Today, 25th March 2010 the school truancy rate is at a record high and has shot up by 44% since Labour came to power, government statistics revealed. The rise is despite ministers taking a tougher line on absenteeism, prosecuting 9,500 parents and fining thousands more because their children regularly skip school. {source}
Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers said: “There are no magic solutions to hardcore truanting.“Despite schools’ best efforts, hard-to-reach families will remain hard to reach.”
Overall, 67,000 pupils of all ages skipped part of school on a typical day because of truancy, family holidays, illness and other reasons, the statistics suggest. Apart from sickness the most popular reason for absence, authorised and unauthorised, was for family holidays. Six million school days were lost as parents took their children out of class to go away outside of term when travel costs are lower. (source)
Pupils are monitored by CCTV cameras as frequently as inmates in prisons and passengers at airports, research shows. {source}
The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the incarcerated being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the "sentiment of an invisible omniscience."
Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example." {source}
The Panopticon
The UBS Bridge Academy, E2
Standing alone on Saturday afternoon scientifically observing, whilst simultaneously devouring the holistic, homeopathetic, 101% organick, locally-sauced Cough-Linctus curry I'd purchased for £20.12p from the Florence Nightingale Olympic Crimean War Recipe Stall on Broadway Market, who radically incorporate upanishads learnt from goa's in India & Ancient Greece by incorporating pederastic athletics into sore throats this might hurt say aaagh, whilst eschewing any Imelda Marcos-like carbon footprint by ladling the stuff straight into the beseeching alms of your outstretched palms - a macro-ritual akin to suffering a bed of nails or a skip for the night in Trafalgar Square cuddling up to stolen out of date technology with a liberated defrosting cuttlefish poking out of yr top pocket.
It made me think. About crime mostly. And what great writers & chroniclers of the East End would make of this place. Arthur Morrison, George Gissing, Alexander Baron, even Dickens.
Later on after picking up a ginger bread man from Percy Engel's to fill me up & ascending the stairs to my laboratory opposite The UBS Bridge Academy I espied a little beggar making off with The Mona Lisa! I gave chase...cornered & chastened, he relayed to me his story. His name was Kris Hedayat and this is what he told me:
"Try & fucking understand the psychological effect it has on you when you're constantly being stopped by the police close to your home & questioned. It's humiliating, frightening, it's literally disturbing – it's gets inside your head. You can't sleep, you start to doubt, lose confidence. 'Zero Tolerance', is exactly what is says on the tin, it's deeply intolerant.
The police question you - 'Where are you going?', 'Who with?', 'Do you know X or Y?'. I didn't realise at first the real implications of that last question, until a more savvy friend pointed it out. You're being invited to grass, to inform, to become part of the police machine. If you say you know X, next time they ask you, 'Did you see X on Friday out with Y?'. And then they play the ridiculous 'good cop, bad cop' routine - 'Hi Kris, how's it going?', but next day they make out they don't know you from Adam! They want to get inside your head, compromise you, get information out of you. All the time! You go outside, you could be stopped, you could be arrested, a night in cells or fitted up, God knows!
Think about it. How would you cope? Would you be the 'ideal model citizen' the church, police and the state demand? Would you respect authority, your elders, when from a young age you realise you're just being played? Unless you 'fess up you're nothing. And even if you do, you're just a tiny little cog in a nasty machine that could decide to sacrifice you at any moment. Because who cares a shit about you! The world is just full of double-think, mind-games to f*** you up!
My brother Sadegh is 21, he's already£25,000 in debt to a bank to pay off university fees, the unemployment figure for young people is now 20%! People I know are being murdered. I walk along Broadway Market on Saturday's and look at the herds of self-satisfied faces and feel sick.
But now it's our fucking turn! You've pissed on us, tried to kill us, lock us up, harass us, keep us out of sight of the tourists long enough! We're coming to get you! Over the walls, under the stalls, climbing Adelaide Wharf, Off/On-Broadway, Vyner Street- Bistroteque, The Victory: "like those cardboard faces at which she remembered gazing as a child in the window of a certain dim shop kept by a mysterious little man in Kingsland Road." Chapter 8 - Victory. Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski.
