Lost Childhood, The Spartans & SNP rule
We need to take care of our children or all is lost.
I cannot stress this enough: people are not paying enough attention to schools. This blindness could lead to the utter devastation of society. And whilst I can (easily and understandably) blame SNP for the situation here in Scotland, I don’t think any politician seems up to the task of addressing the crisis we are now faced with in a productive way. It is worth remembering history in order to ground us. Societies can be organised along many lines, be it Mao Zedong’s Communist People’s Republic, the Warrior Republic of Sparta, the millenarian restorationist Christian Shakers or the Taliban in Afghanistan. (which has just issued an edict forbidding women to speak in public)
We cannot be complacent in the world expecting things to ‘be okay’. We must become active agents - informed and vocal about the world we want. We wouldn’t expect a garden to manifest fruit if we did not ensure blight, infestation and weeds did not take over. We need to cultivate the garden we want, and need.
And children and childhood should be of primary import.
Thank you for reading. And thank you to current subscribers. If you are an unpaid subscriber please consider supporting my work financially. You can ‘buy me a coffee’ here. Or become a paid subscriber for as little as £4.00 per month, £30 for the year, or £250 for a founding membership. In January I am planning on launching a You Tube channel with regular posts, but I cannot do it without your help. Every penny makes a difference and allows me to keep speaking out about the failure in safeguarding for our children in schools and cultural institutions. We need to recognise, preserve and celebrate childhood. I really do need it and so very much appreciate it.
I am reminded of an ad I saw for a children’s charity years ago which had a picture of a forlorn looking puppy saying something like ‘will you help me now’? Drawing attention to the fact that donations to animal charities eclipse that to children’s charities. In 2021 28% of charitable giving went to animal charities and only 23% to children. I suspect in 2024 it’s not much different.
And it’s not because things are AWESOME for kids. They are not. In Scotland we have 240,000 children living in poverty. And those 240,000 children are all parts of families. Which makes the problem much much worse. What does this mean in real terms?
Most notably shortened life expectancy. This week it was reported that after 17 years of SNP rule, Scotland has the lowest life expectancy in all of Western Europe. Unsurprisingly poverty and shortened lifespan go hand in hand.
What lifts society from poverty? Well good education for one. And whilst Scottish government can find £12.5 million pounds to send to African nations to educate children abroad locally we are now seeing the most devastating literacy rates in decades. In South Ayrshire alone only 50% of children are graduating with basic literacy rates (!). FIFTY PERCENT OF KIDS CANNOT READ PROPERLY AFTER 12 YEARS OF SCOTTISH SCHOOL. WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING?
Well there is this:
We could rinse and repeat this across every poor (and not poor) area in Scotland. Children in Castlemilk, an area rife with poverty, addiction, unemployment etc. does not need any LGBTQ+ flags, ‘building racial literacy’ programs, to learn how toxic the boys are, or how they need to be ‘global citizens’. Or drag queens. They definitely DO NOT need drag queens.
This might come as no big surprise to most but children actually need food. (I know radical) And families need jobs. And the path to get there is a good EDUCATION.
Literacy is not some abstract soft skill with no purpose. If children do not learn how to read properly they will be adversely effected FOR LIFE. It will affect their job prospects, their relationships, their mental health, and their children. In other words literate societies are stable societies. It should be the baseline for education. That’s before we even get into the other subject areas of benefit - history, geography, hard sciences, art, languages…. I mean think how marvellous it would be if our children we being given proper educational opportunities?
Yet there is little appetite for knowledge based programming as investment into 3rd party ideologically driven undemocratic quangos such as TIE, Scot Dec, LGBT Youth Scotland and UNCRC et al are untouchable. No parent asked for this. Every single school should be exorcising these politicised third party programs from their schools. They are wasteful of limited time and financial resource and they HARM KIDS. Broken children do not lead to stable societies. Nothing else matters. Children are the foundation of our world.
And yet as I reflect on my weekend at the
Festival with it is striking how little care or attention is paid to the very building block of society, of the world, our children. We are definitely in the minority addressing these issues. (!!) And it’s worrying because 96% of schools in Scotland operate under state control. If our elected representatives are pushing this (as seen in this latest video by Humza Yousaf on the need for reparations) is it any wonder education is a mess? Is is any wonder economies are failing?Here Katharine Birbalsingh Headmistress of the UK’s most successful school challenges Jordan Peterson on this very issue.
Too often the conversation gets obfuscated by the idea that ‘we need to teach children how to think’. But this (as KB points out) misses out on a critical aspect to that issue. One cannot think if one does not have resources to draw from, and those resources are knowledge.
As KB relates ‘I don’t know anything about cars, if you ask me to develop a new car, a special kind of car etc, I need to first learn everything I can about cars. It’s the same in education’.
As I often say, the idea of child led is a lie. Children lack life experience to be able to be informed, they will follow what direction the adults set. And because we lack our own (societal) critical capacity to recognise this, we allow radical ideologies which play into children’s good nature. And then it’s framed as ‘children involved/children as leaders/child’s rights’. But it’s not. Not really.
As KB says ‘all children are communists, because when you say everyone is going to have equality, and there will be no rich or poor, and everyone will share, kids say great! They are naive. We ban things for kids all the time on this basis, we don’t let them drive cars, or drink alcohol.’
We forget that our role, our obligation is to teach children how to become adults. (note that she refers to her students not as ‘young people’ or ‘stakeholders’ but ‘children’). And in the case for children, in their optimism and naivete they cannot recognise the following as penned by a German woman reflecting on the state of the world:
“Socialism is only good for the ruling class. Not one single country has ever seen anything different once communism moved in. The most infamous communist and socialist leaders like Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, and Che Guevara have high and brutal death counts, sometimes even higher than Hitler. And this is not saying Hitler is anything but an evil dictator. I am just saying both left and right have produced evil authoritarian dictators who killed anything and anyone in their way.”
The effects of 'bad education' are further amplified by the first cohort of Curriculum for Excellence children (Scotland’s education framework outlined here by Julie Sandilands for
) now moved into teaching positions and who don't know any better. Having been educated without a knowledge base, and enhanced in an ideological hothouse at their teacher training courses they now move in to continue a cycle of societal destruction via an activist model of education. This is institutionalised child abuse.
Where I see the biggest kick back to this educational disaster is those who have experience of the old system as well as parents who have dual citizenship & have experience of other education systems (as the German woman above) in other countries. As said, 96% of Scottish schools are controlled by the state leading to no perspective of what is wrong.
I often think of when I learned about the Anasazi tribes in the states & their lost languages & culture. Societies can be organised on any lines people determine, not all uplift their people. Some are notable like the Spartans. Others odd and ultimately spell their own demise through their own doctrines, like the Shakers or cults like the People's Temple.
Stable societies are not something 'that just happens', we all must engage and work consistently for their good. And humans in all their fallibility will sometimes fall into traps of greed, ego, sloth, despair etc etc. The process of good societies, of good people is one that should be based on an active and aware obligation to our children.
Thank you for reading. And thank you to current subscribers. If you are an unpaid subscriber please consider supporting my work financially. You can ‘buy me a coffee’ here. Or become a paid subscriber for as little as £4.00 per month, £30 for the year, or £250 for a founding membership. In January I am planning on launching a You Tube channel with regular posts, but I cannot do it without your help. Every penny makes a difference and allows me to keep speaking out about the failure in safeguarding for our children in schools and cultural institutions. We need to recognise, preserve and celebrate childhood. I really do need it and so very much appreciate it.
Join
to be part of the kick back.
Every word true, every word painfully poignant - how do you mobilise parents to fight against this?