19 February 2007

Pussyfooting about compulsory education

Exceedingly pussyfooting criticism of compulsory education, from an article by Professor Dennis O’Keefe, published by the Libertarian Alliance:
As elementary education got going in the late nineteenth century, before and after compulsion, and up to the Second World War, the curve of British crime fell. With the huge growth of secondary, tertiary and further education since then, it has all rocketed back to square one. One flinches from drawing mechanistic associations, but the contingent growth of anti-social activity side by side with the parallel expansion of mass schooling raise questions too obvious to be ducked. (from ‘Compulsory Education: An Oxymoron of Modernity’)
Why should one ‘flinch from drawing mechanistic associations’? It is clear enough that compulsory education, in this day and age, is aimed at producing demoralised criminals. Nor is it the case that only secondary and tertiary education produce them. As the concepts of compulsory and state education have developed, so also has the ideology that is applied at all levels.

When, recently, I and my associates were resident in East London, we found that waiting for a train at a railway station exposed one to being the target of rocks thrown by children of primary school age, something that was unheard of when I lived in East London soon after the inception of the Welfare (or Oppressive) State. Although even then the ideology was far enough advanced to be severely damaging to the education of a person of exceptional drive and ability.

If I gave a seminar in Oxford on this topic, nobody would come, because I have no academic position or social status. This results from the damage inflicted on my life by the post-war educational and academic systems.