Damage Limitation

Contributions by:

This book is primarily for parents and grandparents. It answers one need – that of home-based educators who say they do not know what to say to friends who, by force of circumstances, have to use schools.  This book offers some advice and suggestions.  It answers a second need – those who understand what Bertrand Russell was saying when he wrote: “There must be in the world many parents who, like the present author, have young children whom they are anxious to educate as well as possible, but reluctant to expose to the evils of existing educational institutions”.

It will appeal to those who adopt the position of Mark Twain when he declared that he never allowed schooling to interfere with his education. But the book is of no help to those who are happy to hand their children over to a bunch of complete strangers, and then hope for the best.  Nor will it appeal to those who think that the devotion of schools to the message of relentless competition of modern capitalism for its dubious prizes, is to be preferred to any ideas of co-operation or community.  It will also be rejected by those who are content that the primitive form of democracy we have, whereby we get a chance to elect a new set of ‘dictators’ every four years, using a rigged voting system, who can default on their promises at will, is the best we can do, and that we need domination-riddled schooling to get us used to the idea.

The answer to the question of what is wrong with mass, coercive schooling is 291.  That is the number of separate criticisms logged by Nigel Wright in his Ph.D. research, even before the advent of the second National Curriculum, league tables and obsessive testing. The 15,000 hours (minimum) sentence served in schools often just grows into low-level misery alleviated by ‘having a laugh’, although Clive Harber, in his contribution to the book, shows how this escalates into psychological and physical violence.