Myths about early development

copy of a letter

You once quoted to me the received view that very early indications of precocity are meaningless, because ‘there are all sorts of anomalies in early development’, and I replied, ‘That is what they like to say.’ I do not take any assertions by socially appointed experts on education, IQ, child development, etc. as anything but indications of what the agents of the modern oppressive ideology would like to believe is the case, and there is no reason why that should have anything to do with objective reality.

However, this particular opinion certainly does express what they would like to believe and it is what they already wanted to believe at the inception of the Welfare State and before it, so that all concerned in my education were primarily motivated to prevent any later indication of my real exceptionality arising. If that should happen to leave me with no usable qualification at all with which to earn a living they would be only too pleased; all that mattered was to prevent any evidence arising that my early precocity had not been a flash in the pan but simply a natural expression of my real IQ.

My parents, doing their best to play along with this, had suppressed information about my early life and kept me in a state of suspended animation from 6-11. The reason I nearly got a break and a chance in life at the convent was because one or two people there, unaware of my early history and the significance of my marks in the scholarship exam, were not fully in focus on the need to keep me suppressed. I was in a relatively downtrodden state, having been marking time for five years, and could not at first have appeared too pleased with my life or with myself, being constantly apprehensive of the hostility which I aroused among the girls.

I think the reason it is regarded as so important to reject very early precocity from consideration is that it is actually the most incontrovertible evidence of innate ability. If you are really exceptional at 1 or 2, then you are really exceptional and some explanation should be provided of what has gone wrong if you appear less exceptional at a later age when the environment has had more opportunity to interfere in your life. Of course, a person’s very early circumstances may be so bad that the most exceptional ability has little opportunity to show itself, although it is nonetheless there, but if it does show itself early there can be no doubt of its continuing presence.

I might not wish to have a Department of Education in my independent university if it were not that so much that is actively untrue and pernicious is being promoted, but as it is, it is deplorable that my Department is being suppressed and being prevented from criticising what is being produced by (all?) other Departments in this area.

The Office of "Fair Access"

Apparently there is now an Office of Fair Access (meaning to universities). As usual, ‘fair’ refers to some underlying and unquestionable assumptions, such as that all differences in ability or temperament are the result of environment, and that it is right to try to iron these out, so that equality of outcome is achieved.

How about an ‘Office of Fair Reparation and Reinstatement’ to rectify the positions of those (such as myself) who are left without a qualification with which to enter any career that is possible to them? This is using the word ‘fair’ in a different sense, referring to what is really the case, and not what people who believe in the modern ideology would like to think was the case.

As usual, it is necessary to emphasise what people like to overlook; that a person left without a single usable qualification (that is, of use to them as the sort of person they are) is even debarred from the minimal income that might be derived from so-called ‘social security’. Such a person cannot draw income support because he is not in a position to ‘seek work’ as he is not qualified for any work which he could actually do.

The ‘educational’ system does not admit to any responsibility for providing the individuals subjected to it with qualifications suitable to their career needs, or commensurate with their ability. It cannot do so because innate ability is not supposed to exist, and differences in attainment which arise from, or can be ascribed to, environmental influences are there to be ironed out, in pursuit of equality of outcome.

If differences of ability were admitted, it would not seem too difficult to understand that a person with the most exceptional academic ability might have an absolute need for the most high-flying type of academic career and, in reality, could not have any other.

As it is, this is not understood and it is rigorously excluded from consideration, because the educational system wants to be perfectly free to destroy the prospects in life of the most able.

Peddling propaganda

Yesterday's report on British education from the independent think-tank Civitas represents a dispatch from the battlefield describing a national catastrophe. It is no surprise that pupils learn so little, say its authors, because so much curriculum time has been hijacked for the peddling of propaganda about racism, gender awareness, environmentalism and suchlike.

The High Master of St Paul's, an outstanding independent school, warns of the "terrifying absence of proper science" in the new GCSE syllabus, which is all that a modern generation of 16-year-olds is deemed capable of learning -and all, indeed, that their teachers are thought capable of teaching. ... During a recent training day for English A-level teachers, a senior examiner asserted that it is necessary to "batter out of students" the idea that there is any "correct" way of speaking English. ...

In the adult world, the gulf between educated and uneducated people is widening relentlessly. As unskilled jobs are outsourced to Asia, the future grows ever bleaker for children of any nationality who lack meaningful qualifications. Yet not only are pupils learning less than they did a generation ago, the educational establishment is also committed to principles, entrenched behind a great wire entanglement of demented ideals, which ensure that things will get worse. ...

University lecturers today demand a boycott of Israel because it oppresses the Palestinians. Yet these same ringmasters of intolerance preside over an educational system close to collapse not for lack of cash, but for lack of sanity. ... The educationalists have committed a form of child abuse all the more pernicious because, though tried and convicted on the evidence of their actions, they will never face a court. Until they can be defeated and expelled from authority and influence over British schools, our children will never begin to learn the things which are indispensable to membership of an educated society. (from ‘Education today is a form of child abuse’ by Max Hastings, Daily Mail, 12 June 2007)

The ‘educational’ system is doing exactly what it is intended to do, destroying the lives of those with above average IQs who might contribute to the advancement of science, culture or individualistic ideals.

There is no point in criticising the state educational system for its failure to impart knowledge or skills. It is reducing the freedom of the more functional and moralised sections of the population by heavy taxation and ensuring that it disgorges a largely unemployable and criminal population to make the position of the former ‘middle’ and ‘upper’ classes still worse, since they will find it almost impossible to employ them as servants in capacities in which they might have been able to operate satisfactorily, while their property and persons are at ever-increasing risk from vandalism and mugging.

It is a complete fallacy to suppose that modern society has less need for ‘unskilled’ workers than in earlier centuries. Little of what was taught in old-fashioned schools was of much relevance to most of their pupils in their adult careers.

It is not that people now need special forms of expertise in order to be employable; this idea has been around for over a century and its real motivation was, and is, to deprive those with high IQs of ancillary support staff within their households. The objective is to provide people with pretentious ‘qualifications’ to that they will consider it beneath them to do anything that is actually useful for anybody else.

They are, of course, heavily indoctrinated with egalitarian and anti-individualistic ideology, which is all that the educational system is really there to impart.

There is no solution but the abolition of state education and of compulsory education altogether.

Bright student found dead

Edward Field, 20, was missing for ten days before police found his body. His family and friends had searched for the chemistry student at Bristol University and used Internet networking sites to try to find him.
...

Mr Field, whose family live in New Malden, Surrey, is understood to have been worried about his end of term exams, although a spokesman for Bristol University described him as ‘exceptionally’ clever.

Last night a close friend said: ‘Ed was a really bright boy with everything to live for. ‘Exam stress may have played a part in what happened but there are a lot of different pressures in student life and it is impossible to know.’ (from ‘Student worried over exams found hanged in woods’, Daily Mail, 29 May 2007)

Being ‘exceptionally clever’ is certainly no reason why an undergraduate should not be stressed about a university exam. He may have needed to do exceptionally well in order to proceed to the sort of exceptional and rarely obtainable career which he needed to have.

Those who are not exceptionally clever are much more likely to feel that, whatever their exam results, they will be able to get by in whatever sort of life is available to them in modern society.

It has been recognised by authorities other than me that the correlation of academic success with IQ breaks down at the highest levels of IQ. It is also recognised (but as far as I know only by me and other people here) that those with the highest IQs may have the greatest need for careers that can only be obtained by the highest academic success (and not necessarily even then).

It is also recognised (by me) that high IQ arouses hostility and it is easy for teachers and tutors to use their hostility in ways that are very effective in damaging a person’s prospects.

Why was this undergraduate, if really exceptional, at Bristol instead of Oxford or Cambridge, and taking his degree at so late an age? This suggests that his life may already have gone seriously wrong in the same way that mine did, although it is unlikely that he was so extreme a case.

He had been at Bedales public school, and we know that people from public schools are discriminated against. Perhaps that was why he was not at Oxford or Cambridge. And perhaps his tutors wanted to make him feel “challenged” (or, rather, undermined).

The fact that a “close friend” finds it “impossible to know” what he was stressed about is not particularly enlightening either way. My closest “friends” at Somerville had no insight whatever into my position when I was thrown out with a second-class degree. After that had happened their remarks were extremely misleading, if not positively slanderous.

"Making state schools fit for all children"

In the Mail on Sunday (27 May) David Cameron says he will ‘make state schools fit for all children – including mine.’

State schools can never be made fit for any children because it is fundamentally immoral to deprive an individual of the liberty to make his own evaluations of the uncertain existential situation and deploy his own resources to react to it in what seems to him the best way. (Basic Moral Principle.)

Now it is true that state education may appear to be very bad even to a person who takes into account only a few of the crudest principles. But even if on these very crude criteria (literacy, juvenile crime) it appeared to be ‘good’ it would still be morally wrong, and would be having bad consequences which were less quantifiable. Even if it could be ‘proved’ that it had no bad consequences of any kind it would remain morally wrong.

In fact, it is only on superficial and rationalised grounds that it is admitted to be ‘bad’. Actually it is doing precisely what it is really aimed at, making life as difficult as possible for the functional and formerly respectable high IQ individuals.

What could be more appropriate than that such an individual should be forced to pursue the aims of his highly-taxed life among an unemployable and criminal population?

‘We need ... schools ... that deliver the goal of a truly socially mobile society’ says Cameron. And what does that mean? Rapid descent for the high IQs, I suppose. But it has already happened quite a lot, and is still happening fast enough. There is really no need for any further acceleration.

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’.

Grammars don’t help the poor, claim Tories

Extracts from a Daily Mail article:

The Conservatives distanced themselves further from grammar schools last night, claiming they do not help bright children from poor backgrounds. David Willetts risked infuriating traditionalists on the Tory Right by saying selection in schools widens the gap between rich and poor. ...

Last night Mr Willetts, the Tories' education spokesman, reinforced the message by claiming that a return to grammar schools would widen the gap between rich and poor. He rejected the long-held Tory view that academic selection is the best way to raise standards in schools and vowed the Tories would do more to develop Tony Blair's city academy programme than Gordon Brown.

Mr Willetts told the Confederation of British Industry yesterday: "We must break free from the belief that academic selection is any longer the way to transform the life chances of bright poor kids. "We have to recognise overwhelming evidence that such academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it. A Conservative agenda for education will not be about just helping a minority of pupils escape a bad education." ...

Left-wing Labour MPs and teachers' unions have urged Mr Brown to dump city academies, which are built with private sponsorship. ... However, Mr Willetts promised to open more if the Tories returned to power. He said Mr Blair's academy model of privately-sponsored independent state schools was "a powerful route to higher standards"... In exchange for up to £2million in sponsorship, private backers from business or faith groups can set up an academy ... The Government pays school running costs and the rest of the expense of opening new buildings — typically about £25 million. (Daily Mail, 16 May 2007)

A return to grammar schools would widen the gap between rich and poor? But doesn’t he really mean the gap between above-average and below-average IQs? Grammar schools would fail to inhibit the academic success of those with above-average IQs so effectively as do the present comprehensives, which are better at preventing the difference between high and low IQs showing up in academic achievement.

‘Such academic selection entrenches advantage, it does not spread it.’
I.e. it does not spread it very, very thin like melted butter applied with a palette knife, so that it is no good to anybody.

The Conservative agenda will not, it is said, ‘be about helping just a minority of pupils escape a bad education’. Well, yes, those with high IQs are in a minority, quite a small minority. Fifty years ago, those classified as ‘gifted’, approximately corresponding to potential university graduates, constituted about 3% of the population. And we certainly must not allow the tiny minority with the highest IQs of all, over 150 or 160, say, to escape a bad education. They should have as bad an education as anybody else, in fact they will need to be discriminated against, to ensure (as nearly as possible) equality of outcome.

Not that I advocate grammar schools. I first became aware of the modern hostility to ability at the age of 14, when I was sent to a state grammar school and forced to remain there for a year against my will. What I advocate is, first of all, the abolition of state education altogether, and then of compulsory education.

And I advocate also that instead of encouraging private backers from business or faith groups to apply the resources which they have available for charitable giving to setting up city academies, they should devote them to helping those who have been ruined by their ‘education’ to recover from the damage done to their lives by making donations to my organisation, an incipient independent university supported by a cooperative entrepreneurial empire. [Still kept so small and insignificant by hostility that it can be misrepresented as a group of individuals who are so enthusiastic for particular preoccupations that they have freely chosen to live in poverty and constriction in order to ‘follow their interests.’]

So-called critics of state education

From the archives: A letter to the education correspondent of a national newspaper (1998)

Dear ...

Thank you for your telephone enquiry.

In the information pack which I have already sent you, there is included a copy of a letter to an educational expert. He was one of two, of the sort who pontificate on television, whom I met by being invited as one of the speakers at an undergraduate society meeting about free market education. (He is a proponent of market-based education; I was going to advocate the complete abolition of state education.)

Over dinner with them, I anecdotalised about my education in order to pick up their reactions, which were very interesting. They were soon begging not to hear any more of my stories, became fairly insulting, and left without their puddings. They said to the host as they left that they couldn’t take any more (out of my hearing, but he told me).

I had a friend with me who was a relatively disinterested observer of my interactions with them and found their unveiled hostility surprising. She described them as reacting as if they had had their bluff called. I felt that, in their place, whatever my real feelings, I would have put on a better act of professional interest.

The conversation was mostly about the education of gifted children. I know one is never supposed to believe there is a conspiracy, and in a way I don’t, because I don’t think they had ever conferred together and agreed that such and such a policy would be very good at ruining the life of a precocious child. But asking myself whether they would have reacted any differently if there had been a consciously worked out agreement to damage the chances of precocious children by adopting certain policies and attitudes, I could not think of any difference that I would have expected.

They reminded me of one thing: there is a principle that you never blame schools or local authorities for any harm they have done, or expect them to make any effort to repair the damage to a victim’s life. It is certainly a case of power without responsibility. The educational experts were eager to blame me for my ruined education, or my parents, but showed not the slightest inclination to sound critical of a school or local authority, whatever I told them.

Of recent years some people have got the idea of suing their schools for loss of earnings caused by inadequate reading skills or exam results. Actually it would be very useful to me if I could sue the educational system for a suitable sum (someone at Mensa suggested £500,000 for loss of my own and my father’s earnings, plus something for emotional distress, but I think £1,000,000 would be more nearly adequate, and a more useful sum for setting up a Research Fellowship at a college which, it could be specified, I would hold for life in the first instance, thus overcoming the retirement rule.)

It should be recognised that a second class degree is no degree at all if what you need is to make a career in the academic world, and a person with an IQ of over 180 may actually need what is tendentiously called an 'accelerated' education. Some responsibility should be felt for providing such a person with an education sufficiently suited to his ability to leave him qualified at the end to enter the sort of career to which he is suited.

As my state school headmistress said to me, 'not everyone can take exams young, so it is an unfair advantage if someone is allowed to.' As I did not say to my headmistress, but thought afterwards, 'if you can take exams young, and are not allowed to, that may be a unfair disadvantage.'

The oppressors becoming the oppressed?

One in three teachers is turning to drink, drugs, smoking and binge-eating to escape the pressure of their jobs, a survey revealed yesterday. Some are even being driven to suicide, the National Union of Teachers was told.

Troubled staff are ... blaming excessive workloads, relentless Government initiatives, the stress of Ofsted inspections, ‘bullying’ heads and rising indiscipline among pupils. ... John Illingworth, a former NUT president ... read from a letter from the wife of a headmaster who became depressed after a critical inspection ... ‘He [the headmaster] was a complete mental mess. I now see he had given up on life altogether. Two months later he ended it.’

(‘Stressed teachers driven to drink, drugs and death’, Daily Mail, 11 April 2007)

An oppressive system in which people are deprived of their freedom of action can only be maintained by ever greater oppression. The oppressors (in this case teachers) are themselves oppressed by the difficulty of imposing their will (or the will of collectivist society) on a resentful population. Therefore, no doubt it will be suggested that the oppressors must be protected by repressive measures directed at the oppressed and the parents of the oppressed.

If you really want to help the gifted ...

The following was left out of my January press release about the proposals to provide gifted children with additional "resources", because it would have made it too long, and because I had no reason to think anyone would take any notice of what I (former gifted child) think would be beneficial, compared to what "trained experts" on the subject of giftedness think. As with all other socially appointed "experts" in the modern world, one may ask "trained in what?" — clearly in what society at large wants to think about the topic in question. This does not necessarily have anything to do with what is really the case, and often appears to be related to it as an inversion designed to suppress an unacceptable reality.

Dr. Green proposes an alternative scheme:

What I would suggest is that children be provided with the possibility of greater real autonomy. Academic exams should be something that can be worked for and taken without dependence on the permission of a school, and wherever possible without dependence on attendance at an institution, although in subjects where there is a genuine need for practical work as part of the course, such as physics or chemistry, there would need to be some method of access to centres where this practical work could be done.

Children should be able to enter themselves for exams without having to seek permission from parents, teachers, doctors or any other adult authority, at least after a certain minimum age which could be on a sliding scale related to performance in a standard IQ test. An average child should be free to enter himself for exams at the age of, say, ten; the equivalent qualifying age for a child with an IQ score of 180 would be five-and-a-half.

How would children know of their opportunities? This should present no insuperable obstacles to a society which is constantly informing citizens of their ‘rights’ to obtain benefits etc. We could not rely on teachers or parents spontaneously to inform children of the examination system, but we could have the address of an information centre prominently displayed in every junior public library and after children’s programmes on the television.

A new association for gifted children could be set up which would pay the examination fees for children whose parents refused to do so, or whose school refused to let the required exam be taken under its auspices. Any child able to score as having an IQ of more than 130 would be entitled to the fees for any six GCSEs and any 3 A-levels at any time. Any exam the child passed would entitle it to the fees for one further exam at the same level. Any child who didn’t qualify for free entrance on the grounds of IQ, or who failed too many to have any further entitlement, could go to earn the necessary money at a special work centre where children could earn money – the same sort of idea as workshops for the disabled where they can earn small amounts by addressing envelopes, making baskets, etc. The rate of pay would not need to be very high as the children would still be being supported at home; they would only need a way to earn money for any exam fees that were not provided for them free.

The new association for gifted children could also make available computerised and correspondence courses of instruction which could be purchased with money earned in this way or obtained from parents or relatives. This would supply learning material for those who did not think the ‘teaching’ which they happened to be receiving at school provided them with what they needed to prepare for a given exam, together with the standard textbooks, and samples of past exam papers.

The choice is: school or prison

Extracts from ‘Fines or prison may be used to keep pupils in class to 18’ (Daily Mail 23 March 2007) with some comments by me in italics.

Under Alan Johnson's plan children starting secondary school next year will be the first generation expected to stay in education or training until they reach 18. Teenagers face £50 on-the-spot fines and even jail if they refuse to stay in education until they are 18, it has been revealed ...

[Alan Johnson’s] proposals will have massive implications for employers, particularly small firms which rely on low-wage teenagers. Bosses face criminal sanctions if they refuse to release teenagers for training and so do parents who put children aged 16 to 18 to work in the family business without sending them off for training ...

In a green paper titled Raising Expectations, Mr Johnson outlined four options for over-16s - school, college, apprenticeships or work-based learning. [No mention, of course, of correspondence courses which do not expose a person to direct social hostility. The Open University is not open to those under the age of 18.]

Youngsters employed for at least 20 hours a week would need to do part-time study totalling 280 hours a year. ... Schools, colleges and employers providing training would be placed under a duty to report youngsters if they drop out.

Those persistently refusing offers of education and training would be handed 'attendance orders' setting out where, when and how often they should turn up. Like anti-social behaviour orders they would bring criminal sanctions if breached. ... Mr Johnson insisted: 'No youngster would be in the criminal area of the law unless they are very hardcore and we have gone through a very very fulsome process, including counselling.' ["Counselling" — deprivation of liberty so as to have one’s mind exposed to brainwashing.]

My comments

Terrible things are going on. The appalling proposals for accelerating the breakdown of civilisation pour out faster than I can put even a few comments about them on my inconspicuous and widely ignored blog. Now they propose to deprive everyone of their freedom of action until they are 18. If people had any awareness of the importance of liberty as an abstract principle there would be rioting in the streets.

There seems to be even less outrage at this idea than there was when the school-leaving age was raised from 15 to 16. But at that time most journalists had themselves been educated before the inception of the Welfare State in 1945; nowadays most journalists have themselves been brought up within it.

I believe that when income tax came in at a penny in the pound someone is supposed to have commented, ‘This is the end of civilisation’. For a long time this was quoted as a funny old-fashioned attitude, because everything seemed, in most people’s eyes, to be proceeding in an acceptable way. But I must admit that by now it seems blatantly obvious that if someone said that, he was right, and even if no one said it, it is true. The idea of any supposed benefit being provided by the state, and financed by the reduction of liberty of individuals, can only lead to ever-increasing oppression and persecution.

If you can get a supposed or real benefit only if you can afford to pay for it yourself, you are at least protected from being placed at the mercy of what other people with to impose upon your life instead of what you might, if you could, choose to pay for.

People brought up in the modern world scarcely ever question the unexamined assumptions which are universally made, and which it is taboo to question. It is assumed that education is ‘a good’, so anything that goes under that name is unquestionably ‘a good’, and more of ‘a good’ must be ‘better’ than less of it.

Compulsory education came in at the end of the 19th century, adding to the writing on the wall that resulted from the inception of income tax; then there was female suffrage, then the Welfare State in 1945. Now, sixty years later, we are reaping the whirlwind that has resulted from those events.

More timewasting for the "gifted"

I see they are going ahead with their absolutely horrific proposals to provide even more expensive interference in the lives of any child with an IQ slightly above average. It is very unlikely that the type of ‘educational’ facilities proposed — lectures, classes, groups, summer schools etc — will actually be advantageous rather than disadvantageous, even for those with the lowest IQs in the top 10% of the population.

This is the time-wasting type of ‘educational’ activity (what they call “stretching not pushing”, and “facilitating not spoon-feeding”) . What is really preventing all and sundry from getting anything out of their ordinary ‘schools’ is not that there is not enough ‘teaching’ but that there is too much (in the modern sense of the word). It is simply designed to demoralise, and extra periods of demoralisation provided at the taxpayers’ expense will be no good for anybody (except in the sense of ‘good’ used in "there is no good injun but a dead injun").

If someone with an IQ of 120 or so manages to get to a timewasting and demoralising university after running the gauntlet of this sort of education at school with extra timewasting specially provided, it will be in spite of, not on account of, this extra handicap.

I hope, at any rate, it will be possible for victims of the scheme, or their parents on their behalf, to refuse to expose themselves to these ‘opportunities’. Cigarettes and investments have to carry risk warnings, and the same principle should be applied to ‘educational opportunities’, invitations to which should be accompanied by a warning, ‘Accepting this invitation may do you (or your child) harm and not good, and may do irrevocable damage to your (or his) prospects in life’.

Home Education

Record numbers of parents are choosing to teach their children at home amid mounting disillusion with state schools, the Government’s own research revealed yesterday. ...The study, commissioned by the Department for Education, suggests the numbers of home-schooled children have almost tripled since 1999 despite the boasts of ministers that state schools have improved. ...

By law, parents who shun the school system must ensure their child receives a ‘suitable’ education according to ‘age, aptitude and ability’. ... Local education authorities are legally required to check on home-educated children who have been taken out of school. Their inspectors can force youngsters back to school if they are not being properly taught.

However, the law also gives parents the right to refuse to ‘present’ their children for monitoring. As a result, they do not have to submit to any checks by the authorities throughout their child’s home schooling.

Most children who do go to school are starting at the age of four — a year earlier than the official beginning of formal education. ... The survey by the Times Educational Supplement prompted warning that increasing numbers of children are starting formal schooling before they are ready — in the rest of Europe it does not happen until the age of six or seven. (From ’150,000 children educated at home’ Daily Mail 24 February 2007.)

My comments

Difficult, if not impossible, to believe that a child can really be got off the hook just by its parents de-registering it with the source of all power and oppression.

What happens about the exam-taking? Can you really get your child accepted at some exam-taking centre without it falling back into the power of the ‘authority’? And practicals, as ever, are a stumbling block. Can you arrange for your child to do the work at a place that can suitably certify it for exam purposes without it becoming the business of the local ‘authority’?

Afterthought

A very good thing that parents educating children at home could do, if they had any sense, would be to come and live nearby and offer voluntary work to my beleaguered academic institution in administrative and other useful capacities. If we were receiving enough such help, it might enable us to provide learning materials for various subjects, including, possibly, classes on investment and other forms of business enterprise.

But the snag is that such parents, like everyone else in modern Britain, have learnt that no help should ever be given to individuals with high IQs, even if it might turn out advantageous to themselves to do so.

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.

Middle class students

Middle-class students [euphemism for: those with above-average IQs] emerged as the hardest-hit by rising tuition fees as universities warned of further increases. Official figures showed demand for college places hitting record levels despite the introduction of £3,000 a year ‘top up’ fees last September. But the increase was lowest among youngsters from better-off families — the students who miss out on grants and most of the bursaries designed to cancel out the fee increase for the poorest students.

Leading universities are already pressing for the limit on fees to be raised still further within two years — it is due for a review in 2009. They say tuition fees would have to double or even triple to cover the cost of degree courses. (Daily Mail 15 February 2007)

My comments

It is a long-standing policy of modern society to favour the poorest students (poorest in both senses, since high IQ and autonomous drive are correlated with having successful or ‘middle-class’ parents). This follows from the fact that the primary objective of modern society is to destroy exceptional individuals, who would be likely to be the most successful were they not discriminated against.

This is really a form of genocide, more concealed than that of the Nazi holocaust, since its objective is to reduce the presence in the population of representatives of ‘superior’ gene pools.

But making entry to ‘higher education’ difficult for those with above-average IQs could be a blessing in disguise for those who can overcome their social conditioning sufficiently to realise this. Going to university no longer has any point, and I would not recommend it to anyone without consideration of the special factors that may be present in their case.

This place (Oxford Forum) is a Noah’s Ark, and those who perceive the hopelessness of a normal career, taxed from cradle to grave, followed by living on a pension that is ‘withering on the vine’ as well as being means-tested, should think about coming to join my incipient independent university cum business consortium.

The feminisation of education

Extracts from ‘The lost boys’ by Jill Parkin

The swimming bag hit the car floor with a thump and my son hit the car seat with an even bigger thump, grumbling: ‘What’s the point?’ His primary school had just lost a swimming competition, largely because their head teacher had picked a team on the basis of enthusiasm rather than ability. To paraphrase that old cliché, it wasn’t the winning that mattered, it was the taking part.

The story of my son’s swimming competition is also the story behind yesterday’s figures showing that boys going to university are now outnumbered by girls in every subject, with 23,000 more places awarded to women than to men. The simple truth is that by the time our boys have done 12 or even 14 years in the feminised environment of today’s schools, they all ask: ‘What’s the point?’

The problems start in the classroom. Instead of the make-or-break sprint to the exam deadline, boys have to endure stultifying coursework. This system of continuous assessment means that anyone who can call up Google on a computer can cut and paste answers from the internet at home. Girls, with their more patient approach to learning, thrive under such a system. But where’s the challenge and excitement for boys? Exams used to be a chance for them to show off and think on their feet. Not any more. No wonder all too many of them fall by the wayside, and are opting out of the chance to go to university.

It’s a teacher truism that little girls want to please and little boys want to win. The trouble is that our whole system is geared to a strange idea of egalitarianism which has somehow been confused with fairness. It is egalitarian to put anyone who can float in a swimming gala, but it is not fair to those who can swim and want to compete.

Boys’ testosterone and its companion competitive streak need to be acknowledged. If they are ignored, boys get listless and they start retreating into their hoodies and terrorising the rest of us. Eventually, they spend their time brawling, picking up ASBOs instead of A-levels. (Daily Mail 1 February 2007)

My comments

The author of this article is appealing for recognition of a genetically determined difference between large groups of the population, i.e. males and females. However, we are far removed from any possibility of the recognition of individual innate differences.

I once said to a television researcher who was interviewing me as a prospect for a programme, ‘People should take into account that if someone is clearly outstanding in one respect, such as IQ, they may also have some unusual peculiarities of temperament which are very likely to lead to problems if no allowance is made for them.’ She expressed disagreement without saying anything, as other people have done to whom I have said this. ‘No,’ she looked as if she was saying, ‘allowance certainly should not be made for people with high IQs to differ from the average in any other way than their ability to score highly on IQ tests.’ I was duly not invited to take part in the programme for which she was researching.

It was my misfortune to be subjected to an educational process which may have not yet been, as this writer expresses it, ‘feminised’, but which was just as bad — if not worse — as a girl in girls’ schools and a women’s college. And in an ideological climate that was about to ‘feminise’ society. What made this misfortune so severe was that I had, to an extreme extent, the intellectual and temperamental characteristics which were recognised as more typically masculine than feminine. The female IQ bell curve was said to be narrower than the male; women were less likely to be geniuses or idiots. My IQ was off the scale at the upper end of the curve, a state of affairs which, although rare in any case, is even less likely to occur in a female than in a male.

Combined with a temperamental liking for intellectual challenge and excitement as defined in this article, this made me very vulnerable to the slow and ‘take it easy’ approach which was imposed on my education. I had a lot of channel capacity and needed to be using it; that is, I needed to be taking more subjects than most people (even than most future Oxford dons) and getting qualifications in them a lot faster.

University gender gap

Men are becoming an endangered species on university campuses, education officials warned yesterday. Latest figures show that women made up a remarkable 57 per cent of all first time graduates in 2006. They are outnumbering men in every subject including engineering and mathematics.

The trend has prompted fears that the men are being left behind as education plays to strengths associated with women such as diligence and attentiveness. Girls outscore boys in GCSEs and A-levels. The Higher Education Funding Council for England, which distributes cash to universities, warns that young men may struggle to get on in the workplace. David Eastwood, the quango’s chief executive, says employers increasingly favour graduates. ‘The wider worry is that if we are not careful we are going to arrive at a position where young lads are alienated, they are underskilled,’ he added.

Professor Alan Smithers, an education expert from Buckingham University, said: ‘The performance of girls has outstripped that of boys, first of all in GCSE, but since 2000, at A-level as well. ‘Boys may do better with the big bang terminal examination approach, whereas girls more often have patience and persistence to put in coursework.’ The proportion of men at university declined steadily throughout the 20th century. By the early 1990s, female graduates were outnumbering males for the first time. (Daily Mail, 31 January 2007)

My comments

It is already the case that boys of school leaving age are alienated. They are often what I would call demoralised criminals, which is what the educational system is aiming at producing. The whole object of the modern ideology is to destroy the individual, which means what I call centralised psychology (see my book Advice to Clever Children). Boys and men were more likely to be associated with some kind of centralised psychology -- albeit expressed in the form of very crude ideals -- so they have been particularly under attack in the modern world.

‘Girls more often have patience and persistence to put in coursework’. Girls were supposed to be interested in social interactions and be less achievement orientated, so it is not too surprising that they are better able to tolerate boring and pointless group activities, and boring and pointless work set by hostile (?) teachers.

If people are forced to undergo periods of supervised preparation for any exam they wish to take to obtain a qualification, it is inevitable, even if not deliberately planned, that the system will discriminate against types of people that school and university teachers dislike, such as those with high IQs and/or a lot of drive of their own, rather than an obsessional interest in other people and in using social structures to gain power over them.

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.

"Morality skills"

Another terrible article about IQ in The Times. I am being prevented from writing and publishing replies to the pernicious ideology that pours out.

Heading of article (18 December 2006):

We are about as smart as we're going to get, says IQ pioneer
- Test results are starting to level out
- Morality skills are the "next step"

My comments

It is only to be expected that the ‘rise’ in IQ consequent on the inception of the Welfare State will level out and eventually turn into a decline.

I do not place any particular reliance on the truthfulness or objectivity of academic research workers, so when I read that rises in IQ were reported, I used to think that they might well be shifting the mean, changing the types of question, or just fudging the results to suit themselves. But in fact there is a plausible way of accounting for any rise in average IQ that has really occurred.

Research in America, as reported in the controversial (i.e. largely suppressed) book Dysgenics (David Lynn, Praeger 1996) indicates that the rise may well have been caused by ironing out the effects on adult IQ of poor nutrition and medically untreated diseases, some of which cause brain damage, in early life. Those with the lowest IQs had suffered most from this double whammy, and the rises in IQ were commensurate with those resulting from the medical treatment of disease in control populations. The rise in IQ occurred only in the lowest strata of the population, although of course this raised the overall average IQ to a lesser extent.

A counteracting negative factor, although less immediately noticeable, arose from the provision of medical treatment in early life. A higher proportion of the least functional populations survived to reproductive age. Estimates have been made of the percentage increase per generation of various disabilities, including mental disabilities, resulting from genetic defects.

What are we supposed to understand by ‘morality skills’? Indoctrination in egalitarian collectivist ideology, one supposes, with its dogmatic but unstated beliefs. It takes a very high IQ, as well as some unusual personality factors, to realise what is behind these beliefs, as they depend on a large number of unexamined assumptions about underlying issues that are never even mentioned.

Ignored and/or misrepresented by the media - as usual

My Press Release about the new scheme for 'gifted' children has been rigorously ignored as usual. The one about the terrible proposals for increasing taxation (= confiscation of liberty), in order to interfere even more with children who are already deprived of their liberty by the immoral legislation that makes ‘education’ (= exposure to social hostility) compulsory.

If the media actually wanted some real information about the issues, they might have consulted me, given that I am actually a former gifted child, unlike all the 'experts' waffling about the supposed issues involved in being gifted.

People lift the odd word or quotation from my published material (as they did with Fabian’s book about the legalised crime of the medical ‘profession’) so that they can incorporate them in their own watered-down articles which ignore the real issues.

A Guardian online article about raising the school leaving age uses the word ‘incarceration’ from my November post on this topic in its headline, and gives an anonymous link to my blog, following the convention that I have no social identity. I am merely "one blogger" who thinks that "raising the school leaving age to 18 would be like sentencing intelligent, though not necessarily academically-minded, teenagers to jail", a very watered-down version of my views. Whereas the real point is that all compulsory education is immoral and should be abolished.