The Spectator

A loss of respect

The awe in which professionals used to be held by the rest of society has vanished

Margaret Thatcher is to blame for the abominable rudeness with which parents and children nowadays treat schoolteachers. So said Pat Lerew, president of one of the main teaching unions, earlier this week, and while it is preposterously unfair of her to hold Lady Thatcher personally responsible for the lack of respect in which teachers are now held, it is certainly true that some of today’s parents who were themselves children during the 1980s have absolutely no idea how to behave. The worst among this Eighties generation are marked by a hideous egotism, and by an inability to understand that anything beyond their own dreary consumerist appetites might conceivably be worthy of respect. They work with admirable energy to enrich themselves in a dull, material sense, but they have nothing but scorn for teachers, who are unsuccessful in economic terms and who, if they confer any riches at all, bring these in currency which is not immediately tradeable at the new out-of-town shopping centre.

Mrs Lerew is rightly alarmed that many modern parents fail to uphold the authority of teachers. The days are long gone when a child who got into trouble at school would be in just as much trouble at home. As Mrs Lerew says, ‘If you discipline a child for bad behaviour or not doing their homework, many parents come in and take the child’s side and say they have done nothing wrong.’

The awe in which professionals used to be held by the rest of society has vanished. To the extent that this means we are no longer willing to accept without complaint a second-rate service from doctors or teachers or civil servants, this is doubtless a good thing. But to abandon any idea of professional discretion — any understanding that the professional man or woman cannot provide a proper service without being trusted to take decisions which he or she is more qualified, by training, aptitude and experience, to take than members of the general public — is bound to lead to deep disappointment on both sides.

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