Scumbags ?

MDR

So peeps, let us suppose you are king (or queen) of Ireland for the day, and you made it your mission to deal with what has been dubbed by boards.ie 'the scumbag problem'.

What do you do,

Do you catch them when they are young, educate them, engage with them, attempt to instill a sense of civic pride and a sense of duty towards the community ?

or

Do you punish them when they perform acts which aren't civic friendily like littering, alcholism etc, using a system of fines and short prison sentences ?

or

Do you educate them when they are young, and if they ignore the education, punish them when they are old ?

So you are the monarch, what is your command m'lord.

doh! this was supposed to be a poll ...

Pacifico

LFCFan

Catch them when they're young, ie. in School they should be thought about more than just Shakespeare etc. Life skills are something schools completly ignore. I would make sure that more facilities were built for kids like skate parks, fun parks, basketball courts, mini golf, football pitches etc etc etc. There is nothing for kids to do in Dublin so boredom leads to a lot of the anti social behaviour we are seeing. After this I would implement a fine system for the parents of troublesome kids. At the end of the day a lot of the trouble with Scumbags is down to bad parenting. The State are woefully bad at looking after it's young. This has to change!!!

Exit

Yeah, changing the way schools work is the option I'd go for too. Knowledge of history and Shakespeare is all fine and dandy (and I enjoyed learning in school) but it doesn't educate kids about life. In fact, kids are probably more likely to rebel because they dislike what is being thought to them.

In other words, school should be about life education rather than only knowledge based education.

Tommy Vercetti

D) target practice

Agent7249

Catch em while they're young, teach em to be totally nationalistic and to respect fellow irishmen

loismustdie

how does 1 catch them when their young? kidnap them from their "scumbag" families?

Exit

Trail a bag of heroin on a string and lure them to your hideout.

Sparks

Hmmm.

I'd double the pay for teachers on the spot, and increase the required qualifications for the job slightly. I'd reinstate the capital spending programme for schools and provide capital grants for building new schools or improving old ones in city centres and areas identified as being below the poverty line. I'd crank the educational grant levels up to a more realisitic level, and I'd create a committee of community representatives to advise the Department of Education of problems, the members of which would have to have children in the school system and who would be from each of the areas mentioned above. I'd increase the spending in third-level education back up to the point where colleges like TCD could actually afford to hire professors and lecturers again (they can't at the moment for the undergrad courses and most of the postgrad ones) and I'd increase grants for third-level education as well as for those starting apprenticeships and learning trades. I'd require that the leaving and junior cert syllabi include a new mandatory course which would teach civics, modern politics, the fundamentals of the tax system, the judicial system, human rights, civil rights, basic law, and all the little things that tell you how to live in our society and how that society works and so on. I'd create one or two schools in Dublin specifically for gifted children. I'd provide grants for setting up music schools either seperately or attached to existing schools. I'd make it mandatory that students must take at least one science subject through to leaving cert level and I'd institute a new subject - general science - which covers all three science areas normally taught so that there is less of a lack of knowlege of scientific and engineering matters amongst students. I'd start a programme that paid working stiffs in various industries (not just CEOs) to come to "career days" and actually talk to students about what various jobs entail, and so on, rather than some tired teacher pulling double duty as a careers advisor when they haven't actually done any of the jobs themselves, and drive a lada to work every day. I'd provide grants for preschools/kindergardens on the same level as for other schools, and demanding equal levels of qualification. And I'd raise the dole enough that families weren't living under grinding poverty and chop low-end taxes so that taking a job didn't reduce your weekly income, as it can do now.

I think that ought to cover it for a start, though obviously more would have to follow as time went on.

LFCFan

I agree with everything you say Sparks apart from increasing the Dole. There needs to be more incentives to get a job, not less. Increasing the lower level for paying tax would make more sense if it meant people could earn a substantial amount more working than they do on the scratcher.

quank

Originally posted by Tommy Vercetti
D) target practice

straight away:)

strawberry

Scumbags turn out quite frequently just to be people with ****ed up lives if you get to know them.