Edukashun

I am being berated by various of the Miss Lear's about not putting hyperlinks in to take people to other blogs or articles. I apologise in advance for the following and hope by present guru will help with this later.
Lord Goderich ( www.goderich.blogspot.com) has a short piece on education. It pretty much mirrors something I suspect most people know, but are scared to say.
Forget respect, forget not failing, forget inflating passes, forget the lot, but somewhere along the line we need to restore proper discipline. Add in the fact we must get our literacy rate up and you can largely get rid of everything else.
The Telegraph magazine has a good article about prisons today. It's thesis is that the drop in crime is largely a product of locking people up. This is because - as a generalisation - most crime is committed by about 100,000 under 25s. It's a continuing number, but as they get locked up for a period, the area in which they operate improves. They are mostly young males. Again I blogged on this before - no adult males telling them how it is. Interestingly, a step-father ( or I guess that should be partner) is no substitute, because the mother tends to shy away from parenting and concentrate on the new man in her life. Weirdly, single mums with less than three children do rather well - provided they remain single mums. David Copperfield, that excellent police whistleblower, has a similar theme. The most wanted posters in police stations tend to have the same 15 or 20 people on them - some get caught and are removed for a while, but once out, they reappear on the wanted list. There's more to steal so more gets stolen.
So what's the answer? More police to catch more of the criminals. More prisons to keep repeat offenders off the streets. Discipline at home and in schools.
And for heaven's sake teach them to read, write and do arithmetic. Without it there will be no jobs for them and no betterment in reoffending rates.