General Election

I don't sleep much, so I have watched in horror as the results from the General Election are announced. 

If I were a conservative or a Brexit supporter I would be thrilled but I'm not.

Yesterday, I wrote about how this was a bizarre election campaign where it had become a request to vote for who you disliked the least.  I'm not surprised there has been a Conservative victory but I am surprised at just how badly Labour has done. Actually, I'm not.  Their campaign was awful.  They sat on the fence, they didn't bother to argue their case and their MPs were divided over so many issues.  The Conservatives, on the other hand, ran a campaign that worked.

This morning our children will be waking up to have learnt a few things that worry me.

1. If you want to win you have to repeat a meaningless phrase.  There is a word for this: battology.  The children won't have learnt the word but they will know that if they want to win an argument they can just say the same thing until the other person gives up.  This happens a lot already in school. We try to not let them get away with this because it is morally wrong but they may have learnt that it works.

2.  You don't need to tell the truth - winners lie more than the losers. There is no doubt that many of the Conservative statements have been less than truthful and still they have secured the overwhelming majority of the votes. Again, teachers really try to instill a moral accountability in their pupils.  It's not OK to lie, we tell them but will they now know that's how to become a leader.

3.  If you don't want to answer a question you can just hide in a fridge, or under a table.  This happens a lot when you teach and mostly teachers have assumed that these children won't get on in life.  Now we know that they are the future leaders.

These things make me sad.  I would like to live in a world where we are kind and honest.