socialisation role in childhood development, and to a lesser extent they still do. Today, though, the Victoriana of Jackie and Bunty has been replaced with the competitive society's Just Seventeen (aimed at those nearer seventeen months than seventeen years) and the adventurism of the Eagle by the sci-fi horror of Judge Dredd and 2000AD.

This conditioning process is now dominated by television, with computer games catching up fast in the outside lane. Children's television is actually an object lesson in conditioning and socialisation. This is not to say it is all bad—indeed, some of it is rather interesting. It has to be of some meagre standard today if it is to attract the attention of children at all because they have so many other potential distractions. There is no overt conspiracy to indoctrinate—at least probably not—it is just that the values and prejudices picked up by the programmes’ makers throughout their lives in capitalism tend to be uncritically repeated or reinvented for the youngsters of today.

Milk bottle tops

Blue Peter has always been a good example of this. Though it has always been on the "safe" side by capitalism's standards, with comparatively little encouragement of competition and aggressiveness, it has nonetheless tended to reinforce prevalent political attitudes in society without ever stopping to really think about it. This is most transparently the case with its obsession with charity. No-one can deny that there is not a well meaning veneer to the work of Blue Peter on this front, but its activities never really go beyond youthful training for the Rotary Club, a sanitised guilt-trip for those who know that poverty, deprivation and starvation exist, but do not know why.

Blue Peter, like virtually all children's programmes. does not encourage its audience to ask questions. Let the kids collect their milk-bottle tops for Somalia, or Bangladesh, or for the poverty-stricken disabled in Britain, but don't encourage them to ask why they have to do it. Just run the jumble sales, send the parcels and money off and collect your Blue Peter badge before you go to heaven. Blue Peter's attempts at conditioning go well beyond its charity campaigning, however. If you doubt this, examine closely its portrayal of historical events in its potted-documentary slots. If the Great Man theory of history lives on. it is surely here. Blue Peter's inordinate preoccupation with Kings. Queens and great military leaders is such as to shame the most conformist primary school in the land.

Of course, these days the programme has gone a bit "trendy”, at least in outward appearance, and is in many respects a shadow of its former self, but the essential formula of charity work and ruling class propaganda disguised as knowledge is still very much intact.

Other children's programmes are even less subtle. The ever-growing list of cartoon programmes demonstrates this. Today Scooby Doo has been replaced by Power Rangers and woe betide anyone who gets in the way of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The common threads in these type of programmes are aggressiveness and competition with a hint of gang-warfare. Indeed, just as comics have become more violent and belligerent in tone, so have the cartoons. Is a preoccupation with maiming, death and destruction entirely healthy in those so young? Even some of the more worthy apologists for capitalism argue not. For some, pornography could hardly be a worse influence.

Unlike most of the cartoons, some children’s TV programmes are well worth watching for entertainment value and give a reasonable child’s eye-view of our insane world. Unfortunately, there are not many of them. Probably the best, ever since its inception in the late 1970s. is Grange Hill, the drama about life in a North London comprehensive. Created by Phil Redmond, the man who created Brookside, Grange Hill is an object lesson in how to write, direct and produce a realistic drama series— those working on EastEnders should certainly take note.

Among the most entertaining TV programmes for children are the ones shown on a Saturday morning. There is a definite end-of-term feel about these which makes them particularly engaging for those cooped up in a classroom all week, or for that matter, an office—which is the same thing without the playtime. Currently BBC I is running Live and Kicking while ITV counters with What’s Up Doc?, a cartoon-orientated programme which at its best has mirrored the never-to-be-forgotten Tiswas of the late 70s and early 80s. Live and Kicking hosted by Emma Forbes and Andi Peters is the latest descendant in the line stretching from Noel Edmonds's Multi-Coloured Swap Shop (remember that?) to Phillip Schofield and Sarah Green’s Going Live! Both are excellent examples of the mix of anarchic humour and pop star infatuation that has long characterised TV on Saturday mornings in Britain. They appear to be great fun to make—the camera operators rarely stop laughing—but they are invariably led by the values and concerns that infect the other kids’ programmes, merely doing it with more style, vigour and humour. This is something perhaps, but it’s not a great compensation.

One would have thought that television programmes aimed at the most junior members of society would try and cultivate their better natures and desire to exist peacefully and co-operatively, kindling inquisitive minds as much as possible. Despite the few exceptions that have been mentioned. this is generally very far from being the case. Realistic drama invariably takes second place to cartoon violence, and quality investigative programming to indoctrination and lowest-common denominator TV. We can probably expect little better from the market economy.

According to audience research figures, a hefty dose of those brought up on a diet of children's television and cartoons go on to become fodder for Blind Date (currently on its final warning from the Independent Television Commission) and The Word (ditto). There are no Blue Peter's badges on offer for guessing why.

Dave Perrin