CENTRE POINT
The daft debate about why today's young people are so dreadful
SIMON JENKINS
An old New Yorker cartoon has a father reading his son's school report. The report is clearly a bad one and the father is angry. The boy gazes up and asks, 'Where did you go wrong with me, Dad? Heredity or envi- ronment?'
The cartoon comes to mind every time that hoary debate resurfaces on why today's young people are so dreadful. Last week the education secretary, Gillian Shephard, decided to improve her standing with the teaching unions by telling them that par- ents were partly to blame for the break- down in law and order in the classroom. 'Young hooligans and ruffians', she said, using the now customary Victorian termi- nology, were the fault of parents who 'believe their responsibility ceases when they deliver a child to school.'
This naturally delighted the teachers, as did the Government's pledge to 'get tough with the ruffians' by tightening classroom discipline. How this promise is to be imple- mented was left unclear, unless trained bands are to fan out from Mrs Shephard's office with birches to thrash every pupil in the land. On the other hand, it infuriated the various parents' pressure groups. When Mrs Shephard moves on to address them she will doubtless switch the blame else- where, probably to original sin. As for the children, ask them and they would com- plete the circle by blaming Mrs Shephard. Was there ever a dafter debate?
Some pollster should draw up a scatter diagram of groups most fearful of the degeneration of modern youth. In my expe- rience, the most relaxed are young people themselves and those who work directly with them. Fear increases with age and maturity, rising steeply among those with teenage children. Parents of teenage girls suffer a bout of hysterical gloom at the col- lapse of moral standards throughout soci- ety. This passes as their offspring reach 21, but rises again after 55 when adults switch to reading the Daily Telegraph. They then recall their own youth as a lost era of sobri- ety and obedience. I read one report last week that spoke of a 'golden age' that ended in the oil crisis of 1973!
Three reports presaged the latest debate. All offered different reasons for a per- ceived collapse in youthful behaviour. One, from the Institute of Public Policy Research, related the rise in juvenile crime to movements in unemployment. Another, from the University of East Anglia, related it to the fact that 40 per cent of young offenders in custody were abandoned or abused in childhood. Yet another, by Michael Rutter and David Smith, related moral decline to the general liberalism and permissiveness of the Sixties. Even the Chi- nese joined in. A letter in the Times protested at a new Peking law to stop cou- ples from procreating if they had genetic defects likely to lead to social abnormality. By some oversight, Virginia Bottomley has nbt yet been interviewed on the subject.
Nothing here makes sense. In the first place, every statistic on the alleged break- down in law and order is based on the dis- credited 'police-recorded crime' sequences (rather than the proper British Crime Sur- vey). Such figures reflect police numbers and practice and are regarded by responsi- ble researchers as unreliable social indica- tors. That they should form the basis of serious academic study is absurd. When the police figures are taken back to the 1960s and 50s, and sometimes to the 1930s, they are worse than useless. There has been a steady decline since 1985 in the percentage of teenagers getting into trouble with the police, arrested, cautioned or convicted. But facts have never stood in the way of publicity-seeking researchers or politicians. The same applies to figures for unemploy- ment, the definition of which changes with each passing year and each shift in social benefit.
• More to the point, these apparently con- flicting theories are really dancing to the same tune. They all believe that external agents, in the form of families, teachers, governments, are not just the cause of teenage behaviour but hold the power to change it. Since they pass the buck back and forth between each other with such abandon, everybody is free to play. If a wicked child is wicked because of weak par- enting, the researcher must surely pursue the causal chain to discover the root of that weakness. At this point left-wing and right- wing analysis merge into the same dense fog of nonsense embracing moral 'stan- dards' alongside social and economic 'con- ditions'.
The only sensible conclusion is that dif- ferent excuses for the behaviour of the young will be, adopted according to political taste. Social deprivation suits the Left, moral deprivation suits the Right. The Home Secretary, Michael Howard, is con- temptuous of 'socio-economic' theories of crime. Yet he regards criminals as crea- tures of society, accountable for their actions and susceptible to correction in prisons and boot-camps. If the social con- text of a boot-camp can bring a youth to his moral senses, presumably the social context of a job or community service might do the same. Both are meant to influence what is assumed to be a pliable character.
Why politicians want to meddle in all this defeats me. Something vaguely called fami- ly policy is apparently back in favour in Downing Street. Clearly the punishment experienced by John Major for his last flit down this road in autumn 1993 had no deterrent effect. He wants the domestic lives of himself and his ministers to be torn apart by the press once more.
My vote goes to the Chinese. Every study of human physiology or psychology finds new evidence of genetic influence in human behaviour, including violence, drunkenness, dishonesty and stupidity. But since we are not likely to follow Peking and legislate for eugenics, we must make do with the genetic material we have to hand. I suppose good teaching, parenting and even governing may mitigate the worst hereditary tenden- cies. But Richard Dawkins's `selfish gene' grows more .dominant by the year. We had better learn to live with it.
As for the family policy pundits, they are like Hallowe'en witches stirring brews and rubbing warts. They leach on to frightened politicians and on to those trying to excuse professional failure. Everybody should calm down and not believe what they read in the papers. But there is little chance of that happening.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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