Eleanor Mills (@eleanormills) - When it's cool to be dumb, Ctd

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Eleanor Mills wrote in the Sunday Times of July 6 2014:

"Being “cool” was about rebelling: an urge to be doing what I shouldn’t — because I could. At 13 I would slink off to pubs in Covent Garden with my best mate — we’d tell her mother we were going to the cinema — and pretend to be 18 or older. We would drink and flirt and get into trouble, revelling in the newly honed power that we had over men, and then run off home on the night bus with our child-rate photocards.

And more:

"By 14 and 15 I was going clubbing (Phil Salon’s Mud Club, the Wag, Heaven) and dancing until the small hours. I was even interviewed by Paula Yates for a Channel 4 series she was making called Too Much Too Young.

She explained the report:

"Most school dropouts do not become pop stars. Indeed a large American study, just published in Child Development — a prestigious psychology magazine — found that indulging in minor delinquency, early romantic attachments and drug use at age 13, 14 and 15 might make you popular for a few years but is correlated with “long-term difficulties in close relationships... as well as significant problems with alcohol and substance use [along with] elevated levels of criminal behaviour” in early adulthood."

When it's cool to be dumb, Ctd

@brianjohnspencr @YsabellGiles In the working-class world I grew up in, to succeed was seen by many as 'rising above your station'.
— Ian Livingstone (@IGLivingstone) November 28, 2013

The deputy Lord Mayor of Belfast, Christopher Stalford tweeted in response:

@IGLivingstone @brianjohnspencr @YsabellGiles Ian, absolutely spot on.
— Christopher Stalford (@CDMStalfordDUP) November 28, 2013

Ian Livingstone also shared on his blog his experience and perception of schooling in the context of growing up in a Belfast family:

"I daydreamed my way through school. I paid no attention to class-work and my truancy had now become very regular. In my family there were no expectations from education at all. My parents saw it in a sense, like a glorified baby-sitting service - somewhere I could go during daytime while they were at work. The previous hopes they had for me when I had gained entry into grammar school were by now gone after I had been expelled. I was destined to enter into an apprenticeship as an electrician, plumber or a welder in the Harland &Wolff shipyard, like the majority of males in my family. A good education didn’t really matter."

My previous posts in the "Cool to be dumb" series here, here, here, here, here and here. On the Huffington Post UK here.