Nursery Rhyme Police

[Welsh Girls Allotment]

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/no ... ursery.htm



Can you believe the lenghts this government will go to to control the population

[Shirley]

That's pretty scary isn't it... and only a few minutes I was reading about how Laws to keep children safe are 'getting out of hand'

[HILLDREAMER90]

Big brother IS watching you !!!!!

[Martin]

and even more of the otherwise unemployable being given grossly overpaid government jobs to snoop into every aspect of our lives!
Don't I seem to remember the literal witch hunts up in Scotland a few years ago when some loony social worker decided children were being satanically abused?
What amazes me is the comatose general public - every minute that ticks by, another freedom has gone out of the window - they sit there intoning "well, if you haven't anything to hide, why should you worry?" whilst they are being hogtied with intrusive bureaucracy - ID cards next, dna taken from every child........has nobody read "1984"????????
And are memories so short, that they can't remember recent generations who fought a world war to ensure we would have the freedoms denied to those under the Nazi regime?

[bwaymark]

Still, nursery rhyms are very important.... why just the other day I was explaining to my four old that if she wanders off into the woods, or gets too close the river in front of our house that there really monsters and they really will get her! :-)

Now... if they heard my out-of-key singing to my kids it probably wouldn't be just a course.... I reckon I'd be up for hard time :-)

[Muddypause]

Oh, ffs...this is just bollox. Take a look at the nature of the site; it goes in the same bin as those Ludlow survivalists, creationists and the political far right. And a report supposedly from the Evening Standard is hardly going to be balanced and objective, anyway, is it?

Rather than jump up and down at the terrible things we are having inflicted upon us, be a bit discriminatory. It'll never happen.

[Stonehead]

Same story, different spin:

BBC - Rhymes 'boost child development'

Guardian - Listen to mother. Too many government initiatives to 'support' parenting are actually undermining parents' confidence in themselves.

Telegraph - Will nobody listen to mother? The Government should stop interfering in the nursery and concentrate on getting the basics of school education sorted out, says Judith Woods.

The Times - A sad tale of little boys lost

Daily Mail - This nanny does NOT know best

[Milims]

I'll volunteer to go and teach them all "Little Bunny Foo Foo!" Kids are mesmerised by the idea of inflicting violence on small furry animals!!! Actions most necessary!!! (Especially the bit where you punch one hand into the other to emulate the bashing!!!

In case you've never heard it it goes:-


"Little Bunny Foo Foo
Hopping thru the forest
Scooping up the field mice
and bashing them on the head
Down came the good fairy and she said
Little Bunny Foo Foo
I don't want to see you scooping up the field mice and bashing them on the head
I'm going to give you 3 chances
And if you don't behave
I'm going to turn you into a goon
So the very next day............."

Repeat story several times till three chances are gone

and the last verse goes
"I gave you 3 chances so now Im going to turn you into a goon
So she did
She turned him into a goon
and the moral of this story is............








Hare today - Goon tomorrow!!!

The kids love it - the parents look on in horror!!!
Tee hee - evil laughter!!

[Stonehead]

Hare today - Goon tomorrow!!!

The kids love it - the parents look on in horror!!!
Tee hee - evil laughter!!

Just my sort of thing.

When I do my turn at playgroup, I tell the kids stories about Fionn mac Cumhaill and his adventures. One of their favourites is about Fionn and his magic sword, where Fionn chases a fairy blacksmith over the hills, persuades him to make a magic sword, and then stabs him in the gizzards with it!

We set out the climbing frame as the mountains, run around the hall, climb down through pretend holes into the fairy smiddy, and then make the sword on the forge before finishing with the sword sticking. (There's more to it than that, but that's the main bits the kids want.)

They also like stories about how kangaroos got little black front feet (from beating our bushfires with their paws), about bunyips, dropbears and mugwumps, about jackaroos and cattle stampedes, about Clan MacLeod and the fairy flag, about the Johnstones and the Maxwells (reiving families in the Borders - I'm descended from the first), and about selkies, the bean nighe, the tarbh uisge and kelpies.

At the moment, the kids are convinced there's a troll lurking in the walls and if they're not careful, he'll stick his hands down through a big crack in the ceiling and grab them. Which would be good for me as the troll doesn't like cheese and when he grabs the littlies, I can eat their cheese!!

We have a lot of fun, but some of the parents disapprove...

[baldowrie]

Hey that stories in my book of Scottish Legends and Myths I read recently...

It amazed me how, men particualry, made up all these myths to cover up their violence towards others, mainly women.

Would you like to borrow the book Stoney?

[Stonehead]

Hey that stories in my book of Scottish Legends and Myths I read recently...

It amazed me how, men particualry, made up all these myths to cover up their violence towards others, mainly women.

Would you like to borrow the book Stoney?

There are quite a few that go the other way as well - be nasty to women and you'll get your comeuppance in the end...

There's the one about the sea crofter who kidnaps a selkie (normally a beautiful, peaceful and reclusive faerie folk), hides her cloak of seal skin and keeps her for his wife for many years. But their children eventually find the cloak and they and the selkie escape back to the sea.

Whenever the sea crofter tries to go out in his boat after that, the selkies call up storms, rock the boat, make holes in the bottom and generally terrify him, while the wind tells him that one day, one day he'll be going down, down into the deep where his wife and children are waiting...


Then there are the ones about mighty warriors who beat their foes by guile and with the help of their mum!

One of the Fionn mac Cumhaill stories is about his encounter with the Welsh giant, who's a bit too big and a bit too mean even for Fionn.

So Fionn invites him home for tea and his mum makes a batch of griddle cakes for them. Only thing is, she sneaks rocks into the giant's cakes.

The giant watches in awe as Fionn happily snacks away on griddle cakes, saying how light and lovely they are, while the giant finds his teeth broken by his cakes.

The giant decides to go home rather than try to bash Fionn and wades back across the sea to Wales, while Fionn and his mum have a good laugh.



I might borrow the book at some point - I've picked up most of my stories by word of mouth. And the stories I've detailed above are much better told, than read, complete with all the vivid detail I've left out...

[Shirley]

All sounds great to me...

I'd forgotten all about little bunny foo foo - EXCELLENT!!!

[baldowrie]

Yep you have to watch those selkies

They are all in the book I have

Also watch the hares and rats, they may just be witches

[2steps]

this is a load of rubbish, no way is anyone telling me what I can and cannot sing to my kids. schools aren't even learning nursery rhymes at school half the time - she's been singing just charty music they've been learning for their show lately and my son was telling us the other day that his music lesson was super cool cos the teacher played them queen and guns 'n' roses and he knew all the words cos his dad loves queen

while I agree nursery rhymes are important and the quality time spent together and interation etc etc is great, it this really the most important issue to be dealing with? couldn't they be teaching parents who to cook real meals or disipline children with yelling and swearing?

[Muddypause]

Same story, different spin

But it aint, though. Completely different stories. Compare and contrast:

From the Evening Standard:
"Parents could be forced to go to special classes to learn to sing their children nursery rhymes"

From the BBC:
"Parents will be able to get advice from a new parenting centre from next year"

The difference between those two is startling. One is a story of compulsion and trivialisation, the other is about what would seem to be a worthwhile community asset.

From the Telegraph, 14th November:
"A national academy providing reliable advice on which child-rearing techniques actually work..."

From the Telegraph, 15th November:
"The Government should stop interfering in the nursery"

From the Observer, quoting the government minister's actual words:
"It is not the Government's job to tell parents how to nurture their children"

Which ones are fiction? You decide.

Several of the links you point to are predictably anti-Labour, and stick with that particular bit of monotonous axe-grinding without ever once seeming prepared to let mere facts emerge. One item discredits itself by perpetuating that old chestnut, the persistent myth that Baa Baa Black Sheep is banned by some authority or other on the grounds of racism[1]. It's just another load of old cobblers that some papers seem unable to survive without, along with similar stories about schools not being allowed to refer to blackboards, and set books including 'Billy Lives With Daddy And His Friend Michael' or some such.

These are manufactured stories to support a position; their only purpose is to discredit someone, not to report upon events. Doesn't matter much who's in the firing line, but politicians in power are always good for a drubbing, and an easy target for a lazy journalist, regardless of what the actual issue is. I have little doubt that this 'parents forced to take parenting classes' story is just more of the same.

Really, I wish the Great British Public would get more angry about this type of 'reporting' - don't we deserve better than that? It's worse than just merely objectionable, it's a form of low key manipulation, and I think merits as much protest as the wrongs that any government does.

[1] That myth has been doing the rounds in some form for at least 25 years. This time around a class of children in Oxfordshire were encouraged to use their imaginations and sang new verses about red sheep and blue sheep and much else besides - the story in the papers wrongly reported that references to black sheep had been banned. It was a lie, but who cares about that? A member of staff was interviewed live on the radio about it and specifically set out the case - nothing more was afoot than what all children do anyway - make up their own words to a rhyme. They were simply being encouraged to do more of this, but the papers don't care about that, and never reported it. Their only interest seemed to be in perpetuating their original lie.

What does that matter; the public wants what the public gets - watch them lap it all up.