It’s not even a month since Adolescence ‘dropped’ on to Netflix and into all our lives, whether we actually watched it or not. The mania about the thing is still raging like a persistent brush fire, with the Prime Minister – apparently still unsure whether it’s a drama or a documentary – meeting its makers in Downing Street, and a lot of other politicians and public figures pulling very concerned faces about the internet, the manosphere, toxic masculinity etc.
Keir Starmer’s enthusiasm for getting this (adult-certificated) show into schools for the instruction of children is very revealing, I think. It is, he tells us in his special language of searing fudge, ‘a torch that shines intensely brightly on a combination of issues that many people don’t know how to respond to’.
Put on the spot by the show’s creators, who advocate banning smartphones in schools, Starmer seems to have an agenda slightly different from theirs. ‘Personally,’ he told the BBC, ‘I would much rather we focus on what I think is the real issue, which is, whether you’re at school or elsewhere, what are you actually accessing? Because that, for me, is the critical issue. And whether it’s at school or elsewhere, there’s material that clearly shouldn’t be accessed.’
It shone an intensely bright light, then, on what he already thought before he watched it – censorship of the internet, and everyone ‘accessing’ only what he thinks they should be accessing.
But it’s Starmer’s repeated, enthusiastic support for Adolescence to be shown in schools that intrigues me here. What does he think this would achieve?
Netflix itself has teamed up with an NGO called Tender – specialists in ‘healthy relationships education’ – to get the show into schools. Its CEO, Susie McDonald MBE, has issued a statement beginning with the corking opening line, ‘Adolescence might be fiction, but it tells a very real story.’ Well no, it isn’t a real story, or even a very real story. She continues, ‘As specialists in relationships education, Tender is committed to supporting schools, young people and parents/carers with the resources to continue this vital conversation.’
We never stop having ‘vital’ conversations. The national curriculum contains strict guidelines about compulsory PHSE (personal, social, health and economic education) lessons, which are often outsourced to visiting busybodies like Tender.
You’d think by now somebody somewhere might be wondering why it is apparently necessary to instruct children in the basics of life, and why the process isn’t quite succeeding in socialising legions of well-balanced young individuals.
For Starmer and most of the rest of the political class, ‘vital conversations’ from ‘experts’ are how you deal with teenagers. Now, I have no contact whatsoever with teens today, but unless there’s been a total switch in their demeanour since I was a lad, they greet this kind of thing from adults with full-body cringe.
Visiting experts were less prevalent in the 1980s, though I have a vague memory of a community theatre group rocking up at school when I was 14 to raise our consciousness about the political situation in Nicaragua between the Contras and Sandinistas.
But teachers in general were always raising issues and trying to incite vital conversations. I can still hear the echo of the mass groans that erupted whenever there was an ‘issue-led’ assembly – oh God, what is it today? Shoplifting? Drugs? Spots? World war three? These excursions were welcomed, but only for their comedy value, and for the relief they provided from the grind of actual school work.
There was even an anonymous suggestion box put out, inciting requests for discussion topics in the class for what was then called ‘Human Relationships’. You can imagine how well that went.
‘Funky’ adults discussing issues were bum-clenchingly awkward and embarrassing. I shudder to recall the Grange Hill ‘Just Say No’ campaign, or Radio1’s Drug Alert – Bruno Brookes looking very Starmer-serious and tutting about heroin. Then there was the sheer gaucheness of using supposed ‘role models’ to demonstrate model behaviour – hey, Shakin’ Stevens says smoking isn’t cool, etc.
For Starmer and most of the rest of the political class, ‘vital conversations’ from ‘experts’ are how you deal with teenagers
Teens will always pick up on the stilted solemnity of adults purveying messages of social responsibility and good citizenship, and they have no qualms about expressing how funny it is. The more awkward and uncomfortable adults get, the more kids will laugh inappropriately. My generation bonded over the Blue Peter team’s hushed interactions with Joey Deacon, a severely disabled man. Teachers were horrified, but we weren’t laughing at Joey but at the way adults behaved around him.
Starmer and company must, surely, remember these things. Teenagers respond to clear rules, fairly enforced – so the evidently many-tiered, tongue-tied nonsense of the modern British state is unlikely to cut through to them, except as something deserving of their mockery.
They will see Starmer’s vacuous noodling about ‘conversations’ for the nonsense it is. Starmer himself knows it, hence his comment about ‘many people’ not knowing ‘how to respond’ to the ‘combination of issues’. Because what that actually means is that he doesn’t know how to respond.
He obviously can’t begin to confront the reality that violence among the young is a consequence of progressive policies initiated by people like him. So he passes it over to somebody else – because it’s time for yet another conversation.
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