School... or not.

Bertrand Russell

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.

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A parent's freedom to educate their children according to their vision of what education should be is a basic human right.

So stated the Special Rapporteur to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

It seems that some European legislators feel that giving to the family rights which are described as "inalienable or imprescriptible" places too much emphasis on the rights of the family as a unit as compared with the rights of individuals within the unit.

There is a fundamental, international human rights issue here.

A function of compulsory education in the context of globalisation is to inculcate students with the belief that their "thinking" has already been done for them, and there is no need for them to think about certain things... for example, whether it is ethically acceptable to buy chocolate when such a large proportion of it is produced by child slaves; or whether it is OK for companies to package a tiny bit of yoghurt in a plastic container that takes up space on the planet forever more... or gives off dioxins when incinerated...

The bureaucrats in Brussels - with their suits just the correct shade of blue - are using compulsory education to produce socially acceptable good European citizens: consumers who are more concerned with wearing the correct, socially acceptable brand of trainers and following the football than they are with what is really going on in the world. They want to protect children from the IDEAS of their parents...

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Given the unconvincing case for the caring state, what might the real, but covert objective be? I believe that propaganda, the cloning of a populace of predictable and manipulable passive consumers to serve the impersonal abstract goals of the 'world economy' to be the goal, and that this century and a half old social project is already highly successful.

- Neil Taylor

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"Schoolgirl"

The newsreader said: "police have arrested a man in connection with the murder of schoolgirl Sarah Payne". This made me think... he didn't say, "eight-year-old Sarah Payne". Or just "Sarah Payne". He said "SCHOOLGIRL Sarah Payne".

Any young girl between the ages of 6 and 16 would be referred to on the news as "schoolgirl so-and-so".

The "SCHOOL" bit is crucial. It forms an essential element of a child's identity. A necessary part of a child's very existence. Society refers to all children of that age group as "schoolgirl" or "schoolboy".

This presumption shows how deeply the "compulsory" aspect of school attendance is ingrained in the subconscious minds of most people today. This mindset, this way of thinking influences the perception of children who "are" not "SCHOOLgirls" or "SCHOOLboys" in the minds of the public in general - and legislators in particular.

This idea is so solidly rooted in the collective consciousness that people anticipate, people assume, that all children are school-children. What is the first question asked by an adult meeting a child for the first time? "What school do you go to?"

When the response is "I'm home educated" they recoil with horror - this does not fit in with their fundamental assumptions of the nature of the universe, like "up" is up and "down" is down.

So their reaction is automatically negative, not consciously because they know in their hearts that home education is "bad", but unconsciously because home education does not agree with most people's basic "schoolgirl" and "schoolboy" conceptions of WHAT CHILDREN ARE.

- Debra James

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The following is from a typically rich essay by Adorno on the situation of the professional teacher and the school in postwar Germany:

"Schooling and the school, which now once again is constantly being invoked and fetishized as though it were a value, a thing in itself, replaces reality, which it carefully holds at a distance by means of organisational structures. The infantile character of the teacher is revealed in the fact that he confuses the microcosm of the school, which is more or less isolated from adult society - parents' associations and the like are desperate attempts to break through this insulation - that he mistakes this walled-in illusory world for reality." ... Already in kindergarten the child is wrested out of the *primary community*, from the immediate, nourishing warm relations, and in school with a brute shock experiences alienation for the first time; in the development of the individual the school is virtually the prototype of societal alienation per se."

"Taboos on the Teaching Vocation", 1965, in "Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords"

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