By Neil T
A Tory MP (but s/he could have been from any party) wrote to a constituent: “I do not personally see it as inherently unreasonable that parents should have some public obligation to record their commitment to and responsibility for the education of their children.”
A Liberal Democrat MP (but s/he could have been from any party) went on the record with: “It is quite sensible for all home educators to be obliged to notify local authorities that they are home educating. Local Authorities cannot do their present job if they do not know which children are being home educated. A voluntary system would do little or nothing to address the minority of cases where home education could be of poor quality or non existent.”
So what is so special about education compared with the rest of child rearing, like nutrition for example? Do these ‘representatives’ think the state is entitled to inspect families to see if they are fit and adequate places for children to grow up in in all other vital respects? What about psychological testing to ensure good mental health, for example? If they see government as overseer, not servant, then this is illegitimate government and we want none of it. We demand the presumption of innocence.
For parents to be forced to publicly record their commitment to raising their own children is an insult and humiliation to all parents by the state. How dare they presume?! We refuse such a relationship of serf to the state and its elite rule without reference to us. What are they thinking of? How do they see their own relationship to the state? Commitment to the optimal rearing of the young of our species is hard wired into us by evolution, by our very natures. By definition, therefore, only the severely damaged or over-stressed will fail in this regard, and the state already assumes the role of parent of last resort in those cases. The universal assumption of parental delinquency unless declared otherwise deserves a punch on the nose to anyone with the temerity to suggest it, and you can tell them that from me if you like!
This degrading, downgrading and debasement of parenthood is itself an elite project in order to establish tight control over the lives of a subject people. No decent society would tolerate such predations, and would laugh in the face of anyone who made such gross and anachronistic suggestions. To the extent that such a suggestion appears remotely reasonable is testimony to the severe damage done to us by predators, compromising our integrity and capacities. The solution, therefore, cannot possibly be to bring on even more of the same!
The only functions forced registration would serve is to enable state surveillance, and the ability to control how people live, turning them into criminals for ‘failing’ to follow orders as to how they should live by ‘experts’ whose real credentials are entirely illusory at best and predatory at worst.
There is no way that registration could ever be ‘simple’ in the deceptive language being used at the moment. If it were by statute to be restricted to merely a name on a register, that could not be refused entry, and no consequence would flow from such a registration, then it would also be completely pointless, but would still be an insult. If it resulted in this state making enquiries, in other words inspecting the provision, then implicit in that would be the ability to withhold or withdraw ‘permission’ to home educate; otherwise, again, such investigations without powers would be equally pointless. It would be to sanction ‘fishing expeditions’ to see if a crime was being committed, but it would also replace negative law, the only sort that ensures justice, with positive, or enabling (and therefore potentially disabling) law, which usually violates justice. In this case it sets the state up as final arbiter and judge of what constitutes suitable education, and this agenda is explicitly on the table as we speak. When you have state control over learning and thinking, then you have totalitarianism, just as JS Mill told us.
Ultimately the direction of travel needs to be in the other direction. People should be left alone to regain their lost equilibrium, regain their damaged integrity, then all will be well, and the exceptions will become more, not less visible in an increasingly, not decreasingly moral society where people are taking proper responsibility for their own lives, and looking out for the vulnerable in their community.
The fundamental gross insult was perpetrated in 1870 when education was made compulsory and they lied about it and said it was school that was compulsory. The Newcastle Commission report revealed it was entirely unnecessary because parents were already making adequate provision by the standards of the time for their children’s education, but entirely voluntarily. That is the kind of species we are, if left alone – unmolested, and even under considerable duress, such as early industrialisation, so strong is that bond normally between a parent and their child.
End the gross human insult of education compulsion which coerces that which is already a powerful natural instinct, but thereby weakening it. And get the state out of education altogether, because it has demonstrated so spectacularly over 139 years its profound inadequacy and incapability of replacing that responsibility it took from parents by force, for the purposes of, to use its current language, ‘moulding the workforce for work in the world economy’, ie. creating serfs out of sovereign beings.
When was there a time that the state education system was NOT in crisis? Answer: never! That should tell us something.
