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

Anger and stress

A note on ‘anger’

If a person is angry at the way they have been treated by society (schools, hospitals, etc) this is regarded as demonstrating the weakness of their position. For example, when I have given some account of the damaging ways in which I have been treated, as an explanation of how I could have been forced into my present quite unacceptable and unsuitable situation, people are very liable to tell me that I sound angry, which is apparently automatically pejorative, as there is no concept of justified anger for someone like me. Then they are liable to tell me that I am wasting my time by being angry at my position and by continuing to try to get back into a realistic social role. ‘Life isn’t long enough’, they say, with would-be sympathy, but when it is clear that they have not succeeded in influencing me to change or conceal my real viewpoint, their ‘sympathy’ quickly turns to outright anger.

This is a curious paradox. Anger on the part of an individual victim is contemptible and seen as an invitation to intrude into his life to ‘help’ or ‘counsel’ him. On the other hand, an individual who complains of maltreatment at the hands of agents of the collective, and who does not give up on attempting to remedy his position, arouses an unconcealed (and often quite frenzied) rage in all right-thinking persons, and this sort of anger is regarded as perfectly healthy.

I have already written about some of the situations which aroused anger after I was thrown out at the age of 21. The overt anger that has surrounded me in adult life sheds light on the anger that always stormed around me at school and at Somerville, although then the anger was ostensibly focused on my father, thus destroying his health at the same time as destroying my career prospects.

‘Experts’ hold forth on stress

Salaried academics have been holding forth on ‘stress’ (among all sorts of other rubbishy things) in the papers, in which they are described as ‘experts’.

‘Stress is an engineering term to describe the force brought to bear on an object. Now it’s being applied to any human emotion to frighten people witless and sell them therapy and products,’ says Angela Patmore ... a former research fellow investigating stress at the University of East Anglia ... ‘For the more unscrupulous members of the stress industry, this is mission accomplished: the industry creates the condition, then sells “calmdowns” to cure it.’

Professor Stephen Bloom, an expert in stress at Imperial College [says] ‘Perhaps because of the nanny state we have an inability to face our problems, and too much time to dwell on them ... Maybe we’re not stressed at all.’ (Daily Mail 12 May 2009, ‘Stress is good for you’ by Marianne Power.)

Funding continues to be rigorously denied to all departments of my unrecognised but genuine university which might make some real contribution to understanding, if only by publishing critical analyses of the fatuous ‘studies’ being produced by socially accredited ‘universities’.

No one will work for us because, once they know that I do not regard the way society treats me and has treated me as in any way acceptable, they become too angry at my still trying to make something of my life and needing help in doing so. ‘Move on!’ they shout, as they leave the house.

Emotional 'management'

Managing emotions will be given the same importance as English and maths in Sir Jim Rose’s primary school education reforms unveiled yesterday. ‘Personal development’, along with the three Rs and computer skills, will form the centrepiece of the plans, which will be introduced in September 2011. Children will learn to take turns and share, prepare healthy meals, manage their feelings, and avoid drug and alcohol abuse ... lessons in managing emotions will encourage pupils to curb anger and jealousy and encourage empathy. (Daily Mail, 1 May 2009)

So, children in primary schools are to have lessons in ‘managing their emotions’, including anger and jealousy. I expect they will learn how to direct the anger they experience at being under duress in a prison environment, not towards the teachers and other adults who keep them oppressed, but towards those of their contemporaries of whom they feel jealous because they seem to be doing too well, and not feeling downtrodden enough. They will learn to gain satisfaction from making them feel more downtrodden and will look forward to the time when, as adults, they can express their anger by interfering in the lives of those of whom they feel jealous, by becoming teachers, doctors, social workers or other ‘experts’

By doing this they may be able to avoid becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol. Nowadays such things are referred to as ‘abuse’. ‘Drug abuse’ refers to making use of a pharmaceutical for your own purposes, whereas having your mind zonked out by a drug prescribed by a ‘medical doctor’ is not referred to in this way.

Avoiding ‘drug abuse’ and ‘alcohol abuse’ is part of what is to be taught in the ‘personal development’ programme for primary schools, which will also teach the ‘management’ of anger and jealousy.

How about providing training in the management of anger and jealousy for teachers; also members of education authorities, university tutors and college Principals, etc.? So that they do not take out the anger and jealousy they feel when confronted by someone cleverer than themselves, by destroying the lives of the most exceptional people who are in any way under their power?

How about training all people with social status and influence to direct their anger against other influential people who have ‘let the side down’ by abusing their power in damaging the lives of those over whom they had power, and to put the energy resulting from such anger into providing reparation for the victims of such abuse?

Chardonnay as a gateway drug

As many as 40,000 drinkers are dying every year because the Government has utterly failed to deal with Britain’s alcohol problem, leading experts said yesterday.
Doctors and academics [i.e. agents and beneficiaries of the oppressive state] lined up to condemn round-the-clock drinking, brought in by Labour, and the availability of cheap alcohol in supermarkets. (Daily Mail, 24 April 2009).

Why should it be the business of the Government to prevent people from killing themselves with alcohol and overeating, if that is what they want to do? The object of taking away liberty from individuals in the form of taxes is to create justifications for taking away even more, so as to create the largest possible population of people in a dysfunctional state, to be supported by the increasingly small population of functional people paying taxes. At the same time, taxpayers will have to pay for supporting the ever-increasing population of doctors (who live off the herds of their dependent victims) and academics (who pontificate ‘expertly’ about the morality of these goings-on).

Professor Tom Gilmore, President of the Royal College of Surgeons ... firmly blamed the Government ... ‘a change in licensing laws ... made it difficult to turn down applications for licences, with no need to take public health into account’. (Ibid.)

It is interesting how alcohol has now apparently, in the minds of the medical profession, become a matter of ‘public health’. This concept used to be applied principally in situations where the health of an individual would impinge directly on that of others, e.g. infectious diseases; providing an excuse for interference on the grounds that one person’s behaviour affected another person’s physical health. Perhaps eating sweets will be the next thing to be classified as a matter of ‘public health’.

Martin Plant, professor of addiction studies at the University of the West of England, said: ‘Supermarkets at the moment are displaying the morality of the crack dealer ...’ Professor Plant warned that alcohol was a ‘gateway drug’ leading to cannabis and cocaine addiction in many teenagers. (Ibid.)

The sort of comment which used to be dismissed as ‘moral hysteria’ is now apparently being made by academics. Will chocolate be the next thing claimed to be a ‘gateway drug’, leading to alcohol consumption, and from there to cannabis, cocaine, heroin, prostitution, burglary, etc.?

‘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.

Exploiting the credit crunch

copy of a letter to an academic

The ‘credit crunch’ (so-called) is really just a further stage of development in the ongoing socialist destruction of civilisation, most central to which is the destruction of the lives of the most able and functional. This is, of course, already far advanced; the school and university system was already geared to ruin someone like me when I was exposed to it sixty years ago.

Naturally the obvious worsening of the situation is blamed on ‘free market capitalism’, thus justifying further reductions of individual liberty, but in reality what is being demonstrated is the destructive success of socialist principles and ideology.

My unrecognised university is being prevented from pointing out how this has really come about, while other people (including a former investment banker in yesterday’s Financial Times) are publicised as saying, ‘Free market capitalism has failed!’ – so now (presumably) we can openly abolish individual liberty completely.

As an influential person with socially conferred status, you should not find it acceptable that expression of our point of view is stifled and suppressed, and you should wish to give us help and support in publicising it.

I do not accept your claim that there are already people in universities expressing our points of view, so there is no ‘need’ for us to be given opportunity or publicity. If there are any such people, they are heavily outnumbered, and are putting the case very feebly. And you should also feel an obligation to work towards redressing the wrongs and injustices which we have suffered at the hands of those with socially conferred status. On that basis, we should now be given status and opportunity even if what we would produce would be no better and no different from the work being produced by other people who already have the status and support which we have been denied.

As you may see from some of the things which I have written recently, ethical standards usually seem to be abandoned by those in authority when dealing with people like us. However, that is no justification for a person with socially conferred status wishing to cover up for the wrongdoings of other such persons, rather than attempting to redress them.

Gordon Brown's 'National Service'

Terrible things appear in the papers practically every day and my unrecognised university is still unable to publish any criticisms of them.

An additional infringement of individual liberty is proposed by Gordon Brown.

‘Every teenager will have to do at least 50 hours of community work before the age of 19, Gordon Brown has announced. The Prime Minister believes youngsters would be less likely to turn to crime if they had a sense of citizenship. The scheme, a form of ‘national service’ for teenagers, will ensure that they spend a minimum of 50 hours working with charities and vulnerable groups such as the elderly or disabled. Forming part of Labour’s next election manifesto, it will be woven into plans to make everyone stay in education or training until the age of 18 by 2011. Mr Brown said: ‘It is my ambition to create a Britain in which there is a clear expectation that all young people will undertake some service to their community, and where community service will become a normal part of growing up in Britain. And, by doing so, the contributions of each of us will build a better society for all of us. ‘ He added: ‘That would mean young people being expected to contribute at least 50 hours of community service by the time they have reached the age of 19.’...

The Prime Minister first proposed the idea of a National Youth Service to channel teenagers into voluntary work last year. It is due to be formally launched in September, and would become compulsory if Labour was re-elected. The scheme – which could include teenagers helping out charities both in Britain and abroad – is likely to become part of the National Curriculum. (Daily Mail, 13 April 2009)

Being forced to spend even more time doing things which they have no motivation to do will actually only make teenagers even more demoralised and decentralised than they already are.

I know two people who had a little experience of what is called ‘community service’ several decades ago, when things were less bad than they are now, and both found it an unpleasant and disappointing experience.

In both cases they were attempting to ‘help’ people who had already forfeited their liberty and had fallen into the clutches of the oppressive society. The first person’s experience was earlier, and voluntary, trying to feed disabled children in a disorganised institutional environment.

The second person’s, over a decade later, was compulsory because it was a school ‘lesson’ and he was forced to attend all ‘lessons’ provided by the school in order to attend the school at all. This is an oppressive, although commonly accepted, state of affairs. As I have pointed out before, children should be free to attend only those lessons which they find relevant to their own purposes.

However, the second person was forced in this way to go to a hospital to ‘cheer up’ old people who had fallen into the power of the medical Mafia, and found himself trying to make conversation with an old lady in a hospital bed who did not seem to find anything he had to say interesting. She may well have found it particularly depressing to be confronted by a bright young person who, ostensibly, still had his life ahead of him.

No doubt most of those who will be subjected to ‘help’ from demoralised young people will already be being abused by those ‘trained’ to help them. You could call Gordon Brown’s plan the ‘Compulsory Community Abuse’ programme.

Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Alf Hitchcock last year suggested jobless teens should be sent on a non-military form of National Service to curb the rising tide of fatal stabbings. (Ibid.)

Now what, I wonder, is there to prevent resentful youths, torn away from their knife gangs, from stabbing the old people and disabled children with whom they are forced to associate?

Bullying

When I was describing to a colleague the goings-on in Somerville, he commented that bullies always attack the weak. I thought: in Somerville that meant the vulnerable. If you have motivation or aspirations you are vulnerable; many of the young women arriving at Somerville were ambitious and maybe needed to make up for past deprivations, so they were vulnerable to Dame Janet’s[1], bullying by threat and intimidation. The only undergraduates safe from being bullied were the people who were not needy in any way, such as ___ (daughter of ___ ) who, even if sent down from Oxford, would have suffered little setback in her pursuit of wealthy upper-class men as suitable husbands.

The ‘bullying’ issue is interesting because I think the psychodynamics that produce bullying are closely related to those that produce the socialist ideology; i.e. a sense of inadequacy and impotence leading to a compensatory reaction against it in the form of a drive to have a strong effect on other people.

[1] Dame Janet Vaughan, Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, 1945-1967.

Easter vac workers

copy of a letter

Easter is upon us. ‘Holiday’ times are always particularly bad for us, as any domestic or other workers which we can get become even less reliable and tend to announce without notice that they are going to absent themselves for a holiday of weeks or months abroad. So if you know anyone who might like to earn some money quickly, let them know. But they probably need to have a car, as we could not arrange accommodation for them at such short notice, and would not do so in any case if they had not worked for us before.

Stepp'd in so far

And betimes I will, to the weird sisters:
More shall they speak; for now I am bent to know,
By the worst means, the worst. For mine own good,
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er:
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.

(Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4)

A quotation from Macbeth which expresses the predicament of Western civilisation, determined to go ahead with egalitarian socialism (communism), although by now many must be able to see that its consequences so far have been disastrous.

‘Strange things ... which must be acted’. However crazy things are already, this is no bar – indeed, it is a spur – to the invention of even more crazy egalitarian policies, which those concerned are driven to implement by an apparently irresistible compulsion.