Bottom of the Class
This morning I was reading, in my local newspaper, an article on a study that some group had done. They had ranked 21 countries on various, vague standards, to determine which countries were the best countries for children to grow up in. The US finished 20th on the list.
The only saving features of the result were: 1. The Norwegians were not listed in the top four. (I didn't want to have to listen to Zhukov.) and 2. The United Kingdom ranked 21st. What do you think of the general atmosphere for children in the UK (or your home country)? I think that the figures for the US are probably skewed by the large number of immigrant children in the US. |
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I think the general attitude towards children and the culture which they are subjected to is appalling.
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It's been in the paper here for a few days.
TBH, I'd say it was probably (unfortunately) accurate. The family unit has been completely trashed, we spend far too much time copying america (who were 20th), and many kids are spoilt, unrestraint brats who have no sense of respect or their "place". Most people spend too much time online, or out drunk with friends. In fact, when you get into the "north" (at least I've heard from people in yorkshire / newcastle / etc), kids are going out at 14/15 and getting drunk, doing drugs, sleeping around, etc. My cousin informed me just before christmas that she's been bi for 2 years. She smokes (like her mother and stepfather, admittedly), does drugs (which they don't), has been known to drink anything in the house that has alcohol in it (on NYE she spent the morning with her girlfriend drinking the night's champagne, then asked her mum if there was a bottle of vodka they could have at 3pm...) and is 16 next month. I admit I didn't go out much and it's possibly just as bad in the south, but the percentage of children who disappear (at 13-14) out each evening until quite late instead of staying at home is growing, and they're drinking, smoking and going out to "nightclubs" aimed at under 18s. and it's not good. I'm not saying that's the norm all the time, but familys are now getting more and more to be just groups of individuals - even my family, which is pretty conservative and does things together each weekend (often gardening of late :() spend time in different areas of the house in evenings, apart from meals etc. It is a bit sad, but I assume it's not yet as widespread in other countries? Sections of this post may be based on things said in the Daily Mail. Apoligies for any inaccuraces present :p |
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why does it matter shes bi? apart from the fact that a 15 year old bisexual obviously rings the 'hot' alarm.
Its probably all steeped in our culture of being assholes. |
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heh, :/
I don't know, may be I'm totally misunderstanding the situation, but I can't misunderstand it *that* much. she's so going to kill me if she ever reads this thread. (great, now all of GD is going to be tracking down my cousin...) |
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Anyone have a link for this ranking?
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WE* WON!
:cool: *Holland |
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If we were high up, then I guess having apathic, egoistic and carefree youngsters who only care about them self and their own little world is a good thing!
I work at public schools. The way our kids are treated is shit :( |
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I'd say one of the worst things about being a kid in this country is the huge pressures imposed by marketing (in the widest possible sense - not just advertisements per se). Not just to buy the latest fad but a more general pressure to be living in a certain kind of way (of which sex and money play a huge part). When you get older it's easier to see it's all bollocks but I remember feeling utterly gutted at times because I couldn't afford some random product or other. And then older children have to deal with the fairly horrific effects of body/lifestyle fascism. No wonder we have more mental illnesses than in other countries. And that's without even starting on our criminally poor education system... |
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Far be it for me to point out, but this forum is dominated by people who were at somepoint children in britain.
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The dutch became first, our children are soo lucky lucky happy happy joy joy
Followed by socialistic sweden Teh rankings The unicef report The emo countries, the UK and the USA, ended on the very bottom with their divorced parents, poverty, bad health, bad habits, accidents, sucky education, isolation and suicidal kids But atleast you guys made it on unicef's list of rich countries, that's an achievement on its own right? |
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i was 18 when i first went to england.
a culture shock would be an understatement. drinking with friends was something rather normal in here as well, but there is a difference between getting drunk on occasions, and binge drinking every weekend. my guess is that children are too free too fast. they can afford to be on their own while they are not yet mature enough. being able to support yourself from a day job at 16 is not exactly good. heck, had that been an option, i would have also ran away from home at 16, due to the obvious teenager-parents conflicts. |
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The way 'material well being' was measured had 3 criteria, 2 of which were '% of children living in households below 50% of national average', and '% of children in households without jobs'.
The first criteria is worthless because relative poverty is a terrible way of measuring wealth (we've been over this before often enough), and the second one seems fairly dubious too - some people are going to do their best to quit work in order to spend time with their kids if they are in a position to do so. Anyway, the single most important factor when it comes to the upbringing of children is the intellectual environment in which they are raised. The state schooling system in Britain (and the US afaik) is hopelessly broken and is designed from the bottom-up to engender undesirable characteristics in children (conformity, stupiidty, anti-intellectualism). As such i dont have any a priori problem with a report that states they are terrible places for children to be raised. However this report seems to concentrate on relatively non-essential factors and focuses too much on 'average' children (ie socialist countries are automatically going to come top due to the criteria used). edit: the 'education' section of the report is a good example of this - all the focus is on the percentage of children who manage to reach a minimum level of literacy/numeracy rather than the extent to which the best are pushed to higher levels. This constant focus on average people makes the report somewhat uninteresting to me. I did find the following part interesting though, because I've been having a lot of discussions with a friend recently about the extent to which people's in-built expectations about what they deserve from life influences what they end up getting: Quote:
edit2: the metrics used in the 'relationships' section are horribly worthless. edit3: according to the 'behavior and risks' section a culture in which many children have been in fights and have tried alcohol/weed is intrinsically bad :( |
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I've gone from being angry with USA to pitty them :crymeariver:
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Either way, it's difficult to nail down what any of this means - if you ask someone "Are you going to be rich?" does this mean "richer than other people" or "rich enough to afford x". What about asking people how likely they thought it would be they'd be homeless or suffer malnutrition in their lifetimes? That seems like a more fundamental question. I would think it's a fairly obvious though that countries which promote acquisition and consumption as routes to personal happiness are far more likely to have people who want to earn more. I wouldn't necessarily equate this with ambition though, unless it's an either/or decision between earning millions or starving alone in the gutter. Someone who makes it their life goal to earn a million pounds a year by the time they are 25, or own fity houses is not being particularly ambitious imo (if that's the full extent of their goals), if nothing else they're showing a depressing lack of imagination. |
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High skilled doesnt mean high paid, a scientist or writer are both high-skilled jobs (by my definition anyway, I'm not sure what they used) and neither necessarily earn large sums. It's more a question of whether you want to do something intellectually challenging rather than count rivets all day or work in middle-management.
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I think that at the moment we are in a vortex of rapid scientific discoveries and thinkings about methods on how to design (there is no other word for it) a succesful upbringing, how to design a life and what is good and bad.
I think that the complexity of this problem never really comes back in any of the investigations and that a lot of variables are being influenced by variables not taken into account. And for some variables indicators are used which are very dodgy, or very correlated with other variables. The wish to model life and it's effects and to bring it down into a vectorial equation has unwanted consequences. People start to believe in the equation while the equation itself is only approximated, on a crude crude scale and individual factors which are per individu different is usually neglected when doing sociological studies, while sociological dynamics are often neglected or not taken into account when judging individual cases. Although I do believe that this report is an indicator that some things might be wrong with the English and UK system and that there might be something worthwhile in the Belgium, Dutch and Scandinavian systems, it is nothing more then that. An indicator. I also believe that all over the line, the western world is driving itself crazy. There is noone that can bring us down, except ourselves. Others might surpass us, bring us relatively down, but in absolute terms, we can only bring ourselves down. I hope this was readable and understandable, if not, I'll try to clarify later. I have no proof or references for the causal relationships I just stated, this might however be a nice subject to find scientific proof on. |
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The night was also a bit shit and the place was a shithole, I don't know why so many people turned up - I was there as my friends were DJing. Quote:
I've got a guy in my year who is quite open about his homosexuality (although I've never actually spoken to him; never had a reason to.), I see nothing wrong with it. |
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I'm not surprised that the Nordic countries won. They always win quality of life surveys. I'm not surprised the UK came last. I only hope this helps the UK realise that we fair extremely poorly compared to our European neighbours. Hopefully that will help the public put pressure on the government. Ideally, it'll force them to vote for a party that actually has some kind of strategy (and force the parties to create a strategy, obviously) to pull us out of this mess we're in.
I thought my childhood was poor in regard to education. But looking at the kids in my area I see that they have an even poorer education, that they spent a greater amount of time hanging around making a nuisance of themselves, and have a far poorer emotional relationship with their parents. This seems to coincide with the rise of teenage mothers. And actually it's not just the kids to be fair. The only way to improve quality of life is to improve the state education system. Kids will put their efforts into intellectual pursuits instead of having kids, starting fights, stealing and bullying; they'll see they can make a decent future for themselves (banker, writer, lawyer, artist, etc.) that they can work towards within the education system. They'll also have something to teach their future kids. |
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Children should be abandoned in the woods where they won't be tainted by society.
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Parents should stop letting there kids be raised by television.
It's not surprising with the amount of drinking, sex, drug use, violence, disrespect, and other such behavior portrayed as normal and acceptable on TV that kids are emulating it; and since most kids spend several hours if not half the day or more perched in front of the TV watching this crap, it's not hard to figure out it will influence them. |
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I wonder what kind of worldview one gets from watching soaps to be honest....
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just face it, either way you put it, mankind is bond to go extinct due to canibalism or bleeding to death because of self inflicted injuries. |
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I don't see how we can break out of the current UK culture. Younger and younger people are going out and drinking and whatever because they have nothing else to do and it's the accepted norm. They're given whatever they want anyway, so they don't feel they have to work. Education is seen as a minor importance to them.
Maybe they should spend time on an advertising campaign like the smoking one, where it has homeless tramps scrounging through bins and then people with shiney pens in big offices. Just something to make them ****ing realise that education is important. |
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how about giving kids something to do other than drink, smoke, hang out on street corners and mug old ladies?
Community centres, sports teams etc. Oh and making education actually relevant and useful to the kids would probably be a start. The national curriculum is bullshit - how many of them give a shit about WW2 or trigonometry? They need to be taught how to get a job. I remember jokingly saying years ago that anyone failing GCSE's (without a good reason) should get put down as they're so easy anyone should be able to get a basic pass. I'd still be interested to see what happened if they implemented a "at 16 you get a choice: 2 years of college, training of some sort of military service" policy. |
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I'd say it's wrong to force people to, for example, watch BBC 4 and UK History instead of what they want to watch (mindless violence, jade goody, etc). But I'd also say solely watching those kind of programs is detrimental to society. The only thing I would say the state has a right to force upon people is a decent education (more specifically the ability to read, write and calculate to differentiate from using the education system as a euphemism for disseminating propaganda). And when the kid has a decent education I hypothesise he'll be able to work out his life resolves around an emotional false economy and that his parents' life and social setting perhaps isn't what he should be aiming at. He'll also probably realise that there's more to watch than Jade Goody and mindless violence. I'd also like to point out all the countries that are at the top of that list are social democratic countries and the ones at the bottom are mainly capitalist. I always remember some free market economist canting about letting the entrepreneurial spirit akin to basic animal instincts reign free as those animal instincts reign free in the wild. But in the wild animals don't educate or look after each other; they kill each other. |
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Humpf, you think that the US and UK are really crap for kids based on that study, well Australia didnt even rate! It must be *so* shocking here that its not even worthy of mention!
Pardon me, i'm off to jump on a kangaroo and chase down some dropbears with my spear. |
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This applies to education just as much as QoL. |
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Just putting the idea out there. |
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