I read a headline this morning that the UK government is paying strip clubs and lap dancing bars thousands of pounds to employ young people.  http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/National/article1376579.ece What sort of moral compass are they travelling by.  It is Jack Sparrow’s compass: it points at whatever you feel like.

Many of the young people I meet today have already succumbed to the temptations of smoking (tobacco and weed), drinking (to excess), internet pornography and instant gratification sex.  Many have anger management problems, are bored easily, struggle to see any purpose in life, and find it hard to get and keep jobs.  And I live in ‘middle England’, I can’t imagine what it is like in the most deprived areas.

Who can blame them?

We have structured our society so that we take our children away from their parents and put them in schools where the only adult interaction is focused on learning facts that will help them pass exams.  We have structured our economy such that parents have to work long hours, often at weekends, so our less affluent families have little time for child parent interaction.  We have so regulated schools with ‘child protection’ that the few adults who do interact with children are not allowed even to touch them, and who live in fear of accusation of child molesting. We have done our best to mock and marginalise religious institutions who try to suggest that some form of restraint might be beneficial.

We have put our children in an institutional ‘Lord of the Flies’ scenario, and added the instant gratification of TV, internet, and readily available drugs (legal and illegal).

Surely it is time for a serious rethink.

Instead of sticking plaster politics and abdicating any vision of the future to ‘market forces’, let’s try to define what we want society to be like, and then see what needs to be done to get there.

Please share your ideas of what an ideal society would look like.