Th 46's Sdndag JOKE 2,°1804 © Naith! Shore News

~ You can’t turn back the clock [fm

IT WON'T work. All
the way from the folks
in Surrey, B.C,, to the
Duke of Edinburgh in
Poundbury Village,
England, minds are set
on turning back the
clock.

Eleanor

ae 3 a ea
THE VINTAGE YEARS

Tt won’t work. This is now,
The world has changed.

Yoo-hoc Surrey, Yoo-hoo
Duke.

Surrey folks, a lot of them,
want to return to traditional
schooling. They want kids to
wear uniforms and learn to
write properly — “properly,”
in this context, meaning “the
way I did, when I was a kid.”

The Duke, his head also in
the sand, is sponsoring the cre-
ation — I should say the re-
creation —— of a number of vil-
lages, modest houses centred
around the church, the school
and the market. He says he
wants to “recreate the strong:
community ties and activities
of the past”.

What nonsense. Both of
them.

The parents think that using
computers in Grade 1 some-
how distorts life for little chil-
dren and that they will grow
up thinking knowledge comes
by pushing a button. That
they’! never learn how to
make the figure eight or how
to use a reference book and
thus will face the grown-up
world ill-equipped.

The Duke apparently has
quite forgotten that the times
he’s trying to re-create were
cosy because the automobile
hadn’t been invented. There
was no way to get relief from
boredom except to amble over
to the church or your neigh-
bor’s place or the public
house.

People needew >2°°; other,
in ways that have been taken
over by governments and by
the universal acquisition of
devices for communication

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and entertainment, Don cthey
have telly at Buckingham?

As for the idea of bringing
back traditional schools for
children, the homes they come
from are no longer traditional,
Fathers and mothers drop out
and are replaced with new
ones. Money is considerably
freer and buys ready-made
what used to be made ut home,
together. A fumily car is a
given,

Will they chop up the tele-
vision and ban prepared food
and pull the plug on the tele-
phones aad burn all the super-
narket magazines?

Are the Surrey mothers
going to quit their jobs and
stay home having tea-parties in
the afternoons when they've
finished with the hand-operat-
ed household chores?

Will divorce be outlawed
and single parenting forbid-
den? You can’t create tradition
as an island.

They’re asking the world to

66 They’re asking the
world to pretend
the last 50 years

didn’t happen. 99

pretend the last 50 years didn’t
happen.
So I am astounded — me, a

Ga

LARD

Hi

Baris

i ty ee]
SCIENCE
RLD

WRETANTE ROL ATHDN

if

traditional ex -schoo!-teacher,
trained in the tigid “30s. com-
Initted irrevocably to the tnis-
salable virtues of long divi-
sion, the need to parse intricate
paragraphs and insistence
upon my pupils silting “in
position.” Here Dam subvert-
ing both my own upbringing
and that of hundreds of iny
peers,

An aside, here. Just to
remind you what “sitting in
position” meant — remember
that? It meant you folded your
arms behind you and sut
against them so thal your
naughty litte hands wouldn't
stray from the narrow,

In both cases, these are part
of ongoing eruptions bent on
dragging back what they all
call “basic values.” They are
trying to dodge the real issue.
The reality is we've made a
mess, a big one, and they think
the way to clean it up is to pre-
tend it's a hundred years ago.

We can’t go back, so we
have to be honest, if anything
but lies is to command our
lives. The problem is not so
much how and what we work
at to advance the world, it’s in
the excess of leisure time we
have available to waste.

And therein lies the answer.

Idle hands. The same old
bogey-man has harassed our
psyches since the first rebel
said “Who’s gonna make me?”
If it is desirable to restore
“basic values,” which presum-
ably embrace thoughtfulness,
obedience (to whom?), respect
for one’s elders (do they
deserve it?), abiding by rules,
cheerfulness helpfulness,

R

iy

rae

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Oh, well. you say, maybe not | duty -_

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