On line and off the rocker

In the past, many children entered primary school unable to read. These days, say their teachers, they enter primary school unable to speak.

The second generation formed by the Internet is upon us, and I’m becoming more and more convinced that Darwin got it the wrong way around. The ape isn’t our past; it’s our future.

We can bring it nearer by shedding one by one the distinguishing features of humanity, including the gift of speech. Like any other gift, this one isn’t delivered beautifully shaped once and for all. A gift is a potential. Unless developed, it may be lost.

This is exactly what’s happening to primary school pupils today, according to teachers from all over the country. They get pupils knee-deep in devices whose screens they swipe with virtuoso dexterity. Yet they are incapable of speaking properly.

Children don’t know how to make a transition from the online world to the real world. Moreover, they confound the two.

Flickering screens form the entirety of the tots’ beliefs, ideas and identities. The information they receive is unfiltered, often fake and largely irresponsible, and children themselves lack the critical faculties necessary for self-protection.

Even worse, so do their parents. They too grew up with devices nurturing their vices.

A chain-smoking daddy won’t be persuasive when lecturing his son on the harm of tobacco. Similarly, parents themselves formed by online sources won’t be able to protect their children from poisonous fumes emanating from screens.

Little children lie about their age to gain access to adult content, largely made up of sex, violence and assorted conspiracy theories. Arguments have raged since TV sets became ubiquitous about the damage caused by such material.

I used to think those fears were exaggerated: a boy isn’t going to commit murder just because he watched John Wayne firing his six-shooter, nor will a girl become a prostitute because the same film showed ladies of easy virtue in a Texas bordello.

But that argument was only valid when children were exposed to other formative influences as well: newspapers, magazines, conversations with grown-ups – above all books. Take those away, and a child may well go feral.

This isn’t just a theory. Primary school teachers tell harrowing stories from their everyday practice. For example, while boys used to learn about girls from Hans-Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, today they get such education from Andrew Tate and similar ‘influencers’.

As a result, one primary school mistress complained about getting a note in which a precocious pupil said he liked her breasts and asked if she’d like to have sex with him in the playground. Her reply wasn’t reported, but I’m reasonably certain she rejected the advance.

The same precocity explains why girls are routinely abused in primary schools. In the past, that sort of fun started in older age groups, but there were no social media at the time.

Raised by the Internet, children learn to communicate in semiotic interjections only, reserving any semantic content for the kind of vile language that suggests familiarity with most sexual variants. They exchange such messages with other recipients of social media, and many grown-ups provide parental guidance by joining in. They grew up the same way and now can give their offspring the benefits of their larger vocabulary.

One teacher said: “They’re exposed to too many devices. We’re getting children who can’t talk; they can swipe, they can take a photo, they can access the internet but the speech and language is being affected. Their parents at pick-up are staring down at their phones.

“They’re struggling with attachment. They’ve got the money, you go into the house and they have massive flatscreen TVs but no books.”

Little boys routinely swap nude pictures they get from the net or else take themselves by sneaking up on girls in their class. Unfortunately, they are also buried under an avalanche of other types of pornography: intellectual, political and aesthetic.

There isn’t a conspiracy theory the net flogs that pupils don’t take as a fact, and they avidly self-diagnose with all sorts of ailments they saw described on social platforms. Thus Year 5 and 6 pupils (aged 10 or 11) routinely complain of ADHD, which is a fashionable excuse for laziness.

Most of them have never heard of Nelson or Wellington, but they know for certain that the CIA murdered Kennedy, the Queen ordered Diana’s assassination, the Earth is flat, aliens land their UFOs on that flat surface, and the Covid vaccine contained microchips.

If children used to know they were divided into boys and girls, these days they learn from the net that there exist dozens of other options. They are encouraged to run through a quick checklist of their own psyche and physique to determine which of the 102 ‘genders’ they belong to – and they learn that such belonging is their enforceable right.

Teachers complain that they have to devote a big chunk of every lesson to battle what they call “online conspiracy”. Such warriors are the teachers we know about. But I’m willing to bet that many teachers don’t join those hostilities.

After all, most of them were Internet babies themselves. Their own verbal skills may be marginally better than their charges’, but whenever their memoranda appear in the press, one can see the authors are functionally illiterate. People who can’t form a single coherent, grammatical sentence are expected to teach pupils how to speak, think and behave properly.

Such people may be teachers or parents, but the catastrophic effects of their educational efforts are easy to predict. One such effect is instantly apparent: little feral creatures growing up unable to speak properly, but passionately committed to every bit of wicked propaganda they see on the net, can vote.

At present the voting age is 18, but it will be lowered to 16 during this Labour government. Those juvenile savages with undeveloped minds and no knowledge of anything valid or important will be deciding who will govern the country.

We’ve had ample opportunity to observe how these days it’s not the politicians who affect the electorates but vice versa. Now that Western democracy has entered its age of senile malignancy, incompetent, irresponsible voters elect governments in their own image.

That image doesn’t remain static – modernity is progressive if nothing else. Hence young minds warped by the net will be migrating from voting booths to Westminster (Capitol Hill, Rue de l’Université, Platz der Republik etc.). Are you looking forward to that bright future? I am not.