I wasn’t trying to suggest that teachers have no power, or, more to the point, that interaction with school has no serious consequences. I suppose Willis’ book Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs is still the classic study, for all of its limitations. I just meant that the individual authority of teachers over kids is largely illusory, and regarding it with appropriate contempt doesn’t necessarily entail bad results in any sense the matters. Cops are by contrast always scarily threatening.

ps- how old is Keithie? She’s so cute. Angelica and I want to have a kid ASAP. We’re waiting cuz of where I’m at in my program at uni, which is wicked ambivalent.

Shortly before Keithie was born I was involved in discussions of child rearing with Sarah (ie Keithie’s mother). By now of course those discussions don’t get much further than deciding who is going to take care of Keithie when she wakes during the night, but at that time we decided that our desire was that by the age of maybe five Keithie would hopefully be totally capable of responding to our efforts at control by uttering a sentence along the lines of: “You are out of your fucking mind if you think for one minute I am going to pay attention to a ridiculous statement like that.” Not that we wouldn’t very directly give our views (”What are you talking about you want to be a model!” or some such I hope I never hear), just that she would be comfortable just responding with “Yeah, whatever” and walking off.

People have tediously and repeatedly amused themselves by telling us that Keithie will probably rebel by becoming some kind of right-winger, ha ha etcetera. But I figure if so she’ll be sharp enough such that by the age of maybe nine she will have gone through any such phase, probably tracked down her local ALP branch and joined up in secret, and by ten she’ll have resigned and be organising a campaign of terror against anyone she met in her time in the Party.

Unlike what apparently happens in the US if sitcoms are to be believed, the concept of “grounding” will not enter into some system of punishment.

Regarding school, surely the point is really that when you are a child, even rebelling, one actually has an exaggerated view of the importance of these authorities. If one can get to an appropriate understanding of the contempt in which such efforts at the assertion of control should be regarded, their essential triviality, and thus not be so upset at such petty stupidity, life gets easier. And it helps if you don’t do the tsk tsk thing I think, thus takig any anxiety out of the threat that the school will talk to family about “your behaviour”. For the vast bulk of the way through school, it is like: nothing these people can do matters, really doesn’t have any long-term consequences. I’m not talking ‘Learning To Labour’ style rebellion-into-downward-mobility (like she could get lower), just the irrelevance of it all now. Those detentions aren’t like criminal records following me around, neither is the expulsion, etcetera. Trying to communicate the unimportance of it and that we are automatically on her side would be the key thing I think.

Of course, my father had opinions about enforced conformity at school that ending up causing a younger brother some problems. My brother was at a state high school which enforced a uniform, and dad was against it, so Eddie wasn’t allowed to wear one. He had to go in something else, anything else just not that. Every day he’d get in trouble at school and come home and ask to be allowed to wear the uniform, and every day dad would explain that he wasn’t going to permit some school to push his kid around. Eddie would say he wanted to wear it, dad would say that wasn’t the point. Eventually Eddie had to change schools. Seriously. He seemed a bit upset at the time, but it did seem funny. Dad thought it was funny anyway.