Squinty is a year 8 mixed race boy who sometimes has trouble concentrating in the classroom. He is a lively and inquisitive character but he is also sensitive. More than once, he has confided in me that though he appreciates her help, he doesn’t like the attention that is drawn to him by the presence of the Learning Support Teacher who accompanies him in lessons.
‘But why does Squinty have an assistant?’ you ask. ‘What is so special about him?’
Squinty is ‘blind’.
The case of Squinty raises an important question. Is he ‘blind’ because his optic nerve was destroyed at birth or because of what the well-meaning liberal does to him? Labelling students in this way only encourages their dependency on an overburdened state, and fosters an unwillingness to engage with real, meaningful challenges, such as competing to earn a higher salary than one’s peers. Unless we can shake him out of it – and more importantly, persuade the Leftie beaurocrats who dream up these notions to shape up and get real – Squinty is likely to continue hiding behind this lazy excuse of ‘blindness’.
On the whole, his peers are sympathetic and considerate; they help him in the classroom and stand up for him in the playground. More fool them. Of course, they aren’t to know the extent to which a child like Squinty is putting it on. Not that I blame Squinty – the broken education system’s low expectations of such boys makes it tragically inevitable that he will persist in hiding behind this label of ‘blindness’, stumbling through life, directionless .
And tragically, this culture of indolence is so deeply entrenched within British society that even his parents, despite being polite and educated, have persuaded themselves that their child cannot see.
Earlier today, Squinty’s best friends, Limpy and Hunchback, leapt to his defence as I led him off to detention. ‘Miss, it isn’t Squinty’s fault – he was born blind,’ they bleated. And of course, these words reveal a deeper culture of excuses, of low standards, and expecting the very least from our poorest and most disadvantaged. When I have Squinty repeat after me, ‘I’m responsible for myself, Miss, yes, I’m responsible for myself,’ I am fighting a generation of thinking that has left our education system in pieces – decimated by distorted, confused, jargon-ridden thinking whose worst excesses I have not only supported but encouraged for ten years, until my publisher’s recommendation that I change tack in order to promote my book.
And this raises another, even bigger, bigger question. Who’s really blind: the boy who ‘can’t see’ because his optic nerve was destroyed at birth by an excess of oxygen he received in the incubator? Or those well-meaning liberals who ‘can’t see’ the damage they’re doing to Britain’s future by mollycoddling boys like Squinty, Limpy and Hunchback?
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