24 January 2007

Schools and demoralised criminals

(copy of a letter)

As you know, I always notice when someone indicates agreement with something I have said, and I wonder what they may take me as endorsing when I do not endorse it at all.

You seemed to agree that schools are producing a population of ‘demoralised criminals’, so perhaps that means that you are in favour of ideas that schools, having become more boring and demoralising, and offering ever less scope for aspiration or ambition, should now superimpose on the existing system stricter discipline and regimentation, so that those who are least criminal and demoralised, as well as those who are those things most, will have their lives made even worse.

The modern solution to the consequences of socialism, taxation and intervention, is always more socialism, taxation and intervention.

In just the same way, having flooded the country with terrorists and immigrants, legal or otherwise, there will be ‘justification’ for greater interference with the liberty of the respectable non-criminal middle class by such means as identity cards and databases. Socialists say: ‘Why should they mind if they have nothing to hide, so long as only agents of the collective can access the data?’ But who is to say that agents of the collective will be any more scrupulous and any less spontaneously destructive than the agents of the collective in the educational and university systems who have slandered and persecuted me throughout my life, and my parents until they were dead?

It should not be necessary to discuss what schools ‘should’ be like. Schools are a very dubious concept anyway; that they were ever invented shows how nasty the human race is, and compulsory education is clearly absolutely immoral.