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.’]

Sleuth

I just saw part of the film Sleuth, with Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier, and thought how it expresses a (the most?) fundamental motivation of human psychology.

People think they cannot do anything about their position as finite and mortal in relation to physical reality so, to find some way of asserting themselves, they turn to other people as a source of significance, especially as those others seem to be conscious beings like themselves.

So, having accepted that you can’t do anything about your own physical limitations, you can assert yourself best by having a real effect on the consciousness of someone else, and the most powerful way of doing this is by making him have experiences which he does not want to have.

So Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine mislead one another into experiences of fear and anxiety, in which they become decentralised; i.e. they stop referring to their own internal psychological criteria and distort themselves in any way that may placate other people and avert the threat of what other people may do to them.

The fact that this is associated with lying and deception satisfactorily places the person doing the decentralising in a position of superiority to both objective reality and to the decentralised person who is anguished by his uncertainty of the real state of affairs.

This is the fundamental strategy of the modern religion of collectivism.

We may note also the theme of class warfare; one is supposed to sympathise with the ‘ordinary’ Michael Caine as against the ‘superior’, snobbish and elitist Laurence Olivier, who complains of the damage done to the lives of people like him by the modern world.

Conclusion? The objective of modern society is to make everyone decentralised, especially those who formerly had some vestige of centralisation.

Purely for the money

Letter to a philosophy professor

Dear ...

From what I have told you by now about how I found myself at the Society for Psychical Research when I was thrown out into the wilderness, you may be able to see that no belief system entered into it. I went there purely for money, as I remember saying to an undergraduate two or three years later, when I had returned to Oxford to do my would-be D.Phil which turned into a B.Litt (on account of the hostility, actually, because it would have been quite easy to work out what would have constituted an acceptable D.Phil thesis — if anyone had wanted my thesis to be accepted).

The undergraduate to whom I was talking had asked why I had gone to the SPR, and I said, truthfully, ‘Only for money.’ Like many other people in the modern world, he prided himself on never doing anything that was not ‘interesting’ or pretentious, and he said, a bit shocked and contemptuous, ‘I hope I shall never do a job that I am only doing for money.’ Nevertheless, he also prided himself on the money which he expected soon to be paid for doing something pretentious, saying (when I lent him some money, which I never got back, to ease his financial problems) that his problems would soon be over, and in a year’s time he expected to have a four-figure bank balance (which would be the equivalent of a five or six-figure one nowadays).

However, money was my only motive when I went to the SPR, and as I came to know about them, I considered the potential fields of research which might be subsumed under the heading of psychical research in exactly the same way as any other potential field of scientific research. Provided it had any realistic content it would be as good as any other field of science for making a return to an academic career, social status and the circumstances of an adequate life.

It was, however, extremely underdeveloped and would require large scale work with several streams of information coming in from the work of at least one research department before I could hope to establish any intellectual structures that could lead to real progress.

This fitted quite well with the fact that I needed a full-scale academic institution anyway, large and complex enough to incorporate a residential college with full hotel facilities. The best Oxbridge colleges still have these facilities, although the benefit of them is reduced by their residents being more burdened than they used to be with administrative chores and the need to keep producing publishable ‘research’ which sounds as if it is based on, and takes seriously, other ‘research’ which has been published by socially appointed ‘academics’.

When I first went to the SPR I did at first find some motivation to support me on the part of a few people, so I planned to set up a research institute with the all-important associated residential (hotel) college.

However, the hostility that had gone into depriving me of opportunity throughout my supervised ‘education’ soon re-asserted itself. Thereafter I was slandered for decades as a person who was so extremely enthusiastic about this particular field of research that I had freely chosen to ‘do’ it — although I was doing it only in whatever sense it was possible to do anything at all, living in extreme poverty and social degradation.

Yours
Celia

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.