I've been saying this for years. Both on this blog and at work.

"teachers are increasingly forced to discipline bad behaviour and take on the role of bringing up children"

Nonsense. Teachers abrogated their own disciplinary role decades ago. So now neither parents nor teachers discipline problem kids, and their downward spiral is never checked.

I submit that what we are seeing now is second-- and even third-generation moral decay. Teachers are now encountering the children, and, even, the grandhildren, of post Engle v. Vitale, post Abington v. Schempp pagans.

Yeah,I know this aricle is about Great Britain, not the U.S. I have commented under the assumption that British public education has been similarly corrupted.

Presumably it is worse over there, what with the utter prostration of their society.

OJ is a bit off base here - his headline implies that the schools medicate the herd (I'm sure many would if they could). But his misplaced love for American public education blinds him. While a bit strident, Bruno has the better argument on the state of the public schools. There are good ones, to be sure, but when even the Left has to fight the unions and the educational administration (as in NYC and DC and elsewhere) to improve things, the jig is up.

I suspect that teachers abrogated their disciplinary role only when it became clear that the administration wouldn't back them up (or protect them) from parents or from students. On the whole, teachers are in the weakest position, no?