Teachers' foibles

Their unions still posture, but teachers are less left-leaning than you thinkDAFFODILS bloom and chocolate eggs melt as the long Easter weekend draws near. Alongside such pleasures is another, equally seasonal: the annual outpouring from the teaching unions conferences, whose massed pedagogues can always be relied on to provide a few news stories to delight the headline-writers. Guaranteed are jeremiads about parents and pupils, both inferior to those of yesteryear in various, not always consistent, ways. (In 2008 parents were criticised for being oversolicitous and their offspring for being little princes and princesses; this year the fashion is to bash them for being, respectively, neglectful and unsocialised.) Fairly standard attempts to blame the raw materials rather than inadequate workmen, but these moans are given a ready hearing because they confirm the fears of many readers (and not a few editors) that the nations moral fibre is in shreds.