One of my favourite films, when I was growing up, was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, that strange children’s classic written by James Bond creator, Ian Fleming. Every Christmas it came on the telly some teatime or other, which my memory recalls as being just after that year’s screening of The Great Escape, another all-time classic, or just before an omnibus edition of that year’s Doctor Who series.
Anyway, enough of nostalgia. The most disturbing character in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was the ski-slope nosed Child Catcher. He was nearly as bad as a Sea Devil for pure evil intent, rounding up children on behalf of a child-hating Baroness.
And now, in this wonderful sceptred isle of Tony Blair’s modern Britain, we have an equivalent, the school truancy protection officer. Not content with taking over private charity schools and ideologically convincing the majority of the docile British population that the one-size-fits-all state propaganda farms, also known as comprehensive schools, are far better than any alternative, the do-gooders just can’t rest.
Because, God forbid, children aren’t willingly attending these educational swamps, despite being able to get an A-grade Mathematics exam pass for knowing how many beans there are in a ten-bean bag. And what’s worse, their parents are often ‘colluding’ with them, by helping them with their truancy. Those nasty people! And apparently this is not good enough for ‘Society’, so we’re going to have slap £100 pound on-the-spot fines onto these sadistic child-destructive malcontents. Comprehensive schools have been a complete disaster for this country. Their rise has entirely overlapped with the rise of violent criminality, graffiti-ridden vandalism, and the collapse of the tolerant society. I wonder if this is any coincidence? As poor ersatz copies of academic private schools, filled with Guardian-reading statist shock troops, laughingly known as educationists, they’ve also failed to provide most of the children with what they want.
They’re either too academic for most of them, or not academic enough for those few who do actually like academia. So what happens? To be an academic child in one of these places is like being a dissident in the Soviet Union. You are a hunted species, constantly derided, and gathering in isolated streamed packs to avoid the taunts of the majority. And what’s it like to be in the majority? Bored rigid every day by the acres of politically correct information you rightfully regard as total nonsense, which scoot over your head every day leaving absolutely zero impression. No wonder you start bullying the academics. It’s the only thing that makes the prison tolerable.
And that’s what these places are. Prisons. With all the authoritarian statist mentality that goes with it. But these are special prisons, because not only do you have to endure five years of this torture, you’re pushed unwillingly onto a constant treadmill of tests, examinations, and continuous assessment, with no end in sight, except perhaps the non-compulsory two years in sixth form college where you can smoke dope, drink cheap beer, and text your friends all day, to your heart’s content. A tempting prospect! And if you fancy it, you can then do more of the same on your media studies course at University! At least it keeps you off the government’s employment register for five years, when you could be doing something useful.
You’re also told that if you don’t keep padding around this constant treadmill, you are finished in life, a dreadful failure, and a worthless individual; so on you go. Though very few of you are really interested or motivated, except through fear, to achieve this freedom through work. So in response the system has had to dumb down the exams, to appear as if it is in some way actually improving your life. So the inmates have won, I suppose. At least those who can stomach this irksome insanity.
And then the do-gooders dare to wonder why some of these inmates are truanting. Have none of them ever seen The Great Escape? It’s a wonder anybody stays at all, except for the constant carrot of a ‘better life’ being hung over them, and the stick of punishment being threatened if they fail to attend.
For don’t they realise that the state needs tax-serfs, people to go out there to make money for the government, to allow it to continue in its rightful position as our benevolent ruler? Sorry, benevolent servant.
So who are the schools actually for then? Are they for these truanting children? Obviously not, for they’re voting with their feet and heading down the shopping mall. So are they for the parents? Well, you’d have thought that if anyone had ‘ownership’ rights over these children, or had withdrawal rights as the school’s true client, at least until some vague grey line in teenage, it would be the parents. But obviously not, for when they accompany their children to something they consider more useful, such as a cheap afternoon watching discount-price movies, they’re now to be handed £100 pound on-the-spot fines for daring to do so. So we ask again, who are the schools for? Who is the customer? And further to that, who owns the children? And the only answers I can think of are the schools are for the state, because it pays for them, and the children are now owned by the state, rather than the parents, or the children themselves, because they are destined to be its future milch-cows.
Out of the goodness of its heart the state has provided these rotten propaganda farms, so these disobedient truanting children WILL attend. Because ‘Society’ (a.k.a. the government) needs them there, so it can brainwash them, and turn them into passive Labour-voting tax cows. It’s for their own good. Don’t they realise that?
But if it really was in their personal interest to attend, do you think the children wouldn’t realise this? Or if you think 14-year old children are incapable of deciding such weighty matters, do you think the children’s parents wouldn’t realise this? No, it is to the state’s good that these children attend. And that’s it. They’ve got to be able to read, at the very least, or they won’t even be able to fill in their tax returns. God forbid. Or learn how to obey.
And the really laughable thing is that the moronic do-gooders who are applauding this move think it will actually make any difference. First of all it won’t be applied much, because school truanting officers just want a cushy parasitic life as state drones, and approaching potentially aggressive parents in the street, who nine-times-out-of-ten will have a perfectly ‘valid’ state-approved reason as to why they are with their children in school hours, is not part of the bureaucratic deal they signed up to.
And even if the parents really are just taking their children shopping, so perhaps an older one can look after a younger one, are the courts going to be able to cope with the endless consequences of appeals, non-payments, and the ultimate sentencing of parents to terms in jail?
Who’ll look after the children then? Maybe the other parent, if they have one in this welfare-dependent age, will stop working, go onto state benefits, and cope in the meantime. This is a good lesson for life, don’t you think? And if it’s a single parent, the children will have to go into state childcare. Will this be in their interest? Or if the welfare-dependent single-parent does pay the fine, they won’t be able to afford to buy their children new shoes. Well done, do-gooders. No doubt a special shoe grants department, manned a whole new cohort of properly rewarded do-gooders, will sort this one out.
Government by gimmick. It’s not a nice place to be.
And even supposing the children can be ‘made’ to attend their lovely ‘world-class’ comprehensives? Will they actually knuckle down to their textbooks, say mea culpa, and turn out to be future professors of physics? Well, Fettes College boy Tony, you’ve obviously never seen the inside of a real comprehensive school, other than as a man surrounded by press cameras and flunkies. For what they’ll do is either fade into a sullen daily trance, running out of the school gates at 3pm every day to whoops of joy, or they’ll become disruptive or violent pains in the neck, ruining the lives of everyone else around them who is trying to schlep their way through the dumbed-down treadmill.
Or possibly, just whisper it, they might truant again. And hide out this time in other truants’ houses. Who’d a thunk it? How could they be so devious?
So I suppose the state will then require the right to break into Englishmen’s homes to track down these miscreants? You bet. Society can leave no stone unturned in its bid to do good to everyone.
Would someone please stop the world? I want to get off.
So when they slap a fine on the home educators who have taken their kids to the museum/library/film festival/ park as part of their independent education, the parent then has to go through the courts to get the fine thrown out because the child isn’t playing “parent sanctioned truant” it’s actually part of their education! On the upside, the trip to court could then be used as an educational outing giving the child an experience which isn’t part of the core curriculum.
In my 1st year at secondary school (in Scotland in the 80’s), one of the compulsory subjects was “Sociology”. I managed to fail an essay assignment in that subject: we had been tasked to “pretend you are a pensioner and you are writing a letter to a friend”. So I wrote about how well the business was doing, that I’d had my hip operation privately, was spending 6 months of the year in sunnier climes and was living it up on my private pension. Anathema to the “teacher” who of course wanted me to write about how I couldn’t cope on my state pension, how I was waiting 2 years for my hip operation, and I couldn’t afford to heat the house in the winter. I think from that point I knew I wasn’t a socialist!!
Yes Andy, I want to get off as well, but there’s nowhere to run.
Fantastic rant!
I agree with you on some of these issues, but I dunno… I reckon a lot of parents aren’t ‘making an independent decision,’ they’re just not giving a shit because they can’t see the virtue of education because they don’t have one and they’re doing ‘just fine’ (on benefit, being paid to shit out kids.)
But perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps.
But if it really was in their personal interest to attend, do you think the children wouldn’t realise this?
In all honesty, no I don’t think they did. One of my first sales jobs was in “Industrial” recruitment. I developed a low opinion of dealing with many people.
Or if you think 14-year old children are incapable of deciding such weighty matters, do you think the children’s parents wouldn’t realise this?
Basically, sad to say, I don’t think they would.
I just got back from a late holiday in the Med to avoid having to spend time with people with families.
You would not believe how many people let their kids miss the start of the school year just to go on holiday. Do you think these people are going to be interested in their kids education?
I’d like to know what a plausible alternative is, that can still achieve the outcome of having near 100% literacy and numeracy in a society. Is there another model that can work?
This rant is off base. Or at least it is confusing two separate issues.
School quality is one concern. And it sounds like you have as many concerns in the UK as we do in the US about dumbed-down, politicized curriculum.
But bottom line is, nearly all children have no chance of getting an education if they are not in school of some sort. (“In schoool” includes home schooling; I don’t know how/if that is handled in the UK.) Those kids not in the classroom are NOT off at the zoo or at a museum. Here in the US we’re seeing a growing group of children whose parents don’t give a damn about school, and who don’t care if the kids are on the corner, cruising, or just hangin’. “Incentives work”- some of them are negative, and if that’s what it takes to get the kids back in class, then use them.
And almost any 14-old, given the option to skip school, will do so! I’d look seriously at medicating any that wouldn’t. 🙂 But more to the point, 14-year olds are not considered mature, rational individuals for a reason.
So- reform the school system, or take your kids out of it and teach them at home. But make sure the kids are in a place where they can be taught.
Tom, have you ever heard of functional illiteracy? That the UK or any other European country has 100% literacy is just a myth. According to UNESCO (ok not my favourite source) as much as a quarter of the population in the DEVELOPED countries can not understand nor make use of information in brochures, info bulletins, trains schedules, road maps etc. Try reading the instructions for a household appliance if you can’t read a road map. You also know that if 25% of the product of state schools is illiterate the next 25% is only marginally better. That is the quality provided by today’s one size fits all education systems.
In anycase I took Andy’s rant to be primarily about the fact that the government when faced with a problem instead of solving the cause goes after a symptom with a completely spurious solution. The side effect of said solution being to limit the freedom of all parents.
Truancy officers are not a new thing, they were around in ‘pre-comprehensive’ times. Then they served a valid purpose in keeping kids out of mischief while Dad was in the Forces (fighting a nasty form of socialism), and Mum was out working.
At that time most people valued an education, and thus, not only was officaldom concerned when truancy occurred, but the parents also.
Schools were the concern of Local Authourities, and were smaller and more personal, having far less than a thousand pupils at any one time, and even that was considered to be large. Then the war on grammar schools and the pursuit of personal achievement started, with Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins leading the charge against a working class child getting a worthwhile education.
Dogma triumphed over common sense, comprehensives were built to cater for, in excess of a thousand children, and of course the curriculum and the very style of teaching changed, coincidentally the teachers became ‘unionised’ at about this time.
End result – bored, badly educated children, indifferent, ‘stress worn’ teachers, parents became ‘anti-teacher’, and yet another ‘pillar of the community’ destroyed.
Another experiment failure! with the proles footing the bill.
The parents who are now guilty of keeping their offspring away from school are the ‘fruit’ of the new system. Is it any wonder that they have little respect for education or its practioners.
The real tragedy is that the desire to learn, which is nascent in most people, and more so in children, has been destroyed by this very flawed State system, and all in the name of socialist dogma, and ‘class warfare’.
I amend your by-line, “The State is not your Friend”, to ” Socialism is not the Working Man’s Friend”, – and never has been……..
This isn’t aimed at people with poor parenting skills, they’ll have a plethora of politically correct excuses and no ability to pay.
Its the parents who take their kids on holiday in term time to avoid being ripped off by travel agents who’ll they’ll be shaming and fleecing.
Do you think the childcatchers will target agressive, anti-social patrents when they can fulfill their dream role of targeting the tame middle classes, re-enforceing their “weknowbetter” political predjudices
Andy,
Was all this inspired by that one little item in the BBC, or is there something else I’m missing? Because that particular item seemed “sanitized for our protection,” (meaning it gave us nothing about who the kids are, where they come from and what they’re doing) and I think we need a bit more info before we can all jump on a soapbox about the evils of state comprehensives.
I also want to know whether this is “new” or just a nagging flaw in the Utopian system we have all been promisied. I suspect the latter. In which case Lorenzo’s post about roughly a quarter of the population remaining mired in functional illiteracy is a particularly poignant reminder that we will never “save” everyone through the marvels of modern education. Amen.
And yet the state can hardly stand by while parents flout the law and (quite possibly) blight their children’s future, can it? So I say fine away, Tony. But don’t raise hopes too high that it’ll do much good.
Duncan writes:
So I wrote about how well the business was doing, that I’d had my hip operation privately, was spending 6 months of the year in sunnier climes and was living it up on my private pension.
You are, sir, a star! 🙂
You also, of course, have a particularly fine name 🙂
Harvey writes:
I agree with you on some of these issues, but I dunno… I reckon a lot of parents aren’t ‘making an independent decision,’ they’re just not giving a shit because they can’t see the virtue of education because they don’t have one and they’re doing ‘just fine’ (on benefit, being paid to shit out kids.)
The best argument I have seen for a while, as to why we should abolish the welfare state.
Dave writes:
You would not believe how many people let their kids miss the start of the school year just to go on holiday. Do you think these people are going to be interested in their kids education?
Well, first, you can get some really good off-peak deals doing it like that. And then perhaps with the money saved buy an astronomical telescope and a few good sky atlas books. Maybe your son or daughter will, via this heinous methodology, become that professor of physics. Yes, perhaps I’m an evil parent, too, for even thinking for a nanosecond like this. But I’m the parent, these are my children, and it is up to me. And if my children don’t get the best education I can possibly afford, either with my money or my time, and I have a penny left when the last one is 21, then please take me out and shoot me. But if you really think it should be up to the state, then please sir, sign your children up at the nearest comprehensive, and enjoy the ride. And remember, this is the good bit, even though I don’t want to, I’ll be paying for some of it. That’ll teach me! 🙂
Tom writes:
I’d like to know what a plausible alternative is, that can still achieve the outcome of having near 100% literacy and numeracy in a society. Is there another model that can work?
Yes, it’s called a free market in education. You get rid of all the taxes, regulations, subsidies, busy-bodies, and privatise all the schools. Then you sit back and watch the market at work. If ever such a thing happens, it’ll be a damn sight better than the current expensive socialised rubbish we currently are forced to pay through the nose for, spending almost as much per year on comprehensive education per child, as the average private school. And everyone in education will be much happier, society will be much more productive, and wealthier, and possibly happier too, though that is up to each individual to work out, and of nobody else’s concern. Will it happen? I’m not holding my breath. Though wouldn’t it be nice if someone in the world actually dared try it, even as an experiment.
Don Eyres writes:
“Incentives work”- some of them are negative, and if that’s what it takes to get the kids back in class, then use them.
So you work well under negative incentives, do you Don? You work to your best? You don’t become resentful, angry, and bitter, when forced to do something against your will? I myself would like to drink a little less. I would love to be put into a prison, against my will, and forcibly made to go tea-total. I’d be really happy about it. I would give of my best.
How much do you think children actually learn, when they are compulsorily penned into classrooms? Could they possibly even interfere with the education of others, who do want to be there?
Hey, hang on. Why don’t we try a different approach. Why don’t we make schools so attractive, that not only do you not need ‘negative incentives’, the children are beating down the door every day to be there, like many children want to do when they go to primary schools, or many younger adults do to go to attractive Universities? You never know, making schools attractive might even catch on. But because we’re all individuals, with different needs, aspirations, and talents, the only way we can do that is by having a wide variety of different types of school. And the only thing which can provide that is the free market.
ernest young writes:
comprehensives were built to cater for, in excess of a thousand children
I think mine got up to 1,500, but what’s a few hundred children between friends! 🙂
The real tragedy is that the desire to learn, which is nascent in most people, and more so in children, has been destroyed by this very flawed State system, and all in the name of socialist dogma, and ‘class warfare’.
It is an absolute tragedy. I just wish these do-gooders could see it. Some of them even really do mean well, I’m sure. I just wish they’d realise that not interfering really would be the best thing to do.
Alan Spence writes:
Do you think the childcatchers will target agressive, anti-social patrents when they can fulfill their dream role of targeting the tame middle classes, re-enforceing their “weknowbetter” political predjudices
Wow, I’d not thought of that. It’s another damn stealth tax! 🙂
However, if any child-catching council worker, tries to catch me taking the sprogs on astronomy holidays, or clandestine days out to the London Science Museum, he better be wearing good ear protection. Because one thing my local comprehensive taught me was how to swear, real ****ing good.
Oh, and he can bring the tax inspector along too. It’ll be worth a day in court just to give both of them a piece of my mind! 😎
Kelli writes:
And yet the state can hardly stand by while parents flout the law and (quite possibly) blight their children’s future, can it? So I say fine away, Tony. But don’t raise hopes too high that it’ll do much good.
Why can’t ‘the state’ stand idly by and do nothing? What right does the state possess to come between a parent and their child, and make them do what it wants?
Kelli, who do these children belong to? Do they belong to the parents? Do they belong to themselves? Do they belong to nobody? Or do they belong to the state?
If you believe they belong to the state (or society, or the government, or by whatever the name the shibboleth is currently hiding under, yeh, compulsion, compulsion, compulsion.) If they don’t, it should leave well the hell alone. It really does have absolutely nothing to do with them. Or least, it wouldn’t if it could actually contemplate allowing a free market in education, which would provide everyone with what they and their parents perceived as being the best education tailored for their individual needs, even if that was sitting at home blogging all day! 🙂
But the state isn’t going to ever do that, voluntarily, is it? Because it really does need to persuade people, from an early age, that the font of all goodness is the state, and that it is irreplaceable, and totally necessary. And what better way to do this than by running educational systems? And your final point says it all. What the hell good is it going to do anyway? Absolutely none. In fact, it’ll probably make things worse.
But that’s not the point is it. The main point is about demonstrating control. The state controls us, and has the right to control us, and it will be obeyed whether we want to obey it or not.
Don’t you just love social engineering? 😉
Andy,
As a person who doesn’t want kids, doesn’t intend to have kids and is quite prepared to make sure I earn enough to cover my own retirement and not rely on this ridiculous shell game today, I too will be paying for those kids.
I don’t mind if people are prepared to teach their kids themselves. I do mind people who delude themselves that this is infact what will happen. There are always intelligent exceptions but they are not, in my experience the rule.
I also don’t want my holiday f***ed up by having to put up with other peoples uncontrollable little brats. Even booking out of season, in expensive hotels which don’t advertise child places doesn’t seem to be enough these days. 😉
Much more interesting is the fact that the demure then 12 year old Heather Ripley is now an antiardent anarchist who collects driftwood for a living (www.driftart.co.uk) and can be reached (sometimes) on heather@teknopunx.co.uk
Good on ya, Heather!
Tony
For those who think that parents need to be forced to teach their kids, or we otherwise require public education: the highest literacy rate recorded for Massachusetts was prior to the creation of cumpolsory public education in that state.
Could the truancy be training for the time when the little darlings eventually go to work?, when having time off for no other reason than, ‘didn’t feel like going in today’. or having a ‘sickie’, or more than likely, having a hang-over, is considered to be normal.
The average school absenteeism rate is 15 half-days per year. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/3159532.stm).
The average work absenteeism is 12 days per year.
It seems that the instinct to lie, and the reluctance to fulfil any commitment, are being taught at quite an early age…
Andy,
I’m more than half with you- I said “reform the schools”. It is desperately needed, apparently on both sides of the Atlantic.
I’d much rather use positive incentives. For most people, they work better.
But you can reform until each student has a personal tutor, the world’s best textbooks, a challenging and interesting curriculum, catered cafeteria meals, and the cows come home, and there will still be some children who would rather be elsewhere, and some parents who could care less if their kids are in school.
In a perfect world, we could simply tell all concerned that if you don’t want an education, if you’re willing to flip burgers for a living and will never hit up the rest of society to pay your bills, then go for it. But guess what: at present, and for the foreseeable future, our societies don’t work that way. Those ignorant little jerks are going to live, most of them, off of the public dole. So this member of the public feels perfectly comfortable requiring them to be in school where they *may* absorb some education, even in spite of themselves.
Then you sit back and watch the market at work.
What do you do then if the market fails to work? Do you have a contigency?
Dave writes:
What do you do then if the market fails to work? Do you have a contigency?
Full-blooded communism, comrade, with me as Big Brother. No more Nancy-boy welfare state rubbish. We’d go for the full mother. We’re going to anyway, if we keep down the welfare road. I’d just cut out the 50 years of messing about in the middle.
It would be particularly compulsory for Harrison Ford not to do Russian accents in films.
Andy,
I was asking a serious question.
Given the grave consequences to the economy, what is you proposal?
“What do you do then if the market fails to work? Do you have a contigency?”
I’m confused. How does the free market “fail to work?” You have something I want, I have something you want, and when we agree on how much for how much, then we trade. This only “fails to work” when you deliberately break it by theft, or violence, or coercion by third parties.
I think your idea of the system “failing to work” is if free people trading freely happens not to bring about your desired result, whatever that may be.
Speedwell,
I’m confused. How does the free market “fail to work?” You have something I want, I have something you want, and when we agree on how much for how much, then we trade.
Do you want education? What if you decide you don’t want or need it? What if a lot of people do?
The assumption here seems to be that because it is obviously in peoples own benefit to get educated, then they will.
The market fails if this assumption is incorrect.
I think your idea of the system “failing to work” is if free people trading freely happens not to bring about your desired result, whatever that may be.
No, my idea of the system “failing to work” is the creation of an educationally ill equiped work force which would cripple the economy of this or any country unfortunate enough to be in that situation.
“Do you want education? What if you decide you don’t want or need it? What if a lot of people do? The assumption here seems to be that because it is obviously in peoples own benefit to get educated, then they will. The market fails if this assumption is incorrect.”
The market doesn’t fail at all if the assumption is incorrect, Dave. It just changes to reflect the correct, successful priorities rather than the incorrect, unsuccessful ones.
As things stand now, I think it would take a peculiar sort of blindness not to recognize that most people do value education, either for its own sake or for its assumed results. I think the assumption is a justified one and that you would be hard pressed to prove otherwise.
“No, my idea of the system ‘failing to work’ is the creation of an educationally ill equiped work force which would cripple the economy of this or any country unfortunate enough to be in that situation.”
I can’t help but see the parallels between this and the present situation, in which the educationally ill-equipped workforce cripples the economy of every country unfortunate enough to try to function with these substandard workers. I’m one of those who lays the blame for the present situation at the door of the government-controlled school system.
A free market, one in which employers and customers find educated employees and vendors necessary, will simply and easily provide sufficient motivation to people to educate themselves and their children. People will quite naturally choose a form (not THE form) of education that the market demands. It’s too simplistic to assume that just one form of education will serve every market demand. But it’s a mistake made by the government-controlled schools every day.
Dave writes:
No, my idea of the system “failing to work” is the creation of an educationally ill equiped work force which would cripple the economy of this or any country unfortunate enough to be in that situation.
Let’s keep this simple, so I can get a handle on where you’re coming from. First of all, you and I live on two ends of an island. There’s a school in the middle with an internet link to comps.co.uk. The school’s daily cost is 10 tree berries.
You’re happy to pay this one day a week, because you think the 10 berries, plus your lost opportunity of the 5 berries you can’t pick because you’re at school, is worth it. You reckon the benefit will make up this loss. With your topped-up education, you’ll be able to pick 20 berries a day, the other 6 days a week, rather than 5, for as long as you’re at school. Still with me? Excellent! 🙂
Let’s even assume you’re right, that by investing in school you’re actually better off, plus you get that one day a week on the latest thinking why global warming will destroy the earth, on the comps.co.uk/geog/facts.html home web page.
You also think that if I came to school, and paid my 10 berries (and lost my 5 unpicked ones), that not only would I be better off, but both of us, working in educated co-operation, would pick 30 berries a day, each. Again, let’s assume you’re right.
But my refusal to attend is really getting to you, to the point where you’re thinking of forcing me to go, at gunpoint, for my own benefit, and for the benefit of the whole economy (ie. you.)
But I’m a lazy bum, and I hate school, and I’d rather subsist on 5*7 = 35 berries a week, than (30*6) – (10 + 5) = 165 berries I could be living on if I went to school, as you’d like.
But Dave, I have news for you. This is my life and I’ll do whatever the hell it is I please.
This is what being free is all about. The freedom to live your own life, your own way, without other people imposing their wishes upon you, even if it is ‘for their own good’.
I get to loaf all day, and write bad poetry, and watch stars, while you’re stuck behind all those screens from comps.co.uk, and although I know I could have more berries if I did what you wanted, I’m perfectly happy the way I am. And I’ll get to school in my own good time. Not in yours.
And aside from what seems to be your desire to force other people to do what you want, to satisfy your desires (such as taxing them for state education they don’t want and don’t use), we haven’t even got to your flying-in-the-face-of-all-evidence fears that the free market ‘won’t work’. Since when has a truly free market not worked? How can it not work, as in the arguments above? It is perfectly self-adjusting. For instance, can you imagine the horrors of a state run ‘National Food Service’? Two bags or rotten spuds, once a fortnight, take it or leave it. Thank God for Tescos and the semi-free market in food. Without it we’d starve. Just ask any non-party North Korean.
Let’s even look at UK education, though it faces imminent death through tax and regulation.
Seven percent of people are privately educated, at an average cost of around 6,000 pounds a year, paid out of taxed income by people who’ve already paid 5,000 coerced tax pounds to pay for a state place for the same child (which is then used to subsidise the education of the other 93%.)
These EVIL privateers not only believe in education, but are forced to pay for it twice to satisfy the bone-headed 19th century ideology of a German ponce who never did a day’s work in his life, except getting maids pregnant, growing beards, warming a chair in the British library with his fat arse, and using envious malevolence to twist Adam Smith’s economics into the nightmare reality that later became Stalin’s Gulag (plus, many other assorted socialist hells.)
These twice-payers appreciate the value of a good education, not the pigs’ swill of a bog-standard comprehensive (or the foundation school subterfuge which is about to be foisted upon us), which they have to pay for whether they like it or not. Which is why it is so rubbish, because there’s only one customer, the government, and all it wants is compliant tax-generating Labour voters.
Do you really think that even in Uncle Milton Friedman’s half-way house of school vouchers, that many people being given 5,000 pounds for each child to spend in any school of their choice, would actually CHOOSE a bog-standard comprehensive? I may be a mad-eyed lunatic, in your eyes, but even you can’t be that bent on a socialised education system that you think people would do that, with real money on the hip?
And that’s a state-franchised halfway-house, with all the horrors that that often brings, though I get the feeling you think state-franchised subsidised horrors like Railtrack/Network Rail are free markets? Just guessing. With one major subsidy customer, the government, and three major state regulators? Some free market. But imagine a truly free system, where schools would spring up all over the place offering people more or less exactly what they wanted for more or less the means at their disposal, just like Mr Tesco does with Pesto sauce. And think how much better off we’d be without all that money pouring into the mouths of useless LEA staff, useless truant officers, and useless NUT teachers, and children actually going to schools they wanted to go to, and learning skills useful to their own personal needs, and up to 100% of the parents getting the service they wanted out of schools, rather than just the 7% who can afford to pay twice, and the lucky few in the state sector at the few remaining grammars.
When the true free market comes, citizens, put my kids down at Tesco.edu, immediately.
We’ll look after our bit of the economy, Dave. You look after yours. You may think I’m selfish, but I’m not, just tired. Tired of all the truly selfish socialists who keep helping themselves to my wallet, to satisfy their own ends. When this used to be a free country, all those years ago, we used to have another name for people like that. Thieves. May they all rot.
Regarding daves questions:
Do you want education? What if you decide you don’t want or need it? What if a lot of people do?
I would like to point out that a democratic government is supposed to be involved in giving majorities what they want. If you assume that a majority do not value something highly enough to pay for it on the market, then why would you assume that they would value it highly enough to vote people into offices at any level of government, from education presidents down to school-board members or PTA secretaries, who will give it to them?
For those who give lip service to the value of a democratic form of government the question is not “What if the people don’t want what they ought?” rather it is, “what institution is best able to give the people what they want, whatever that may be?”
Andy,
Here’s my problem.
We’ll look after our bit of the economy, Dave. You look after yours.
What bit of the economy is yours Andy?
My bit of the economy is huge – I rely on highly trained engineers to come and work for me, for productive cutomers to need my services, I require the services of doctors, mechanics, scientists to come up with the improvements in my life that have made the 20th century such a roaring economic success and so forth.
By your logic as I don’t have kids, and don’t intend to I should have any worry about the costs to provide these people with a basic education. Yet, the entire ediface of my lifestyle is actually dependant on a rather high level of assumed knowledge and a technically able work force.
You can opt out if you like but if enough of us do can you guarentee me that there will remain a critical mass of trained individuals to continue the development we crave?
Since when has a truly free market not worked?
Show me a truly free market and we can have a discussion.
I would like to point out that a democratic government is supposed to be involved in giving majorities what they want.
That’s probably why a lot of American friends of mine point out that they don’t live or want to live in anything remotely resembling a democracy.
If you are a minority, the majority can be a terribly scary thing.
Oh dear Dave, it seems my feeble attempt to try to reduce the problem to a simple matter, so we could examine its core essentials, must be drowned out in complexity, so next time I’ll have to write a 1,000 page book before I dare try to reply to one of your questions. In the meantime you might want to try ‘Man, Economy, and State’, the ultimate in question-answering 1,000 page books. That should answer most of your questions for you. Then try ‘Power and Market’, then the ‘Ethics of Liberty’, and then ‘For a New Liberty’. All of these fine works are of course by Uncle Murray Rothbard.
In the meantime, I suggest we’ll have to agree to differ again, as my part of the economy is ramping up again.
Got to train 22 IT engineers tomorrow, for four days, so they can be even more highly productive for their bosses on Monday. Oh those Lucky People! 🙂
Andy, perhaps this is something for email as I have severe and fundemental problems with what I see as a hugely over simplistic economic argument you present.
Reducing complex arguments to simple analogies is rarely productive, especially when you ignore the small fact that in your analogy neither of us are actually producing anything as we are, in fact, children. What adults do is, of course, entirely up to the individual. The question is deciding what children do, and not limiting children to be burdened by incompetant parents. Unless you are assuming that all parents are equally able? Would that that were true!
I have an issue with many Libertarian arguments, and have thrown more than one “fine” text at the wall because the author seems to live in a rather strange issolated world where it is practical to consider individuals as economic islands.
Stephen Den Beste, a person I don’t always concur with (especially with his Kool Aid approach to Qualcomm technology, they’re a client of mine and they are a little hard to take), does, however, have some interesting thoughts on these problems on his Blog.
Glad to hear the IT economy is improving, our company has been at capacity for almost all the year now, and we’re still recruiting to deal with a huge stuffed pipeline of IT development which hasn’t yet been outsourced to Bangalore and their education system…
Good luck with the IT engineers – of course, you are lucky that their core reading, writing and analytical skills were developed at tax payer expense. 😉
Dave:
“The question is deciding what children do, and not limiting children to be burdened by incompetant parents”
The “State must provide schools because parents are incompetent” argument is garbage. It was never anything more than a propaganda device to justify the expansion of the State into education in the late 19th and early 20th c.
See E.G. West’s classic “Education and the State”. The URL is http://www.ncl.ac.uk/egwest/educationandthestate.html
What is so alarming is that this feeble and false argument has now become received wisdom – as your comment sadly illustrates.
Don’t you mean that their analytical skills were developed in SPITE of their State mandated education? Maybe it’s different accross the pond, but the last thing American schools seem to teach these days is actual thinking. They seem to actively avoid it.
What is so alarming is that this feeble and false argument has now become received wisdom – as your comment sadly illustrates.
So Cydonia, you won’t mind explaining how false and feeble it is then.
Just looking through the selective “quotes” I can already see a number of rather glaring misconceptions and errors.
Hardly encourages me to bother reading the rest if the web page contains so many deep errors.
There seems to be, reading many Libertarians an urge to return to the 19th and early 20th centuries.
I base my opinions on spending 2 years trying to get the lowest paid members of British society into work. The attitudes and experiences I had were anything but fiction, I can assure you. There is a deep anti-education feeling, certainly towards skills essential for the well being and development of this country.
This isn’t 1818, thankfully, its 2003. Time to start thinking that way!
Dave O’Neill:
“Just looking through the selective “quotes” I can already see a number of rather glaring misconceptions and errors.”
Such as?
Perhaps, you could answer my question first Cydonia? It would be polite after all.
However, here’s the first that leapt out at me. The following statement states a number of facts, however, it then goes on immediately to draw some conclusions which, frankly cannot reasonably be drawn from the data presented, suggestion the conclusions are at best spurious and probably wrong.
“[In England] the numbers [of pupils] in schools had increased from 478,000 in 1818 to 1,294,000 in 1834 ‘without any interposition of the Government or public authorities’.”
“It seems reasonable, therefore, to infer that when the government made its debut in education in 1833 mainly in the role of a subsidiser it was as if it jumped into the saddle of a horse that was already galloping.”
It is not reasonable to infer anything of the sort. That kind of sloppy reporting does nothing to make your case.
Without consideration of, at the very very minimum the following, the statement is meaningless:
What level was this education to? What was the standard, what skills were people being equiped for? How did this correlate to the growth in middle class occupations? Was this regional or localised due to other factors? What were prevailing educational entry requirements to jobs? Did these change in that period?
To dismiss the role parents play in ongoing education is eroneous even without going back to the 19th century. Within my own family my Grandfather was forced to leave school as soon as legal to work because his mother felt education was bad for him. Something he then inflicted upon my mother by not supporting her desire to do A levels in the 1940’s.
Oh yes, and what did this number represent as a percentage of the population.
A quite google shows that between 1810 and 1860 the population of the UK doubled, of course this will be mostly an increase in the numbers of children. While it does not account for all of the increase – it certainly, even if the percentage in education remained static, the bulk of that large increase is accounted for.
My daughter has never played trant ….we have been over the last 4 years treated like rat’s over her not going to school over bullies ruling our lifes.
Olivia is now 16 born 20 sept 1989 so she has to stay on at her (SPECIAL SCHOOL) because she missed the school leaving age by a few weeks this year !
I feel so let down and upset for Olivia because after a problem at the (SPECIAL SCHOOL) im now faced with eduction officers with no idea what we have been through over the years.
My daughter has been depressed and ill most of this time like wise most of my family have been through hell to get her back to main stream school.
Im on the job 24 hours a day getting Olivia to go to school .
“YOU CANT” tar everyone with the same brush .
I believe every parent wants the best for their children .
Single mothers need more suport from the fathers …who dont seem to be on this hit list of hell .
“SEND” the mother to Jail and mess up all the hard work you do to rear your childen alone!
The law needs to stop threating ppl like Olivia and me and helping us instead.
The eduction welfare offices havent got a job all they quote is the law and im sick and tired of no help !!!!!
What in gods name do they get paid for ?????????
Janeymw45@aol.com