No escape from state education

The basic moral principle is that one should avoid imposing on other people one’s own interpretation of the existential situation, and overriding their reaction to it. This principle is weakly, and occasionally, recognised in human societies, and best protected, more or less unintentionally, in capitalist societies in which you can only get other people to do anything for you if you are willing to pay for it. This does not mean that they will necessarily provide you with what you really want, but at least it avoids the socialist situation in which, in many important areas, such as health and education, you can only get what other people want to provide you with; in fact you may be forced to surrender your liberty entirely and submit to what they want to impose upon you.

At present it is possible, although very difficult, to opt out of the state educational system and let your child work at home, although you must still in many ways comply with state prescriptions about what will count as acceptable.

This, however, is coming to be regarded as unnecessarily permissive. Within recent years I have seen the view expressed that this loophole is no longer necessary, as the present state educational system is tolerant of all religious beliefs (this, apparently, is the only grounds on which objection to the state system could be considered acceptably valid). From this point of view, people can now have no justifiable reason for preferring any variant to the system provided by the state, and so it should be a legal obligation to ensure that one’s children are forced to attend the child-prisons, as required.

Baroness Delyth Morgan, debating this issue, argued that home schooling ‘could be a cover for child abuse.’ (Daily Mail, 20 January 2009)

This dubious logic may be generalised to any area in which the individual is free to do anything other than comply with the requirements prescribed by the state. He might take the opportunity to commit any crime or depravity that occurs to him. ‘Satan finds some mischief still, for idle hands to do’, as the 18th century hymn-writer said.

If people are not fully occupied with the necessities of staying alive, they may (it is feared) use their freedom to do something unacceptable, including finding out important things in science, especially if they are rich enough to be able to afford to do this independently of having a university appointment. So, better that there should be no freedom at all.

Of course, one may mention that state-provided incarceration may also be a cover for child abuse, which obviously includes any sort of programme of psychological warfare and undermining devised by teachers.

While ‘home schooling’ is considered an option that provides unnecessary freedom for the individual, it should be noted that it scarcely exists at present in the UK. While it is possible to claim that your child reading books at home constitutes ‘education’, as soon as you consider him ready to take an exam, you must invoke the approval of the education ‘authority’.

Personally I did not think of taking an exam as separate from the process of preparing for it, so someone like me would have tripped over the landmine straight away (even if my parents had home-schooled me).

It is very dangerous to have anything to do with an education ‘authority’. In fact, if you are forced into the clutches of one as soon as you want to take an exam, you cannot really be said to be opting out of the education system at all. Being allowed to spend less time in a school doing purposeless things which are not directly aimed at exam-taking does you little good if the time saved from demoralising purposelessness at school must be spent in demoralising purposelessness at home. As soon as you want to do anything for real, you have to fight it out with the local authority. But that is precisely what you may wish primarily to avoid in ‘opting out’ of the state educational system.

I conclude that although at present there is a nominal possibility of ‘opting out’ of state education, this is only a euphemism, and there is no real possibility of keeping clear of the dangers of contact with education authorities.

There should be a real possibility, but that would involve quite different arrangements to be made. Far from considering how the deadly clutch of the education authorities on the lives of their victims could be loosened, there is a drive to eliminate even the ambiguous possibility which exists at present.

Michael Gove and the bear pits

The right every child deserves, to be taught properly, is currently undermined by the twisting of rights by a minority who need to be taught an unambiguous lesson in who’s boss. (Michael Gove, Education Secretary, quoted in Daily Mail, 2 September 2011)

‘Rights’ and ‘duties’ are both fictitious, socially determined concepts, and actually are both forms of oppression. They do not arise from an individual’s own drives, or from the real threats of his physical environment. They arise from a social belief system about the drives an individual should have and how he should react to the threats of both the real physical and the real social environment.

Actually ‘rights’ are typically oppressive because they deprive individuals of the freedom not to take up their supposed rights, as well as depriving other people of freedom (by taxation) in order to pay people to enforce the rights of the individual: doctors to make decisions for him against his will, teachers to supervise the incarcerated multitudes, social workers and psychiatrists to induce the individual to find his ‘rights’ tolerable.

Complying with the rights imposed upon him without complaint is a ‘duty’, and of course a person can be blamed by the society around him for not fulfilling his ‘duties’. This is an artificial moral evaluation.

[Michael Gove] insisted it was clear that Britain’s social malaise had its roots in the breakdown of discipline in the home and the classroom.

No, the social malaise is the malaise of the Oppressive State, it is the inevitable consequence of socialist ideology, in which those who impose ‘rights’, such as teachers, become ‘the boss’.

The right of a child to go to school is now the duty of a parent to send their child to school, possibly against his will, and both the parent and the child are to be punished if this does not happen. This illustrates the absurdity of ‘rights’ in modern society.

A victim of the state education system comments:

‘The state of the education system in this country is rotten. Schools have become bear pits, where the bright and conscientious are held in contempt at best, and more likely to be attacked in numerous ways.

Celia Green’s brief analysis is a minute example of the material that we could publish on this and other subjects, and can be taken as an appeal for funding to allow Oxford Forum to expand as an independent university and challenge the disintegration of standards in this country.

We should be supported by every parent who has the least interest in seeing their children not come to harm, psychological and/or physical, by being in contact with the state education system.’

He knows the names of beastly flowers

The ideas that dominate modern educational ideology and practice have been incubating for a long time.

The idea, for example, that evidence of IQ (in the old-fashioned sense) was irrelevant, and had nothing to do with what a person was good at, was implicitly present in a book called The New Broom which my Uncle Harry had had as a boy and which I read at about 8, so it might have been written about 1900. In this book, someone refers to having seen a former schoolfellow sweeping the streets, and says, without any implication that anything had gone wrong and needed to be corrected, that this was a great surprise as this person had always excelled at school and they had all expected him to become Prime Minister. (How foolish they had been.)

In another episode in the book, a new master at a public school does some social engineering. Many of the boys are in the habit of going to the local pub for drinking, smoking and billiards (played for money, no doubt). This is seen as bad, and the new master goes and drags back a boy called Mansell, who is a prime mover in the goings-on. He is forced to play football, which at first he resists with a show of disinterest on the field, but into which he is eventually drawn by his natural aptitude for the game. He ‘could not prevent himself from being fast and clever on a football field’. So soon he is playing for the school and becomes a great team player and a prominent and feted member of the school community. At no stage is the idea expressed that he might be steered into some kind of academic pursuit rather than football.

The same idea, that school life is not, and should not be, about learning, is expressed in a poem in E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children, published in 1906. The poem is about a new boy at a school, who will soon come to know better.

He cannot wicket-keep at all,
He's frightened of a cricket ball.
He reads indoors for hours and hours.
He knows the names of beastly flowers.
He says his French just like Mossoo--
A beastly stuck-up thing to do--
He won't keep cave, shirks his turn
And says he came to school to learn!
He won't play football, says it hurts;
He wouldn't fight with Paley Terts;
...
Now Wigsby Minor says that Parr
Is only like all new boys are.
I know when I first came to school
I wasn't such a jolly fool!

Even as early as this, there is clearly a conviction that it is unnecessary to consider a person’s inclinations. Force him into the situation which will permit him to do what he should want to do, if he were the right sort of person, and he will change into that sort of person, or it is his own fault if he does not.

The antagonism to IQ, and the pressure that could be applied to individuals, became much greater in the Welfare State era, in which many parents were no longer paying directly for what was being meted out to their children, and could themselves be slandered and persecuted.

Even before the onset of state education and the Welfare State, several of those who became leading intellectuals had parents who thought it was a good idea for them to be preserved from, or only minimally exposed to, the school experience. Such as John Stuart Mill, Frederic Myers and Bertrand Russell.

Blank slates with 'interests'

copy of a letter to a voluntary worker

There are fundamental ways in which the modern ideology is against us; in its hatred of capitalism and its hatred of IQ. These are not so independent as they may appear to be and, as I think, arise from the same underlying hatred of centralised psychology.

In a letter to a potential supporter, which is already on my blog, I said that the forces which destroyed my education and my life were the same forces that are destroying civilisation.

The antagonism to exceptional ability is not expressed overtly. However, in fact everything is geared against it.

Consider the extraordinary, old-fashioned attitude expressed by the Reverend Mother who nearly managed to give me a chance in life by letting me take the School Certificate exam at 13. She was about 40 years older than me, so had lived a substantial part of her life in the pre-1945 world.

She was prepared to accept that there was such a thing as innate ability and to draw conclusions about how it would develop at later ages.

So in her testimonial to Oxford she said that she recommended me unreservedly. I was more than merely talented, she said, and certain to contribute significantly to the intellectual life of my time.

I was surprised at her being willing to express such certainty. However good I was at taking exams at an early age, how could you draw conclusions from that about what I would do as an adult? And, after all, I had no particular intention of contributing to anything; I thought that all I wanted to do was to do some research in some science or other, and probably write some books, the latter seeming to be a natural thing to do, although at that time there was nothing in particular that I wanted to express.

But, if you are prepared to trust your perceptions, maybe you can predict quite accurately how a certain type of personality will relate to its social environment in later life.

Attitudes quite different from the Reverend Mother’s were expressed by everyone else, both at the same time and earlier.

My father, fobbing me off from finding out how to take degrees in science subjects, and expressing no doubt the received wisdom of the local educational establishment, would say that I couldn’t tell from what interested me now what I would want to do later. Only the passage of many years could reveal this. Perhaps I would not want to do anything academic at all, or perhaps I would want to write books about the architecture of ancient Greece. So meanwhile I should not do what I thought I wanted to do immediately.

The modern attitude is that there are no individual characteristics, so nothing one does can be regarded as evidence that one might do much more if provided with opportunity. Also there is no longer any respect for the underlying common factor, which used to be called the ‘g’ factor, and which was recognised as the predominant factor in performance in any field.

Nowadays a fictitious factor of ‘interest’ is supposed to be all-important. So nothing I have ever done has to be regarded as justifying giving me opportunity to go ahead in any field on a more adequate scale than the best I ever had in the past, or on any scale at all.

However, as one observes people’s reactions in practice, it seems that any evidence of ability which one gives or has ever given is, subconsciously or otherwise, recognised as a threat that one might do something really significant if not bound hand and foot with barbed wire. So it is a justification for choking off every penny of support from every quarter.

Invitation to parents to come and work for us

There are plans to enable groups of parents to set up schools, as mentioned in the Daily Mail of Saturday 19 June.

Extract

Schools Secretary Michael Gove is set to unveil the government's 'free schools' policy today. Disused shops, vacant office blocks, old hospitals and even homes could be used as classrooms under ambitious plans to set up a wave of 'free schools'.

Planning laws will be relaxed in England to make it easier for parents, teachers, charities and other groups to open taxpayer-funded independent schools, the Education Secretary vowed yesterday. ...

Ministers in the Coalition are determined to smash the state monopoly on education by allowing communities to set up schools outside the control of local authorities. ...

A threshold of just 40 or 50 parents-would be needed for a primary-school bid. Groups applying to open a free school fill out a ten-page form setting out their aims and vision, possible sites for classrooms, teaching methods, a curriculum and proof of demand from families.

The first wave of schools are expected to open in September next year.

Invitation to parents

Anyone who has school-age children and is worried about what is wrong with most schools, as they may well be, should think of moving to Cuddesdon. If they were to do some voluntary work (or possibly paid self-employed work) for Oxford Forum, we could give them advice and suggestions based on our extensive experience of what can go wrong in schools and universities.

The ideology which has undermined state education to the point of making it worse than useless is highly pervasive. It is difficult to create an establishment which does not suffer from it, even if in a milder form, without thinking through the underlying issues more analytically than is done by newspapers or in educational 'research'.

More about home education

Home tuition loophole. Khyra’s mother and stepfather used home education as a cover for her horrific abuse. If parents wish to remove a child from state school to teach them at home, they simply have to notify the head teacher. By law, they must provide a ‘suitable’ education according to the ‘age, aptitude and ability’ of the child. But there is no requirement to follow the national curriculum or to provide a set number of hours of education. Local authorities can make informal inquiries to establish if parents are offering a suitable education. But the law allows parents to refuse to let officials see the education that is taking place. They simply have to show examples of the child’s work – with no need for the youngster to be present. *

The above extract is evidently implying that the degree to which individual liberty survives in the ‘educational’ system is regrettable.When I got the top scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, it was almost entirely on the strength of work which I had done under my own auspices and which the local education authority had not known about. I translated all four languages on the optional translation paper, having become proficient in reading languages by reading them. I had deliberately prepared myself for the General Essay papers by informing myself of the views of major philosophers of the past, and a Somerville don later said to me that my essay papers were the most remarkable she had ever seen. Even the maths, on which my marks would not on their own have got me the top scholarship, owed nothing to tuition from anybody or to the supervised courses which I had been forced to undergo, and which had not even been intended as ‘preparation’ for the specific purpose of taking university entrance exams.

It is a complete fallacy to suppose that ‘teaching’ necessarily has much relevance to outcome, or that conformity to the ‘national curriculum’ or ‘set hours’ of supervised ‘work’ would be a good thing in any individual case.

The contribution of the ‘education authority’ to my education was consistently negative, as it, or individual members of it, discouraged my father (a headmaster) from allowing me to take the School Certificate exams (normally taken at 16) when I was 13, then from supporting me in going to a post-graduate summer school at a French university when I was 15, and finally from supporting me in starting to take external degrees from London University when I was 16. On the other hand, they encouraged him to get me into supervised school and university courses against my will. I did not think they were relevant to my purposes and being forced to attend them was anything but beneficial.

Incidentally, the comments in the Daily Mail refer to the current law ‘allowing’ local authorities to make ‘informal’ enquiries in cases of home education, as though this were somehow less intrusive than ‘formal’ enquiries. I am not quite sure where a line could be drawn between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ enquiries in any case. ‘Informal’ ones can have sufficiently damaging effects on the life of the victim being ‘enquired’ about, as I know to my cost.

* Daily Mail, 26 February 2010.

Home education: a scapegoat for abuse

Yesterday’s Daily Mail reports the case of a girl of seven beaten and starved to death, in spite of the involvement of social services and the Education Department. “Beyond belief ... how 9 officials let a girl of 7 starve to death in a modern British city”*. As usual, instead of concluding that the entire philosophy behind ‘child protection’ is flawed, it is implied that the answer is to have even more intervention.

Because the girl was supposedly being educated at home, the finger is being pointed at the loophole whereby parents may choose to exclude their child from the state education system if they think the child would do better being taught at home.

Just because a child is forced to attend a state school does not mean anyone is going to notice more readily that it is being abused at home. People seem to be very good at ignoring the signs of real abuse, whether they are paid to notice them or not. This, one may think, is because people have no real motivation to prevent suffering, although they may have some to enjoy inflicting it. Paying them money and giving them powers of intrusion into other people’s lives does not affect their underlying motivation, and one may think that this is the real cause of the ineptitude of the collectivist ‘services’. There is no reason to think that providing them with even more money and powers of intrusion and interference will produce any more beneficial results.

Also, there is no reason to think that enforced attendance at a school would assist with the process of preventing real abuse from taking place. The girl did attend school for a while, and some concerns were raised when she was found stealing food from another pupil’s bag, but they did not result in any useful action. No doubt, however, a case such as this will be used as ammunition for eroding still further the liberty of the individual.

*Daily Mail, 26 February 2010.

Home Schooling

Baroness Delyth Morgan [a person called "Children’s Minister"] commissioned a report [at great expense to taxpayers] on home education, which alleges that parents could be using home education to mask sexual abuse and/or domestic servitude. (Daily Mail, 5 October 2009, Letters page, extract from letter written by Nikki Galbraith.)

But ‘teachers’ and education ‘authorities’ certainly are using the concept of ‘education’ to destroy the lives of both children and their parents, and no-one commissions me to write a report on that, although I have offered to do so.

Craziness in education

Not only is the possibility of teaching or tuition being a positive factor in someone’s education greatly exaggerated, but its negative potentialities (which may be very great) are overlooked.

I concluded retrospectively that everyone’s determination to make me do maths as a sole subject, and at far too late an age for taking a first degree, could only have arisen from their awareness, subconscious or otherwise, that this was the subject in which supervised courses of ‘preparation’ could have the greatest negative effect.

I got the top scholarship to Somerville not on the strength of the maths, in which I had been thoroughly turned off and messed around by being forced against my will to attend (and ‘do set work’ for) supervised courses at the Woodford High School and Queen Mary College.

I translated all four languages on the translation paper, and wrote essays on the general essay paper for which I had deliberately prepared by becoming familiar with the basic views of past leading philosophers. No school had contributed anything to speak of to my being able to do any of this, although I had had some lessons in French and a few in German. My facility in reading languages arose, at least in part, from my having identified for myself the readers which provided the most rapid access to doing so. I had likewise found for myself the books which gave the most rapid overview of everyone’s views on the most important issues, notably Will Durant’s Story of Philosophy, which gave the lives of leading philosophers of the past with a summary of their philosophical points of view.

At a Somerville social event while I was an undergraduate a don I did not know came up to me and said she remembered my essay paper in the entrance exam; the most remarkable she had ever seen.

Part of what made me successful (in the areas in which I might have been successful on social terms if not prevented from acquiring qualifications) was my exploratory attitude to the learning materials available, and skill in picking out the best.

Since the age of 13 I had found the idea of being forced to sit through lessons or lectures, and then being ‘set work’, horrific.

A Professor once asked me how long I was at the Society for Psychical Research and I said about four years; but that is not really meaningful unless you take into account my extraordinary speed of uptake in any new area of information. Four years was quite long enough for me to become better informed than anyone else about everything in ‘the subject’, as well as in related areas of psychology, psychiatry and electrophysiology that might contribute to progressive research, if that should ever be possible.

But there are not supposed to be any innate differences in ability, so it never has been taken into account that I could do much more than other people, and much faster, and that I not only could but needed to do so. Nor has anyone shown any recognition of how much progress I could have been making, and would have made by now, if not kept completely inactive; unless you regard the universality of the squeeze on me as a recognition that I could not be allowed to do anything at all, as I might make too much use of even the smallest freedom.

’We appeal for £1m as initial funding for a social science department in our unrecognised and unsupported independent university. This would enable it to publish analyses of the unexamined assumptions underlying current discussion of the philosophy of education.’ Charles McCreery, DPhil

’Any undergraduates or academics are invited to come to Cuddesdon (just outside Oxford) in vacations as voluntary workers. They are expected to have enough money of their own to pay for accommodation near here, but would be able to use our canteen facilities. However, we cannot enter into correspondence about arrangements before they come. While here, they could gain information about topics and points of view suppressed in the modern world, as well as giving badly needed help to our organisation.’ Celia Green, DPhil

‘Working Class Children Betrayed by Labour’

The Daily Mail is not much less obsessed with the ideology than any other newspaper. Today it has a front-page headline ‘Working Class Children Betrayed by Labour’, with the ridiculous first two sentences:

Bright children from poor homes are failing to get into university because of under-performing state schools and not class bias. That is the finding of a major study, covering hundreds of thousands of children, by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. (Daily Mail, 21 April 2009)

(And what did the major study cost, I wonder?)

Whatever is the point of getting to ‘university’ anyway, one might ask, if one were allowed to do so. What is it supposed to lead to? And if it does not lead to anything, what advantage is it supposed to be to the individual?

The campaign against people with high IQs and in favour of people with low IQs was well advanced in the 1940s and 1950s when it ruined my life. The only possible remedy is to abolish state education and compulsory education altogether. And I continue to be censored and suppressed by lack of salary and status.

Really bright children are unlikely to be dependent on schools for learning anything. Someone I knew at Somerville was found to be able to read when she went to school at five, although her mother’s hostility to her had led to her concealing this. She learnt Latin and Greek by reading the classics in the public library, outside of school hours.

Crazy crusade

Tendentious stuff continues to pour out of universities based on the unfounded assumption that there is no such thing as innate ability or genetically determined personality characteristics. Or perhaps one should say, founded only on wishful thinking.

The ‘critical obstacle’ to an official crusade to widen the social class mix of students is [state school students’] poor performance compared with private school pupils, it was claimed. In a veiled attack on Labour’s record, [Cambridge University] said it had failed to break the ‘pernicious link between deprivation and educational attainment’...

In an analysis, Dr Geoff Parks and Richard Partington said state schools were ‘unlikely’ to hit the target of accounting for over two-thirds of admissions to leading universities ‘unless their exam performance improves’ ... But, said Dr Parks and Mr Partington, the real barrier to top universities was an ‘uneven’ education playing field and the link between a child’s prospects and their social background.

The research follows a Commons inquiry which found that almost £400 million has been spent on boosting recruitment of working-class students to university with barely any effect. Cambridge’s intervention will rile Universities Secretary John Denham, who believes leading universities should do more to change their social make-up. (Daily Mail, 28 February 2009)

Well, of course there is an uneven educational and academic playing field. Exceptional ability arouses hostility in its egalitarian-minded teachers and tutors, both at school and at university.

It is easy to prevent the exceptional from demonstrating their ability realistically in exam results. It is also possible, though maybe less easy, by methods such as 'dumbing down', to improve the exam results of those with much less aptitude for academic activities, which may well be combined with little natural inclination to pursue them. Both procedures seem to be a standard feature of modern education, though their effects are apparently insufficient to satisfy the expectations of ‘researchers’.

A further £400 million of taxpayers’ money has been spent on making the position of the able in modern society even worse, while even the tiniest support is rigorously withheld from the relevant departments of my suppressed independent university, continuing to prevent it from publishing criticisms of such things as this tendentious report, which has the spurious claim to authoritativeness of coming from Cambridge, socially recognised as a ‘university’ and massively supported with taxpayers’ money.

Even a four-hundredth part of £400 million (0.25%), that is £1 million, if donated to my independent university, would enable it to contribute to current debates by writing and publishing a few books and articles for a period of 2 or 3 years. That would only be a drop in the ocean of what is really needed, but it would be a start and get us out of the deadlocked stasis in which we remain at present.

Children and Mill’s Principle of Liberty

As quite a young child I was under the impression that it was a basic principle of accepted morality and legislation that an individual's freedom of action should not be restricted except in so far as his actions might impinge upon the freedom of others.

A century ago this principle was to a large extent respected. Provided you kept the law you could make your own decisions, subject to the resources and opportunities you had, and could try to enlarge your resources and opportunities. The law, it is true, violated the principle by including some moral elements, such as a prohibition of homosexuality, which could scarcely be justified as restraining the infringement of the liberty of others, as between consenting adults. A law of this kind was evidently based on psychological grounds, that people doing things of this kind might generate disapproval in others, and persons should be protected from having to feel such things.

Although the modern world has repealed the penalties for homosexuality between consenting adults, this is scarcely likely to have been out of concern for individual liberty; more likely the repeal was made because sex is the modern opium of the people, it being supposed that if they are encouraged to fill their lives with such harmless distractions they will not notice more serious oppressions.

Nowadays legislation is frequently justified on statistical grounds: that we must bring about a state of affairs in which society as a whole is the way we (that is, the legislators) would like it to be. I first noticed this when a law was brought in prohibiting the taking of what are now called GCSEs before a person's sixteenth birthday. Even at the time, and before I realised how serious the effects of this would be on my own educational prospects, I thought this surprisingly immoral legislation. Surely a person was not doing anyone else any harm by taking an exam younger than the average? The only harm you could be said to be doing was psychological: it might make other people jealous. But then the acquisition of any benefit in life might make other people jealous. If you started to take psychological considerations such as this into account you could plainly justify practically any restriction of individual freedom of action. What other people would like best would be to see you living a dull, unambitious life, enlivened only by such diversions as they permitted themselves, such as the aforementioned opium of the people.

Another way this sort of legislation is justified is by reference to protecting people from themselves. Thus in this case, it may have been represented that children were being preserved from being made to work hard, or to 'cram', as previous legislation had preserved them from being made to climb up inside sooty chimneys in order to sweep them. This, however, leaves out of account all manner of individual differences, and does not allow the child or its parents the freedom to make a decision on the basis of his own abilities and temperament. The amount of effort that goes into preparing for exams is vastly different depending on aptitude and motivation.

Similarly people are supposed to be preserved from choosing the wrong pharmaceuticals for themselves, by being allowed to have only those which the doctor prescribes for them. They are not protected from the mistakes of the doctor, who cannot be supposed to have nearly the same interest in their wellbeing that they have themselves. Nor is the recipient allowed to use his own judgement to assess the likelihood that the doctor's prescription is more harmful than he would choose under his own steam, in the light of the doctor's stupidity, incompetence, sadism, lack of interest, love of power, etc.

The principle that an individual should be free to make his own decisions, subject only to their infringement in obvious ways of the freedom of others has, clearly, always been most vulnerable to abuse in situations of incapacity. There is an age before which an infant cannot make informed decisions for itself and must inevitably depend on its parents to make decisions on its behalf. In a similar way, a person suffering from physical illness may be really incapable of making decisions for himself; in an extreme case, he may be unconscious. There may be no friends or relatives around. The fact that education and medicine deal, in their most limiting cases, with individuals who are not in any realistic sense able to decide things for themselves has, of course, led to extreme abuse. In both state education and medicine (even, though to a marginally lesser extent, in private medicine) there is supposed to be a complete transfer of concern for the 'interests' of the individual to a social authority.

One secret of successful parenting

A book on “parenting” has been written, telling people how to help their child continue to tolerate his or her life in the children’s prison (known as a “school”) and to minimise some of the most obvious damage, physical and psychological, being caused by it. But the assumption seems to be that they should help the child to go on going through this instead of taking him away.

Whether it’s a minor incident or a more serious problem that is upsetting your child, start by tuning into his feelings so you can find out what’s happening ... He may be unusually quiet, aggressive or you might notice bruises ...

If your child hates school: School-related problems often come down to confidence ... Praise your child for packing his school bag, remembering to feed his pet or doing a school project – this will help him build up a repertoire of things he knows he’s good at. (review of Seven Secrets of Successful Parenting by Karen Doherty and Georgia Coleridge, Daily Mail 24 April 2008)

What parents should do is consider leaving the country, as well as taking the child away from school. Even being educated at home he would, in this country, be potentially liable to assessment and supervision by the local “education” authority.

Unfortunately for me, my parents also felt it was their responsibility to try to kid me along that I should find a way of reconciling myself to the arrangements being imposed on me despite my protests and against my will. I do not blame them for this, but I do blame those who encouraged them to side with the oppressive forces of society against their own offspring.

My parents had themselves grown up in the pre-Welfare-State world of the early decades of the twentieth century. They thought of teachers and people running the educational system as responsible, highly-principled middle-class people with at least moderately high IQs, with whom it was right for parents to cooperate.

They did not realise the world had suffered a sea change in 1945 when the Welfare State came in, and that nothing was as it had been before.

A world class warfare system

Some comments from a member of the education establishment:

I want to narrow the disparities between people’s attainment, between the highly motivated and the less well motivated, because I want everyone to have a bite at the cherry and a chance to do well ... What I want to ensure is that all universities are really part of a world class system. That means they all have to have resources concentrated on them, right across the board. (Tessa Blackstone, on BBC Radio 4, 26 March 2008, my emphasis)

Here again we find, sixty years after 1945, an overt expression of the motivation that ruined my education, my subsequent life and the lives of my parents (who also had high IQs and a lot of drive and conscientiousness). Also the prevalent social motivation, gaining strength with the passing years and decades, has continued to oppose my attempts to restore myself to a realistic relationship with the society in which I have the misfortune to find myself.

What is being aimed at is not universities being part of a 'world class system', but being part of a ‘class system’, that is, an instrument of class warfare. In effect, Tessa Blackstone is arguing that the greatest possible resources should be devoted to preventing those with higher IQs and strong motivation from achieving more than those with lower IQs and no noticeable motivation at all.

Those who represent the greatest obstruction to the egalitarian outcome are the exceptional; it follows that by far the easiest way to achieve greater equality of outcome is to eliminate the highly able and highly motivated from the picture. Thus, according to exponents of this point of view, those with the highest IQs and the strongest motivation should be thrown right out on the dungheap, and it should be made plain to them they have no place at all in modern society.

Reading is "not natural"

It seems that 2008 is National Reading Year: I wonder whether this is because the disfavouring of the ‘middle class’ that has proceeded apace since the inception of the Welfare State in 1945 has by now had a noticeable effect on the literacy of the population as a whole.

From a review of Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf (Financial Times Magazine 5 April 2008):

“Reading is not natural,” writes Wolf, a professor of child development: only a few thousand years old, reading is too new to be encoded into our genes. Which means we have to learn it the hard way.

I do not see that you can assume that. The human mind seems to have abilities for dealing with things that cannot in any obvious way have developed by evolution, that is, by natural selection in favour of aptitude for dealing with specific things of that kind.

It is acceptable for writers on child development to write about factors which may have an influence without mentioning innate intellectual ability, correlated with measurable IQ. But this is associated with the fact that it is acceptable, in a particular case, for people to interpret the situation in terms of the only factors which are explicitly taken into account.

As they did in my case. Whether or not reading was ‘encoded in my genes’, whatever was necessary for learning to read, very rapidly and without apparent effort, evidently was. As it was acceptable to interpret this as my parents ‘pushing’ me, it was interpreted in that way and this was considered justification for frustrating and opposing me and for persecuting my parents. This was several decades ago and I am sure that the tendency to adopt such interpretations, and to act on them in interfering in people’s lives, is no less, but almost certainly greater, than it was then.

To quote further from this review,

For some, their problems are a product of their word-poor upbringing: middle-class children have on average heard 32 million more words by the age of five than their less advantaged peers. This makes a difference: the best predictor of how easily a child will learn to read is how often they are read to as a toddler.

Perhaps for some, but for how many? I have known people who, living in the most middle-class and highly educated households, with a constant coming and going of influential and articulate people, remained unable to read until a relatively advanced age and would have been very unlikely to get grammar school scholarships. On the other hand, I have also known people who were deprived of attention as young children in unfavourable circumstances, but learnt to read at an early age and were, or would have been, highly placed in grammar school scholarship exams.

“The best predictor of how easily a child will learn to read is how often they are read to as a toddler.” But the majority of people with high IQs have attentive middle-class mothers, themselves with high IQs, who are likely to read to young children. It is not necessarily true that high IQ children who are read to frequently will learn to read much more easily, or earlier, than children with equally high IQs who are not read to at all.

Engineering students

According to the Daily Mail (28 March), over the last 8 years 10 billion pounds of taxpayers’ money has been spent on a campaign of working towards the Government’s target of having 50% of the population between the ages of 18 and 30 in universities, which includes of course ex-polytechnics.

The recruitment campaign is regarded as having failed because the population of university entrants is only 0.6 of a percentage point higher than in 1999.

Ministers had set a 2010 target of 50 per cent of young people entering higher education by the time they are 30. Official figures yesterday revealed that the proportion in 2006/7 was 39.8 per cent – down from 42 per cent in the previous year and only 0.6 percentage points higher than in 1999. …

Conservative universities spokesman David Willetts said: ‘At this pathetic rate of progress it will take a further 118 years to hit the Government’s target. We need to do far better to spread the opportunities for young people. Under this Government we are completely flat-lining.’

Of course, at the same time as encouraging the sections of the population with the lowest IQs and least academic aptitude to go to university, those with above average IQs (referred to as the ‘middle class’) have been increasingly discouraged, and are becoming disillusioned with the prospect of burdening themselves with debt for the sake of worthless ‘degrees’ which employers, including me, do not regard as any guarantee of competence in anything.

So, while the overall number of university entrants has scarcely risen, the proportion of lower IQs to higher IQs almost certainly has, and further attempts to promote ideas such as those expressed by David Willetts may well result in a complete exclusion of those with IQs above 140, or even 130, from university life.

Meanwhile, people with exceptionally high IQs, such as Charles McCreery, Fabian Tassano or I, cannot get even minimal salaries to enable us to contribute to the philosophical ‘discussions’ which go on, let alone pay for the institutional environment that we need to work in.

Even if we had a one-person salary apiece for working in our (socially unrecognised) independent university, it would not pay for the institutional environment that we need to work in, as well as the extra people (the equivalent of research students) to write papers on issues related to our own which we could also make very good use of.

An academic gets a lot out of his residential college with dining hall facilities etc which we have to pay for and work on maintaining for ourselves, so even with salaries we would not be as free to be productive as if we had a socially recognised residential college to live in.

Hooked on excellence

Joan Bakewell on her grammar school (Stockport High School for Girls):

The school was relentlessly competitive and selective. ... The six houses [named after "significant women of achievement”] competed for a silver cup awarded to "the most deserving house", the winner arrived at by compiling exam results with netball and tennis tournaments, house drama competitions and musical achievements. There were even awards for deportment — for virtually anything that could be marked. We got hooked: it became a way of life. ...

The rules were remorseless, dragooning us in every particular of behaviour. Uniform even meant the same indoor shoes for every pupil; hair-ribbons had to be navy blue. The school hat had to be worn at all times to and from school; girls caught without were in trouble. The heaviest burden was the no-talking rule: no talking on the stairs, in the classroom, in the corridors, in assembly — anywhere, in fact, except the playground. We were a silent school, shuffling noiselessly from class to class, to our lunch, to the cloakroom. ...

Among this welter of disapproval — conduct marks, detentions and, finally, a severe talking-to by Miss Lambrick [the headmistress] — physical chastisement was unnecessary. We were cowed long before things became that bad. The cane in the headmistress’s room was redundant. When a girl got pregnant — the worst conceivable crime — she was expelled without fuss before she could contaminate the rest of us. (quoted in David Kynaston, Austerity Britain, Bloomsbury 2007, pp. 566-567)

But, as Joan Bakewell says, ‘We got hooked: it became a way of life.’ And, as I observed it at my convent school, it did not seem too bad a way of life. I did not get the impression that most of the girls were suffering very much; children and young people do, I think, quite easily get ‘hooked’ on sets of rules and standards of excellence to apply to every aspect of their lives. Trying to keep all the rules as well as possible even produces a sort of centralisation (to use my own psychological term).

At least so far as my convent was concerned I do not think that ‘disapproval’ was the predominant attitude conveyed, or that the girls were ‘cowed’ in trying to avoid it. I got the impression that they got hooked on ‘being good’ and they felt ashamed and disgraced if they slipped up, but not in such a way that they became identified with being disgraced and gave up on trying to be an admirable rule-keeper.

Joan Bakewell is implicitly critical of her competitive and highly-organised school life, implying that there is some obvious ideal of which it falls short, or which it actively violates. This, I suppose, is an acceptable attitude, probably the only acceptable attitude at present towards any school that makes possible any kind of centralisation.

It may well be that fear of disapproval and punishment was a stronger feature of Joan Bakewell’s situation than it was at my convent, which was originally a fee-paying school, and had become a direct grant school which accepted a certain proportion of pupils with grammar school scholarships. Parents are more likely to pay for their children to attend schools that allow them to feel good about themselves than are agents of the collective acting through ‘education’ authorities.

Centralised psychology depends on distinguishing between what is under your own control and what is not. The reactions and evaluations of other people are not under your control, and it may be helpful in later life to be aware that people can be hostile and will make nasty things happen to you if they can catch you out in breaking one of their rules, which they will be motivated to do. So you need to concentrate on what you can do to help yourself by taking whatever opportunities you can to improve your position.

Schools which convey that anything goes, and that the worst that can be done to you is to be sent home and provided with a tutor at the expense of the taxpayers, may be a bad preparation for adult life.

One frequently hears of people who ruin their lives by incurring terrible penalties, such as imprisonment and the breakdown of their livelihood, as a result of attempting to break the law in flagrant ways with little apparent sense of danger; for example, the hapless couple John and Anne Darwin, who recently attempted to start a new and prosperous life in Panama on the proceeds of the life insurance payments resulting from the husband having pretended to be dead, while really living in a house adjoining his own, in which his wife was still living openly.

More 'research' on gifted children

Apparently there is a terrible place called "Research Centre for Able Pupils" (RECAP) at Oxford Brookes University. (See article ‘Is your child a genius’ by Sarah Harris, Daily Mail, 5 January 2008.) We are told that someone called Bernadette Tynan, formerly of RECAP, "has toured schools helping identify talented pupils for a Channel Five series, Make Your Child Brilliant, which starts on Thursday."

Before confiscating even more money from taxpayers for ‘research’ to be done by socially appointed oppressors of humanity, they should have devoted at least the same amount of money to restitution and reparation of those who have been deprived of a career, or even an acceptable means of livelihood, by the oppressive school and university system.

They should close this place now, and give me the money which is being spent on supporting it, so that I can set up at least a minimal institutional environment within which I and my associates can at long last have progressive and productive academic careers.

The same applies to the other appalling place, the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth at Warwick University (now taken over by the education department). If both were closed and the money given to me, I could proceed to make some use of my ability on a more adequate scale.

The money that is being spent on ‘helping’ the present generation of gifted children should first of all be spent on undoing the harm that has already been done to the lives of former gifted children, rather than doing ‘research’ on even more effective methods for destroying the lives of those with high IQs.

Usually discussions of whether or not treating gifted children, or any others, in a certain way is good or bad do not start by arguing about what are the correct assumptions to be made about the motivation of those concerned (this is usually assumed to be unquestionably benevolent). Instead the discussion is solely about whether the outcome of their attentions is to be regarded as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, again with plenty of unexamined assumptions about what is good or bad.

It is certainly possible to discuss the matter on these terms, but I know that nobody is likely to agree with my analysis of the psychological driving forces in the situation. So before doing so, let me first say that on what appears to be the basic moral principle, society should interfere as little as possible with the individual's freedom to evaluate for himself the various factors which affect his existential situation, and to react to it as effectively as his resources permit. On these grounds, compulsory education is immoral, and compulsory state education even more so.

But since we live in an oppressive society which has both compulsory education and state education financed by taxation, one would hope that those concerned in the educational system were trying to provide their victims with what the victims would wish to purchase for themselves, with their own money, if they were able to do so, and not to impose the providers’ own evaluations of the priorities of life, in an attempt to manipulate the outlook and behaviour of the victims. However, it is fairly obvious that the providers are often primarily interested in social engineering and ideological manipulation of all kinds.

There is no reason to assume that because teachers and educational experts have nothing to gain financially by frustrating and oppressing their victims, they will refrain from doing so, or will even, as is usually assumed, be motivated to bring about results that are advantageous to the victims.

There is every reason to think that many of those involved in education have ideological axes to grind; and even if they did not, they are in a position of so much power to influence what goes on in the lives of their victims, that it could hardly be expected that their subconscious motives would not have considerable influence on the outcome. Their motives are not necessarily purely ideological; they may simply prefer or dislike one type of person rather than another. In particular, jealousy of exceptional ability, exceeding their own, is likely to be a very influential force in the situation.

It now appears to be widely accepted that it is ‘bad’ for able children to constantly succeed, and that they need to be ‘challenged’.

On a website called ‘Gifted Exchange’, there is an example of this way of thinking.

Charles Murray [in an article called 'Aztecs vs. Greeks'] calls for the gifted to be given a challenging, classical education. He further states that we need to encourage gifted kids not to become just smart but wise. 'The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one’s own intellectual limits and fallibilities – in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today’s education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, “I can’t do this.” Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them.'

The editor of the site, Laura Vanderkam, agrees with this and says:

If anyone reads Aztecs vs. Greeks and decides to push for education that holds gifted kids’ feet to the fire, intellectually, then I’ll be happy.

This is just an incitement to those who are running the lives of gifted children to humiliate and frustrate them. Such people do not need any incitement.

PS
In the Charles Murray quotation he uses vague words, wisdom and humility, with confidence that these attributes (whatever is to be understood by them) can be produced mechanically by paternalistic manipulation, and by subjecting the victim to certain types of experience. What is really meant is that incipient centralisation* is to be opposed, and decentralisation enforced. The demand for gifted children to be ‘challenged’ is really a demand for any rudimentary centralisation to be destroyed. This is now a far more explicit part of the modern ideology than it was when it was so destructively applied to me.

* A state of psychology involving a sense of self-determination and identification with one's life. For more details, see link.

Truant child's mother is fined

From the Oxford Times of 12 October:

A mother has been given a £1,000 fine – the maximum penalty – for not sending her child to primary school in Abingdon ... after her six-year-old child missed almost 50 per cent of classes between February 19 and July 13 this year.

Barry Armstrong, Oxfordshire County Council’s manager for attendance and welfare said: ’This is not the first time we have brought court proceedings against parents who persistently fail to ensure their child attends school. In previous instances the penalty has been a spell in prison. If we are to continue to raise educational standards, we need the children to be at school. It is as simple as that. The law should be obeyed.’ …

Michael Taylor, headteacher of St Edmund’s Primary School – not the school that the six-year-old was attending – said: ‘I do feel we need to make a stand on this. Children’s education is suffering through absence from school. … I think this fine is just and necessary if we are to send out the right message.’

When we were based in North Oxford, we had various part-time voluntary workers, among them the Japanese wife of a Japanese DPhil student. Her daughter was going to a primary school in Oxford. This Japanese lady was a highly intelligent and very efficient person, and was concerned that her daughter learned very little at school. The little girl seemed to spend most of her time painting pictures, watching videos and going swimming. She was not unhappy, her mother said. Her daughter enjoyed doing all these things; it was just that she was not actually learning very much.

The mother had bought some books for home-teaching parents and made sure her daughter did some sums from them every evening, to make up for what she was not doing at school.

The little Japanese girl about whose life at school we were told was a few years older than the girl whose mother has been fined. It seems even less likely that a six-year-old was missing out on anything much in the way of gainful education when she stayed away from school.

Perhaps, for all one knows to the contrary, the girl was slightly precocious and was learning nothing at school on the days she attended, even if anything was being taught, because she was slightly in advance of her age group. In modern schools, a child would not have to be very remarkable to be in this position.

When I reached the school going age of five, the local primary school entreated my parents not to send me. There would be no way, they said, that they could explain to the other parents how it was that I could already do everything.

Myths about grammar schools

The fiction continues that the grammar schools provided a way in which bright working class children could rise in the world. Thinking back over the lives of my parents’ families in East London, I suppose that the time at which the grammar schools were of most use to at least somebody was when my parents got scholarships, and that was before they were state grammar schools. There were 16 scholarships in the Borough, so only a relatively small proportion of the children had them, there were two separate departments for boys and girls, and the school still had the standards and ethos of a private school of that time.

The sort of people who most obviously benefitted from this situation to some extent were my parents’ families, socially displaced people with aristocratic genes and with high IQs. It enabled such people to rise into white-collar but strictly lower middle class jobs, which the upper class would not have touched with a bargepole. My aunts and uncles were as successful as was permitted by their bad start in life, but the ones I knew were nearly all frustrated and complaining of their lives. One uncle, branch manager of an accountancy firm in Chelmsford, groaned wearily to my mother, ‘It is just a case of finding people’s missing halfpennies for them.’

Another uncle became Head of a Department at the Local Authority and won a scholarship in a national competition (for local government employees) to go to university – any one that would take him, but he refused to take it up. My mother, perhaps unrealistically, thought him perverse for not taking it up, but where would it have got him? As he said, he could not be sure that he would get his job back at the Local Authority if he left it, and he had no assurance that he would be able to get any job better than that, however well he did. He would be a mature student and there was no guarantee of an academic career.

I know that the modern unrealistic ideology wishes you to ascribe value to ‘taking’ a degree per se, without considering what you are doing it for, but it seems that my uncle did not, or not sufficiently to set his predictable career at risk.

Quotation from review of a pernicious and tendentious modern book on IQ, to which I am prevented by lack of financial support from providing a riposte:

“The brains of our nation,” Galton proclaimed, “lie in the higher of our classes” – precisely the assumption the 11-plus was designed to challenge. (John Carey in the Sunday Times *)

If the idea of the grammar schools was to show that only poverty prevented the working class from competing on equal terms with the aristocracy, I don’t think they did that.

* from a review (Sunday Times Culture section, 8 July 2007) of IQ: The Brilliant Idea That Failed by Stephen Murdoch.