The shame of it

It may not be a cause for celebration among the area's youngsters, but Wales has far fewer schools closed because of snow and ice than the rest of the UK. But why do schools close at all?  After all, the rest of the essential services struggle on, so why not schools?

There are a couple of reasons why schools close.  The first is because most staff strategically live well away from their school catchment area.  In much the same way that off duty police don't frequent known criminal haunts, teachers try to avoid socialising with children they teach or their parents, and that can mean a long trip to reach work.

And the same sort of thing applies to Doctors and Police. Friends of ours who work as GPs always attempt to holiday incognito, as once it's known they're medical practitioners the questions and demands for their services never stop.

But a medical practitioner, a teacher and a Police officer do have something in common.  Not that long ago their jobs weren't simply 'jobs';  they were vocations. The village Doctor knew their patients, often socially, and was happy to spend time with them outside the practice.  The village bobby could always be relied on to sort out trouble, even on their night off, and wasn't averse to getting 'stuck in'. The teacher would often be found volunteering with any one of a number of youth-related activities, clubs or societies but all that was in the pre-Thatcher era. That was when people cared about their communities, invested time and effort into community based activities simply because they believed it was the right thing to do and before every activity, effort and contribution had begun to acquire a monetary value.  Now, people are regarded as inherently untrustworthy, ascribed the basest of motives and assumed to be making any contribution for personal gain.

Whether this is solely a consequence of naked materialism, as introduced by the egregious  Thatcher, or her oleaginous cohorts, such as Baker or whether society would have moved in that direction, anyway, is a moot point but whatever the cause we're left with a society markedly less trusting and welcoming than we used to have. And that's the real shame.