Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Leading academic? Gives Tips on "How to politicise fatherhood"?

Given that it was such an awful weekend weather wise, I spent much of my time this weekend reading and lounging about in the house, particularly on Sunday which is no hardship, since reading the papers is one of the joys of any weekend.

A favourite of mine being Kent on Sunday, which this weekend has a story (page 5) concerning Dr. Ellie Lee a lecturer in social policy, at the University of Kent, not entirely sure what err social policy is as an academic subject but assume that it is some woolly minded, vaguely political sort of stuff, that conditions and trains young students to become one of those irritating bland politicians or bureaucrats, like the Millibland brothers or any of the half wit local authority bosses we're so familiar with.

According to Dr. Ellie Lee, assuming, I'm reading this article correctly, politicians, as ordinary fathers and by that I mean, a father who has what many would consider, a normal relationship with his family is somehow politicising that fairly basic role.

Presumably Dr. Lee would prefer British prime ministers, to be so cold and self important and disown their own children, leaving them as damaged goods, as is the case in so much of broken Britain.

Ignoring her own opinions apparently at one point in the story she is quoted as saying " people should be able to bring their children up in any way, they see fit" and " we are always being told there is someone else who knows best and we have to see some guru" maybe Dr. Lee ought to take her own advice.

Anyhow such " stories" are provocative space fillers for newspapers, which both entertain and irritate, still I'd love to know how Kent on Sunday journalist Chris Murphy, comes up with a story like this, how would you approach it, just ring up an academic randomly, and asked if they could come up with some provocative tosh for next Sunday's newspaper.

No comments:

Post a Comment