- Joined
- Sep 2, 2006
- Messages
- 1,134
I’ve started a new thread rather than continue from the otherin Mainstream News Stories as I believe that it’s a far wider issue than education and I don’t want to derail the existing thread. Also, this is a very long post and I didn’t want to rude and just drop something so big in an existing thread.
I’m not one for ascribing a single explanation to anything as I tend to think that’s often too simplistic an approach. I agree with the other comments in the thread that education does play a part, however, I don’t think it’s the underlying cause and I certainly don’t think changes to the curriculum will actually alter anything on their own.
Whilst I don’t think it’s necessarily the root cause, I think there’s one thing that seems to factor in most of the aspects or symptoms of what’s happening in modern society and that’s the idea of ‘worth’. I know the word ‘respect’ seems to get bandied about by politicians and journalists as being a root cause, but I think the idea of respect alone relies on too many other things to really be that cohesive an argument. I’m aware that ‘worth’ also has problems in that it’s relative/subjective but I think the idea of ‘worth’ covers more problems/symptoms than ‘respect’.
There just seems to be an amazing lack of worth attached to anything anymore; very few people seem to place any value on anything or anyone and when value is placed on something, it just seems so misplaced; the value our society places in terms of cultural significance and financial worth on footballers and reality TV contestants is, to me, mindboggling. Elsewhere, most things just seem to lack any ‘real’ worth at all. Human life now seems to have very little value to it; not only in the sense of casual disregard with which assaults and murders take place but also the way this is now reflected by the legal system: how often do you read news items now along the lines of offenders having a blasé nonchalance for their crimes with victims or their families wondering how 2 years is a fair sentence?
I think identity and the sense of self-worth is eroding on numerous fronts. I think various problems to do with identity are having a massive impact this. I think over the last couple of decades there’s been some pretty big shifts in our attitudes to gender/sex that have created some big fault lines in society. For instance, the role of men and ‘what men do’ is becoming pretty vague. Similarly the role of the woman in society has opened up and changed from being the new supermum with career to the increasing pressure to conform to increasingly impossible body types and looks etc. Now, that’s not to say, some of these changes weren’t necessary at all – I don’t subscribe to the idea that women should be submissive in society, stay at home whilst men are breadwinners with the right to abuse or belittle women – just that, as with all change, there is ramifications or at least periods of adjustment. Whatever changes are happening here, I think that it’s affecting a lot of people’s sense of worth as they are uncertain as how they fit in society and whether society wants or needs them.
Maybe the similarly needed changes in the notion of class and the shift towards this middle-class-lite that many recent politicians have advocated rears it head too?
The nature of work and employment is changing too. What people actually do for a living has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades. Whilst this has happened before with the obvious shift from agricultural to industrial jobs in the past, I think there was a marked difference. I think that people, at the time, thought it was genuinely the way forward and that’s how things were going to be: the start of a new age. Now it could be argued that the shift from manufacturing &c. to office-based work is similar in that it’s another technology-driven change in society and another ‘new age’, I think there’s an uncertainty about the safety of jobs on a scale never really seen before. I know there’s been ‘pluggers’ and ‘Luddites’ in the past, but, again the difference here is the sense of scale and that it seems to affect most people now.
The days of a job for life seem to be over as with any idea that most people could leave a job on Friday and start another on Monday. Also, the idea of ‘job threats from abroad’ is nothing new either, but has it ever really been on the scale that it is now? I think the uncertainty of the workplace and the fact that there are people queuing up to replace them just compounds a lack of self-worth. Similarly, the uncertainty of jobs maybe affecting some schoolchildren as the idea of what they want to do when they leave school seems like some weird, nebulous target they can’t get a handle on – hence the recent findings about a gobsmacking percentage of people wanting to be ‘famous’ when they leave school as if it was a job in itself.
The consumer and disposable society I think plays a big part in this too. I think there’s been a generation that has grown up with no real sense of worth when it comes to buying and owning things. Whilst the ‘never never’ and Higher Purchase are, again, nothing new, it’s the scale of credit card spending in this country that is different now. I think credit and finance and the worryingly availability of it has detached people from the reality of owning and buying things. For some people, those with a detached sense of owning and buying, there might be this extended thinking that other people have a similar attitude towards ownership too – this idea that it’s ‘easy come, easy go’ and, with the nature of mass-produced, that anything and everything can be easily be replaced and with that no room for sentimentality etc.
Thanks to anyone who made it to the end. Any of this makes sense?
I’m not one for ascribing a single explanation to anything as I tend to think that’s often too simplistic an approach. I agree with the other comments in the thread that education does play a part, however, I don’t think it’s the underlying cause and I certainly don’t think changes to the curriculum will actually alter anything on their own.
Whilst I don’t think it’s necessarily the root cause, I think there’s one thing that seems to factor in most of the aspects or symptoms of what’s happening in modern society and that’s the idea of ‘worth’. I know the word ‘respect’ seems to get bandied about by politicians and journalists as being a root cause, but I think the idea of respect alone relies on too many other things to really be that cohesive an argument. I’m aware that ‘worth’ also has problems in that it’s relative/subjective but I think the idea of ‘worth’ covers more problems/symptoms than ‘respect’.
There just seems to be an amazing lack of worth attached to anything anymore; very few people seem to place any value on anything or anyone and when value is placed on something, it just seems so misplaced; the value our society places in terms of cultural significance and financial worth on footballers and reality TV contestants is, to me, mindboggling. Elsewhere, most things just seem to lack any ‘real’ worth at all. Human life now seems to have very little value to it; not only in the sense of casual disregard with which assaults and murders take place but also the way this is now reflected by the legal system: how often do you read news items now along the lines of offenders having a blasé nonchalance for their crimes with victims or their families wondering how 2 years is a fair sentence?
I think identity and the sense of self-worth is eroding on numerous fronts. I think various problems to do with identity are having a massive impact this. I think over the last couple of decades there’s been some pretty big shifts in our attitudes to gender/sex that have created some big fault lines in society. For instance, the role of men and ‘what men do’ is becoming pretty vague. Similarly the role of the woman in society has opened up and changed from being the new supermum with career to the increasing pressure to conform to increasingly impossible body types and looks etc. Now, that’s not to say, some of these changes weren’t necessary at all – I don’t subscribe to the idea that women should be submissive in society, stay at home whilst men are breadwinners with the right to abuse or belittle women – just that, as with all change, there is ramifications or at least periods of adjustment. Whatever changes are happening here, I think that it’s affecting a lot of people’s sense of worth as they are uncertain as how they fit in society and whether society wants or needs them.
Maybe the similarly needed changes in the notion of class and the shift towards this middle-class-lite that many recent politicians have advocated rears it head too?
The nature of work and employment is changing too. What people actually do for a living has changed dramatically over the last couple of decades. Whilst this has happened before with the obvious shift from agricultural to industrial jobs in the past, I think there was a marked difference. I think that people, at the time, thought it was genuinely the way forward and that’s how things were going to be: the start of a new age. Now it could be argued that the shift from manufacturing &c. to office-based work is similar in that it’s another technology-driven change in society and another ‘new age’, I think there’s an uncertainty about the safety of jobs on a scale never really seen before. I know there’s been ‘pluggers’ and ‘Luddites’ in the past, but, again the difference here is the sense of scale and that it seems to affect most people now.
The days of a job for life seem to be over as with any idea that most people could leave a job on Friday and start another on Monday. Also, the idea of ‘job threats from abroad’ is nothing new either, but has it ever really been on the scale that it is now? I think the uncertainty of the workplace and the fact that there are people queuing up to replace them just compounds a lack of self-worth. Similarly, the uncertainty of jobs maybe affecting some schoolchildren as the idea of what they want to do when they leave school seems like some weird, nebulous target they can’t get a handle on – hence the recent findings about a gobsmacking percentage of people wanting to be ‘famous’ when they leave school as if it was a job in itself.
The consumer and disposable society I think plays a big part in this too. I think there’s been a generation that has grown up with no real sense of worth when it comes to buying and owning things. Whilst the ‘never never’ and Higher Purchase are, again, nothing new, it’s the scale of credit card spending in this country that is different now. I think credit and finance and the worryingly availability of it has detached people from the reality of owning and buying things. For some people, those with a detached sense of owning and buying, there might be this extended thinking that other people have a similar attitude towards ownership too – this idea that it’s ‘easy come, easy go’ and, with the nature of mass-produced, that anything and everything can be easily be replaced and with that no room for sentimentality etc.
Thanks to anyone who made it to the end. Any of this makes sense?
? I need more Lemsip.
