“I am not in favour of any parental choice in education. You will go to your local school.”
– Former London mayor and Hugo Chavez buddy, Ken Livingstone. Not too up to speed with the concept of choice, is he? No wonder the unions loved him.
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The only answer to such people is active resistance, social, political and physical. By any means necessary. Burning down the school is a nice start.
He goes on to say:
“Tom’s in his first year at school. In his class there are only three kids who were born in this country, and one of them is called Mohammed. He’s doing fine because he has parents who read to him and he lives in a house full of books.”
Ah, of course- after you’ve sent your kid to be indoctrinated in state approved education, if he’s still a total idiot, it’s your fault for not reading him Marx at bedtime.
I detest this man.
I agree with Ken Livingstone. I oppose parent “choice” in the state system. The worse it is, the more parents will get their kids the fuck out of it before they’re permanently ruined.
I suspect that parents having the ability to send their children to non-state schools is very much part of the “choice” that Ken opposes.
Of course, mandating that children attend “the local school” would lead to parents deciding where to live on the basis of the quality of the local schools even more than they do now. The impact of this would pretty obviously be to give an advantage to rich people. Obviously we would need to do something about this, and we would then have an excuse for mandating where people live.
I suppose listening to the children about what they want to do about education is out, too, then? Must get them under the thumb of government early and often; the parents are simply the conduit. Unfortunately, most parents are willing dupes.
That is a sort of “to save the village, you first have to destroy it” argument. Not much consolation to whoever is in the village at the time.
For all its drawbacks, this is why I favour vouchers, or tax breaks for folk educating their kids how they want.
As Susan rightly said, the preferences of children also need to be given some weight, at least after a certain age. And as I have said before, we also need to resist, and reverse, the constant attempts to raise the school-leaving age.
I don’t. I’m not saying “to save the village, you first have to destroy it”. I’m saying the village is at its end, and needs to be allowed to collapse by itself. As I’ve said in other threads, I think schooling itself is a fundamentally broken idea, but certainly state schooling is a disaster beyond imagining. Anything that eases the pain such as vouchers just sustains it and prolongs the agony. If parents want to save their kids, they need to get them out of this terrible machine, full stop.
I think there’s a reasonable argument that the greatest error of the Thatcher years, which we now know was the last, crucial period in history when the Enemy steamroller could have been stopped without a seismic discontinuity, was that rather than smashing the welfare state, Thatcher’s government patched it up by various reforms. There was a period- after the Falklands, pretty much- when Thatcher could have got away with anything if she’d had a bit more grit and ignored the wet wing of the party. Had she wanted to.
She could have started the process of privatisation of schools and health and had it done by the end of the 80s. Instead, an attempt to reform the welfare state just entrenched it. It was on its uppers when she came to power and could have been dealt the death blow. We’d be over the difficulties of readjustment by now. It’s a tragedy it didn’t happen.
But it’s also a lesson we have to learn. Incrementalism works for the enemy but does not work for us. Cut away a little at a time, and it will grow back. Do a half-hearted privatisation and you end up with a regulator more powerful than the old Ministry. The Enemy are like weeds; they advance incrementally. If a gardener has 100 overgrown acres, and says he will weed 1 acre per day, by the time he’s finished the first are as weedy as they were the day he started. The weeds’ strategy does not work for the gardener.
We can’t reform the system into something more liberal, a bit at a time, heading towards freedom. We will fail, just as Thatcher failed. If we take the example of school vouchers, it will simply lead to a new bureaucracy overseeing the voucher system, to more inspection and controls of the remnants of the independent school system, to government extending its tentacles even further. It will be done their way, not ours.
We must stand back, not help them, do everything to let the state schools rot. We must encourage parallelism, with parents homeschooling and unschooling and setting up their own private schooling groups. The state schools must be left to fail. We must not save them again.
–that last “them” refers to the Enemy in general, and all their malign works.
Ian, while I generally agree with your point about “incrementalism” (and your weed analogy), I cannot agree with you on the subject of vouchers. If the village truly is about to collapse, what benefit is served by forcing all of its occupants to remain inside? Must we create our own version of Pompei to satisfy your goal of eliminating government schools? Why is it wrong to allow, and even assist, those who perceive the rot to escape from it?
The purpose of vouchers is to permit some of the funds which otherwise would have been spent on these children by the government schools to be diverted to private schools (using the US terms here). If anything, this should help hasten the demise of the government education system. Yes, I am aware of the risk of the government simply extending its tentacles to ensnare the private school sector as well (which is why I think refundable tax credits would be superior to vouchers, but you take what you can get), but we are all alert to this possibility and can attempt to forestall it. In any event, if we are unsuccessful and that does come to pass, we won’t be any worse off than we are now.
I have a visceral objection to callously using helpless children as “cannon fodder” in this fight. They are the ones who will be damaged for life, and even if it is for the “greater good”, to me that price is simply too high. Plus, it smacks too much of collectivism for my taste. You want to throw yet another generation of children into the abyss, our version of a Somalian “children’s brigade”. I have no stomach for that.
Laird, I’m not promoting callously using children as cannon fodder. Those in the State System are already being fodderised and there is nothing we can do about it. They’re in the abyss the day they walk through the school gates.
IIRC you’re not in America (I apologise if I’m wrong). Britain is fundamentally different to the USA. We are farther down the slope than you are, and our political structures are different. There is no concept left of the truly independent; our “private” schools are already registered charities, inspected and instructed and under threat from the Charities Commission to devote themselves more and more to “social goals”.
The Enemy work by co-option. We have to do an end-run around them, by creating new structures which are entirely independent and guarding that independence with absolute jealousy. We have a chance of that. Protecting homeschoolers, and new types of parent-run school structure is possible but only if they are kept entirely, absolutely, independent of the state; that means no tax breaks, no charity status and no state funding.
Children are already going through the meat grinder. We can only save them by pulling them out entirely. Minor dicking about with the state structures isn’t going to change a goddamned thing. What it will do is further entrench the system and condemn yet more future generations to the same miserable fate.
We have got to, as libertarians, start appreciating teh importance of structure, as the Marxists do. That’s why they win; it’s because they do what will actually get them where they want to be. Sometimes that means appearing to walk away from your objective in order to find the path to reach it.
Ah, but in Ken’s world, you’d live in the house the state gave you, too. The only advantage would go to the politically connected. Like Ken.
Yes, Ian, I am in America.
If, as you say, the British system is already farther down that slope, and there really is no vestige of truly “private” schools remaining (with the possible exception of a few homeschoolers), then I really don’t understand your objection. Vouchers would simply facilitate the movement of children from overtly government schools to slightly-less-overt government schools. At most, it’s a difference in degree rather than in kind. If the entire structure is doomed to imminent collapse, what does it matter which room you’re in?
In the US the private school system is more vibrant, diverse, and jealous of its autonomy (and many have a religious orientation, which makes it even harder for the state to intrude constitutionally). Vouchers would make it even stronger, and most of the parents making use of them would strongly oppose government interference in their internal workings. And even if that were not so, and the only true alternative to the statist indoctrination camps were home schooling, refundable tax credits would return some of their taxes to the parents to help defray the costs, and it would be extremely difficult for the state to regulate. It would remove children from the state’s grasp and starve it of revenue, all good things. So I stand by my position.
Laird, what I meant is that the private schools are hanging onto what’s left of their independence for dear life. I believe that sucking them into a voucher system would be the coup de grace.
If I had a child trapped in Livingstone’s system, I would encourage as much juvenile delinquency as required to get that child kicked out.
Up to and including shanking the fuckers, followed by total outlawry.
A problem with the refundable tax credit for homeschoolers (in the US) is that anytime the gov’t gives you money for something they think they have the right to demand accountability.
Another difference between the US and Britain, if I understand correctly, is that in Great Britain it is explicitly stated that parents are responsible for their children’s education (leaving some interpretation, presumably, as to how that education will come about) whereas in the US it is almost universally assumed that the state is responsible for children’s education though I’ve not been able to ferret out exactly how the law in written in the US as yet.
Theres a quote from the wensite of the movie “age of stupid” (Guardian approved, pro global warming bollocks) in which Red Ken says “All people in the UK should be forced to watch this movie” or words to that effect. Rather sums up the man really.
I think the future of education is by home schooling.
Here in Australia, we already have a ‘School of the Air’, radio used to connect kids on stations, so they can learn ‘together’. They are posted books, which they go through at a set pace, and do homework, etc. This could be the prototype of an Internet schooling system!
Why can’t we just learn at home, straight from the net? Download videos and films of lectures, with teachers as consultants on tricky points? This would bypass Ken completely, as anyone could get material from anywhere, so long as they could afford it. I think the future is more open than socialists want to believe.
Oh, I dunno. Do it his way, don’t do it his way and suffer the consequences, or rebel. Sounds like choices to me.
Susan, I understand and agree with your point; that’s why vouchers (which are direct payments from the government to the school) are a risky approach. However, tax credits directly to the parents are entirely different. That is just cash in their bank account, and cash is fungible. There’s now way for the government to track where the credit is applied, so using this as a wedge to assert control over private schools presents a significantly lower risk.
I really like Nuke Gray’s idea. That really does seem to be the wave of the future.
Laird, how would tax credits work? A flat refund for every child not sent to a state school?
Yes.
“Do it his way, don’t do it his way and suffer the consequences, or rebel. Sounds like choices to me.”
I think you could call that a Hobbes’-son’s choice.
Parents who hold the same view about the education of their child are more likely to send their child to the same school, as it instills the same beliefs they uphold.
Alot of parents want their child to go to the local school, and move home to within the catchment area of the school they believe is the best for their child. That’s choice, isn’t it.
I wonder how this sense of choice stacks up against the French state schooling system.
Oddly enough I do not believe that Red Ken is even being honest in what he is saying.
After all “you will go to your local school” would mean “economic segregation” (lots of children of wealthy families going to the local school in rich areas – and so on) and “racial segregation” and so on.
So methinks “busing” would come in.
I wonder if Ken gets his material from ‘The league of Gentlemen’?- the TV series. “This is a local shop, for local people- there’s nothing for you here!”