HITCHENS: Parents are in revolt against comprehensive school monopoly

Is schooling as we know it coming to an end? Governments have been raising the English school-leaving age for decades, compelling more and more boys and girls to stay at school when they don’t want to. But has this made us a more educated country?

School was made compulsory for five to ten-year-olds in 1880. The leaving age rose to 11 in 1893, 12 in 1899, 14 in 1918, 15 in 1947, 16 in 1972, 17 in 2013 and 18 in 2015 (in the rest of the UK it is still 16).

What has this actually achieved? If the quantity of time spent in class was a measure of how educated the country was, it would be marvellous. 

But quantity does not equal quality. From things such as mental arithmetic skills and knowledge of history, geography and literature, my father and his brother and sisters (born before and during the First World War) were far better educated than I am (I was born in 1951) and limitlessly better educated than today’s young.

I am weary of reading about some person that he was the first of his family to go to university as if this meant he was introduced to some vast, glittering stairway to genius. As far as I can tell the main purpose of university is to get a man to reject his father’s opinions, not to make him know more.

And I tire of being told of the horrors of cane and strap at old-fashioned schools. Many modern schools are tyrannies of bullying, where teachers are afraid of their pupils and the small and weak children live in fear of the large and strong.

Like the subjects of all revolutionary societies, we are free to criticise the evils of the past, even perhaps to exaggerate them.

But we must keep quiet about the evils of the present, for fear of being cancelled.

So no wonder a quiet but growing revolt against our dreadful schools is now beginning to catch fire.

Most people cannot afford to pay private fees to escape them. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, a stern dogmatic leveller, is determined to make sure that even fewer will be able to do so.

The vast scandal of ‘exclusion’, by which schools fail to deal with children who do not want to be in class, is bad enough, affecting perhaps 50,000 boys and girls.

But there is also an uprising among parents – and children – no longer prepared to put up with bullying, chaos, moral brainwashing, bad schooling and all the other ills which have become endemic since the mad decision, 60 years ago, to adopt comprehensive education.

The Great Panic over Covid, and the long, futile closures of schools which resulted, made many realise what they were actually getting for their tax money.

A lot of parents found out for the first time what was being taught, and they did not think much of it.

In the USA, a huge Home Schooling movement has been mainly successful, getting many home-schooled children into the best universities and fighting off the Left-wing mind control which is unavoidable in many state schools there.

Now, something similar is beginning here. A loophole in the 1944 Education Act allows it. Perhaps 100,000 out of 10 million school-age children are being educated at home. I suspect this number is about to grow quite a bit.

No doubt some of the home-schooling going on is pretty bad and there is an increased danger of abuse to children who are not attending school.

But a lot of the official schooling going on is also terrible, judged by results. The subjection of children to Leftist cultural propaganda is dismal. And abuse is not unknown among children who attend school.

My view is that home-schooling, while it can be superb, is very hard. Many parents can’t cope with it.

I absolutely think it should be allowed and the Leftist state should be prevented from coming between parents and children.

But the current rebellion against school is caused by desperation among parents with no money, who can see no other way to save their children from Ms Phillipson’s horrible comprehensive monopoly.

I do not blame them. 

Don’t like the Crown? Don’t take the gong

Anti-monarchism is a teenage opinion, a way of looking brave and clever to other teenagers. Anyone who actually studies constitutional monarchy sees it is one of the best forms of government in history.

Perhaps Left-wing politicians, having so many followers with adolescent brains, lack the nerve to abandon republicanism in public.

At least that is the kindest way to explain why former New Zealand Premier Jacinda Ardern simpered her way through a Windsor Castle investiture, during which she had some sort of Damehood pinned to her clothes by the Prince of Wales.

If she thinks monarchy is wrong, she just shouldn’t take such decorations. If she now accepts that it is a good idea, then she should say so. One or the other. Not both.

Net zero = cold, dark and poor 

A few weeks after the rash, vainglorious closure of Britain’s last coal-fired power station, the country came close to blackouts. Just after noon last Monday, the new National Energy System Operator issued a warning to generators to prepare their back-up systems for trouble.

The crisis passed. But whenever the wind drops, which happens on the coldest days, the danger is there. It will grow more as our decaying nuclear power fleet goes offline. The ceaseless boasting about our Green energy system is hogwash.

Without gas, which is not a Green fuel, and without nuclear power, which the Greens mostly hate, and without imported electricity from the coal-burning Netherlands and nuclear France, we face darkness and cold. And what about when those huge, expensive windmills wear out, as they will? They mostly cannot even be recycled.

Strolling the other evening along a Paris boulevard, I noticed this sign advertising pints of ‘blonde beer’ – a much more attractive way of describing this drink than the Teutonic word ‘lager’. 

But pints? In metric Paris? Bossy republican France has been struggling to compel the use of the metric system on and off since 1799, yet the pint still survives in daily use. 

This is because, like all customary measures, it is human in scale, not devised by a committee. It is based on the human frame, not on the state. 

Vive la pinte! Down with the litre!