UK Schools Bill : corrupted system

UK Schools Bill

10 July 2022

The UK Government is currently trying to push a new Bill through the House of Lords and then Parliament to fundamentally change education. You can find the main documentation for this on the Government’s website, and here are some archived copies (PDF) (PDF) (PDF) (PDF) of the documents detailing the amendments and the purported reasons for this new Bill.

In the House of Lords Briefing document published on the 19th May 2022 the “background” to this Bill is written as follows…

In the 2022 Queen’s Speech, the government said it would introduce a Schools Bill to reform education. It said the bill would “help every child fulfil their potential wherever they live, raising standards and improving the quality of schools”.

Hmm. We’ve seen the effect Government “reforms” have. The appalling state of the NHS is the result of multiple reforms by both Labour and Conservative led Governments, so you’ll forgive me if the notion that the State wants to help anyone except themselves and their UN/WHO/WEF masters seems a tad unbelievable.

The Government sought to take over the “education” of the nation, not because without it people were all illiterate dunces sitting around eating mud, but because they understood what was described by Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Communist leader who paved the way for millions of deaths and a reign of terror that would have made any self-respecting Nazi blush, which was, in his words…

“Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.”

Lenin hadn’t come to this conclusion by himself however. He was, like all Governments that have taken control of “education”, inspired by the Prussian-Industrial School System. This was the origin of State-schooling, and most people unfortunately have no idea what the true motivations and goals of State-schooling were, and still are to this day.

As described on Wikipedia, Prussia was a region of Europe near the Baltic Sea, which expanded into a large Kingdom over the centuries from 1525 until it was superseded by various formations of Germany in the early 1900s.

How it achieved this expansion is described in the Wikipedia entry as “by way of an unusually well-organized and effective army”. The root of this unusually well-organised and effective army was the world’s first State education system, designed with very specific goals in mind.

In 1716, compulsory state-sponsored education was engineered by King Fredrick William I of Prussia to ensure the early-days Kingdom would attain it’s imperial aspirations via a single-minded and unified population, loyal to the cause. His son, King Fredrick the Great, refined this system further.

In a book written in 1918 by Richard Thomas Alexander titled “The Prussian Elementary Schools” (PDF), the author notes in the preface…

…the Prussian citizen cannot be free to do and act for himself; that the Prussian is to a large measure enslaved through the medium of his school ; that his learning, instead of making him his own master, forges the chain by which he is held in servitude ; that the whole scheme of Prussian elementary education is shaped with the express purpose of making ninety-five out of every hundred citizens subservient to the ruling house and to the state.

The elementary schools of Prussia have been fashioned so as to make spiritual and intellectual slaves of the lower classes. The schools have been used almost exclusively to establish more firmly the Hohenzollern upon his throne.
Page 9 – https://ia800307.us.archive.org/28/items/cu31924032699542/cu31924032699542.pdf

While this sounds like a warning, it is noteworthy that Alexander was a “proponent of the progressive education movement of John Dewey”. John Dewey was an extremely influential “philosopher” in the United States that espoused pragmatism as the foundational principle for pretty much everything including State education. Pragmatism is described on Wikipedia as…

…a philosophical tradition that considers words and thought as tools and instruments for prediction, problem solving, and action, and rejects the idea that the function of thought is to describe, represent, or mirror reality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism

Without getting into a philosophical debate over the merits and validity of such a prescriptive and yet reality rejecting notion, this kind of ideology leads to things like utilitarianism, and in the wrong hands this mechanistic view of the world can, and does become a system of enslavement. Once you start down the path that purely materialistic outcomes are the be all and end all, you can justify all kinds of things, depending on who sets the goals and defines the parameters of success. A form of Machiavellian-style amoral ‘end justifies the means’ totalitarianism is always the outcome, and history bears witness to this repeatedly, as do the mass graves and tragedies all around the world, even now.

Dewey was an intelligent and articulate man, and certainly talked a good game. Wikipedia will tell you that he was a devoted evangelist of democracy, and yet he was associated with the Carnegie and Rockefeller families who were and still are the antithesis to the very idea of actual democracy, even for those that believe in it.

Another name that was heavily involved with the Western implementations of the Prussian State School system even earlier was Horace Mann. Oxymoronically our friends at Wikipedia will inform you that Mann was an American educational reformer and slavery abolitionist, and yet having described…

…the whole plan of education in Prussia, as being not only designed to produce, but as actually producing, a spirit of blind acquiescence to arbitrary power, in things spiritual as well as temporal — as being, in fine, a system of education adapted to enslave, and not to enfranchise, the human mind. And even in some parts of the United States —the very nature and essence of whose institutions consist in the idea that the people are wise enough to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong — even here, some have been illiberal enough to condemn, in advance, everything that savors of the Prussian system, because that system is sustained by arbitrary power.
Horace Mann, quoted in Reading in History of Education, 1920 – Page 488 – https://ia600503.us.archive.org/22/items/readingsinhistor00cubb/readingsinhistor00cubb.pdf

…he then goes on to say…

But allowing all these charges against the Prussian system to be true, there were still two reasons why I was not deterred from examining it. In the first place, the evils imputed to it were easily and naturally separable from the good which it was not denied to possess. […] In the second place, if Prussia can pervert the benign influences of education to the support of arbitrary power, we surely can employ them for the support and perpetuation of republican institutions.

If we take the most charitable of interpretations, we will allow Mann the position of the ultimate idealist, as he simultaneously acknowledges the “evils”, the massively destructive enslavement of human minds that is the result of such a system, and his wish to use this “arbitrary power” for good. Personally I don’t take such a charitable view of the likes of Horace Mann, John Dewey and Richard Thomas Alexander. They were not stupid men, and they knew full well the forces at play, even in those days. The association with the Rockefeller and Carnegie families, with their monopolistic, ruthless business practices and all the schemes they subsequently came up with to hold onto that wealth and power for generations, also unsurprisingly ended up with them getting involved with “education” via their “philanthropic” mechanisms.

The entry on Wikipedia about Mann includes a quote by historian Ellwood P. Cubberley who is the author of the 1920 book referenced earlier, “Reading in History of Education” describing Mann…

No one did more than he to establish in the minds of the American people the conception that education should be universal, non-sectarian, free, and that its aims should be social efficiency, civic virtue, and character, rather than mere learning or the advancement of sectarian ends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Mann – Emphasis added

Yes, the man who acknowledged the power that can be wielded over a population if you can take control of their “education”, was all for “social efficiency” and “civic virtue”. Even Wikipedia describes “social efficiency” as…

…the harvesting of habits important for the success of a society. Closely linked to the concept of citizenship, civic virtue is often conceived as the dedication of citizens to the common welfare of each other even at the cost of their individual interests.

We have watched and witnessed over the last two years what the “dedication to the common welfare of each other” looks like. As with John Dewey’s pragmatism, it all depends on who is making the decisions as to what “welfare” actually is. Examining the idea of “social efficiency” a bit more closely, reveals that to be yet another ideology that is a ruling-class control-freak’s dream. Described in a publication by Timothy J. Bergen, Jr in 1981, he writes about another “pioneer” in the field of education, David Samuel Sneddon. Bergen wrote…

Social efficiency, as Snedden defines it, is the position in education that calls for the direct teaching of knowledge, attitudes, and skills intended to shape the individual to predetermined social characteristics. Social efficiency presumes to improve society by making its members more vocationally useful and socially responsible.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42588908?seq=2

As it turns out, there were two versions of “social efficiency”, ironically each calling each other inefficient. Sneddon’s critics were from the camp that measured the efficiency by the cost of the “education” per student. Sneddon’s idea was to measure it by the number of “changed individuals” as noted by Bergen. This explicitly demonstrates the ridiculousness of any such approach to the upbringing, education and nurturing of our children, as depending on your targets and/or methods of quantifying success, even proponents of social efficiency were at loggerheads.

The two camps within the realm of the drive for social efficiency ended up creating yet another false dichotomy, where one was claimed to be creating a “herd-like uniformity”, and the other pre-determining at the individual level where you would best aid the overarching goals set for society and your education was intended to program you to achieve that, regardless of your own personal wishes and individual freedom.

Sneddon was in the second camp, and taken to its logical conclusion which it will be if permitted, this sounds very much like the 1997 film Gattaca. As the ever-helpful Wikipedia describes…

The film draws on concerns over reproductive technologies that facilitate eugenics, and the possible consequences of such technological developments for society. It also explores the idea of destiny and the ways in which it can and does govern lives. Characters in Gattaca continually battle both with society and with themselves to find their place in the world and who they are destined to be according to their genes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gattaca

The storyline revolves around one of two brothers, who’s parents decided to allow him to be born and raise him, despite his alleged genetic inferiority. He is driven to achieve his dreams despite the discrimination he faces, and has to find ways of passing various tests to be able to do so. In the film, your genes predetermined your place in society. Sneddon’s ideas were just early version of that.

A common thread runs through all of these vociferous advocates and campaigners for State education, that being using the system of education itself to shape society in some kind of idealistic way, that overtly rejects the ideas of freedom, individual rights and personal responsibility and replaces it with collectivist notions of a utopian society that is created and moulded by those who get to micro-manage the education of children.

Naturally the ruling predator class that makes up Government and the collective interests of the State’s symbiotic conjoined-twin, global business, forming what we identified previously (thanks to Iain Davis for coining the term) as the Global Public Private Partnership (GPPP) have thoughtfully constructed a system that is the worst of both worlds. Not for them of course. This system of State education is as ruthlessly efficient and effective as the original Prussian system was. As the Prussian system was refined over several generations of the Monarchy, State education everywhere, including the UK is undergoing refinements based on their “big data” obsessed, micro-managing bureaucratic monitoring. The new Schools Bill is just another instance of that.

Looking at this new UK Schools Bill, it is divided into five main sections, the fifth being a catch-all for legislation that doesn’t fall into any of the previous four, which are:

Academies
School and educational funding in England
School attendance
Independent educational institutions

There has been little to no media coverage on any of this, but on the 29th June 2022 the Telegraph did publish an article titled “Nadhim Zahawi U-turns on ‘enormous grab for power’ over schools”, but the main objections appear to be limited to part one of the Bill, which is the huge increase in control over academies. It is kind of amusing to see the rather pathetic face-saving claims by the ex-Vaccine Minister and now Education Minister Nadhim Zahawi, such as…

A government source denied that Mr Zahawi was bounced into axing large chunks of the Bill, adding that he was thinking of making the changes anyway.
https://archive.ph/lLrcI

Yes of course he was. He presided over the composition and publication of hundreds of pages of multiple documents outlining the minutia governing every aspect of so-called education, but was going to change it anyway. Of course the millions of pounds this is all costing the taxpayers, wasted as they argy-bargy over this garbage will never be dealt with. As if anyone believes he actually wrote all this, or even came up with the contents. Zahawi, just like all politicians, particularly cabinet members, are interchangeable figureheads and mouthpieces, serving their masters/mistresses further up the food chain.

Some of the rules set out in part one involve regulations about how and for how long “acts of worship” should be conducted in schools with “religious character” as they describe them. Obviously the Government has no business determining such things, but it is noteworthy that this section seems to be the only aspect of this entire Bill that has received any attention out of the minimal coverage by the mainstream press.

Part three is where a lot of the more nefarious aspects are, the part about “school attendance”. Overall there are troublesome and downright tyrannical aspects threaded through the entire thing, but to summarise the main, serious points, paraphrased from legalese based on the ever-changing labyrinthian set of Government documents covering the Schools Bill here is a list…

All schools must become academies, ending the dual system under which church schools have always operated.
New academies can only have state provided sites, closing the future possibility that any new church school can be set up. In fact, the Department for Education (DfE) wants to prevent any new church school from being set up.
School governance can be decided by the DfE as the Bill gives the DfE power to remove governors and replace them itself.
The Bill provides that worship and RE arrangements in academies can be changed or even removed by DfE regulations.
Schools set up under trusts would lose the right to receive or buy extra land for their school.
The DfE will have the legal right to set the curriculum removing any freedom of choice from school heads and governors.
The DfE will have the legal right to set school hours and term times removing any freedom of choice from school heads and governors.
The DfE will have the legal right to set absence policies, completely removing the right of any parent to obtain permission from the head teacher for term time off for any reason.
The DfE will set fines for absences and has already indicated that these will be punitive, and are not defined specifically and so could be very severe.
The DfE will have the legal right to set admission procedures, regardless of the current admission policies of each school.
If you are a teacher, the DfE will set your salary level.
If you are a teacher the DfE can ban you from teaching not only in schools, but also online and remotely.
The DfE will control how the proprietors of school spend their money, completely removing their autonomy.
The Bill gives OFSTED the power to seize any material from a school that it sees fit. It will be a criminal offence to not comply.
The Bill introduces a register of children not in school. This does not just affect home educating families, but also erodes the rights of school children.
If your child takes a day off for an appointment, you will have to register with your local authority.
You will be under a duty to supply your local authority with any information that it demands of you, under threat of fines or imprisonment if you fail to do so, or even if you make a clerical error in doing so.
If you use a tutor, or out of school classes, the service provider will be under a duty to provide your child’s details to the local authority.
If a tutor or service provider fails to provide the information, or makes a clerical error, they can face closure, fines and loss of their business.
Parents who home educate even just one child with an EHCP (Educational, Health and Care Plan), or is registered as having SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities) will have to register as a school and face OFSTED inspection and the duties that schools have to provide information to the local authority.
Parents who home educate 5 children or more, even if they are their own children will also have to register as a school and face OFSTED inspection and the duties that schools have to provide information to the local authority.
Any ‘setting’ which provides education to one child with an EHCP/SEND or 5 or more without an EHCP will have to register as a school: no exceptions are made for childminders, tutors, after school clubs, forest schools and large families who home educate.
The Bill takes away your right to remove your child from a school without oversight of your local authority, regardless of how that authority has already failed your child.
If your child has an EHCP/SEND and you are served with a school attendance order, the bill prevents you from ever having it revoked, even if you move from the area or the education that you provide is suitable and your child will be forced into a school that you have no choice over.
The Bill gives the DfE the legal right to close down independent schools and make it an offence for the school to continue to operate.
The DfE will have the legal right to force entry into any educational setting, including those registered as dwellings, needing only a warrant issued by a JP (Justice of the Peace) from a Magistrates Court, the requirements for which are extremely vague and open to abuse.
The DfE will have the legal right to demand any information, and be able to seize anything from the premises they decide to, once they have forced entry as per the previous point. Not complying is a criminal offence.
Independent schools will need to apply for DfE approval if they change their details, including: the proprietor, the address, the age range of pupils, the maximum number of pupils, whether the school is for boys or girls and whether it provides accommodation.

As always, this is being sold to the public, should they happen to accidentally hear about it, as a protection for children. The register which is likely to be the first and only thing that is mentioned, is claimed to ensure no child is “left behind”, or ends up radicalised, or neglected etc. etc. Never mind that stuff already happens, in State schools, and nothing in this Bill will actually prevent that, so as always, this is a non-sequitur. The children that do end up abused, neglected and so on, are already known to the State via the various departments in place, such as the NHS and the school system, and are often victims of those very institutions.

The very idea that the Government wants to help, support and care for children is demonstrably false if you just look at the last 2+ years. All the Government cares about is the unexpected rise in parents who after being made to manage the education of their children, albeit with some low quality video-calling classes provided by the schools, they have decided to continue to do so, even after schools reopening. Parents who may well have believed the story fed to them about the COVIDS by Government and the media and complied as adults, could see that their children were not a risk, not in danger, and being forced to wear dehumanising, cognitively and physiologically impairing masks that provide no positive benefit was not something they wanted for their children who’d just had a large proportion of their life stolen.

There are multiple reasons why the choice to home educate is on the rise, and the Government once they realised that numbers were rising, were desperate to “get back to normal”. The damage was done however to their cause, a result borne from a combination of ideological myopia and supreme arrogance, and that combination has subsequently led to this latest big stick approach, the go to for Governments who aren’t seeing things go their way.

Someone who was a contemporary of John Dewey who we mentioned earlier, was Bertrand Russell. Russell was basically the UK’s version of Dewey, an intelligent, articulate man who’s interests spanned many similar fields, such as mathematics, logic, philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, politics and education. It is up for debate as to exactly what Russell’s motivations and genuine attitudes were, but like Dewey he presented himself as a public intellectual who just wanted everything to be nice and fair, and over the course of his life espoused many ways in which he thought that should be achieved. Naturally as an Earl, raised in the liberal aristocracy and mostly living a charmed life, he eventually settled on socialism as humanity’s saviour despite arguing that Karl Marx’ metaphysics was “nonsense”. Because logic.

Bertrand Russell wrote a lot, on many subjects, and one of his books written in 1953 is called “The Impacts of Science on Society”. In this book Russell wrote the following…

Physiology and psychology afford fields for scientific technique which still await development. Two great men, Pavlov and Freud, have laid the foundation. I do not accept the view that they are in any essential conflict, but what structure will be built on their foundations is still in doubt. I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology. Mass psychology is, scientifically speaking, not a very advanced study, and so far its professors have not been in universities: they have been advertisers, politicians, and, above all, dictators. This study is immensely useful to practical men, whether they wish to become rich or to acquire the government. It is, of course, as a science, founded upon individual psychology, but hitherto it has employed rule-of-thumb methods which were based upon a kind of intuitive common sense. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modem methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called “education.” Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part. What is essential in mass psychology is the art of persuasion. If you compare a speech of Hitler’s with a speech of (say) Edmund Burke, you will see what strides have been made in the art since the eighteenth century. What went wrong formerly was that people had read in books that man is a rational animal, and framed their arguments on this hypothesis. We now know that limelight and a brass band do more to persuade than can be done by the most elegant train of syllogisms. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.

This subject will make great strides when it is taken up by scientists under a scientific dictatorship. Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark gray. Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician’s paradise.
Page 29 – The Impact of Science on Society – Bertrand Russell – 1953

I’ll leave you to ponder which country Russell is referring to that created this “politician’s paradise”.

Similar to the observations of the Prussian School System, Russell observed that a “scientific dictatorship” would make “great strides” once it adopted and applied the methods of social conditioning based on “mass psychology”, and this begins with “education”, summed up with the sentence…

“It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.”

Depending on whether you listen to a fan of Bertrand Russell, or a critic, you’ll hear that this was either a “warning”, or a piece of studied advice to the political and aristocratic class he belonged to. Really though, for the purposes of this discussion it hardly matters. What does matter is we have seen how many of the most outspoken people over the last century, well respected and influential people at that, have understood and explained just how State education can and does work, based on history, observations and a clear understanding of the driving forces of the time they were written, and the future.

No wonder the UK Government is desperate to recapture those who have strayed off the plantation. The very last thing they want right now is more independent thinkers and people who don’t get the full dose of State indoctrination at the critical time in their lives, their formative years as children.

There is supposed to be some kind of Parliamentary debate on the Schools Bill on 13th July 2022, which may or may not change the course of the implementation of this Bill. There may be an argument for some push back, where people make their local MPs feel some heat and demand this horrendous piece of legislation is dropped. This is not an advocation for engaging in the system of politics, as it is blatantly rigged, and merely petitioning your slave-masters to be slightly nicer slave-masters is not tackling the real issue, but I understand that sometimes staving off the impending danger by whatever means are available makes sense.

Raising awareness of this Schools Bill is the first thing to do. As always the Government is putting on a big clown show, intended to distract from all the other things that still go ahead, even when yet another Prime Minister resigns and the dogfight for the position of chief talking head and WEF puppet seems to be up for grabs. With that in mind, please feel free to share this article, which is not intended to be the final word on the topic, but hopefully explains the issues and motivations behind it all.