But Ichinono is special. In 2022, for the first time in two decades, a child was born there. Kuranosuke, writes the FT, is “cherished by a cooing, tribute-bearing platoon of surrogate grandparents from around the village”. Poems are written about him. A haiku is engraved on a plaque outside the toddler’s home. He is “a hero for simply existing”.

I thought about Kuranosuke while I was reading “The Big Ambition”, a new report by the Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel D’Souza. Its lead finding is that children don’t feel listened to: “Just one in five children in England believe their views are important to the adults who run the country, while only 10% of teenagers believe they have the power to influence the issues they care about.” This report, writes de Souza, “is a call to action to all politicians and policymakers in this general election year: listen to children and act on what they are telling you.”

A manifesto for children! Big votes for eliminating all bedtimes and free pick ’n’ mix! Except actually, the ambitions of the children in the research are modest and reasonable: an end to child poverty, proper support in schools, fairness for foster children and places to play in. These are not radical flights of juvenile whimsy. They’re the kind of things that a country with any interest in its young people should be investing in anyway.

That this is not a country with a great deal of interest in its young people is hardly worth pointing out by now. Over the past week, the news cycle has been dominated by stories that are effectively about old people retaining their perks. First, there were the “WASPi women”, who claim to have been unfairly caught in the Government’s plan to equalise the state pension age, so that rather than collecting their pension at 60, women collect it at 66 alongside men.

It’s very hard to mount an argument against this in principle, given that it effectively eliminates a residual perversity in the system from the days when female wage earning was seen as an eccentricity. Yet the parliamentary ombudsman found that the DWP had failed to adequately inform the affected women, and should pay compensation of between £1,000 and £2,950 per person; campaigners had been asking for an eye-watering £10,000 each.

That strikes me as inordinately entitled — and so far, the DWP is declining to pay up — but pensioners are used to being indulged. As this story was being debated, chancellor Jeremy Hunt confirmed that the retention of the pension triple-lock would be a Tory manifesto commitment — meaning that the Government will raise publicly funded pensions annually by whichever is highest out of average wage growth, inflation or 2.5%.

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It’s an astonishingly generous settlement, unmatched in any other area of public spending, and one that has proved immune to austerity economics. The reason for this is straightforward: older people get what they want because there are a lot of older people and they tend to vote. No one ever lost an election pandering to the grey vote. All noises from Labour suggest that they have no intention of rescinding it.

Meanwhile, the generation whose hopes and dreams are captured in the Children’s Commissioner’s report have the privilege of being taught in schools that are literally falling apart, while the £4 billion hole in council funding means ambitions of safe, open spaces to hang out and play are unlikely to be realised. The more complex recommendations in the report around foster care and prevention models for young offending are hopelessly remote.

These terrible facts of national life can seem too entrenched to even think about changing. And yet, as the report points out, these young people know from their experience of lockdown that governments are capable of sweeping — and effective — action. At the same time, lockdown may also have taught them that these powers are highly unlikely to be exercised in their favour.

The errors of the pandemic years must be forgivable given the number of unknowns and the huge risks that insufficient caution might have had, but it seems obvious now that closing the schools was a terrible overstep. That decision cut children off from their education. For many of those who were unhappy at school already or suffering from a chaotic or dangerous home, it denied them an academic future, let alone an escape.

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In short, these children have paid a high price in order to protect older people from Covid, and are going to be asked to pay a high price again when they enter employment, at which point they will likely be working to fund a standard of living for pensioners that they will never be offered. Why won’t they be offered it? Because while the UK is in a slightly more robust place than Japan demographically, a birth rate of 1:49 means we are still facing the future with an ageing population. Eventually, economic logic dictates that old-age perks will become unsustainable.

The tragedy of all this isn’t hard to glean. A society that relies on young people should treat them well. Even if children aren’t quite as scarce and precious a resource as toddler Kuranosuke is in Ichinono, they are still too valuable to be taken for granted. Their taxes will keep the welfare state creaking along; their hands will perform the care that older people inevitably need. But the rewards they will receive for that are highly uncertain.

So, at the very least, they should be listened to now — if not exactly worshipped. For the older villagers of Ichinono, the tributes they pay to their child king are an act of hope: a promise that perhaps their village won’t die and leave them forgotten. Similarly, a more generous attitude to our own young people would show that this country has a future. The alternative option of elders hoarding their wealth and political interest would send the exact opposite message, and tell children they have nothing to look forward to but their own decline. There could be no surer way to break down the generational contract holding society together than that.

But Jane really wanted Lily to get some qualifications. She was 13, the age at which persistent absence starts to increase in secondary schools. And in a year’s time, her peers would be choosing their GCSE subjects. But Lily didn’t feel able to go to school. She wanted to be home educated. Unfortunately,  while Jane’s job as a web designer allowed her to work from home, and therefore keep an eye on her daughter, it kept her too busy to teach her. They needed the school to make more of an effort to include her.

The problem was, the school imposed expectations that Lily couldn’t meet. They wanted her in class with her peers, but Lily was terrified of being picked on by a teacher. Her fear gave her stomach aches and headaches. At first, she’d take days off to recover, but those days off turned into weeks off, until she wasn’t coming in at all. School said she could come in part-time, but teachers still expected her to keep up with the work and sit in lessons.

The authority that Jane exercised over her daughter was quite different from that of the school. She had always given Lily the space to be autonomous, to act according to her needs. Her parenting style was “child-centred”. Informed by attachment theory, “gentle parenting”, as it is otherwise known, tells parents to be led by their child’s stated needs — and is increasingly popular in the West. The rationale is that a calm and reassured child will be able to make good choices, observe boundaries and thrive in the world. You don’t give orders; you allow them to make choices. Rules are negotiated on an equal basis rather than imposed from above. Problems with behaviour reflect a problem with the connection to the caregiver: a child acting out only does so if needs have not been met, and the way to address the behaviour is to address the relationship first.

This approach seems idyllic when it’s going well. If things go wrong, however, parents end up feeling helpless. Many end up in a double-bind, knowing their child’s behaviour needs to change while believing that their child must not be forced into doing anything against their will. For Jane, it was inconceivable that she would pressurise Lily to go back to school — but that meant that Lily would only return if she wanted to, and she didn’t want to.

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The school absenteeism crisis made the news last week, when Labour announced its plan to tackle a growing crisis. One in five pupils is persistently absent from school, a number that has doubled since before the pandemic, with many blaming lockdown for the spike. And while it was once linked to markers of poverty such as free school meals, to assume that this is simply a class problem would be misguided. Plenty of absent children come from middle-class homes. In fact, middle-class parenting philosophies seem to be contributing to the problem.

Taylor was also 13 when he stopped going to school. He became increasingly withdrawn at home, staying up all night on his phone or Xbox. He wouldn’t feel like coming downstairs for dinner, so his mother Luci took meals and snacks to his room. She knew it would be better for him to take part in family meals, but she worried that insisting would affect their relationship. She knew that he spent too much time on his screens, but she feared that taking his Xbox away would only make his mental health worse.

Taylor was starting to show signs of depression, and Luci was increasingly worried and frustrated — who was supposed to help him? Was it the school, or the local authority, or the NHS? In her view, setting rules at home was near-impossible, because she didn’t want to affect her relationship with her son — therefore, any change had to be facilitated from the outside.

It’s common to hear parents say that their absentee children can’t come to school. The relationship between “can’t” and “won’t” crops up a lot when we talk about school avoidance — and young people’s mental health issues more generally. And it has fundamental implications for the question Taylor’s mum often came back to: whose responsibility is this? If a child won’t do something that they are supposed to do, like go to school, it’s a problem that needs to be addressed with discipline. The responsibility is the child’s, and by extension their caregiver’s. If someone can’t do something they’re supposed to do, it’s not their fault. The system has to accommodate them: school needs to be more flexible, or homeschooling needs to be provided.

Many parents frame their child’s difficulties in terms of mental health: she is avoiding school because she feels anxious — and if I challenge her, her anxiety will only increase, and her behaviour will only get worse. Here, the lines between won’t and can’t blur. Anxiety thrives on avoidance; if a child doesn’t confront the challenges that school poses, they are likely to fear school even more, having been deprived of the opportunity to find out that it isn’t so bad.

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School pastoral officers are endlessly infuriated with the effect of parenting on attendance. One tells me how pupils text their mums from the loos to say they are having a bad day, and some parents will drop everything to come and pick them up. There are options for struggling children, though: they can use their time-out card, or make an appointment to see the counsellor. But parents who get immediately involved undermine the work her school is doing to help kids settle. It’s understandable for them to find their child’s distress distressing — but sheltering them from the challenges will not serve them well in the long run.

When she tells them this, the parents will agree, and then they’ll do it all over again. Each of them, Kim says, knows on some level that their behaviour is causing problems — not just for their child, but for the school more generally. But they also see their child as vulnerable, as being an exception. This is the influence of attachment theory, which sees all children as fragile, and all discipline as traumatic.

And yet, attachment-based theories are starting to leak into schools. “Connection before correction” is now the most fashionable approach to discipline; it preaches that bad behaviour is an expression of unmet needs and staff need to make pupils feel emotionally safe before introducing any sanctions. Proponents of more traditional approaches, such as government school behaviour adviser Tom Bennett, are sceptical, expressing concern about the increasingly widespread belief that poorly-behaved pupils can’t help themselves — which stops teachers from using sanctions that work.

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Indeed, replacing no-excuses behaviour policies with a theory that is its own tailor-made excuse for poor behaviour has not led to great outcomes. In Scotland, where this approach has been taken to its logical conclusion — a restorative approach that focuses on helping the offender process their emotions — a rise in violence against staff in schools has led to a near-doubling in payouts due to workplace injuries over the last year. Bad behaviour is not only contributing to Britain’s teaching retention crisis but also having deleterious effects on the nation’s most vulnerable pupils. Firm rules tend to make children with profound special educational needs feel safer, because they minimise the risk of other kids behaving noisily or aggressively. And each child who isn’t in school needs to be chased, checked up on, even visited at home — time-consuming tasks that can draw attention away from pupils who may need it more.

That’s not to say that all schools are pleasant, or that all children can manage mainstream education. Plenty have needs or disabilities that mean they simply can’t cope with environments or demands that others can adapt to. Increasingly, though, this category is expanding to include children who are avoiding school because it is uncomfortable or difficult — rather than impossible. Children depend on boundaries; under-18s aren’t legally responsible for themselves for a reason. Their capacity for decision-making, emotional regulation and self-control is still developing.

The official concern about children missing school is the effect it will have on their life choices, narrowing their options without formal qualifications. But arguably more important is what school teaches them about to get on in the world. And if we believe that making youngsters do things they don’t want to is going to harm them, they aren’t going to learn that. They need rules to be upheld and expectations to be consistent. It’s down to the adults to help the children grow up.

Whether this information causes you to call for the defunding of the academy or to shudder empathically probably depends on whether you think there’s any chance that, during some coffee-fuelled, sleep-deprived, deadline-driven moment in your own dim past, you might have done something similar — and whether anyone could now use it against you, if you had. As far as I remember, I never did this in my own university career, though of course I’d occasionally wake in the night, clammy with fear that my subconscious might have inadvertently hoovered up someone else’s vivid phrasing and spewed it out again on the page.  But wherever you stand on this issue, it invites us to consider why we should care about plagiarism in modern universities — if, indeed, we still should at all.

One immediate thing revealed by the row is the extent to which some on both Left and Right only care about academic principles when it suits them. The plagiarism accusations emerged just after Gay’s much-publicised appearance in a congressional hearing on antisemitism on campus in the wake of October 7, sitting alongside the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania. In a viral excerpt from the hearing, Gay and her fellow Presidents stated that “calling for the genocide of the Jews” would have to “cross into conduct” before becoming technically illicit according to their respective university policies. Many onlookers were scandalised by what looked like obvious antisemitism. Longstanding critics of DEI in universities scented blood: no doubt genuinely supportive of Israel, but also amplifying the outrage for opportunistic reasons. The Penn president was forced to resign four days later, and the combing of Gay’s back catalogue seems to have begun.

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Yet not so well-publicised at the time were other parts of the hearing, in which “calling for the genocide of the Jews” was presented by representatives to their three squirming witnesses as the inevitable implication of pro-Palestinian chants like “from the river to the sea” or demands for “intifada”. You can argue about this semantic equivalence — but that’s precisely the point, it’s arguable. And in fact, the thrust of Gay’s answer here was correct. Given their emphasis on academic freedom, universities should not, as a rule, be in the business of policing offensive speech; and especially not when the speech in question is presumed by opponents to acquire its harm via a sinister hidden meaning at several removes of interpretation. (This point is not negated by the fact that some expressions of support for Hamas are unambiguously hateful towards Jews.) If the topic at hand was speech perceived by others to be covertly racist or transphobic, this is a point Gay’s critics on the Right would immediately endorse — except that, once they were trying to cause as much embarrassment as possible for a high-profile champion of DEI policies, it conveniently slipped from their minds.

From the Left, meanwhile, responses to claims about plagiarism by Gay have been depressingly predictable, as attempts are made to blot out the blatant problem of a university leader, paid in six figures, committing an infraction for which students on her own campus would be sanctioned. Defensively, many have scrambled to paint a touching picture of a poor, vulnerable, black female President of Harvard unfairly set upon by racist Right-wingers. Here it seems the capacity to detect nuance, temporarily acquired with respect to pro-Palestinian speech, has vanished once again, with all outward expressions of concern about the standard of Gay’s academic writing automatically becoming something more sinister. Other commentators have claimed that the strict standards outlawing plagiarism don’t apply in the same way to academics as they do to students, or else suggested that, since other high-profile cases of plagiarism have been overlooked, this one should be too.

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On the whole, then, it seems that the Right doesn’t care about academic freedom when the contested words are those of enemies; and the Left doesn’t care about academic violations when committed by their friends. But then again, it seems that some on the Right don’t care about the latter either. After a billionaire hedge fund manager called Bill Ackman was particularly scathing of Gay, a bright spark at Business Insider magazine did a search on his wife Neri Oxman’s PhD thesis and discovered apparent plagiarism there too. Ackman has since listed a raft of reasons why Oxman’s case is different from that of Gay, including that she merely committed “clerical errors of missed punctuation” not “fraud”, and that she was not granted “due process” in the reporting of it. Suddenly vague about what constitutes misdemeanour now that a loved-one is in the frame, and apparently willing to allow repetition of another’s phrasing due to “laziness” or “unintentional errors”, Ackman proposes not to define plagiarism strictly but only to say that “we will know it, when we see it” —thereby invoking a well-known definition of obscenity by a Sixties Supreme Court Judge (“I know it when I see it”).

What Ackman doesn’t say, of course, is that this is also near-identical to the rubric witchfinders use to identify witches — which historically hasn’t worked out so well. In actual fact, though, with the help of computers it is still possible to identify many instances of plagiarism without doing a searching moral inventory of the author. Some standard definitions — including the one given to Harvard students — don’t even rely on the repetition being deliberate or intentional. Are there striking similarities of wording or structure? Are there quotation marks and a citation, or not? Are there more than a few similarities, so that the chances of accident reduce with each new instance? In detecting plagiarism, arguably you are not trying to look into someone’s soul but rather just picking out a particular writing behaviour.

Undeterred by his newfound qualms, with the help of AI and deep pockets, Ackman has now promised to launch a “plagiarism review” of all MIT faculty and administrators before moving on to Harvard and other Ivy League institutions next. And frankly, a lot of people must be sweating. Modern academic culture insists on the regular production of articles and books alongside sometimes heavy teaching and administrative duties. Disciplinary norms usually limit you in advance to using dull, colourless prose. The more technical your point, the more it can appear that all of the limited number of ways available to make it are already taken by others. You also know that, unless very famous or very lucky, hardly anyone is going to read what you produce anyway. It’s only words, perhaps you reason. Words are public property anyway. It’s not like you are stealing possessions from people.

I actually think there’s something right about this. Despite the surrounding hyperbole, plagiarism of the kind Gay and Oxman apparently committed really isn’t that grave a moral sin, as sins go. It’s easily done and on an individual level can be detached from any deeper character flaws. The person whose phrasing is plagiarised doesn’t lose anything of value, if the imitation isn’t discovered; and if it is discovered, they gain the kudos of having written something worth imitating.

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But that doesn’t mean plagiarism shouldn’t be exposed and punished severely — because it should. The infringement is intellectual not moral. The loser from even minor acts of imitation, were they permitted at scale, would be the university as a whole. If you can’t easily explain a complicated idea in your own words, the chances are you don’t fully understand it; and you certainly can’t safely be given the credit for it. Plagiarised passages offer simulacra of understanding but they are counterfeit goods. Like a luxury market, the university system cannot afford to become flooded with counterfeit goods. It would remove its main reason for existing.

Viewed like this, the punishment for plagiarism should be unfashionably medieval — aimed towards deterrent, rather than proportionality or rehabilitation. As philosopher Fabio Paglieri puts it: “The penalty must always be as harsh as possible … Sanctioning plagiarism is not about getting even on moral grounds, it’s about building a better academia to live in. Thus the punished plagiarist has to serve as a cautionary tale for anyone else who may be tempted to follow the same path.” Again, we don’t need to do a deep dive into a perpetrator’s intentions, personality trait, and background circumstances. We are not trying to work out what she or he deserves for missing out some quotation marks and a reference. We just need to put the fear of God into others, to make sure they don’t do it too.

This is all fairly theoretical, though. I don’t know what things are like at Harvard, but my own experience of the British university system tells me that, in practice, it’s almost impossible to insist that serious punishment be meted out to a student for plagiarism anymore: say, removing them from a module, or giving a mark of zero for an essay automatically. Since everyone involved is terrified about deteriorating student mental health, enormous efforts are made to find exculpatory reasons. A laborious process of investigation is undertaken each time, with the eventual upshot being the loss of a few marks at most. So it seems that, in order to preserve the function of universities, deterrence within the system is going to have to rest on meting out highly public punishments to plagiarising academics. In this respect, what has happened to Claudine Gay is a good start.