Wednesday, January 31, 2007

FIRST CREATE "YOUTH" and THEN IMPRISON

We have created the "youth" myth and we keep on increasing the range of this myth. Before youth was about teenager age but today it seems to be somewhere between 12 and 27 years of age. Such labels are confusing and absurd. So who benefits from this mad and absurd myth-making deal? A human being at 14 years of age is often capable of making children, working hard, studying, playing and all the rest. A human community could support this kind of realist appreciation. But no.

We hear that in places like the UK ( and in other EU countries) schools are said to be places for ALL until 18 years of age. Then, after that a continued "education" called life-long-learning should take place. Wow! But maybe this deal keeps the younger ones off the streets and off the unemployment statistics and under watchful eyes. Maybe. I just wonder who really benefits.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is 'Cui bono?' the question, Zola?

Only the young spend money on 'becoming' who they want to be. Since the 1960s, every advertising hack knows that much.

Old 'has beens', by contrast, have little need for buying much. Some antiwrinkle cream, maybe, oh and that fairground thing Saint Thora Hird recommended you install for mechanically hauling your ass up the stairs at home.

Perpetual youth, kerchung.

zola a social thing said...

Butwhatif : You are so cruel. You are so, so, old but with an impish childlike sense of play.
The older one gets the more .... eider knows.

Must get a thread on the 1950s soon I guess. me readership is full of OAPs.

Anonymous said...

Butwhatif Who or what is that Thora Hird?

Anonymous said...

Thora Hird, British actress, national treasure, one of Alan Bennett's 'talking heads'. Yet saleswoman, too, in the winter of her days, for stairlifts.

She's also a rival, running against Douglas Hurd, for entry into Brit student rhyming slang; for attaining a third class honours degree.

If my old grey cells are still working right, it went something like:

Damien Hirst (I)
Attila The Hun (II:i)
Desmond Tutu (II:ii)
Thora Hird/Douglas Hurd (III)

And, to bring it all back to Zola's original post, I'm sure those staying on these days in education will change it.

But it'll never be as good or funny.... Grouchgrouchnotlikeitwosnmydaynage.

Anonymous said...

Ooops. Dame Thora Hird, even. Soory: I forgot my place. Temporarily.

Even better reason, though, IMHO, for her winning that rhyming-slang contest: "You went to Uni and only ended up with a lame third?"

zola a social thing said...

Anything to do with a dis-honourable discharge the Turd-Way ?

Anonymous said...

In UK the plan seems to be - school till 18 and then national service.
The very model of ....something.

zola a social thing said...

Maybe the UK begins "national service" already at junior school with those awful school uniforms and military styled measurement regimes.

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