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For properly raised children, top journalists recommend Miss Alberici’s Finishing School for Nice Children, where everyone is kept in their own locked canvas sack until they turn 30.
For those who missed the reference, one of Australia’s top journalists wants to prevent people communicating. Literally ridiculous, which is to say, it provokes provoke ridicule and derision, at least from me.
Of course there was this suggestion earlier too. Spot checks on people’s communications to make sure they conformed to the “ethos”. 
God help us! The existential threat of “crude language”! It’s difficult to imagined a more bleakly middle-class hand-wringing. Attn: @stronglang.
Another excellent callback.
Exactly, @NewtonMark. Why a professional in the communication business isn’t across this stuff, though, that’s what I don’t understand.
Then there’s this point. I’m not a parent myself, but I got the clear impression that the actual job is to prepare your offspring for the challenges of the world they’ll face.
As an aside, the current industrial-age school system was designed to create workers with a standardised base level of knowledge for the industrial-age factories and offices. Community, ethos, religion, was a parental responsibility. But…
The burgeoning upper middle classes didn’t have time for their children, of course, so they paid to shunt them off to private schools which mistreated them until they could parrot some version of acceptable behaviour and sit up straight.
So complaining that their children behave badly is basically middle-class parents whinging about having paid for a poor product, and fear of the embarrassment, fear of their own moral failing, of having chosen the wrong school.
Therefore they project. It’s not MY fault that my children have turned out so badly. It’s the school. It’s the bad influences they met. It’s other people’s children. It’s social media’s fault.
Blaming “social media” (whatever that is) for teenager misbehaviour is as ludicrous as blaming the railways for being the place that kids of my generation interacted with their peers.
These days, of course, any parent who doesn’t collect their precious little darling from school in a luxury truck is negligent. Who knows what might happen if they were out of your sight for more than a minute! So many Bad Ideas out there.
From here on, you can insert my standard rant about over-protected little petals and paranoid parents. I’m sick of it myself.
Dear Parents, the fact that YOU don’t understand “social media”, and you’re frightened of it, isn’t social media’s fault. It’s yours. The world’s knowledge is right there in front of you now. You can learn about anything you want. You choose. You chose.
I’ll shut up now. No further correspondence will be entered into. Just phone talkback radio and have a sook.
If you don’t have time for your kids, sell them. Your delicate, straight-teethed little naifs would fetch a good price. Then you could get back to fingering yourself over home renovation porn, and that new kitchen would be a shitload cheaper than another three years at Newington.
Definitely shutting up now.
HAHAHAHAHA.
Agreed.
