18 May 2007

Lessons in magic for gifted pupils

Extract from Daily Mail article:

The brightest 700,000 children in the country will be encouraged to apply for extra holiday lessons at their local university ... Academic high-fliers will be invited to study subjects as diverse as maths, creative writing and magic.

The £3.6 million scheme is part of a Government effort to counter concerns that bright pupils are not being challenged by the state sector. (Daily Mail, 12 May 2007.)

Compulsory education is fundamentally immoral and oppressive.

State education is immoral, oppressive, and a contradiction in terms because the majority of people desire the oppression of the individual.

A 3.6 million pound scheme is proposed so that children designated as ‘gifted and talented’ can be offered demoralising time wasting at summer courses at universities. But never mind how harmful this rubbish is to them. The real point is that it will lead to more money (freedom) being confiscated from taxpayers, including individuals such as myself whose supervised ‘education’ ruined their lives. My drives and needs to acquire usable qualifications were opposed and frustrated so that I was thrown out at the end with no way of making a career or even of ‘earning’ money, nor with any eligibility for social security. I could not say that I was ‘seeking work’ since I had no qualification for anything which I could realistically have done. So I was completely alienated from the oppressive society in which we live.

Those who have been left socially disabled by their ‘education’ should at least be exempt from taxation, and in practice I have paid plenty of it in my struggles to work my way out of the pit into which I was thrown fifty years ago.

I am reminded of John Stuart Mill’s father who did not want his son to go to school (even a private one) so that he would not acquire habits of idleness. Similarly, a realistic parent might not wish their child to go to summer school where they would become (even more) demoralised and acquire habits of purposelessness and woolgathering. But, of course, the main raison d’etre of such goings on is not so much to do harm to the children concerned as to squeeze the taxpayer still further, however disadvantaged he may already be by the harm that was done to his life by his own ‘education’.