there is no magic cure
yes, there is ! Educate our teachers to a level where they can instil some sense into our young. The rest will fall into place by itself.
just look around at the insanity of "DON"T signs, no wonder they start drinking, they're not allowed to do anything else.

Oh dear: 'educate our teachers to a level where they can instil some sense into our young. The rest will fall into place by itself.'

Here I was thinking that parents could play a role in raising law-abiding and responsible children. Perhaps this could be another instrument for performance-based pay for teachers: track the alcohol consumption of current and past students for the next decade to ensure that teachers have instilled some sense into them. Maybe also dock the pay of teachers whose students have parents who let them have alcohol-fuelled parties on the weekends.

Sorry individual - my tone was out of line in that last post. Surely, though, the development of a child's behavioural sensibilities is the domain of a parent? And surely their best role models should be found in the home? Certainly teachers have a role to play in indicating that some kids' home lives may not be entirely normal (or healthy), but they are a very minor part of the solution.

parents could play a role in raising law-abiding and responsible children.
Otokonoko,
There are possibly still some countries unaffected by oilitical correctness i.e. Academia & Nazism but here parents have absolutely no power over their own children by order of Government since moron Goaf.

Crickey, the silence of the degree-flashing do-gooder social engineer brigade is deafening !

You have a point, individual. But even in these days of legislated parental impotence (and note that if parents are rendered impotent, schools are practically castrated), there are some things parents can still do to set their kids on the right path. Refraining from buying their kids alcohol, for example - and refraining from hosting parties with underage drinking at their homes. An alternative method would be to model (and, possibly, allow) drinking in moderation. During a homestay in Germany many years ago, the whole family would drink beer at dinner. Nobody drank too much and the kids seemed to refrain from getting plastered afterwards, despite heading down to the pub for a drink (bizarrely enough, with their teachers). The idea of drinking themselves to oblivion seemed to be alien to them.

That's not to say that there are no drunks in Europe - far from it. But the drunks tend to be a degenerate underbelly of society rather than its otherwise-respectable mainstream.