What have we done to our society?

[Norman Verona]

A dedicated and much loved teacher is murdered in her class in front of her pupils.

 

Terrible and I can't express my true feelings.

 

But I ask myself what have my generation (or even the next) done to our society to have such an obscene murder carried out.

 

When I went to school and when my kids went to school we didn't have police on duty and metal detectors to stop knives (and guns?) being taken into school.

 

We're all to blame, it's not just any one group. Although I would think that the politicians have failed to do the right thing we elected them to do.

 

I'm not religious, do not believe in any gods, but hope we can find some understanding of the situation and trust the culprit will be helped rather than just punished. I think the teacher would have hoped for the same. 

[Captain Colonial]

It is a terrible tragedy and I'm sure the thoughts of all of us are with those affected.

 

What have we done to our society?  I doubt we've done anything.  People have been murdering each other since the beginning, and it wasn't seen as wrong back then, just survival of the fittest.  We've moved on, but there will always be a small element of evil and violence in society, which you can try to reduce but can never completely eliminate.  What makes me have faith in society is that this incident is being viewed with universal shock and sadness, not sadly accepted as an everyday risk.

 

It hits home for Lady MemSec and I particularly, as her teaching career was ended 25 years ago when a ten-year-old child, whose mother was a prostitute on drugs and whose father was a drugs dealer and pimp, came to school and brutally assaulted my dear wife, kicking and punching her to the floor, and putting her in hospital for five weeks with severe nerve damage that left her partially paralysed down the right side.  She's been on codeine, morphine, valium and frequently has to wear a neck brace since then, and can't work at all.  But she's still an optimist, lives a full a life as possible, and is the joy of my life.  When things like this happen, it rakes it up all over again, but she doesn't let the past run her future.

 

We didn't blame the child, we blamed the parents and the system that put a child with a history of violence into a mainstream school rather than a specialist school, rather than society in general.  Poor little sod never had a chance from the day he was born, and that's part of the tragedy here as well.

 

I'm not prepared to over-react or blame society for what happened in Leeds yesterday until we know more about what happened and what drove this teenager to commit this horrible deed.

[blue ass fly]

Some people are born to kill,they just need a trigger

He was obviously one of them to do that,calmly ,and stand there waiting for the police

No anger

No provocation

Generally theres little deterent

Since children were not allowed to be punished theyve become ferrel

Then they breed and produce offspring whos parents have no regard or respect

When i was at school i would never F and blind at teachers,let alone attack one

Getting the cane was bad enough - facing my dad worse still

Same with police

You now see the yoof taunting them because they know theres nothing they can do

Unfortunately the horse has already bolted

I have no idea how to resolve it and i fear for my kids kids

[Norman Verona]

Scott, I can't fully agree. You hint at one cause when you say we should the kids from drug/alcohol addicted parents lose control over their offspring.

 

I see government fully occupied in dreaming up ways to cut costs rather than ways to improve services and care.

 

Maybe it's the video games with wanton violence where the player brutally kills an opponent who then gets up and continues to play (or fight).

 

Maybe it's the TV that we have allowed to become ever more violent.

 

Maybe it's the greed mentality which we seem to have copied from the US but was started by Thatcher. 

 

It's probably all these things and many, many more. 

 

However, in my opinion, it isn't just the natural state of society.

 

Having said that, Churchill said that war was mankind's natural state. However he meant war between nations, fought by armies. Not children (15 is still a child in my book) walking into a classroom and murdering a teacher with a knife.

 

Survival of the fittest will always prevail. But hasn't it changed in the last 300 years. Now it's an economic survival not one where we kill each other to gain the meagre supplies of water and food. Wars and fighting for land isn't about survival, more about grabbing more for oneself. A few acres will support a family, apart from the drought affected areas of the world (like Surrey?) water should be available everywhere.

 

I see todays survival of the fittest wars being fought with Euros and dollars, not guns.

[Norman Verona]

BAF,

 

Not saying you're not right but doesn't society take some responsibility for the state you describe. 

 

When I was a kid we had genuine respect for others. Not because we were told to but because our elders deserved that respect.

 

Standards have fallen (or at least changed) over the 67 years I've been around.

[Petemac]

My wife is a teacher and it does make me nervous to say the least, she has in the past been attacked by one of her pupils, thank goodness he was not armed.

We need to let the youth of today know and understand it's not acceptable to walk around with any form of weapon, if 5 years in jail is the current punishment then we should not hesitate to put them behind bars and put a stop all of this. We are far too soft and our Judges are a laughing stock. The youth who attacked my wife came from a bad background father in Jail l!! need I say more. Children emulate you, bring them up properly and they will lead a good life. You may disagree with my next comment, and it's only my opinion but bad parents bring up bad children it's that simple.

 

That's my pennies worth.

 

Petemac

[Rory's Dad]

Shocking for everyone concerned but such an extremely rare occurrence.  This is not symptomatic of what's on TV, the state of the parents or anything else.  It's just shocking, tragic or whatever and sadly just part of the world we live in....  IMO of course.

[blue ass fly]

Totally agree norman and pete

All children need firm boundaries as its natural to try and push them

The difference is that we were stopped when we pushed them too far

Today theyre not

If a child is kicking off in class,a teacher cannot remove them if they refuse to leave when asked

The teacher then has to move the other 30 kids if they want the idiot away from the group

I was no saint at school,and was punished for it

A cane across the A*** stung

The rollocking and shame that went with it i remember more

Its about being allowed to deal with them when they do overstep the mark in whichever way is needed,not wrapping them up and finding excuses for them

Children from a young age are able to recognise the difference between right and wrong

Thats where society failed

It stopped parents and teachers being able to impose and maintain boundaries

[Dibby]

One incident and Daily Mail headlines like this hit forums across the land. 

 

Ohhh, back in the day ... the world was rosey, cops handed out a clip round the ear 'ole to miscreant kids, nobody murdered each other. Priests and celebrities didn't fiddle with kids in my day ...  oh, hang on a minute ...

 

Things are as bad as they always have been, we have always had terrible acts of violence, murder, kids robbing grown-ups in the street, torture in military prisons, just now we have a media to ram it down our throats until we're scared of the world we have always lived in.

[Norman Verona]

Dibby, I do not remember any of the kids I went to school with attacking a teacher, let alone using a weapon.

 

Yes, we were a real bunch of miscreants. I went to school and was friends with two chaps you may have heard of. A Master Sugar and Ray Cooper, the percussionist. 

 

I was a real rebel, getting caned several times a week. I wasn't "bad" as such but skived of certain lessons to spend more time in the metalwork room where I was making an engine.

 

Had any of us attacked a teacher I think we would have come of worse. Most were ex RSM's in my day. And the women were harder than the men!

 

Maybe it's a generation thing. I left school in 1960 (December). My kids left school in the late 80s.

[Graham0127]

I have to agree with Dibby I'm sorry to say. I have 3 children ,we do our very best we can for them as our parents did for us.

Nobody,however, knows what the future holds.

My dad had a good friend who is serving a life sentence for the murder of three drug dealers. When he heard who had been charged and then sentenced he could not believe it. He died this year,the crime was committed in the late nineties and my dad went to his grave in denial.

What pushes people to do terrible things ?

Luckily incidents like these are relatively few and far between, but these days bad news travels instantly around the world and for a brief moment we all get wrapped up in it.

What happened in Leeds is dreadful,but it WILL happen again......we can only pray it doesn't happen to us or ours.

[westy turbo]

And its only gets worst.......

[iain m]

During the 1940s the only female teaching post were PE and Music and none lasted very long. Male teachers were all called Sir and when one approached you stood still until he passed. If you misbehaved, serious stuff like flicking paper balls on a ruler or speaking during a lesson you were made to stand outside the classroom and hope the Head was not doing his rounds and spotted you or you would not enjoy sitting down for the next hour. No one got expelled, for serious offences ( one a year) you received a thrashing in front of the whole school and then your parents were summoned for a verbal lashing. The recipients considered staying at school was preferable to being at home. If you had an latent tendency for violence shortly after leaving school you received military call up and after 2 years of learning 101 ways to kill your fellow man and training with live ammunition and a possible very grim posting the novelty would have worn off.  Every decade I think how long can society continue behaving on this downhill path before someone reverses this depressing trend. I am not holding my breath.

[Nick Algar - Competition Secretary]

 trust the culprit will be helped rather than just punished. 

 

The problem in a few words.

 

There are so few boundries now, no effective punishment and anyone committing any kind of crime is generally treated extremely softly. ie, shoplifters with a record of over 100 offences still being just given a caution.

 

Society is now so soft on crime, it's no-wonder it's getting worse. There is no fear of the punishment holding criminals back. I do wish that this was not the case, but it's the reality of what is happening, we ignore it at our peril, or rather our children's peril.

[Dibby]

Sorry Norm but there are cases dating back through the 1800s about kids killing people. It's like judging your kids by the actions of John Venebales and Robert Thompson. Every decade or so there is the odd shocking case that comes along and you can't tar a generation with an isolated case or we would assume that every teacher during the 80s was a child molester and every old guy you see on the street is a Kray twin who will slice your face off for a couple of quid.

 

I watched Alex Gibney's documentary on the human behaviour experiments in the weekend and it's shocking how ordinary decent people can be put in a position to commit hateful acts from Nazis to British prison guards in Abu Graib to college kids who killed a good mate in a drinking game while everyone watched and nobody phoned an ambulance. Well worth a watch to see how humanity can be twisted by a situation to make people commit horrendous crimes.