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.'

Correction: re physics department

When I said that one residential college might do for several departments of my independent university, I was thinking that it might do if only the most senior people lived in the residential college, and there might be some people from outside who evidently accept for themselves that they should be able to live without domestic and other ancillary staff, and apparently expect us to pretend that we can do so as well.

But really all personnel, however junior, should be able to live in a hotel/residential-college/stately-home environment so as to apply its energies as efficiently as possible to the work of the organisation.

I should like to correct what I said before. If we started with one research department, say theoretical physics or neurophysiology, and then added another, we would need to add to or enlarge the residential facilities, fully to cover the needs of all personal.

The value of "friendship"

Report in the Daily Mail of a ‘study’ published by the Journal of Socio-Economics.

They say you can’t put a price on true friendship. But that hasn’t stopped economists having a go. And after all their additions and subtractions, they have calculated exactly how valuable friends and family can be. Seeing them every day is worth the equivalent of an £85,000 pay rise, they say. Even chatting to neighbours frequently makes us as happy as if we had been handed a £37,000 increase. And getting married is the same as an extra £50,000 in the pay packet (and that’s after the cost of the wedding). ... The study took information from 8,000 households across Britain. Those surveyed were asked to rate the level of happiness certain changes in their life would bring, ranging from pay increases to face to face time with friends and loved ones.

‘An increase in the level of social involvements is often worth many tens of thousands of pounds a year extra in terms of life satisfaction,’ said Dr Nattavudh Powdthavee, from the University of London’s Institute of Education, which carried out the research. ‘Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness. One potential explanation is that social activities tend to require our attention while they are being experienced, so that the joy derived from them lasts longer in our memory. ‘Income, on the other hand, is mostly in the background. We don’t normally have to pay so much attention to the fact that we’ll be getting a pay packet at the end of the week or month, so the joy derived from income doesn’t last as long.’ On average, a person earning £10,000 a year who has face to face time with friends and loved ones every day was as happy as one earning £95,000 a year who hardly ever saw their friends and relatives. (‘Why true friendship is as good as an £85,000 rise’, Daily Mail, 1 May 2007.)

This ‘research’ is said to have been carried out by an Institute of the University of London, so it may be presumed that it, and all concerned in it, were supported by money (freedom) confiscated from taxpayers (individuals).

How meaningful is this ‘research’? The measure of ‘happiness’ used is how individuals would rate their ‘happiness’ when asked about it, knowing what the prevailing social views on ‘happiness’ are and what they ought to say. And, even then, it is only statistical. Who but a collective body, or someone with a vested interest in promoting collectivist ideology, would have had enough interest in obtaining this dubious information to pay for it to be done?

These days statistical ‘research’ is taken to justify universal prescriptions, leaving out any possibility of individual differences (or at least, any possibility of respect for individual differences.) ‘Friends’ are supposed to be people who make you feel reconciled to your frustrated position in life, not those who help you in your efforts to improve it.

"Middle-class child neglect"

In an article by India Knight entitled ‘Middle-class child neglect’ the following occurs:

Middle-class mothers ... are likely to raise their children in self-created ghettos of rarefied so-called excellence. (Sunday Times, 29 April 2007, p. 15.)

Maybe she is aware of my usage of the word ‘ghetto’ in calling us ‘the high IQ ghetto’. However I do not mean by that an enclave within which we can use our abilities in highly specialised or very suitable ways. The usage is as in ‘Jewish ghetto’, a place where very able people can struggle for the merest physical survival, surrounded by a hostile society which aims to cut off supplies and support.

We also attempt to work laboriously and tediously towards creating , in the first instance, a more tolerable and adequate environment within which at least a very small use of our abilities may be made.

Knight seems to be among those who are encouraging society to become ever more hostile to the able by instilling guilt in those middle-class mothers (probably themselves with above average IQs) who provide their children with opportunities which are more likely to be needed or enjoyed by those with above-average IQs.

She supports the fallacy that there is an either/or involved. ‘Stimulation’ versus ‘social skills’, as if above average achievement necessarily implied detracting from time spent on social interaction, and with no reference to the possibility of individual differences in IQ or other aptitudes.

When I was five I had already read as much as a fairly bright child might have been expected to get through in the course of its primary education. By ‘fairly bright’ I mean ‘potential university graduate later on’, and at that time that would imply a higher IQ than it does now.

People often suggest that I must have gone short of playing with other children, but in fact I did not. My mother, who was a very experienced teacher, saw to it that I had playmates who were a match for my mental, rather than chronological, age and I have photographs of myself playing with children at the seaside who may have been twice my age and were certainly twice my size.

There was no sense in which I cut down on interactive activities in order to devote myself to my reading matter, but I am sure that I made full use of unoccupied intervals of time. When I was four, I was told, I once travelled from London to Wiltshire on a crowded evacuee train, sitting on a suitcase in the guard’s van with my head in a book the whole way. (My parents were, of course, guilty of having provided me with a ‘stimulating’ book.)

Workers relieving the imprisonment

copy of a letter

Well, to express my own position, I have always found it stressful and somewhat damaging to have to work with people who have some version of the normal worldview, which means they are antagonistic to us, and especially to me, because while other people here also suffer from our very bad social position, it may be less clear to them exactly why.

It has always been very clear to me from the time I was thrown out what I need to have in life and what I was suffering in being deprived of it. When we interact with outsiders we are always having to appear to accept their implicit assertion of social interpretations, i.e. that they only help us at all within social parameters, we are to be treated as less important and less to be worked for than socially set up institutions, etc.

Well, actually, it has been and still is pretty terrible for me. People sometimes say I shouldn’t complain of the ruin inflicted on my life by the ruined ‘education’. I’m still alive, they say.
I suppose imprisonment is a fairly good parallel as a situation in which one stays physically alive but is deprived of all other functions, and there are many examples in history of the imprisoned going out of their minds with the intensity of the claustrophobia and sensory deprivation (cf. A Tale of Two Cities).

Sensory deprivation is known to cause people intense distress and an urgent need to get out of it. On account of my IQ and channel capacity I am really seriously deprived without an extraordinary quantity of intellectual processing. Without it I am forced to remain on a painfully low energy level, although that may not seem out of the way by other people’s standards.

I need to be running at least one research department producing several streams of information so there is enough to think about, and, of course, in the living conditions of a residential college (hotel environment )so that I never have to break off the continuous scanning function. If this were going on, it might not be interrupted by a good many academic activities, such as university teaching, but it is interrupted, very painfully, by interacting with physical objects in ways that require concentration, or with other people, when you have to pay attention to their intractable psychologies, such as teaching in schools or working in offices.

I have a need for uninterrupted continuity when my mind is working at all, and in fact all the channels go on working continuously. People at Somerville commented on the way I would come up with an observation on something that had cropped up some time before, all the intervening conversation having been about other things, and they would realise I had been thinking about it all the time the other conversation had been going on.

Actually it takes me a lot of psychological ingenuity and memories of a higher level to remain reasonably functional and apparently tolerant of my position. It has been a long time since we got a new person and it seems increasingly difficult to get workers, perhaps because it is now much clearer that we are not a bunch of drop-out ‘enthusiasts’ who like living like this.

Now it has been so long since we got anything like a break that I don’t know whether I could, or how well I could, tolerate anyone working here other than full-time, as if they accepted the desperate urgency of our need, even if they don’t.

My only hope in life was to get on with taking exams young before people noticed and could mess it up. I used to say to my mother, ‘You should have made sure I took as many exams as possible as young as possible’, and she would say, ‘Oh, but people would have hated you.’ ‘They hate me anyway,’ I would say, ‘and I would rather be hated for having what I want than hated for still wanting it when I have been deprived of it and need their help in getting it back.’

Patients starved to death

In 1989, there was another life crisis when Marjorie’s mother, then in her 70s, had a series of increasingly severe strokes. ‘The hospital withdrew food and water and I watched her starve to death. My sister felt it was the kindest thing to do but my mother spent a week in agony. I felt utter grief and still haven’t dealt with it.’ (From ‘A troubled mind’ by Moira Petty, Daily Mail, 17 April 2007.)

It is legal for an incapacitated patient to be denied artificial hydration and nutrition — now considered to be medical treatment in law — if doctors consider death to be in their best interest.(From ‘I’ve changed my mind, says woman in right-to-die case’ by Steve Doughty, Daily Mail, 19 April 2007.)

It is legal, but it is still immoral (it is a strong violation of the basic moral principle), for members of the medical Mafia to kill people by starving them to death. This is only making explicit the immorality which was already inherent in the medical profession, operating on the terms it does.

If an individual, or a relative or other person appointed by him, loses the right to decide for himself what is in his interests as he perceives them, the harm that may be inflicted upon him by the decisions made by the criminal doctor to whom he has lost his autonomy, whether by accident or design, may clearly extend to extreme suffering or death.

Mr Cameron highlighted figures showing assaults on NHS staff running at 60,000 a year... (From ‘Rudeness is just as bad as racism, says Cameron’, Daily Mail, 24 April 2007.)

We are unfortunate enough to live in an age of legalised crime. Agents of the collective, such as teachers and doctors, are at risk from the resentment of their victims, who do not realise how thoroughly justified their resentment is. In fact the victims should be opposing the principles of social oppression, not indulging in ‘anti-social’ violence, which is seen as an excuse for ever more oppressive incursions on individual liberty. But the victims have been trained to believe that they would be losing free goodies described as ‘education’ and ‘health care’ which have been paid for with money taken away from other people, so that they are ‘better off’ hanging on to these ostensible handouts, even with the great penalties which are attached to them.

The hypothetical

It is obviously very difficult to define the sort of rejection of society as a source of significance that goes into becoming centralised. You don’t give up on wanting or needing things that society can provide, or on trying to get them, but you do give up on thinking that you ought to be able to prevent anyone from opposing you, or that it is some sort of reflection on you if you can’t.

The hypothetical is very important; you don’t give up on your drive to get things, but you do have to ask yourself whether you would give up on it, or nor act on it, if there should happen to be some consideration of a higher order of significance (that appeared to you to be of a higher order of significance). This is quite independent of a belief in such a thing or even expectation that there might be.

However, the hypothetical precedes anything presenting itself as highly significant, and has more psychodynamic force than might appear; I mean it has an effect on what actually happens.

As I approached the final degree exam at Somerville I found it very difficult to be motivated. Of course this was comprehensible in view of the unappetising vistas of doing pointless things without a hotel environment, but it was very alarming because the idea of being an outcast in the non-academic wasteland outside of a career as a Professor in a university, without a hotel environment, was simply appalling and unthinkable.

So also was the idea of ending my period of supervised education without even one first class degree. I knew that getting a second class degree would entirely destroy my social identity and my relationship to society. I would no longer be able to identify in any way with myself as a member of society. I would never again meet anyone as myself.

But however much I wanted to retain at least the tiny toehold of respectability that a First would provide, the horror of the cancellation of my life that would result from failure made it no easier to be motivated. I could work only mechanically, with deliberate conscious effort, to do something in which I had no subconscious cooperation.

Of course I was on a higher level so there was no doubt that there was an urgency of overriding significance and that I wanted to proceed in whatever would be the best way in terms of it.

That should not be taken to imply that I found myself wanting to do anything different in life from what I had always wanted, which was the best sort of academic career, expansive research projects and so forth. It appeared even more urgent than pre-higher level to get on with this, and even more certain that I would be able to make significant progress in any field in which I was able to work.

On the face of it, the best way of proceeding was by having the most successful sort of academic career, but by now I had fallen foul of the system; years of tedious work in bad circumstances at other people’s behest still lay ahead, with no guarantee that they would lead to the sort of life I needed to have.

But if I did not get a research scholarship, what then? Exile into the non-academic wasteland outside of Oxford University, into a place with which I had nothing to do, which might perhaps contain an opportunity somewhere, but of which I knew nothing good.

The university was at least supposed to be about things that were meaningful to me, even if they were not doing them very well and there was no sympathy or motivation of any kind to which I could appeal.

All ways appeared barred against me, and my sense of urgency produced extreme desperation. I was on a higher level, and that implies that all information was, at least potentially, accessible. I tried, therefore, to find out something useful. Surely there must somewhere be someone who was willing and able to help me. If I could, I thought, get a name and address in Australia I would walk out of the college and catch a plane like a shot.

But nothing came. It seemed I could not get any specific information on this point. I would have to go on with what I was doing; it did not seem right to stop trying to work as hard as I could for the degree, equally it was impossible to have any positive motivation. It remained an uphill struggle to do something rather disgusting, in a rather disgusting situation.

Might it not be better to do badly and get a Second? It might be better to be thrown out and find something in the uncharted wasteland. Of course it seemed preferable to get a First and simply abandon the research scholarship, even if I got it,, but somehow I felt it could not work like that. Obviously one would be very strongly inclined to stick with what seemed like a more secure and obvious way ahead.

So I thought that I had better consider as hard as possible that it might actually be better to get a Second and to go out into the wilderness, if there were anything out there. This seemed wildly improbable, but one always had to be openminded to the improbable. If something improbable was the case, it was a fact.

So I considered this possibility very hard because I did not want my preferences to get in the way of what might, in reality, be the best thing.

After a short time of doing this, and quite suddenly, I stopped being stressed. It was all right, it was all worked out. I hadn’t been able to get information consciously, but my subconscious had all the information that was necessary. Whether I got a First or a Second, all I had to do was to follow my nose, or do whatever seemed obvious.

There would be a way ahead.

And one must admit, in retrospect, that my subconscious did quite well.

Within a couple of months I was being interviewed for a job at the SPR, by two of those who had been most concerned with the Cross-Correspondence scripts. A fortnight later I was meeting Sir George Joy at the SPR office, and before the next academic year started in October I had found out about the Perrott Studentship of Trinity College, Cambridge, and decided not to return to Oxford, as I had intended, but to stay at the SPR to try to get the grant.

On not doing physics

Remembering about my physics research thesis topic that was turned down (I used some bits of the initial material in the philosophy thesis, which I would have expected to develop more extensively in a physics thesis) I realised that that is another department of my independent university that has been kept inactive all this time, and should not have been, in some unusual sense of the word ‘should’.

As the preliminary mathematical developments that would be necessary fully to develop my ideas have been carefully neglected, in much the same way that opportunities to observe psychological/physiological correlates have been, I could easily keep several research assistants fully occupied. Although the mathematical developments have been only very partially made, computer techniques have been developed which could handle them much better than at the time of my rejected thesis topic. Although I could see, 50 years ago, what I would like to do, it would have been very heavy weather at that time, for a single person working without the more recently developed computer techniques, and I could not have got very far in a two-year thesis, even if I had been allowed to do it.

So that, the physics department of my independent university, is another department that could have been being productive all this time, and could start being so any time that anyone should see fit to finance it on an adequate scale – i.e. allowing for a residential college environment with full ancillary staff for at least the senior people working in the department. (One residential college would be adequate for the senior staff of several research departments.)

Further reflections on ancient history

When I was thrown out at the end of my ruined education, my only concern was how to get back as quickly as possible into an academic career that could lead to a Professorship, so that I could have the sort of life and social identity that I needed to have.

The DPhil which turned into a BLitt which I did with the grant from Trinity College did not lead to any way of re-entering a career. Professor H H Price was, actually, no more on my side than anyone else and made no attempt to help me do the sort of thing that they would have been forced to recognise, nor to suggest any ways in which I could get to be regarded as qualified for appointments in physiology, psychology or philosophy.

It should be observed that I got the Trinity College studentship very early on in my time at the SPR, less than a year after arriving there. Hostility towards me had been building up at the SPR throughout the writing of the thesis, and by the end of it there was little left of the initial reactions in my favour.

At the end of the BLitt thesis Professor Price did not help me to access sources of finance for developing any of the lines of research suggested in the thesis or, of course, any other research in any field which might have led to career advancement. I said to him that if a BLitt was no use for re-entering an academic career, as appeared to be the case, I would need to work towards re-entry by getting further qualifications, so how could I work for a D.Sc. He said that a D.Sc. was not something you worked for, but was given on the basis of your published work. This left me with an impasse. Would it be possible, outside of an academic career, to get one’s work published? I did not even bother to ask him, nor whether he had any suggestions for obtaining funding to do the work that might enable me to re-enter a career.

Rosalind Heywood ensured that all sources of funding, both personal and institutional, were closed against me, and I was soon condemned to doing tedious and futile work with a stroboscope in Oxford in circumstances in which it was impossible to increase my savings, although I strenuously defended my small capital from erosion except by deliberate expenditure on fundraising to discomfort Salter and Sir George. Nor was it possible to regard the work being done as of any use for academic career progression, either my own or that of anyone associated with me.

I had only two aims in life at that grim time, and everything I did was directed towards them; one was academic career progression and the other financial build-up, that also being necessary in working towards restoring myself to tolerable circumstances. Until I could get back into a hotel environment as provided by a residential college, I had to work towards building up money to provide myself with the equivalent of such an environment outside of a residential college.

Rosalind and all concerned were forcing me to enact, in the grimmest way possible, their preferred fiction that I was pursuing what ‘interested’ me instead of money, since they would not accept that I was debarred from the only sort of career I could have, and I could not get money by any sort of paid employment for which I was regarded as eligible. Which, as I have said before, also meant that I could not, and never have been able to, apply for what they call ‘social support’, which would not have gone far towards providing me with adequate living circumstances even if I had been eligible for it.

Unfortunately, my supposed ‘supporters’, Sir George and Salter, knew how much money I had managed to save while I was at the SPR; I don’t suppose they were discreet about it. Most of it went into buying my first small house, and no doubt all and sundry thought that if I was squeezed badly enough, I would get into debt, as other people probably would have done, and be forced to sell the house. Then I would have been totally destitute again, as they wished me to be and thought I should be.

Fabian has noticed people commenting about my blog and website that I have a very grim, or dark, view of life. They might consider that this arises from the fact that I have always been placed in the grimmest and darkest of circumstances that the machinations of other people could devise.

Exceptional ability, as I have said before, arouses hostility, and an exceptionally able person needs commensurate social status and recognition to keep such hostility at bay. It was fatal for me not to take the School Certificate exam at 13, and to go on from there with the rapid acquisition of qualifications which I had planned for myself.

I went to the SPR with the terrible handicap of a total lack of the academic qualifications and appointments which would have been necessary to avert direct hostility and opposition.

The usual run of emails

Copy of a note to the person who manages emails to celiagreen.com:

Thank you for the emails you forwarded but they are depressing, as usual. The person with a fairly high IQ in Wigan, who says he can’t get on in modern society, does not, as usual, suggest coming to work, but tries to draw one into correspondence without sending any money, although we have made it clear enough that people can only find out about working here by coming on a provisional basis as voluntary workers. However, we have emailed him an invitation to the seminar and a notice about the seminar.

The CBC Radio Canada thing [wanting me for an interview at very short notice] is very rushed and subject to all sorts of negatives. As usual they want us to talk about lucid dreams when all we have to say is that we are being prevented from working on them, and what is being done by other people is very bad; as it doesn’t say it is live it is probably liable to editing, as was the last thing we did for CBC ages ago, so probably nothing significant we said would survive.