Prince Charles Comments

[DREDIOCK]

LONDON (Nov. 18) - Prince Charles' tirade against people who aspire to lofty goals beyond their natural talent earned him a rare public rebuke from a senior government minister on Thursday - and gasps of disbelief from the British media.

Education Secretary Charles Clarke branded the heir to the throne "old fashioned" after details emerged of a royal memo written in response to an employee's inquiry about promotion prospects.

"People think they can all be pop stars, high court judges, brilliant TV personalities or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having natural ability," Charles wrote in the memo, which was read out Wednesday at an employment tribunal.

"Not like you eh, Charles?" countered The Sun, a popular daily that is normally highly supportive of the monarchy. The prince is next in line to the throne by virtue of heredity.

"Don't try to rise above your station," was how The Daily Telegraph newspaper, a pillar of the British establishment, summarized the prince's memo. Another conservative paper, the Daily Mail, devoted its first two pages to the story under the headline: "Don't get above yourself."

In his handwritten note, Charles attacked Britain's education system for encouraging young people to nurture ambitions they are unlikely to fulfill.

"What is wrong with everyone nowadays?" the prince wrote. "Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far beyond their technical capabilities?

"This is to do with the learning culture in schools as a consequence of a child-centered system which admits no failure," Charles said.

"This is the result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically and socially engineered to contradict the lessons of history."

Clarke said he thought Charles should "think carefully" before intervening in any debate about education.
   
"To be quite frank, I think he is very old-fashioned and out of time and he doesn't understand what is going on in the British education system at the moment," the minister told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.

It is very rare for government figures to publicly criticize members of the royal family, but Prime Minister Tony Blair's office played down the disagreement.

"I know that Charles Clarke values his relationship with the Prince of Wales and enjoys discussions on education with him," a spokeswoman for Blair's office said.

Charles' memo was read out at an employment tribunal where a former personal assistant in his private office, Elaine Day, claimed unfair dismissal. She also claimed sexual harassment by the prince's assistant private secretary, Paul Kefford.

The prince wrote the memo in reply to Day's suggestion that personal assistants with university degrees should be given the opportunity to train to become private secretaries - a more senior position within the royal household. Day excluded herself from the proposal.

   Charles concluded the note by writing: "What on earth am I to tell Elaine? She is so (politically correct) it frightens me rigid."

Day, 45, who worked at Clarence House for five years before quitting earlier this year, told the tribunal that the royal household was run in "Edwardian" fashion.

"It's hierarchical, elitist, everyone knows their place and if we forget our place the system will punish us," she said.

Asked by her lawyer how she understood Charles' memo, Day replied: "I completely felt that people could not rise above their station."

Day claims she was effectively forced out of her job after complaining to superiors about the sexual harassment. The prince's office contests the claim.

[DREDIOCK]

Now honestly I really dont have too much of a problem with alot of what he said as alot of it is true.

But I am curious as to why The Brits even keep a Royal Family anymore.

[deSelys]

The entertainment value?

...And maybe to avoid the extinction of the specie

[Dowding]

Money. The Royals are a very profitable organisation these days. It's nice to keep some traditions alive also.

[lazs2]

better put those peasants in theire rightful place or next they will be poaching on the kings land.   Probly should make sure those peasants aren't armed.

lazs

[Dowding]

Do you hear that?

That's the sound of Lazs shoe-horning gun control into yet another thread.

Boring bastard, but in a funny kind of way.

[lazs2]

gun control... ruling class... how can you possibly seperate the two?    

lazs

[GRUNHERZ]

Heed the call of your next King, Dowding!  Be a god subject and aim low! Dont set high expectaions only to be dissapointed by your lack of inbred royal blood.

What an arse that guy is...  

Dowding, do you actually have to pay taxes to these people????

[Dowding]

Lazs, you could link gun control Cordon Bleu cooking if you wanted - and you probably would. Keep up the good work.

Grunhertz - we pay taxes to British government who fund the Royal Family, who attract tourist revenue, which goes into the economy, which is taxed... it's a bit of a money spinner - especially now that the Royals have been cut down considerably.

[Yeager]

he is a "subject' lazs, what more needs to be said?

[beet1e]

Lazs! We haven't had a King since George VI, who snuffed it in 1952.

OK, so Charles is in a bit of hot water over a memo concerning a woman who is so politically correct she probably wears steel underwear.

The other Charles, the Education Secretary Charles Clarke, is a buffoon if his latest policy is a yardstick of buffoonery. He wants all schools to take their share of disruptive pupils, instead of having sink schools where we can send these miscreants. How would you like your child to be attending a "normal" school, but to be sitting next to a nascent drug dealer/knife wielding avacado?

Here's a piece by Tom Utley in today's Telegraph. I love his piece about teaching his son drug dealing and knifemanship.

 

Clarke's masterstroke will surely finish off the good state school
By Tom Utley
(Filed: 19/11/2004)

In the words of yesterday's official press release, Charles Clarke proposes to "limit the number of previously excluded children that schools will have to admit".

 
 
Well, that is one way of putting it. Another way, just as accurate, would be to say that the Education Secretary proposes to compel good schools to accept violent and disruptive pupils who have been expelled from other schools in their area. But that wouldn't look so good in a press release.

You can't blame the people who write these documents, I suppose, for trying to put the best possible complexion on every damnfool initiative to emerge from the Cabinet. That is what they are paid to do. But after seven years of this relentless spinning and sexing up, they ought to realise that we are all wise to their techniques by now, and heartily sick of them.

The headline on the press release from the Department for Education and Skills was enough on its own to put all parents and teachers on their guard: "Walking Tall - More Support for Schools to Tackle Bad Behaviour."

Never mind that the official who thought of the slogan "Walking Tall" wasn't really thinking at all. He (or she) probably just felt that these were feel-good words, which might as well be bunged in, whether they meant anything or not.

The point is that whatever came next in the press release, we could be sure that the effect of the Government's proposals would be to make behaviour in a great many schools a lot worse than it is now.

Sure enough, the text of Mr Clarke's speech shows that his big idea for solving the problem of bad behaviour in schools is not really to tackle it at all, but just to spread it around a bit. Henceforth, popular schools whose teachers have worked hard to establish discipline will be forced to accept unruly pupils who have been chucked out elsewhere.

Parents reading Mr Clarke's proposal to "limit the number" of such pupils at any individual school are supposed to think: "Oh, good. That will mean fewer of the little fiends at my child's school." For huge numbers of parents, however, it will mean precisely the opposite.

By the standards of this Government, the wording of Mr Clarke's speech and the official release from the DfES was only a minor deception. But a deception it was, all the same - written and uttered with the deliberate intention of deceiving - and it must not be allowed to pass without rebuke.

The shame of it is that the problem of disruptive pupils is a very serious one, not easily solved, which deserves much more serious attention than Mr Clarke is prepared to give it. It cannot be wished away by a cheap little initiative, a speech carefully worded to deceive and a press release headed "Walking Tall".

If the minister were a more honest man, he would admit that the Government to which he belongs has made the problem a great deal worse. Before New Labour came along, with its insistence on "inclusion", the policy was to teach disruptive children separately, in schools specially equipped to cope with their needs.

It is true that some of these institutions were not nearly as good as they should have been, and I can well understand how they offended Labour's sense of fair play. It is a horrible thing to write children off at the age of 11, by sending them to schools widely seen as being reserved for no-hopers.

But the paradox is that Labour's policy of inclusion - the party's refusal to countenance selection of any sort - has done nothing to reduce the number of these "sink schools". If anything, it has created more of them.

The difference is that the worst schools are no longer properly equipped or funded to cater for the special needs of the children who are dumped on them by the system.

Under the present arrangements, it works like this: disruptive children, or those who are otherwise hard to teach, are sent to ordinary state schools along with everybody else. The teachers at these schools do their very best for them.

But when they feel that they can no longer cope, and that the disruptive children are jeopardising the education of all their other pupils, they chuck them out.

The problem then arises of where to send the rejects. And the answer, as things now stand, is to send them to whichever local school is unpopular enough to have spare places available. So it is that all the most difficult children tend to end up in all the worst schools, whose underfunded staff then find it harder than ever before to break the vicious circle of failure.

Mr Clarke's "solution" to the problem can only make everything worse. Disruptive pupils will be shunted round from one school to the next, so that they are evenly distributed throughout every local education authority.

Everywhere they go, they will make it harder for teachers and for their fellow pupils. The Government is offering an incentive to schools, in the shape of money previously allocated to LEAs to manage excluded pupils - but this is no guarantee they will get the special, expensive attention they need.

Like almost everything else that this Government does, Mr Clarke's initiative seems directed against parents who want the best for their children - and particularly against the middle classes.

"All right," the minister seems to be saying, "we have already taken steps to ensure that your children's good exam results count for nothing when they are applying for admission to universities. If you are middle-class, or if your children go to good schools, then they are already on our blacklist. But we are not finished yet. We will not rest until there is no such thing left in the country as a good state school."

My own 11-year-old failed to get into the secondary school of our first choice (although, I hasten to say, I am very pleasantly surprised by the local comprehensive where he now goes).

The guilty thought occurs to me, however, that perhaps I should hire a private tutor to teach him graffiti, drug-dealing and knifemanship. That way, under Mr Clarke's new rules, he can be shunted around from school to school, until he ends up at the one we wanted for him in the first place.

[thrila]

Charles is a tard but i do like the Queen, she is above the mud slinging in politics.  I like Prince Phillip too but only because royalty would be much more boring without him- his gaffes are great.
I wouldn't lose any sleep if the crown skipped a generation and went to Prince William though....

The thought of a president Blair scares me.  

Lazs i don't understand the gun control/royalty thing.  In general royalty didn't want to ban guns, it was the govt.

Here was Prince phillips view on banning handguns- "If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?"

[Pongo]

Charles didnt seem to feel that way when he payed someone else to write school work for his son so he could get into the school he wanted.

[Darkish]

I think he's spot on - a huge skills gap is devolping with regard people being able to do bloody useful stuff.  I mean getting hold of a good plumber isn't easy.

The state of things round our way allowed me to jack in my 9 to 5 and set up on my own as a gardner/handyman.  Huge demand see.

I'm with Charles on this one...

F****ng TV... all it's every done is remove the need for people to communicate and sell a 2' square window full of pulp 'n platitudes as reality.

[beet1e]

Originally posted by thrila
I wouldn't lose any sleep if the crown skipped a generation and went to Prince William though....

That scenario is entirely possible.

Darkish - Winchester, huh? Whereabouts? I have family there. My brother even lives on Chilbolton Avenue - and is bemoaning the Prescottisation™ of his neighbourhood, what with all those new houses being built on "brown fields" sites.