Crisis at the convent

The motto of the
Ursuline convent schools

I want to write about my interview with my father, after he had been summoned to see the Reverend Mother in connection with her concerns about me. First I have to explain what happened.

I have always found it difficult to write about the constant disagreements throughout my education, because they were always rationalised and contradictory. But I think that the underlying forces which affected my position are clear, in retrospect, from the situation which arose when I was fourteen (after I had been prevented from taking the School Certificate exam at thirteen, and thus locked into years of delay before I could take any exams at all).

The ostensible cause of this particular crisis was that I was supposed to have said that I did not believe in God.

Actually Mother Mary Angela (the maths nun), finding it impossible to change my views on what I wanted to do in life, had brought matters to a head by peering at me and saying, ‘Do you believe in God?’ Even then I had not said that I did not, but had said, ‘Oh yes.’

I had always assumed that I would never be asked such a thing, because in the convent environment, saying that one did not believe in God would be too shocking. However, I knew that the tone of my voice was not likely to carry conviction. In fact, Mother Mary Angela reacted as if I had said the opposite.

I do not think her doing so was justified, as people (so far as I could see) often said things they did not mean very much, or meant very vaguely, this being accepted socially at face value. In most cases of people who said they believed in God, or were assumed to do so, I had little idea what they might mean by this. Retrospectively, or perhaps even at the time, I had more of an idea what Mother Veronica (the nun who habitually wore a beatific expression) might mean by professing belief in God. Mother Veronica always seemed to be maintaining a continuous awareness of some kind of presence external to her own mind.

Of course I had not said anything about such things to the other girls, although they knew that I was not actually a Catholic. I remember at least one occasion on which one of them, a grammar school scholarship girl a few years older than me, became very angry that she was unable to convert me to Catholicism on the spot.

One of the things that makes it difficult to write about the conflicts in my education, and made it difficult to understand them at the time, was that they had little or no relationship to reality, but were about fictitious states of affairs. In fact these fictitious problems were a cover for people’s real anxieties about me, which seemed to have more to do with a fear that I might do something radical, or unpredictable, on an intellectual level.

Of course, by the time this conversation with Mother Mary Angela took place, I had already been in the same form as two girls, Jane* and Sarah, who were notorious for their rejection of Catholicism, and presumably any form of Christianity. But I do not remember any expression of disbelief in God as such, and even if there had been, I would not have joined forces with it.

I thought of my own position as agnostic, on account of my awareness of the uncertainty inherent in the existential situation, and this ruled out disbelief in God (or in anything else), as well as belief.

Even if it was known that I talked a lot to Jane, I certainly did not talk about my rejection of Catholicism, whereas I think she did like to assert it frequently. It was known that I did not believe in Catholicism, since my parents always passed me off as ‘Church of England’, but I had no interest in expressing this disbelief.

With hindsight, the crisis regarding my alleged lack of belief in God seems to me to have been a cover for a crisis regarding some other aspect or aspects of my personality. The maths nun, Mother Mary Angela, was already aware that I had drives and ambitions of which she disapproved. What she and others may have been really afraid of was my analyticalness, my ability to see through society. They were afraid of my having any social success, and thus of having a chance to use these capacities to get on in life, and also to influence other people.

* Names have been changed.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Wasted talent

Writing about Christine Fulcher has reminded me of how difficult it is, and always has been, to say anything about our position.

In Christine’s case, she was clearly IQ-ful enough to have become an academic, even a professor.

It was a reflection on the educational system that, as her school life ended, she was not attracted by the possibility of making a university career in any subject, and not even interested in the idea of going to university at all, as she did not see how it could lead to a life that she could get anything out of. She went to university because her father put her under pressure, regarding it as disgraceful not to do so.

What would she tell her children (he argued) if she turned down the opportunity to go to university? She was told she should follow the example of her mother, who had been to college.

When Christine came to work with me in my independent and unrecognised academic establishment, a sympathetic family might have thought that it was a shame she had no easier way of making a suitable career, and they might naturally have thought that she needed support more than her brothers, or anyone else who was able to have a career that was salaried in the normal way.

But instead of this, they took care to discriminate against her, so that all financial support which might have come her way was cut off, and subsidies to her siblings were correspondingly increased.

Also they discouraged rich relatives and friends from subsidising her, whereas her brothers did receive subsidies (such as wedding presents etc.) from such people. Her family’s treatment of Christine discouraged her from socialising with them. This then gave them a (spurious) excuse to be even meaner to her.

Christine’s suitability for academic pursuits was shown by the fact that she naturally gravitated to subjects which only people with a ‘superior’ IQ are said to be able to do well. That is, sciences and languages – to which I myself was attracted.

Christine had wanted a career in science, but she did not pass her Chemistry O-level, having had mumps shortly before the exam. She wanted to retake it, but was discouraged from doing so by her school, and by her parents making unnecessary difficulties about it.

Christine could read French and German well by the time she left school, although merely attending the lessons provided in those subjects would certainly have been insufficient to produce this result. By the time I met her, she was widely read in the classics of French and German literature.

Many of those with the greatest aptitude for academic pursuits are thrown out by the system – whether at university or earlier – and the waste of their abilities is ignored. They are supposed not to mind, and indeed supposed not to exist except as rejects.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position and that of Christine Fulcher. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Books are better than blogs

text of a letter to an academic

I do not think that my blog is a good way of attracting potential associates. We need to publish and distribute hardback books.

I do not know how we would attract anyone like Christine Fulcher into reading my blog.

Christine Fulcher
of Oxford Forum

When Christine was in her late teens, she was interested in helping a genius. But if someone searched the web using the word ‘genius’, they would get thousands of hits, many of them about Einstein, some about Leonardo da Vinci and other geniuses, but they probably would not find my blog. Christine was not interested in parapsychology, nor particularly in mysticism or gnosticism, and would not have thought of looking for blogs about the problems of high-IQ people, although she is one herself.

So I do not know what keywords I would have to use to attract people like her who might be interested in helping a genius, and who are not necessarily aware that they have the problems that high-IQ people tend to have foisted on them.

In fact, the best way of attracting someone like Christine to come and become an associate would be by having plenty of our books on the shelves of university libraries, and on the shelves of bookshops in general.

There is a phenomenon in economics known as ‘framing’, in which the same cultural product can receive quite different reactions depending on the context. A famous violinist can give a performance at Carnegie Hall in which seats sell for $100, but if the same violinist gives his performance for free on a subway, few people take any interest. A famous professor like Richard Dawkins can write books which are published by a respected publisher and sell in the tens of thousands. If he was unknown, the text of those books, if available for free on the web, might only attract a few hundred readers.

Christine found my book The Human Evasion in the philosophy section of Heffers Bookshop at the University of East Anglia. The title attracted her, and my ideas rang a bell with her. By the time she had read something in the book to the effect that a genius might need help, she was determined to come and see me. After about six weeks, she had already corresponded with me, and she was ringing at the door of 118 Banbury Road. At that time, our books were published by Hamish Hamilton, and their reps were taking them round to bookshops automatically, along with all other current Hamish Hamilton publications.

For any chance of attracting people who are as interested and potentially long-term as Christine, we need to be publishing new books, reissuing all our old books in large quantities, sending thousands of free copies to university libraries in this country and worldwide, and promoting the books to bookshops so that they stock them, probably especially in university towns. For this we need hundreds of thousands of pounds, but any smaller contribution would certainly be welcome.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Modern students

Recently we have been making contact with various undergraduates. The impression most of them give is that they are determined to make things as easy as possible for themselves at university, without trying to make their work interesting, or to do as well as possible at it. Certainly of recent decades I have heard and read statements that might have been thought shocking before the onset of the Welfare State.

For example, one fairly well-off, upper-middle-class pre-undergraduate, who had expressed an interest in becoming associated with us, refused to consider working for us before college or during the vacs, although we said how badly we were in need of extra manpower. He said he could not take on either employment or voluntary work until he had got the full benefit of three full-time years at university. The attraction of which, according to him, was that he would not have to do much work while there. Presumably it was to be taken as understood that he would be able to spend most of his time having ‘fun’, as he and his contemporaries would call it. From what one hears, this would seem to include plenty of social life and getting drunk.

Nor, apparently, do students mind much about having to leave college with large loans, built up by not paying the fees themselves. Another pre-undergraduate was quoted in an article as saying that he did not mind about the debt which he would incur by going to university, because he would not have to start repaying it until he was earning above a certain level. This suggested the possibility that repayment could be avoided indefinitely by taking care to earn little or nothing.

I hear or read of many modern graduates and university dropouts who are disaffected by the difficulty of getting started on a career in the modern world. They are, however, not attracted by the possibility of becoming associated with us, where they could share in our sense of purpose and direction. In a way this is not surprising, as they have become identified with the avoidance of effort, intensity, and purpose.

Throughout my life there has been an almost universal rejection of my need to live with the maximum of intensity and purposiveness, and an unwillingness to accept that my life could be damaged by being deprived of the possibility of such things.

The modern educational system opposes purposiveness and favours its opposite. It has succeeded in creating, on a wide scale, what might previously have been described as ‘demoralised laziness’.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

The fear of breakthroughs

text of a letter to an academic

I remember that you once asked me why schools, even the Ursuline convent school, wanted me to do maths in preference to physics, which is what I wanted to do. I said, “I don’t know. It was crazy.”

But actually, although none of the rationalisations which were expressed or hinted at held water, it seems clear that everyone was afraid of my doing research in an area where I might easily find out something fundamentally groundbreaking.

Albert Einstein
in 1921

Theoretical physics bought you up against the inadequacy of the current set of concepts about the physical world, and that was why I wanted to do it. I felt a little like Einstein when he said:

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which the books are written. *

When I was attending the Ursuline school, aged about eleven, my father thought it was now appropriate to ask me what I wanted to do in life. I replied without hesitation, “I am going to be a physicist and do research.” My father looked a bit shocked but also, as his initial reaction, impressed. But later I found that both he and everyone else opposed my doing physics. In fact, there was opposition to everything that I did want to do, including getting more degrees than other people, and doing so at an earlier age. So there was not only opposition to my doing research in physics, but to all my ideas for working towards that end result.

However, it is now seems likely that what underlay all the rationalisations, which were supposed to justify making me do something I did not want to do, was an absolute fear of the breakthroughs which I might make, in view of my lack of inhibitions. The same thing has also been true of my attempts to start doing research in the areas associated with perception and hallucination, in which I opened up what could have been new areas of research, operating with extremely limited resources.

In fact, everyone all along has been afraid of my doing any research at all, and actually quite rightly so. As I am uninhibited in considering possibilities, I certainly would have made at least a few breakthroughs, if I had not been prevented from doing anything at all.

It is still true that I would make progress very rapidly in either physics or the psychology of perception, if not kept rigorously starved of financial support.

* quoted in Denis Brian, Einstein: A Life, John Wiley, 1996.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Innate ability, and its enemies

The belief system associated with the egalitarian ideology has been increasing in influence for a long time, and is now overwhelmingly dominant.

Splitting pupils as young as six into classes based on ability – known as streaming – makes the brightest children brighter but does little to help the rest to catch up, according to new research into schools in England.

The analysis of the progress made by 2500 six and seven-year-olds in state primary schools in England, conducted by academics at the Institute of Education in London, found that the use of streaming appears to entrench educational disadvantage compared with the results of pupils who were taught in all-ability classes.

“Children in the top stream achieved more and made significantly more academic progress than children attending schools that did not stream, while children in the middle or bottom streams achieved less and made significantly less academic progress,” wrote the authors, Susan Hallam and Samantha Parsons.

The research ... [is] to be presented on Thursday at the British Educational Research Association annual conference ...

The authors [of the research report] conclude that the widespread use of streaming will do little or nothing to arrest the difficulties faced by children from disadvantaged backgrounds and those whose parents have low levels of education ...

“The data suggest that streaming undermines the attempts of governments to raise attainment for all children whatever their socio-economic status,” the paper concludes. “Overall, the evidence indicates that streaming, particularly where it begins at a very early age, is likely to be counterproductive in reducing the attainment gap.” (The Guardian, 25 September 2014)

Celia Green with mother,
Dorothy Green (née Cleare)

My own case might seem to provide a counterexample to the idea that there are no innate individual differences influencing ability and development. Early in my life, when the modern ideology was less dominant, my exceptionality was often commented upon. An early example of this was told to me by my mother several decades after it happened. A few weeks after I was born, some sort of health visitor or nursing aid for new mothers was helping my mother to bathe me. Presumably this person had a wide experience of babies, but she expressed surprise about me, soon after seeing me for the first time. She said something on the lines of:

“Gosh, isn’t she intelligent!”

“How do you know?” my mother said.

“It’s the way she looks at things,” the nurse said.

It did not appear to be the case, as people would like to think, that recognition of my exceptionality at an early age had no predictive value for my later development.

When I was two, I was found to be able to read. When I was ten, I came top of the Essex County grammar school scholarship exam. When I was seventeen, I was awarded the top scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford.

However, as time passed, and the modern ideology gained ground, people told me more often that I was not special, I was just an ordinary person, and that no conclusion could be drawn from early precocity.

At the same time, I was increasingly frustrated and deprived of opportunity, since what might have been regarded as indications of my exceptionality aroused hostility and obstructiveness.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Professor Otto Frisch and psychokinesis

Of course I knew when I was thrown out, to try to do research in the wilderness, that there was no sympathy with my position or predicament. I did not suppose that there was any great motivation in the world for the advancement of science per se, but the absolute negativity of the response to anything I could produce as evidence of my ability to make progress was a constant surprise, even to me, and one concludes that only the most absolute restriction and obstruction is to be expected. That is a simple law of human psychology, although not totally easy to understand.

Professor Otto Frisch FRS
(1904 -1979)

To give one example, the late Professor Otto Frisch of Cambridge University, who had been involved in the development of the atom bomb, once said to me that if there was such a thing as PK (psychokinesis), every physicist in the world should drop whatever they were doing and work on nothing else. This showed a theoretical recognition of its importance, although it would have been a stupid way of tackling the problem.

At that time, Professor Frisch asked me whether, among all the cases of possible PK that I had ever read or heard about, there was one that provided conclusive proof of the existence of PK. Of course I said that there was not, because proof of anything is, strictly speaking, impossible. However cast-iron a case might seem to be, the possibility would always remain that one’s informant was lying or misremembering. Professor Frisch seemed relieved at this, and said he was glad to hear me say that, so that he did not have to feel under pressure to organise any research into PK at all.

Now if somebody with my IQ, who has done enough relevant research of a respectable kind, has a lot of information and ideas about the possible psychology of PK, this would appear to be an opportunity for a scientific breakthrough potentially of such magnitude as to constitute a fairly irrefutable claim on funding. Especially considering the billions that are annually poured into totally futile ‘research’ guaranteed to lead to no outcome of any importance whatever.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

A friend in need

Text of a recent letter to a potential associate, whom I had known as a child, and with whom I had corresponded some months ago.

Dear ...

I was disappointed that you did not come to visit me here after you had apparently said that you would. You seemed to want to reminisce about an earlier stage of my life, and I could hardly think of doing that without correcting the misinterpretations that have always been placed upon me (and, of course, on my father as well). And when I talk about my past, I really want to get more of my past history into writing, which means dictating and editing.

Maybe you, or any other visitor, would be willing and/or able to help with the secretarial work that will go with doing this, when I am able to do it, but in any case it would be a break for me to have a visitor. Until people have made some contact with me here, there is certainly no possibility of their passing on any information about me, my need for new people, and my need for money, to other people, and this information is what I need to get spread around.

Anyway, could you not come and visit as a favour to me. Any new people might make a tremendous difference to me, and even a very temporary visitor who might pass something on would give me a boost.

Follow-up letter by me, in response to his reply.

Dear ...

It is interesting that you make it explicit that you will not visit me if I make the condition that I talk to you about my situation.

It has often seemed to me that this must be the reason for visitors rushing away soon after turning up, but you are the first person to make it explicit that you do not want to hear anything about my situation.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Serviam (‘I will serve’)

Further to the previous post, the following is another extract from The Lost Prince by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

This episode occurs soon after The Rat starts to live with Stefan Loristan (the exiled king), his son Marco and his servant Lazarus. The Rat goes to Lazarus’s room to talk to him, and to ask what he can do to serve Loristan.

“I want to find out everything he [Loristan] likes and everything he doesn’t like,” The Rat said. “I want—isn’t there anything—anything you’d let me do for him? It wouldn’t matter what it was. And he needn’t know you are not doing it. I know you wouldn’t be willing to give up anything particular. But you wait on him night and day. Couldn’t you give up something to me?”
Lazarus pierced him with keen eyes. He did not answer for several seconds.
“Now and then,” he said gruffly at last, “I'll let you brush his boots. But not every day—perhaps once a week.”
“When will you let me have my first turn?” The Rat asked.
Lazarus reflected. His shaggy eyebrows drew themselves down over his eyes as if this were a question of state.
“Next Saturday,” he conceded. “Not before. I’ll tell him when you brush them.”
“You needn’t,” said The Rat. “It’s not that I want him to know. I want to know myself that I’m doing something for him. I’ll find out things that I can do without interfering with you. I’ll think them out.”
“Anything any one else did for him would be interfering with me,” said Lazarus.

The attitude of wanting to serve an admired person by doing useful things for them is very much at variance with the attitude of employees nowadays. The richest and most famous are left to eat cold food alone on Christmas Day, or after a late-night performance, so that their assistants, however highly paid, can give priority to their own interests.

Frances Hodgson Burnett
(1849-1924)

Frances Hodgson Burnett had spent decades of her life in social environments where attitudes like that of The Rat and Lazarus were much easier to observe and imagine. The attitudes ascribed to Loristan’s associates seem to go beyond what might arise from wishing to curry favour with someone who could confer advantages upon you.

The average modern employee seems to reject considerations, such as currying favour with his employer, or doing something for idealistic reasons, as being beneath him or her.

* Serviam is the motto of the Ursuline convent schools, one of which I attended for four years after coming top of the Essex Grammar School Scholarship exam.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

The Lost Prince

The following are extracts from The Lost Prince* written by Frances Hodgson Burnett, published in 1915. This is the story of Stefan Loristan, the exiled King of Samavia (a fictional European country), and his son Marco, a boy of about 12. The story is apparently set in the late eighteen hundreds or very early nineteen hundreds.

When the story starts, they are living in poverty in dingy lodgings in London with their loyal servant, an ex-soldier called Lazarus. Marco has made friends with a street boy nicknamed ‘The Rat’. The Rat is the leader of a group of street boys who wear ragged clothes, go barefoot, and do not go to school. One evening, The Rat comes to the lodgings and says that his father has died in a drunken fit. Marco and his father welcome him, and The Rat clearly wants to stay with them.

... Loristan did not turn and walk away. He looked deep into the lad’s eyes as if he were searching to find some certainty. Then he said in a low voice, ‘You know how poor I am’ ... ‘I am so poor that I am not sure that I can give you enough dry bread to eat – always. Marco and Lazarus and I are often hungry. Sometimes you might have nothing to sleep on but the floor. But I can find a place for you if I take you with me,’ said Loristan. ‘Do you know what I mean by a place?’
‘Yes, I do,’ answered The Rat. ‘It’s what I’ve never had before – sir.’

Later in the story, Marco’s father has left the lodgings and the landlady, Mrs Beedle, is worried about whether they can pay the rent.

‘That’s just what I want to find out about,’ put in [Mrs Beedle]. ‘When is he [Marco’s father] coming back?’
‘I do not know,’ answered Marco.
‘That’s it,’ said Mrs Beedle. ‘You’re old enough to know that two big lads and a fellow like that can’t have food and lodgin’s for nothing ... Your father’s out of sight. He,’ jerking her head towards Lazarus, ‘paid me for last week. How do I know he will pay me for this week!’
‘The money is ready,’ roared Lazarus.
...
‘Is there so little money left?’ said Marco. ‘We have always had very little. When we had less than usual, we lived in poorer places and were hungry if it was necessary. We know how to go hungry. One does not die of it.’
The big eyes under Lazarus’s beetling brows filled with tears.
‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘one does not die of hunger. But the insult – the insult! That is unendurable.’

After finding out that they have enough money to cover the rent for one, possibly two more weeks if they are very frugal:

‘Never mind,’ said Marco. ‘Never mind. We will go away the day we can pay no more.’
‘I can go out and sell newspapers,’ said The Rat’s sharp voice. ‘I’ve done it before. Crutches help you to sell them. The platform would sell ’em faster still. I’ll go out on the platform.’
‘I can sell newspapers, too,’ said Marco.
Lazarus uttered an exclamation like a groan.
‘Sir,’ he cried, ‘no, no! Am I not here to go out and look for work? I can carry loads. I can run errands.’
‘We will all three begin to see what we can do,’ Marco said.

In the pre-Welfare State world, people’s minds were constantly preoccupied with the urgent need for money to buy food, pay the rent, and support their families; and for work as a way of obtaining money. Therefore people wanted to do what other people wanted, in order to be paid for it. As a result, the motivation to ‘get at’ other people, by making them do things for themselves, was suppressed.

People had been selected, for centuries if not millennia, by being able to do better than other people in these circumstances.

Once there is a Welfare State, which removes the threat of starvation, people start to interact with one another on quite different terms, and this affects everything that goes on, not only the attitude to working – such as people’s levels of politeness and honesty.

* Illustration taken from the US 1915 edition, published by The Century Company, New York.

I appeal for financial and moral support in improving my position. I need people to provide moral support both for fundraising, and as temporary or possibly long-term workers. Those interested should read my post on interns.

Loans

I have always had a strong principle against getting into debt, as had my parents.

The accepted attitude towards being in debt changed abruptly in 1945 after the Second World War, and this was obviously an important element in the oncoming ideology.

In the modern world, nominal loans are often made, with little or no expectation that they will ever be repaid. Perhaps this is considered to be less insulting to the recipient. When I was a poor student, with no grant and not even a small salary (and not in receipt of any state benefit), people sometimes offered me loans of this kind, seeing that I was short of money and with no real expectation of repayment. These I never accepted, although I would have accepted an outright gift. And now I certainly would not accept any gift of money if I had any reason to think that the donor regarded it as a loan.

In general, my associates and I are too aware of the existential uncertainty to place themselves at anyone’s mercy by getting into debt.

Not only do people offer gifts as if they were loans; they also ask for gifts as if they were loans. When one of my colleagues was at school, a rather demoralised working-class friend quite often asked her to lend her something, which she did, but without expecting to get it back – and she did not ever get it back. She never asked for it back, and regarded these ‘loans’ as outright gifts as soon as her friend asked for them.

Nowadays being in debt, rather than having savings, increases eligibility for benefits. This is rewarding irresponsibility, and hence penalising responsibility. As Polonius in Hamlet (c.1601) says:

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

Educational ideology and the loss of clarity

One of my colleagues has a book that was given as a school prize in a State primary school 50 years ago, and which shows how the dominant ideology has developed since then. The book is entitled The Living World of History, the author Gareth H. Browning, and it was published by Collins in 1963. Evidently the book was regarded as respectable at the time, but it expresses an unfashionable world view by today’s standards. It is implied that the value of compulsory education is not unquestionable.

The Factory Act of 1833 (one of a long series to come) prohibited the employment of children under nine and limited the hours of those under thirteen to forty-eight per week. Then, as a doubtful treat, the latter group were given schooling for two hours a day. The government also made a money grant for educational purposes. These were the first effective steps made by the State towards the free, compulsory, universal education that children “enjoy” to-day. (p. 112)

Then again, the goodness and rightness of socialism, as opposed to capitalism, is also questionable.

In Britain, in the general election of 1945, the Socialists swept the country. There was an urgent feeling that society must be created anew on truly democratic lines. The State must ensure a higher standard of living for ordinary people. All the political parties were pledged to social reform. But, while the Socialists sought it through State ownership and control in industry and the public services, the Conservatives believed in private ownership, free competition and individual enterprise. (pp. 155-6)

Another sign of the changing times is the clarity with which the book expresses what it says. The attitudes described may or may not seem convincing to the reader, but it is clear what they are.

As the modern ideology became more dominant, although presented as unquestionable it was expressed with a certain vagueness or blurriness, which had the effect of making it difficult to criticise. This kind of blurriness, after a certain date, became fairly universal in academic productions. It became a feature, not just of subjects such as history or sociology, but also of ostensibly objective subjects such as physics.

Interns

People who are thinking of coming to form an association with us should be aware of the concept of ‘interns’.

People starting their careers are often glad to be allowed to work for a statusful organisation without being paid, as the work experience is supposed to enhance their chances of paid work later on. There are even people who are willing to pay a firm or university for allowing them to work as an intern. People have expressed objections to this, and say that employers should not be allowed to accept paying interns, because this is giving an advantage to those who can afford to pay for an internship, while the poor, who cannot afford to pay for one, are at a disadvantage.

As we are not a statusful organisation, or a socially recognised university department, people think that we should pay for any scrap of work they do for us, although the useful information and practical experience acquired by working here could be extremely valuable to them, even more so than that gained from working for an organisation with an accepted social position. It would actually be very reasonable, for someone who wanted to develop an association with us, to offer to pay us so much per annum for working here.

Appeal for funding to lucid dream researchers

The following is an edited version of something I published on the web some years ago. Since that time, no financial contributions have been made by any of the individuals mentioned.
I continue to appeal to anyone who has derived advantage from the topic of lucid dreaming, either as a field for research, or as a topic of personal interest, to contribute not less than £2000 per annum towards funding for my research and my personal income.

When I was interviewed by the head of the Oxford University philosophy appointments board, a senior professor, to discuss how I might get onto a salaried university career track as an academic philosopher, I did not attempt to conceal my bitterness at the fact that my book on lucid dreaming, which I had written under duress because I had no other way of advertising my need for funding to do laboratory research to force my way back into a university career, had provided academics around the world, already safely on career tracks, with advantageous areas of research.

The professor hastened to defend the academics for doing nothing to improve my position, by saying that once a piece of work had been published it was free to anyone to work on it. And of course there is no law asserting that anyone should recognise the socially disadvantaged position of someone else, or do anything more than is strictly prescribed by law to help them. But spontaneous decency is not illegal, even where not socially prescribed. It is not explicitly recognised that it is socially proscribed. There was no law against the professor himself, having recognised that he had become aware of someone so seriously disadvantaged in life in comparison with himself, donating to me half of his own salary, or any other fraction of it, from that time forwards. Or he might have wished to make a mailing to all academics around the world known to have worked on lucid dreams, in which he could have expressed to them his own recognition of my disadvantaged position, and his own hope that each of them would make a significant annual donation out of their own salaries towards compensating me for my continuing lack of a university career, despite the fact that there was no legal obligation on them to do so.

Many years ago an international conference on lucid dreaming was held at London University and I was invited to contribute by giving a paper, although no one had shown any sign of wanting to provide me with funding to contribute by way of research.

At the conference someone informed me that he was sure I should be really pleased that some more of my ideas for research were going to be tried out at Stanford University. I felt about as overjoyed as if I had been slapped in the face, and it just illustrates how insensitive to my predicament those who themselves benefited from my work on lucid dreams have always been.

I was (and still am), in my grievous and destitute position, very embittered that it did not occur to any of those who worked on lucid dreams, salaried as nearly all of them were, to send me money to relieve my unsalaried position. If each of those concerned had sent a contribution of £2000 per annum (even if only while they were actually working on lucid dreams) my position would have been significantly improved and by now I would probably have been able to publish enough research to force my way back into a university position. It is not too late for my position to be relieved in this way. In fact the urgency that it should be has only increased with the decades of delay, since I am still physically alive, and needing to get started on my forty-year academic career.

So I am appealing to anyone who has derived advantage from lucid dreaming, either as a field for academic research or as a topic of personal interest, to contribute either a lump sum towards the £2 million which I need to set up a residential college, or to contribute not less than £2000 per annum towards my research and my personal income.

Legacies of any size are also requested. There is no upper limit, as the endowment required for residential colleges and research departments is considerable. Please note that any donations or legacies should be made direct to me, and not to any organisation with which I may seem to be associated. The latter leads to so much complication that the benefit is severely reduced, and probably completely aborted.

I address this appeal particularly to the following, who are known to have made use of the concept of lucid dreaming in their careers.


List of lucid dream researchers

A. Baker A. Brylowski A.A. Sheikh Alan Moffitt Alan Worsley B. Kediskerski B. McLeod B. McWilliams B. Rodenelli B. Shillig B.G. Marcot C. Sachau C. Sawicki C.N. Alexander Charles Tart D. Armstrong-Hickey D. Davidson D. Foulkes D. Orme-Johnson D.B. Jenkins D.E. Hewitt D.S. Rogo David B. Cohen Elendur Haraldsson F.A. Wolf Fariba Bogzaran G.S. Sparrow Gayle Delaney George Gillespie Gordon Halliday H. Reed Harry Hunt Harvey J. Irwin J. Adams J. Dane J. Walling J. Wren-Lewis Jane Bosveld Janet Mullington Jayne Gackenbach Judith R. Malamud K. Kelzer K. McGowan K. McKelvey

K.P. Vieira Keith Hearne L. L. Magallon L. Levitan L. Nagel L. Rokes L.L. Magallon M. Walters M.L. Lucescu Mary Godwyn Morton Schatzman N. Heilman O. Clerc P. Maxwell P.D. Tyson Patricia Garfield Paul Tholey Peter Fellows Peter Fenwick R. Boyer R. Cranson R. Curren R. George R.J. Small Robert D. Ogilvie Robert F. Price Robert Hoffmann Robert K. Dentan Robert Van de Castle Roger Wells Ross Pigneau S. Boyt S. Hammons S. Stone Sheila Purcell Stephen LaBerge Susan Blackmore T. Neilsen Thomas Snyder V. Zarcone W. Dement W. Greenleaf Wynn Schwartz

Dream research

We recently received an enquiry from the magazine of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, requesting an interview. This is the text of my colleague Dr Charles McCreery’s reply.

“Thank you for your email addressed to Celia Green, to which she has asked me to reply. I am the co-author with her of Lucid Dreaming: the Paradox of Consciousness During Sleep, which was published by Routledge in 1994.

We were invited by Routledge to write this book. We would not otherwise have considered writing a follow-up to Dr Green’s first book on the subject, Lucid Dreams, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1968, since the latter had not resulted, as we had hoped, in any financial support being forthcoming to enable us to carry out any of the experimental work which Dr Green had in mind.

Instead, several years after the publication of Lucid Dreams, we found other people entering the field, who were funded by university appointments in most cases. They began to carry out work which acknowledged Dr Green’s priority and the influence it had had on their own decision to enter the field of research, but which did not represent the sort of research which she had had in mind to do herself. Nor did it have any effect in making it any more possible for us to raise funds for our own work.

We are still appealing for funding to continue our work in this and other fields. We are also appealing for funding to keep Dr Green’s first book on lucid dreams in print, as well as books on other topics which we have written and published, and further books which we could write, or edit and publish, if we had funding to do so.

We are short-staffed on account of our lack of funding. Dr Green does not give interviews as we have found it impossible to avoid misinterpretations.

I add below three links to pieces which Dr Green has published on the topic of lucid dreaming in recent years on her blog, and which describe our attempts to get funding for continuing her research in this area.”

Lucid dreams: watching others get the benefit

An appeal to Harvard

More on lucid dreams and the BBC

An evil headmaster

I reproduce below an account by one of my associates of an experience they had with the headmaster of their primary school. The account illustrates what is seldom acknowledged: that teachers, especially those employed in the state sector, may have destructive motivation towards some (or all) of their pupils, particularly those of high ability.

“Mr ‘X’ was the headmaster of the primary school I attended. When I was nine, he was in charge of the relatively small class of pupils deemed as possibles for passing the 11-plus exam. There was a parallel, and larger, lower-ability class. Although I was not aware of any formal policy on this, there were clear signs that this second class were regarded as no-hopers for the 11-plus exam. For example, the first class were occasionally given hints about how to do well in the exam, which was not done for the second class.

At that time, pupils of age 9 at the school entered either the 11-plus class or the parallel class, and left the school at 11 to go to secondary school – normally a grammar school if they had passed the 11-plus, or a secondary modern school if they had not.

At nine, I was among those selected to enter the ‘top’ class (as I, not the school, called it). I was at that time a bouncy, sociable and self-confident person. I was also conscientious, and felt identified with working hard and doing my best.

However, after entering the top class it soon emerged that I had not completely learnt my multiplication tables by heart, as I was apparently supposed to have done. This gave Mr X an excuse to punish me. As a result of my relative weakness in multiplication, I scored badly in the mental arithmetic tests Mr X gave regularly, and he began threatening me with the idea that I might be relegated to the ‘lower’ class. I was too full of shame and panic to tell my parents about these threats.

In due course I was relegated to the lower class, which happened towards the end of the first term. I did not tell my parents immediately that it had happened, because I felt ashamed. Mr X made no attempt to teach me the tables himself, nor did he contact my parents to encourage them to do so.

Mr X generally treated me as if I were a criminal or similar moral reprobate. He appeared to attribute my not having learnt the multiplication tables to laziness and frivolity, and hinted that my defect might consist in something even worse. When I thought about it later, I realised that (at the time) I felt that I had not known how wicked I was until Mr X had told me.

Eventually I had to tell my parents about the situation, and they reacted as I feared they would. They assured me that they ‘loved’ me but took it for granted that my being relegated to the lower class by Mr X meant that I was deficient in arithmetic, and that I would not pass the 11-plus. They started to console themselves with the idea that even if I went to a secondary modern school, I might still have a chance to take O-levels, like the children who got into grammar school.

Being in the ‘lower’ class damaged my self-confidence and did not improve my prowess at mental arithmetic. In neither the ‘top’ class nor the ‘lower’ class were the multiplication tables actually taught. I felt cowed.

One thing I remember vividly is that I had been in the school choir, which Mr X was in charge of, and that I had greatly enjoyed it. However, it appears I was penalised for my ‘sins’ by being excluded from choir events as well. That school year, the school choir performed with a number of other choirs at a concert in a nearby town, and one of my brothers was on stage as a member of the choir, but I was not. Instead, I was in the audience with my parents and younger siblings (they were too young to be in the choir).

At the end of that school year, I only managed to come third in the ‘lower’ class, even though I had previously come top of my year. I am sure this was because I felt demoralised and unable to identify with myself.

At the start of the next school year, Mr X graciously allowed me back into the ‘top’ class. I was relieved that I was back in the ‘land of the living’, i.e. in the same class as other obviously intelligent children, but my confidence had been damaged and I continued to think of myself as naturally lazy and frivolous.

All the pupils who turned 11 in that school year, including me, took the 11-plus. I made my best attempt at it. By that time I had learnt the multiplication tables by myself, at home. I didn’t feel I was doing particularly well at school (we didn’t get much feedback about how we were doing, until the end of a year) and so I fully expected not to pass the 11-plus. Nevertheless I did pass it, along with a few others in the top class. Also, at the end of the year it was announced, to my surprise, that I had come first in class, in terms of marks for schoolwork during the year.

I expect Mr X was fuming as he signed my book prize for coming first, as he evidently hated me. During the ‘demotion’ episode he had treated me as if I had somehow injured him, and as if he had to try to take revenge.

Although I could be said to have left that school on a relatively high note, my self-confidence did not return until many years later. I remained disconnected from my schoolwork throughout most of my time at the secondary school, and only achieved mediocre results in my O- and A-levels.

Thirty years later, I was only reminded that I had in fact come first at the end of the last year of primary school when I visited my parents, noticed the prize book there, and opened it to see the inscription signed by Mr X.

In retrospect, I expect Mr X had first noticed me when I went with my mother, at the age of four and half, to meet him for an interview about my attending the school in due course. At that time I could already read. While my mother was talking to Mr X, I took a great interest in the school noticeboards which I found in the corridors. Mr X asked me about what I could see, so I told him what I had read. I came to his attention again when I came top of my school year at the age of eight, and he was no doubt reminded to keep an eye on me.

By the time I was nine I was on the board of distinguished readers, an elite group of about ten pupils. One bad thing Mr X did not do when I was put down a year, though he had the capacity to, was to wipe my name off that list. But it was not my ability that he had called into question; it was my character. This may have done me more harm than if he had merely implied I was stupid.

My tentative interpretation of what happened is that Mr X was hostile to me because I was clever. Hence his desire to punish me by making me appear stupid. I think this reaction to ability, and desire to do someone down, is more common among teachers than is generally realised. The concept of the sadistic teacher is relatively commonplace, but the idea that hostility is particularly aroused by the able is less so. Of course this characteristic can be found among private school teachers as well as those working in the state sector. However, in the private sector there is at least a modicum of competitive pressure to keep anti-ability motivation suppressed.

Parents may not always care about the effects of a school as much as one might hope. However, they care more if they are paying, and are liable to transfer their children to another school if they think their money would be better spent elsewhere. By contrast, there is little pressure on state school teachers not to behave destructively. The parents aren’t paying and they typically have little power to change schools. Even if they do change, the school being rejected doesn’t suffer financially, so it has little reason to avoid teachers who behave like this, or to give them an incentive not to do so.”

Lucid dreams: watching others get the benefit

text of a letter to a journalist sent a few years ago

When you came you asked me whether I regretted having written the first book on lucid dreams, and I should like to answer that in writing. It may be too late for your article, but I am often asked similar questions by journalists and maybe when I have written it down it can go in my forthcoming book.

In my previous letter to you I referred to academics who make applications for funding for a project, don’t get any, and then find someone else is doing a similar project. Do you suppose they regret making the application? Of course with hindsight they may think that if they had known the outcome they would not have bothered, but they could only have found out what the outcome would be by making the application, so in a sense I suppose they do not regret having made the attempt.

My position about lucid dreams is similar. I had no wish to write a book about lucid dreams, and would not have done so if I had had any way of proceeding with actual laboratory research on lucid dreams or on anything else, but all the possible sources of funding with which I had contact were impervious, and so I made what was in effect an application for funding. But I had no way of doing that except by publicising to the world my acquaintance with this potential field of research.

Of course, the academic who finds his ideas being copied has no cause for complaint. His ideas are not protected by patent or copyright, and if he makes them known to the personnel of a grant-giving body they may leak. There is no law against insider dealing in this area. In any case, even if there were, he would find it difficult to pin anything on anybody, unless his application drew on unpublished material known only to himself and this clearly appeared in the design of the other person’s project. This is very unlikely to be the case, and if specialised information is not involved, the other academic can always claim that he thought up the project independently. Great minds are said to think alike, and mediocre ones certainly do.

And, of course, it does the rejected academic no real harm, unless you count emotional bitterness as harmful, to see someone else implementing his ideas. In this respect, however, the emotional pain has been decidedly more severe in my case, in relation to lucid dreams, than that of the average rejected academic is likely to be. The academic has his status and salary; a certain lifestyle including ancillary staff and dining halls etc, facilitating intellectual activity, is assured. I was attempting to compensate for my lack of these things by getting funding to enable me to live a decent academic life, and this was a desperate long shot at best.

It therefore caused me some intensity of despair to observe that one of my long shots had in fact succeeded to the extent of providing other people, already safely on academic career tracks, with a field of research. As the minimal funding which had made possible the writing of the book had run out, there was no way in which I could hope to improve on the application for funding which I had just made.

A person on a desert island cannot exactly say that he regrets having fired a distress rocket without success. He understands what led him to do it, and in the same circumstances he would do the same again. But if I had known what the consequences of initiating this field of research might be, I might have refrained. The expansion of work and interest in this field can only appear to someone in my position as a cruel mockery of it, a refinement of torture which I could have done without.

Article on lucid dreaming in BBC Focus Magazine

text of an email from the picture editor at BBC Focus Magazine:

Dear Ms. Green,

I am mailing from BBC Focus Magazine, a popular science and technology publication. In our August issue we are running a feature about dreams, and how you may be able to take control of them. We mention your early research into lucid dreaming in our piece, and I wondered if you might be able to provide us with an image of yourself that we can put alongside the copy.

I would be happy to credit the image and send you a copy of the magazine in return.

Best wishes,
James Cutmore

text of my colleague Dr Charles McCreery’s reply:

Dear Mr Cutmore,

Thank you for your message to Celia Green, to which Dr Green has asked me to reply. I am the co-author with her of her follow-up book Lucid Dreaming, the Paradox of Consciousness During Sleep, published by Routledge.

The position is not merely that Dr Green carried out ‘early research’ into lucid dreaming, but that she was the first to develop the subject as a field of scientific study, a programme for which she laid out in her book Lucid Dreams, first published in 1968 by Hamish Hamilton.

This priority was fully recognised by her successors in the field some years later, notably Professor Stephen LaBerge and Dr Keith Hearne.

I add below three links to pieces which Dr Green has published on the topic of lucid dreaming in recent years on her blog, which describe our attempts to get funding for continuing her research in this area.

I will send you a scan of a photograph attached to a separate email.

Yours sincerely,
Charles McCreery

text of James Cutmore’s reply:

Dear Charles,

Many thanks for sending the image through to me. We do, in fact, state that Dr Green was the first person to experiment extensively with lucid dreaming, and develop an understanding of it. My first email was written in haste, so many apologies for that.

Please enjoy the rest of your day, and thank you again for your help.

Best wishes,
James Cutmore

More about the threat of intelligence

text of a letter to an academic

I have written to you about the IQ test that I did when I was ten, and in retrospect I realise that probably my father’s initiative had little to do with it; more likely the educational psychologist was set on by the local authority to spy on me and work out how best to damage my education.

I was very much in the dark at the time, and it was only in 1956 that a book* was published which discussed reading at two as indicating a mental age of six to seven, and thus an IQ of over 300. It was only then that I realised that the test score obtained by the educational psychologist could not very well have been less than 200, although I was told, via my father, that my IQ was 180.

In fact, it appears possible that all the new legislation concerning the ages at which external school exams could be taken, which was created at the time of my education, was made with me in mind, and affected me very badly.

When I told you how early I learnt to read, you quoted an official opinion to the effect that there are so many variations in early development that (by implication) anything of this kind is not meaningful.

No doubt this is what everyone wanted to think, even at that time (i.e. in the 40s). When the post-war Labour landslide occurred in 1945, the minimum age for taking the grammar school scholarship was raised; and if I had not taken the scholarship in the last year before it became the 11-plus, I would not have been able to take it for another two years.

However, I slipped through the net, although not without attracting attention. When, still aged ten, I was interviewed for entry to the Ursuline High School, the Reverend Mother told my parents that I had been one of the youngest candidates, and had got 100% on every paper of the grammar school scholarship (English, arithmetic and intelligence). She had clearly got this information from the local authority, and it was obviously accessible to the government as well.

So the local authority probably set their educational psychologist to spy on me and find out whether they had any grounds for attacking my father. Allegations about his pushing me were already circulating, and did not stop doing so when the educational psychologist could find no grounds for them.

I had been relatively inconspicuous between the ages of two and nine in a private preparatory school, from which I frequently stayed away, my parents paying the fees for the term and squaring it with the headmistress. This inconspicuousness did not last once I became exposed to the state educational system.

* C.W. Valentine, The Normal Child and some of his Abnormalities, Penguin, 1956.

Intelligence: a threat to the welfare state?

text of a letter to an academic

My life continues to be constricted by the anti-exceptionality syndrome of modern society.

When I was about ten and had come top of the grammar school scholarship, my father, wishing to show his dependence on expert opinion, had my IQ tested by an educational psychologist who lived nearby – possibly because he (my father) was sceptical about the result of the scholarship exam.

The psychologist’s verdict, as I was told, was that he had never tested a child like it before, and never expected to again. Testing school children for local authorities was, more or less, his occupation in life. He added that I had a phenomenal memory. Of course he was only able to test my short-term memory, which he had done by reading me lists of numbers and asking me to repeat them backwards. Eventually he had asked me how I did it, and I said that I fastened the numbers on my fingers and read them off again. (This may sound like a way of memorising things with eidetic imagery that some people use, so I think I should explain that no imagery was involved, it was just a case of connecting the associations of a number with an ordered sequence.)

I was told that my IQ was 180, which they described as ‘near genius’. Genius was defined as over 200, and there was apparently supposed to be a population of people with IQs between 180 and 200. Probably my father would not have told me my IQ was 180 if he had not realised it was an understatement.

The educational psychologist appeared to pride himself on his own IQ of 140, which he described as ‘a professor’s IQ’.

This was in about 1945.

This account of what happened to me may provide some indication of the accepted attitudes to intelligence at that time. But things were changing fast.

Nowadays the concept of IQ is considered of doubtful significance by most psychologists, and IQ tests have been progressively changed, supposedly to allow for cultural differences between different cultural and ethnic groups.

The concept of IQ was originally developed as a predictor of academic success within the academic system of that time. The academic system has changed, and IQ tests have changed with it.

As the system has changed, academic standards, both in universities and in professional environments, have also changed, so that in both environments it is common to find people writing English that routinely needs to be edited and proofread by somebody else.

Part-time ex-Oxford lecturers

text of a letter to an academic

I wonder if you know anyone who knows the Principal of Ripon Theological College, which is in Cuddesdon and fairly near to where we live?

The inflation continues to make it more difficult than it has always been to be even minimally productive in this incipient academic institution. Whatever the official figures may suggest, many of the types of expenditure which we face seem to have risen significantly in price over the last couple of years.

It would be helpful if we could alleviate the constrictive pressures by supplementing our incomes as part-time or temporary lecturers or tutors at university level. Three of the people here now have Oxford doctorates – two of them former Oxford college lecturers – and between us we cover a wide range of topics, including statistics, mathematics, accounting, psychology, philosophy and history of religion.

I do not know what areas are included in the courses provided by Ripon College, but it is likely that they include several in which somebody here could function as a tutor or lecturer. If the Principal of Ripon College knew about us, he might realise that we could provide a fill-in if there was a temporary absence or breakdown of some present lecturing arrangement. We could also act as temporary lecturers for Oxford University or for Oxford Brookes University, but these could only be very temporary on account of the travelling.

However, if a student in the Oxford area were having difficulties with his work and could drive himself into Cuddesdon for tutorials, it might be very significantly to his benefit to do so.

We should like our availability in these capacities to be known about on the academic network.

Opportunity in Cuddesdon, Oxford

text of a letter to the author of an investment newsletter

Dear ...

I am a long-term subscriber to your newsletter. I am an outcast academic, publishing, when able to, under the imprint ‘Oxford Forum’.

It is easiest to account for my position in life by going right back to the beginning. The rejection of hereditary ability is a salient, if somewhat concealed, feature of modern anti-capitalist ideology.

I showed remarkable precocity from an early age. This is something of which the modern world does not approve – although pre-1945, the concept of IQ was still accepted. As a result, I was thrown out at the end of my ruined education with no usable qualification with which to make an acceptable career. Therefore I founded my own independent academic organisation with the intention of working my way back into a normal university career at a higher level.

I hoped that others would join me in this endeavour, but in practice found that my position aroused little sympathy, but did arouse intense opposition. Over the decades I acquired some associates. Those who are here now are people who had themselves aroused unjustifiable opposition, which had made it impossible for them to make suitable careers. Other associates I had fell away, apparently for no better reason than that somebody like me, who had been thrown out by people with status, should receive no help in attempting to remedy his position.

I am seeking people to come and live nearby, because cooperation between individuals who are prepared to criticise the ideology could lead to significant, and possibly dramatic, increases in the resources and opportunities of those concerned.

You are the sort of person we have in mind, since you are clearly prepared to envisage increasing your own capital and helping other people to increase theirs as well. We would like people like you to come and live in Cuddesdon, a village on the edge of Oxford, which is easily accessible to both London and Oxford. Cuddesdon is on a hill, with clean air, and views of the Chilterns.

Kind regards,
etc.
Celia Green

‘We appeal for £5m as initial funding for our unrecognised and unsupported independent university.’
Charles McCreery, DPhil

Socialism and the Cleare family

From the onset of socialism, it clearly reduced the opportunities of the most exceptional. This may be illustrated by its effects on the family of my Cleare grandfather (my mother’s father), which was always struggling to overcome the effects of its socially displaced position.

My great-grandfather had been relatively wealthy but had lost his money some time in the late 1800s. His son, my grandfather, had gone to a bad state school, as education was already compulsory up to the age of fourteen. However, at this early stage, it was possible to leave school completely if one had passed the school leaving exam. This my grandfather did at the age of 12. He became a shop boy and, by saving money, a shop owner. He worked very hard, and flourished since he could add up everyone’s bills in his head by mental arithmetic. He worked all hours, and would get up to sell something in the night if someone threw a stone against his bedroom window.

His rate of progress was slowed down when time limitations on shop opening hours were introduced in the early 1900s, so as to prevent people who wanted to from working longer hours in order to make more money.

Before the law was changed there had been demonstrations by shop assistants in favour of restricting opening hours. So people may argue that the introduction of time limitations on shop opening hours was in the interests of the shop assistants, and not done for the sake of reducing the opportunities of exceptional people such as my grandfather.

Whatever the ostensible motivation for the restrictions may have been, they did have a bad effect on my grandfather’s attempts to improve his position. (My mother, being philosophical about it, said that it was advantageous to her, as it meant he took her to the music halls every Sunday.)

It is likely that one effect of the restrictions was to damage my grandfather’s ability to pay for qualifications for his children. My mother went to teacher training college for two years, having said that she was not sufficiently interested in any subject to want him to pay for her to get a degree by spending three years at a university. My mother’s school (East Ham Grammar School) had thought she was so exceptional that she should go to university. In those days it would have been paid for by her father, and it was very rare for a girl to go to university.

My uncle Harry (one of my mother’s brothers), who was the captain of the Essex chess team, was not able to take a degree in spite of his father having announced, ‘Harry is going to be a lawyer.’

Uncle Harry later won a university scholarship in a national competition for local government employees, but did not take it up, out of a very realistic fear that he might lose his job as head of a local government department if he took leave of several years to take a degree. (In his case, the government would have paid his university fees.)

My grandfather gave my parents a small house when they married, and might have been able to do more to alleviate the pressures on my father, both before and after their marriage, if he had been better off, which he might well have been without the restrictions on shop opening hours.

Clearly several people with exceptional ability were involved. My grandfather himself, my mother, my father who was brought into the family circle by his association with my mother, my uncle Harry (my mother’s brother), and myself. The restrictions on shop opening hours and shop employees, and also the introduction of rent controls which gave tenants security of tenure at controlled rents, were very damaging for my grandfather’s attempts to rise to a position more comparable to that which his father had lost.

If his attempts to improve his position had been less hampered, he might well have been able to pay for degrees for some or all of my mother, my father and Uncle Harry. Then I might have gone to private schools, and been saved from exposure to the state educational system which ruined my life.

My unfunded independent university, which could be publishing analyses of the complex issues involved in the area of social policy, has been effectively censored and suppressed for decades. Meanwhile, misleading and tendentious material on the topic continues to pour out from socially recognised sources.

Education against ability

copy of a letter to an academic

We never get a break, which is not surprising as modern society is geared against ability. There has been no response to our appeals and invitations for people to come and work here, and for financial and moral support of all kinds.

The idea of preventing people from taking exams ‘too’ young did not come in until after the Second World War. There was a time in the late 1800s when the statutory school leaving age was 14, but it was possible to leave earlier if you had passed the school leaving exam, as my grandfather did, leaving school at 12. At 14 everyone was free to leave, whether or not they had passed the school leaving exam.

Nowadays there is no ostensible minimum age for taking GCSEs (what used to be O-level exams), but they can normally only be taken under the auspices of an educational institution, which may well resist attempts to take exams at an ‘inappropriate’ age.

When I was 12, the majority of the school population left at age 14, without having taken the School Certificate exam, so that only a minority of the population had taken a qualifying exam, which was regarded then as much less important by future employers.

Nowadays nearly everyone has results of qualifying exams that have been taken within the school system, which are regarded as much more important than they used to be, although they are actually far less significant than when a smaller population was taking them.

When I was 14, a law came in restricting the sitting of the School Certificate exam to students of 16 and over. This was reported in newspaper articles, which also mentioned that anonymous ‘representations’ had been made against the change by a number of schools on behalf of their cleverest pupils. I noticed that one of the schools had mentioned a ‘girl of 14 who is awfully good at science’. At the time I thought this could not be me, as I was ‘awfully’ good at all academic subjects. In retrospect, I see that this could well have been me. I suppose it is more noteworthy for a girl to be ‘awfully good at science’ than at other academic subjects.

No concern was expressed by the articles about possible harm being done by holding anyone back, nor was there any suggestion that people at different levels of ability might need to do things at different ages. Instead, discussion revolved around the question of how people with nothing to do might fill in their time.

I took the School Certificate exam (later O levels), A levels and S level exams when I was 16, but this was really far too late for me.

We appeal for £5m as initial funding for a social science department in my unrecognised and unsupported independent university. This would enable it to publish preliminary analyses of areas in the history of education that are currently being ignored because they do not fit with the prevailing ideology.

Means-testing of pensions

I am reposting this piece from August 2010, in the light of the recent Daily Mail investigation by Tony Hazell that the government will not be paying the additional state pension to everyone, as claimed. The report also points out that an inflation increase, which certain former employees were guaranteed, will no longer be paid.

When Money Mail contacted the Department for Work and Pensions, it claimed it had never actually paid these inflation increases and the belief stems from ‘an over-simplification’. Yet we have obtained Government statements and leaflets published over many years which state time and time again that it does pay these inflation increases.

It looks as if the policy of cheating national insurance payers, where they think they can get away with it, is alive and well.

* * *

Of course the terrible financial crisis is taken as justification for yet more penalising of the more functional members of society in favour of the less functional (‘we must protect the poor’).

Both the means-testing of pensions, and the charging of those who have some capital assets for ‘care’ either in their homes or NHS prisons, are iniquitous. However the ‘care’ situation is complicated by treating as a ‘benefit’ (the same thing as a person might have paid for with his own money) what is really better described as an oppressive persecution. So I leave discussion of this complex question for the moment and confine myself to the rise of means-testing.

The state pension was initiated well before the rise of the Welfare State circa 1945, and for that reason was conceived as something which would be received as a right by those who had made the necessary number of qualifying payments - which were supposed, always fictitiously, to provide a fund which could be invested, and from the income of which the pensions would eventually be paid.

When I first went to the Society for Psychical Research after being thrown out of Oxford University in 1957, I thought that I must do everything possible to reduce the disadvantage at which I would be in comparison with, say, an Oxbridge professor of physics on reaching retirement age. At the time I did not find it credible that it would take me many years to get back into the right sort of academic position, but until I did, I would want the intervening years to drag down my pension income by as little as possible. Therefore I paid voluntary contributions for the unpaid student years, and went back to paying them each year as soon as I was no longer receiving a salary from the SPR.

As time passed, I became aware that the hostility to the idea of my working my way back into a suitable career was very great, and perhaps permanently insuperable. I continued every year, without fail, to pay voluntary pension contributions both for myself and for anyone who became associated with me and might be permanent. So I was paying four, and maybe five or six, contributions per annum out of what was usually a nugatory income. After forty years my own pension became payable, although I was still having to pay three voluntary contributions a year for other people. But the situation was turning around from being a drain on our pathetic resources to an annual income, although even when all the pensions became payable, the total income would still be very far short of what was needed to run the very smallest residential college cum research department.

Soon after my 40 years of efforts had been rewarded with the then basic state pension, I started to notice statements by officials to the effect that pensions would be allowed to ‘wither on the vine’, implying that no attempt would be made to keep them adjusted to inflation. After I had received my pension for some years the government decided that these pensions should be means-tested, so that help could be given to the ‘poorest’.

I felt (and always have done) pretty close to being the poorest of the poor myself, in being deprived of a salaried career, but I had built up capital over the years. This was because my only way of getting ahead in life had been to provide myself with capital, the gains on which could be used to finance my institutional environment, so that eventually I might be able to do something.

The means-testing was achieved surreptitiously. Annual increments became much smaller than they would previously have been, while an annual ‘Pension Credit’ (initially ‘Minimum Income Guarantee’) payable to those with very little in the way of savings began to increase.

Making the pensions means-tested was retrospective legislation, as everyone paying into them had been led to believe that they would not be means-tested.

Now I receive only the basic state pension, and not the supplement, which is paid to those who had made no attempt to increase their independence by saving money, such as the chronically unemployed who roam the streets of Oxford and draw disability allowances.

I believe it is the case that I would be receiving thirty-six percent more than I am receiving, if I were eligible for pension credit.

The question of ethics with regard to pension policy is one of the issues on which critical analyses could be being published by Oxford Forum if it were provided with adequate funding to do so. Meanwhile, the idea that it is ‘fair’ to penalise better-off pensioners is likely to receive further reinforcement from pseudo-research published by the universities.

From heredity to genocide?

Today there was a programme on BBC Radio 4 entitled:

Intelligence – born smart, born equal, born different

According to the Radio Times,

The analysis of inherited intelligence is something of a moral maze ... [does research on this topic] really threaten all our utopian ideas of equality?

Francis Galton
(1822 - 1911)

In 1869 Francis Galton published his book Hereditary Genius, exploring the possible genetic basis of high ability. The idea of hereditary ability had already been of long standing when Galton’s book appeared.

The concept of an ‘intelligence quotient’ (IQ) as a measurable predictor of academic success only started to become of serious interest with the rise in state education. However, IQ soon became unfashionable again, perhaps because studies such as those of Cyril Burt suggested there was a significant inherited component to it, which did not fit with the politics of the time. And so research on IQ was gradually expunged from academic awareness.

IQ began to be referred to as ‘the false hypothesis’, as if it had been intrinsically bound up with the assertion of hereditary ability, whereas in fact the heredity idea had been around since well before the nineteenth century. Dismissing the concept of IQ as dubious also made the idea of heredity per se taboo in academic circles, and it now appears to have become something that is not even ‘talked about in polite society’.*

According to the Daily Mail** preview of the programme, Galton’s ideas

were taken up with lethal enthusiasm in many countries in the early 20th century, leading to the theory of eugenics, sterilisation of the ‘unfit’ and, ultimately, Nazi genocide.

This of course is the standard way in which the concepts of heritability and innate intelligence are nowadays made to seem controversial, to the point that it supposedly becomes reasonable to suppress discussion of them. The argument is that they are somehow responsible for the Holocaust, as well as other atrocities.

An alternative line of argument, which seems no less plausible, is that what made the Holocaust, the Gulags, and various other genocides and human rights abuses possible is the notion that the collective has a right to invade the individual’s territory, provided it is done for the benefit of society.

Accepting this line of argument would make concepts such as ‘the interests of society’, the ‘right of the majority’, ‘social justice’ or ‘state planning’ seem ethically dubious, and would point towards such concepts being strenuously avoided in discussion.

However, in practice this line of argument is never applied.

* David Willetts, The Pinch, p.198
** Weekend Magazine, 26 April 2014

My unfunded independent university, which could be publishing analyses of the complex issues involved in the areas of intelligence and heredity, has been effectively censored and suppressed for decades. Meanwhile, misleading and tendentious material on the topics continues to pour out from socially recognised sources.

Invitation to members of the Oxford and Cambridge Club

My colleague, Dr Charles McCreery, has been a member of the Oxford and Cambridge Club in London for a

Oxford and Cambridge Club
at dusk

number of years, the membership of which is confined to graduates of the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge.

Charles recently spent the night there after attending a launch party in the City for Hugo Williams, a contemporary of Charles at Eton, whose latest book of poems, I Knew the Bride, has just been published by Faber & Faber.

We would like to issue an open invitation to any member of the Oxford and Cambridge Club to consider moving to Cuddesdon or nearby, either immediately or on their retirement, and becoming associated, in any way that appealed to them, with the work of Oxford Forum.

They might consider investing in a property, either in Cuddesdon or nearby, for use at the weekends or for living in permanently if they were retired.

The village of Cuddesdon is within 3 miles of the M40 to London, and 20 minutes from the Haddenham & Thame railway station which is only 50 minutes by fast train to Marylebone station.

Cuddesdon is on a hill, 3 miles outside the Oxford ring road, so has clean air and good views to the Chilterns, ten miles away.

There is an ancient church in the village, and an Anglican theological college, Ripon College, which can provide conference facilities and accommodation. The village pub, The Bat & Ball, is notable for its excellent and reasonably priced food, and has overnight accommodation.

Emotional abuse – by teachers and social workers

It seems the government is planning to update the law on child abuse to include ‘emotional cruelty’ as an imprisonable offence.

Changes to the child neglect laws will make ‘emotional cruelty’ a crime for the first time, alongside physical or sexual abuse.
The Government will introduce the change in the Queen’s Speech in early June to enforce the protection of children’s emotional, social and behavioural well-being.
Parents found guilty under the law change could face up to 10 years in prison, the maximum term in child neglect cases.
The change will update existing laws in England and Wales which only allow an adult responsible for a child to be prosecuted if they have deliberately assaulted, abandoned or exposed a child to suffering or injury to their health.
The new offence would make it a crime to do anything that deliberately harmed a child’s ‘physical, intellectual, emotional, social or behavioural development’.
This could include deliberately ignoring a child, or not showing them any love, over prolonged periods, damaging a child’s emotional development.
(Daily Telegraph, 30 March 2014)

It is of course ludicrously vague to define a crime in this way. The existing reference to physical health is vague enough, and results in such appalling instances as children being snatched from parents because of supposed risk of obesity, exposure to cigarette smoke, or refusal to let surgeons perform operations of dubious value. The mind boggles at the various ways a definition of emotional harm might be interpreted by zealous and ideologically motivated police or social workers.

We may assume that, whatever suffering a child may be undergoing at home, the intervention into the family and the coercive break-up, involving forced separation of parent from child, is liable to be highly traumatic and cause long-term psychological damage to the child. This aspect of intervention is surely obvious, but is rarely mentioned in such discussions. Nor is the damaging psychological effect on parents discussed.

The analysis being offered in support of the proposed change is highly asymmetric. There is no suggestion that social workers themselves might face prosecution under the new law if their actions damaged the child’s psychological well-being; or that their actions are already doing so in many cases, and that they would therefore have to modify their behaviour if the new law came in.

It seems likely that, after an initial period, a law as vague as this would come to be used to express all manner of disagreement with parental behaviour, and as an excuse for agents of the collective to behave in a destructive manner; not merely in ways which fit with the current image of preventing psychological cruelty, such as deliberate humiliation.

There are many parental practices with which ‘expert’ views on child rearing disagree. Why should all these not also be conveniently classified, in due course, as ‘cruel’? Particularly in a climate where activists such as the Child Action Group (apparently the main driving force behind the current proposal) are constantly pressing for change, in the direction of more activities being recognised as things the legal system should prevent.

For example, it is commonly held to be good for children that they be ‘allowed to fail’. Rather like the phrase ‘emotional cruelty’, this can be interpreted in an almost infinite number of ways. The American Enterprise Institute, describing the book Real Education by Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve), says that the aim for educating America’s elite should be ‘not to pamper them, but to hold their feet to the fire’. Oxford High School for Girls was recently said to have introduced tests in which it is impossible to score 100 per cent, in order that the girls ‘understand it is acceptable not to be “little Miss Perfect”.’

I would myself regard educational policies such as these as abusive and damaging. Yet ironically, with a law as vague as the one proposed, parents could conceivably be accused of abuse if they fail to adopt such policies themselves. Once it is seen as acceptable for the legal system to adjudicate on the psychological aspects of parenting, one might easily find that nebulous concepts such as ‘allowed to fail’ are being used to attack individual parents’ approaches to child rearing, and hence to break up families.

The idea of blaming parents (but not agents of the collective) for emotional abuse is only making explicit what has been going on, in practice, since the onset of the Oppressive (‘Welfare’) State in 1945.

My parents were accused at various times of ‘not letting me’ meet enough people, or have enough social life; of ‘pushing’ me to get on with taking exams fast, which was actually what I wanted to do, and suffered from being prevented from doing; not compelling me to join the Girl Guides, and so on.

The pressure placed on them – to force me to become a different person, and appear reconciled to arrangements made against my will – successfully ruined my prospects in life and their lives as well, since my father’s health broke down and he was forced to retire early on a breakdown allowance. There was no law at the time of the kind now proposed, or perhaps I might have been taken into care, which would no doubt have been extremely damaging both to my parents and to myself.

I would certainly describe as emotional abuse – or, indeed, as persecution – the pressures placed on my parents, and on myself, by agents of the collective. I would also describe the attitudes of the schools and education authorities involved as sadistic and abusive.

My unfunded independent university, which could be publishing analyses of the complex issues involved in the area of social policy, has been effectively censored and suppressed for decades. Meanwhile, misleading and tendentious material on the topic continues to pour out from socially recognised sources.