I think the problem that most young teachers have is this.

By and large, people who go into teaching are quite bright and have done well within the school system. Many of them have come from good schools full of highly motivated and capable pupils.

For many of them its a real shock to the system to meet the folks who take the Jeremy Kyle Show as a guide as to how one should conduct oneself in society.

The cane and the slipper has stopped working almost by the time I'd started fifty years ago, as a way to control the situation. the bluff had been called. Short of introducing capital punishment - corporal punishment was a busted flush in modern liberal society.

In puzzlement we looked at our fractured society - family life being the most moveable of feasts. We looked at the factories - in those day a worker at Jaguar earned three times what a teacher earned after three years in college. What inducement was there to be educated?

In truth - education has a less than honoured place in our society. We call people nerds. We burden graduates with debts. We make entry to becoming a doctor or a trial lawyer virtually unattainable. And we laud the vapid, the reality tv star, even the serial murderer, and the foul mouthed talk show guest in to stars of our firmament. faces in the news. Celebs!

In the Thatcher years, the whole education budget was blown on the right wing ideology of the national Curriculum. Schools became slums. I waas working in thos years in Notts and Derby schools. Every building seemed to have holes in the plaster. the books you used were ancient. In one school in Nottingham they had given up an entire room to SATs test papers, SATs marking schedules. Rewrites of SAT's tests, Re writes of the marking schedule. Re-writes of re-writes. The whole of a large room with high Victorian ceilings was filled from from the floor to the ceiling with bumff. No doubt some genius had been paid a fortune to nearly think that one through.

If a   child comes to school and finds himself confined in a slum for
seven or eight hours - what is he supposed to make of it. maybe it is the disruptive and the anti- social who are seeing things accurately, and they see the way society is and exactly how much it values education.