Once upon a time, there was a very poor family who didn’t have enough food to eat. All the children of the family went hungry. One day, they all heard the sound of a big car outside their house. What could it be? It was their dad. He had just passed The Knowledge and he had driven home in his black cab. From that day on, the family always had enough to eat, and they all lived happily ever after.

The story was loosely based on my grandfather. He had grown up very poor in the East End in the Thirties. He did The Knowledge in 1947 and drove a black cab for the next 50 years — and as a result, his family never went hungry.

Why am I writing about this now? Because my grandmother was telling me a fairy story where the hero was, in effect, a vocational qualification.

“The Knowledge” is the famously demanding test that London’s black-cab drivers must pass, requiring them to memorize thousands of streets and routes across the capital. It is so tough that, in 2011, researchers found that studying for it significantly changes the structure of your brain.

And while it might seem a bit odd to make up a story about the Knowledge, my grandmother’s respect for it was not unusual. It had a semi-mythic status in East London, when I was growing up, as a tough course that gave you a great standard of living. It’s a good example of a vocational qualification that enjoys incredibly high status and esteem.

There are other examples. My mum and dad both have City & Guilds qualifications in hairdressing and electrical installation. I have a PGCE. Qualifications like these don’t just give you earning power; they also give you status, self-worth, and a sense of competence. Even when you’re not using them to make a living, they are useful life skills. My mum still cuts my dad’s hair, my dad fitted a new fuse box in the first flat I bought, and friends still ask me for advice about how to teach their children to read.

I think vocational qualifications are great, I think we should have more of them, and I think in many cases they are more rigorous and challenging than university degrees. People might be surprised to hear me make this argument, as I have a reputation for favoring a traditional, knowledge-based education. But I don’t think there is any contradiction. In fact, I think there are a lot of overlaps between quality vocational education and knowledge-based teaching and assessment. It is really striking, after all, that The Knowledge is called “The Knowledge” — not “The Skill”!

But that doesn’t mean we need more vocational qualifications at 14. Given how positive I am about vocational qualifications, you might expect me to be very positive about the Government’s new proposal to introduce more vocational qualifications at age 14. As Andy Burnham put it: “From today, Britain will value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap.” But I can’t find much enthusiasm.

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In fact, I think the scheme is a bad idea. There is a world of difference between what you can achieve by taking a City & Guilds or a degree apprenticeship or The Knowledge, and what it is possible to do in our current school system at ages 14 to 16.

There are a number of specific structural reasons that make it really hard to deliver high-quality vocational training at scale in comprehensive schools to 14-year-olds, and I will explain them shortly. But what is more powerful than any explanation is that we have very recent evidence of the education system trying to do this — and failing badly.

Starting from about 2000, the English school system went all-in on a particular interpretation of school-aged vocational education, which caused a lot of problems. Between 2004 and 2010, the number of vocational qualifications taken in schools up to age 16 increased nearly 40 times: from 15,000 a year to 575,000 a year. If doing more vocational qualifications makes you better prepared for work, then by 2010 England should have had the most work-ready generation in its history. But there is no evidence that it did, because a lot of these newer vocational qualifications didn’t have the same labor market value of the qualifications I discussed above. 

Though there were these big differences in labor market value between different qualifications, the Government attempted to enforce equivalence by fiat using “equivalence tables”, which declared that very different qualifications were worth the same for the purposes of school league tables.

This caused some huge distortions. In perhaps the most egregious case, about 20% of students ended up taking the European Computer Driving Licence, a vocational qualification that was equivalent to a GCSE but that could be completed in three days.

It’s also worth noting that the big increases in vocational courses did not include what many people think of as the classic vocational GCSE: design and technology. Across the same 2004-2010 period that vocational courses in general exploded, the numbers taking DT GCSEs fell by about a third (from about 450,000 to 290,000). One possible reason for this is that DT GCSEs are expensive to deliver and hard to scale. Schools ended up choosing courses which could be taught to large mixed-ability groups in a classroom with limited specialist equipment: courses like the ASDAN Certificate of Personal Effectiveness and the OCR National First Certificate in ICT.

My view is that the underlying error which caused a lot of these problems was that policymakers were never completely clear about the purpose of vocational school education. Was it to provide a clear pathway to the 15-20% of jobs in technical sectors for the 15-20% of students with the most interest and aptitude for those jobs? Or was it to provide an alternative to GCSEs for the 30-40% of students struggling to get five good GCSEs?

A lot of the time, policymakers would assume that these two purposes were basically the same. Their thought process seemed to be as follows: students who struggle with academic learning will be “good with their hands”. So we can therefore get the 30-40% of students struggling to get five good GCSEs to do vocational courses instead. We’ve then conveniently solved two problems: we’ve solved the problem of disaffected teens turned off by academic learning, and we’ve created a pipeline of future technical specialists.

The problem is that there is not a one-to-one match between these two cohorts. Of course, we can all think of a student who hates the classroom but comes alive in the workshop. But that is an anecdote, not data, and to the extent we have relevant data, it suggests that academic aptitude and being good with your hands have a modest positive correlation, not a negative one.

And a lot of the most valuable vocational courses have quite challenging academic demands: the electrical installation course requires knowledge of algebra and trigonometry, plus mastery of a wiring regulations handbook that is twice as long as Pride and Prejudice. Of course, there will always be individual exceptions, but it is difficult to imagine many students with grade 2s in English & Maths thriving on such a course.

So the problem is this: if vocational courses are conceived of as an alternative for students with low academic attainment, that makes it harder to run the kinds of vocational courses that have the greatest labor market value. You also won’t help the low-attaining students: in many cases, they might benefit more from stronger support in the English, math and science GCSEs that underpin vocational success.

What I am describing above is not a hypothetical prediction of how “vocational at 14” might go wrong. It is exactly how the system went wrong within very recent memory. So if you are advocating for vocational qualifications at 14, I think it is incumbent upon you to explain how you will stop all these problems happening again.

The detail on what the Government is proposing is thin on the ground, but there are already some worrying signs that they could be about to repeat the mistakes of the past. Andy Burnham has said “I want an education system based on parity between academic and technical”, suggesting that equivalences could be making a comeback. Lucy Powell has said “we must recognise that an over‑focus on academic outcomes has left too many young people behind”, reinforcing the idea that vocational qualifications are for students struggling with GCSEs. There have also been briefings about new qualifications like a GCSE in AI, which again worries me, because it suggests we are going down the route of cheap classroom-based courses.

The general principle of more vocational courses appeals to a public who are growing more skeptical of the value of a university degree, and who would like to see qualifications which guarantee a job at the end. But that would suggest reforming the post-16 and post-18 systems — and most of these plans are about 14-16 qualifications, where establishing links with employers will inevitably be much harder.

Are there any ways we could make vocational courses at age 14 work? It is going to be very hard for some big structural reasons. High-quality vocational courses require specialist teachers, expensive equipment and deep employer connections. Establishing these three things is not just about cost; it’s about scale. It’s not realistic to expect 3,000 comprehensive schools to build and staff a trainee nail bar for the one student every three years who wants to be a nail technician.

Further education (FE) colleges have the scale to do this because they are much bigger institutions than schools, and are able to specialize in certain areas. Given the structural challenges, I think we’d be better off getting FE colleges to focus on vocational qualifications, and schools to focus on teaching a relatively traditional slate of GCSEs.

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GCSEs are often referred to as “academic” courses, but I think that is misleading. GCSEs — in English, math, science, history and geography — are not academic in the way a degree in English literature is academic. I think they are better thought of as foundational qualifications that provide students with skills and knowledge that help them understand the world, and that provide the basis for more advanced academic and vocational study. That is why broadly similar foundational subjects appear in the compulsory curriculums of many countries.

And we diminish them at our peril. The only way I think you could make vocational at 14 work at scale is if you completely restructured our system, so that everyone took their GCSEs aged 14, secondary schools became 11-14, and FE colleges expanded to 14-19. That is an enormous amount of upheaval! By all means advocate for that if you want to, but would the benefits really justify the upheaval? Would we not be better off working within our current system, to help both schools and FE colleges get even better at their primary purposes?

So what about parity of esteem, then? As I’ve said, I have some sympathy with the idea that a lot of vocational qualifications are more challenging and valuable than a lot of degree courses. So maybe in that sense, we do have a problem in that some vocational courses don’t get the full credit they deserve, and some degrees get more credit than they deserve.

However, where I find the “parity of esteem” phrase misleading is that it assumes all vocational courses are the same. I don’t actually want The Knowledge and the European Computer Driving Licence to have parity of esteem: because one of them deserves more esteem than the other.

We shouldn’t give a course esteem just because it is badged as vocational, just as we shouldn’t give a course esteem just because it is badged as academic. But high-quality vocational courses and pathways deserve esteem. And while they might not get as much esteem as many people would like, they do still get some esteem. The Knowledge is esteemed. City & Guilds Electrical Installation is esteemed. The PGCE is esteemed. Medicine is esteemed. The Rolls-Royce apprenticeship is esteemed. Securing a place in a Premier League academy is esteemed. Qualifications and pathways which deliver negative wage returns are just not going to be esteemed in the same way, whether they are vocational or academic.

It is completely legitimate to want education to provide students with good job opportunities. But will new qualifications and pathways at 14 achieve that? My challenge to Andy Burnham, and to the people who will end up developing these new qualifications, is as follows. The Knowledge is a vocational qualification that is so esteemed people made up fairy stories about it for their grandchildren. The European Computer Driving Licence ended up being the punchline in jokes about dumbing down. What are you going to do to make these qualifications more like the former — and less like the latter?

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This essay was adapted from Daisy Christodoulou’s Substack, No More Marking.

The report confirmed some of the parental anecdotes I’d heard about kids getting around phone bans: from dishonoring honor systems, to turning in fake or unworking “burner” phones, to sneaking in newfangled gizmos like Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. Since my kid attends a similar-sized school in the same district as Van Nuys, the Times’ Yondr takedown made me wonder if my child, too, was trapped in a screen-littered hellscape, doomscrolling with impunity. 

Could the doubters have real reason for concern? Is it too late to reverse the takeover of classrooms by technology?  

In today’s tribal America, it’s remarkable that we’ve achieved almost bipartisan unanimity on the movement to ban phones from schools, which was jumpstarted back in 2024, when Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, and then-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, both signed restrictive bans just weeks apart. Fast-forward to 2026, and according to Ballotpedia, 41 US states have taken formal action to limit in-school phone use by K-12 students — and nearly half have embraced “bell-to-bell” bans prohibiting phone use for the entire school day. So far this year, six more states have enacted or expanded bell-to-bell policies, and restrictive bills are pending in several more. Ninety-eight percent of American students now face some level of school phone restrictions, with more than half facing “bell-to-bell” all-day bans, according to a 2026 Brookings Institution survey. Weingarten also embraced the bans in her recent remarks.

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Objections to the premise mostly seem myopic or self-serving. Among the few remaining die-hard opponents, some take a performative empathy tack, insisting that screen-deprived students’ academic achievement will suffer due to poor morale. They cite a Texas teenager’s August 2025 petition against the Lone Star State’s phone ban, which has garnered over 150,000 online signatures; or Pew Research from 2026 indicating that 73% of teens oppose full-day bell-to-bell phone bans. Others insist that school phone bans are pointless because they make kids “want them more,” resulting in bigger screen-time binges at home. And safetyists, of course, still demand 24/7 electronic umbilical cords — citing school shootings to justify their helicopter parenting. (Because military history is clear: nothing repels bullets so effectively as panicked phone calls from Mommy.)

Setting these objections aside, most rational people at this point understand that children aren’t learning if they’re scrolling or clicking on their phones. But there’s a difference between parents and schools saying they want something, and being actually willing — or able — to make it happen. 

What I witnessed at my kid’s diverse public school of 1,500 students in North Hollywood was a picture of efficiency, not chaos. At each campus entrance, aides in neon vests monitor as students pass through Yondr processing stations; the kids slip their device(s) into the thick neoprene pouches, then lock them with table-mounted magnets before being granted admission. (The process is reversed after the last bell.)

As coincidence would have it, my kid forgot his Yondr bag on the morning I accompanied him to the gate. He’s among the last in his cohort to not have a phone, but he does have a cellular Apple watch, which must also get Yondr’ed, per the phone-ban policy. So when he told a bearded young aide named Brian that he’d forgotten his pouch, Brian simply stowed the device in a ziplock bag and issued a ticket for end-of-day retrieval.

Brian has worked that gate daily since the ban went into effect early last year, putting him on the front line of the screen battle. He told me he’s seen plenty of creative efforts by kids to thwart it — from forged parental notes saying the phone is broken or lost to the “burner”-phone gambit (the child locks up the burner, and keeps their real phone accessible). Brian admits that there are flaws in the system: “a lot of kids say they don’t have a phone, and I’m not going to be able to check every kid,” he says, but his overall take was positive. “It really does make a difference. We don’t really see kids with their phones out anymore.” 

A key to implementation, he says, is rules that successfully keep most kids in line for fear of upsetting parents. First, the school has a strict phone confiscation policy: if a child gets caught with their phone out, a parent has to come pick it up in the main office. Second, there are monetary consequences; a damaged pouch results in a $40 fine for the parents. This puts real teeth in the policy for dealing with apathetic grownups who can’t be bothered to enforce the ban — compelling their compliance via unpleasant jolts of inconvenience and fines. 

Around the corner at the school’s more heavily trafficked north gate, three more aides in yellow vests stood behind folding tables at a larger Yondr station just inside the chain-link fence. One of them, an amiable young woman named Tori readily admitted the Yondr pouches aren’t perfect. “There’s good and bad things about everything,” she said, “but this has been pretty good.” Tori went on to describe a sea change in how kids at my son’s school interact post-ban. “We’re seeing a lot less internet drama, cyberbullying — the problems that the phones were causing have gone down like 90%.” After pausing to help a girl whose Yondr pouch’s clasp had bent, Tori added, “the fights have also gone down because kids aren’t recording them and doing it for clout.”

That’s no small difference. At this very same school just two years ago, it had become routine for student social-media beefs, hatched on personal phones during class, to explode into physical violence between periods. Scores of kids would surround the melee to record with their phones and post the footage in a mad dash for likes and followers. As a parent, I’d seen (and saved) one such video myself; it looked like a prison riot. That scene has not been repeated even once since the phone ban took effect last February. 

But it’s the change in the mundane, everyday rhythms of school that are most obvious. Last year on the same campus, pre-ban, I witnessed a lunch period that was eerily quiet and antisocial, with sedentary kids glued to their phones, wordlessly shoveling food into their mouths. A few weeks ago, however, I saw a school that was genuinely transformed. During lunch on a sunny California afternoon, kids gathered at tables in animated clusters, chatting, telling jokes, and playing with their food. On the fields adjacent to the cafeteria pavilion, young teens chased each other, tossed balls, did cartwheels, and trash-talked. A quirky boy wandering solo with a grimy orange traffic cone atop his head approached me and asked with a smile, “Do you like my hat, sir?” Yes, the scene was still marred by scattered Chromebooks, but overall, it felt like passing through a time portal to pre-iPhone America.  

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My conclusion was that lockable pouches and other restrictions aren’t perfect, and kids can be counted on to stress-test and break rules. But they seem to be largely achieving the desired effect — especially when principals implement them bravely, with consequences that put parents on the hook, too. 

Rachel Alonzo, a parent in Jacksonville, Fla., notes that while her two sons already had “pretty healthy relationships” with screens, she approves of the strict school phone bans enacted in their county three years ago — despite having had to collect phones at the school office on the three occasions her boys got caught using them in class. “They enforce it. They mean business,” she said of her sons’ schools, adding, “but rules are rules, you know. They exist for a reason. I’m in full support of that.”

Alonzo and others like her who support the bans are in luck, because at this point, it looks like they are here to stay. The 2026 Brookings study found that more than 90% of adults and nearly 80% of teens now support restrictions, and other recent surveys from both Pew and Rand show large year-over-year increases in public support for school phone bans. More important, the bans are actually making an impact, with schools themselves reporting improved student well-being, higher attendance rates, and fewer fights. Perhaps most interesting, many schools with phone bans are now reporting huge surges in library–book checkouts — because apparently, in the absence of screens, kids can still find paper stimulating. 

Unfortunately, even while the evidence of behavioral benefits piles up, there has been no accompanying bump in academic achievement. American scores remain dismal relative to other developed nations. Indeed, in the largest study to date, hot off the presses from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a survey of 40,000 schools shows big increases in overall student well-being by year two of phone bans but also indicates “close to zero” impact on test scores. 

Wielding this data, the usual suspects will argue that phone bans are but a pointless moral panic. But standardized testing is a crude measurement tool, even when done well, and there is a much more obvious reason that culture and morale have improved even as academic achievement hasn’t: there are still too many screens. 

The NBER study confirms what many parents and teachers already know: phones in schools are only half the problem — and the lesser half at that. When phones are banned, students’ gazes merely shift to “digital distractions that are not blocked, such as accessing video or social-media sites on laptops.” In other words, the core obstacle to learning isn’t whether a device is a phone or an iPad or a Chromebook, or even who owns the device — it’s the screens and internet themselves, which remain deeply entrenched. 

By evicting “private” screens from schools, the phone bans have succeeded in restoring the healthy, human-centric atmosphere of cafeterias, hallways and playgrounds. But back in the classrooms, state-issued screens wrapped in a false cloak of educational legitimacy remain atop every desk, in the form of Chromebooks and iPads running (unproven, ineffective) ed-tech platforms, such as the widely loathed i-Ready.  

So yes, the school phone bans are popular — and they’re working — but they’re not a magic cure. If screens are a cancer on American education, you might say phone bans were the first round of chemo that halted the tumor’s growth. But for any true rebound in achievement, we’ll need radical resection surgery on the Chromebooks and iPads, followed by a blast of radiation targeting endless online standardized tests. Then, and only then, can we expect to see the malignancy of imploding youth cognition put into long-term remission.

Days after the Local Government Association warned that eight-in-ten councils could face bankruptcy due to the rising costs of SEND provision, the Government announced it would spend £5 billion canceling their debts. This may ease council fears of financial calamity — but only adds to the narrative that costs have spiraled out of control. The Times was swift to pin these costs on “sharp-elbowed” parents in wealthier areas, reflecting a view that is popular in the Right-wing press and eagerly parroted by opportunistic politicians: that Britain is facing an epidemic of “over-diagnosis” thanks to some noxious combination of snowflakery, entitlement and greed. Meanwhile, parents, clinicians and educationalists insist that the needs of disabled children and young people are real — and to blame them for the breakdown of a system that is, in fact, woefully failing them is not merely unfair but a callous misdirection.

The debate — if that’s not too generous a term — has been cruel and at times exhausting. As the father of a young man (Joey, aged 29) with no speech, severe learning disabilities and intractable epilepsy, it feels personal. What both sides can agree on, I hope, is that the current system is broken and needs urgent reform. But my fear is that a generation of children is about to lose their legal right to an education. Given how hard the struggle to gain that right has been, this would represent an enormous backwards step for equality in this country.

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It is worth remembering how we got here. The Provençal doctor Jean Marc Itard (1774-1838) can claim to be the founder of special education. Hearing of a non-verbal, feral 11-year-old boy who had spent his childhood in the woods of Aveyron in southwest France, Itard spent six long years trying to teach him speech and language, and rudimentary social skills. He eventually gave up on Victor (as he called him) as a lost cause — but Itard’s account of his systematic, if sometimes brutal, methods provided a template for the many approaches that followed.

By the mid-19th century, the Enlightenment dream of “educating the idiot” had given way to greater pessimism. Confining thousands of children with learning disabilities in asylums and so-called “colonies”, far removed from mainstream society, became the norm. It was also in this period that terms such as “idiot”, “imbecile” and “moron” were first used in this context. By the early 20th century, the British eugenics movement enjoyed the support of many progressive educators, intellectuals and politicians. The Nazis were so disgusted by these so-called “useless eaters”, whom they dismissed as a drain on the public purse, that they murdered tens of thousands of them.

It is often assumed that the defeat of Hitler’s Germany ushered in an assertion of universal human value. But the 1944 Education Act, one of the most cherished achievements of the postwar welfare state, divided children into two distinct groups: the “educable” and the “ineducable”. Schools for the “educationally subnormal” were established for those on the borderline, but a small cohort was rejected as not worth the trouble. Their destiny was to live in overcrowded “long-stay hospitals” for the rest of their lives, ignored and almost entirely forgotten.

It took until 1967 for this practice to be challenged, when the Austrian refugee and special educationalist Stanley Segal wrote his remarkable polemic, No Child is Ineducable. This paved the way for the 1970 Education (Handicapped Children) Act, whose chief objective was to bring educational segregation to an end. Progress was slow, however, and Segal was compelled to produce a follow-up in the 1980s which challenged politicians to deliver on what they had promised. But a parliamentary report as late as 2009 declared that the system was still “living with a legacy of a time when children with Special Educational Needs were seen as uneducable”.

Furthermore, the 1970 Act didn’t resolve how these promises should be delivered in practice. An inquiry chaired by the philosopher Mary Warnock recommended that the negative concept of educational “handicap” should be replaced with the more generous catch-all, “special needs”. The resulting 1981 Education Act insisted on support within mainstream schools wherever possible, with special schools reserved for the small number of children with defined disabilities.

New Labour stressed the ideal of “inclusion”. Thus, the 2001 SEND Act stipulated that children with learning disabilities should enjoy the same educational opportunities as their non-disabled brothers and sisters — with “reasonable adjustments” made to ensure that they could, for the most part, attend mainstream schools. The Act outlawed educational discrimination and launched the system of SEND Tribunals, whereby parents could appeal against decisions made by the education authorities.

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This rare moment of optimism was not to last, however. Complaints mounted that children with learning disabilities were holding back their more able peers, and David Cameron’s coalition government set out to “end the bias” towards inclusion. The result was the 2014 Children and Families Act, a carefully considered attempt to deliver a more holistic approach. One of its key innovations was the introduction of Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs), which were designed to offer a person-centered, joined-up description of a child’s individual needs and to specify the particular support that local authorities were legally obliged to deliver.

EHCPs were largely welcomed by parents and educators alike. In recent years, however, these documents have become increasingly contentious — described by some as “golden tickets”, a means of parents, especially middle-class ones, to “game the system”. Last year rumors abounded that EHCPs were going to be abolished altogether. We’ll see. However, limiting them to children with only the most severe and complex needs seems the most likely outcome.

All of this is taking place against a background where politicians increasingly cast doubt on the validity of professional diagnoses. Late last year, the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, made his own position explicit, commissioning a review into the “over-diagnosis” of conditions such as ADHD and autism —  lending credibility to claims that have more often been voiced on the Right. Streeting did, to his credit, later retract his claims. Nigel Farage — who wrongly suggested that GPs were responsible — argued that we are “massively over-diagnosing those with mental illness problems and other general behavioral disabilities”. Kemi Badenoch spoke of a cultural shift in which disabilities have changed from something “people should work on themselves” to “something that society, schools, and employers have to adapt around”.

The history of learning disability is riddled with similar anxieties, resulting from similar category errors. Thus, the rapid expansion in the early 20th century of the number of people branded as “feeble-minded” — a category that lumped together schizophrenics, depressives, alcoholics and unmarried mothers — directly fueled the proliferation of inhumane asylums and “mental defective colonies”. Indeed, the Edwardians spoke of such people as a “social menace”.

But the current rhetoric is something different. By denying the validity of professional diagnoses, a number of ignorant politicians and journalists have placed the blame for the cost of the SEND system on the young people affected, their parents and the clinicians.

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Of course, behind all this, lurks the contentious question of funding. As the rising number of SEND diagnoses have placed budgets under extreme pressure, local authorities have discovered a range of money-saving loopholes — which turn out not to save money after all.

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Thus, as the National Audit Office recently reported, £2 billion is spent every year on transporting disabled children and young people to school. But many local authorities are refusing to provide such transport to disabled children over the age of 16. This is because the 2015 legislation, which mandated education or training for all young people failed to update the guidance on SEND transport to include young people from 16 to 19. The result is that many cannot attend school unless their parents pay for taxis or can drive them themselves — often long distances to one of the small number of special schools in the country. One mother I know has had to find £400 per month to ensure that her 18-year-old disabled son can enjoy the same right to an education as his non-disabled peers. And she’s confronted every morning by the sight of half-empty minibuses driving disabled younger children past her house to school. Theory has trumped practice and families pay the price.

Resorting to such loopholes suggests that the oft-repeated commitment to equal rights in education is wafer-thin. Indeed, I’m told by sources familiar with the process that the panels who make the decisions about educational placements are urged by budget holders to turn down any option which costs more than the bare minimum. The result is predictable: vast sums of public money are squandered on legal services to fight parents at the tribunals which follow, with a 2023 report putting the figure at almost £80 million a year. This has led to a tragic breakdown in confidence between families and their local authorities, with the rights and dignities of disabled children betrayed yet again.

To add insult to injury, a recent investigation carried out by Isos, a research and advisory company, seemed to place blame for these problems on the growing number of disabled children and their “demanding parents”. As one commentator put it, the “research and recommendations appear to be aligned with the financial concerns of local government, rather than those of children and young people being let down”. It’s time we stopped blaming children and their families. It is, quite simply, a form of gaslighting.

The reality is that, as with so much in Britain, the SEND system has become tragically contested. Many local authorities are reluctant to issue an EHCP, or lack the expertise to do so properly. Writing one is in any case a tortuous process, requiring reams of expert evidence, with parents advised to describe their child’s disabilities in the most negative terms imaginable. Even when an appropriate EHCP is agreed on, success depends on securing not just a place at the right school, but also the vanishingly rare specialist intervention required: speech and language and occupational therapy, dyslexia support, and so on.

The irony is that the EHCPs are well-designed tools that identify individual needs and provide the legal framework necessary for addressing them. Crucially — and almost entirely overlooked amid the current noise — an EHCP describes more than just education, and includes health (“H”) and social care (“C”) needs. It provides crucial support for children from impoverished or troubled backgrounds as well as those with health issues. My Joey, who required a residential setting suitable for his intractable epilepsy, is one of those people who benefit from EHCPs. The crucial point is that every child is different and every child has different requirements. We can only deliver on the great ideal of “person-centered” educational support if we engage with the wide range of challenges that our children and young people face.

The EHCPs are not perfect and could be streamlined, but parents know that they offer the last legal bastion protecting the rights and dignities of their disabled children. The financial challenges faced by local authorities will not magically disappear if EHCPs are abolished. Scrapping them would not curb the rate of diagnoses either — it would simply serve to shoot the messenger.

It’s not as if parents of disabled children aren’t hard-pressed enough already. As Scope’s “Disability Price Tag” indicates, families with a disabled member have to find on average an additional £1,095 per month to achieve the same standard of living as non-disabled ones. In other words, the state is hardly keeping disabled children and their families in the lap of luxury.

What’s more, as a new report by the charity Cerebra has concluded, instead of receiving help, parents “face a relentless, hostile, and bureaucratic fight for basic support. They are met with disbelief, repeated assessments, and processes that leave them feeling blamed or broken.” Surely they deserve better.

Meanwhile, politicians who are concerned about the rising costs of educating disabled people should stop blaming the children — and start looking into where the money is actually being spent. Private finance has poured into the sector in recent decades, creating a highly profitable network of independent special schools, academy trusts and residential care settings. Senior management, property developers and shareholders have all benefited handsomely from the huge fees that they can extract from local authorities. This money could be used to make children’s lives better. Instead it is being extracted by a small army of lawyers, consultants and financiers. If there is a system that is being gamed, here it is.

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Finally, we should consider a grim but significant statistic: the median life expectancy for a (white) man with learning disabilities is 63, compared with 81 for the general population. There are many reasons for this, but the dreadful consequence is that the vast majority of people with learning disabilities will never draw a state pension, receive winter fuel allowance or travel benefits, let alone incur any of the considerable costs incurred in health and social care by an aging population. It’s a brutal fact that short lives cost the state less money.

Meanwhile, every child, regardless of cost, regardless of ability, has a legal and moral right to an education. It is hard to imagine politicians questioning whether society can afford the £8,500 a year that, on average, we spend on non-disabled children, whatever their academic abilities. And so, the underlying question remains: are we prepared to grant children and young people with learning disabilities the same educational opportunities as their non-disabled siblings?

If the answer is “no” — if we conclude that some children are fundamentally “ineducable” — we must abandon our cherished notions of equality of opportunity and universal human rights. But if, instead, we insist that that all children have an inalienable right to an education, we must bring rationality, pragmatism and a renewed sense of shared humanity to ensure that every young person, whatever their differences, receives the support that they need, so they can thrive, grow and realize their potential. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out where to stand.

When I first found out about it, I don’t think I was meant to notice. The head teacher mentioned it offhand in a staff meeting, folded between rotas and bullet points. A safeguarding tool, she said — like it was a smoke alarm or a wet floor sign. Neutral, necessary, beyond question. 

I sat there fuming for the rest of the meeting, checking my phone under the table to see whether I’d misunderstood our rights. I hadn’t. No consent had been sought. No Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) had been shared. There was no discussion of who would see what, or under what terms. I wasn’t even sure what was being recorded. I’d had private conversations with friends through email — some stupid, some serious, some that could easily have triggered alerts. I left the meeting already second-guessing what had been noticed — and what might be next. 

At first, I thought my reaction was about privacy. Partly, it was. But what lingered — what I kept turning over — was something else. A kind of moral labor was being handed over to a machine: the quiet discipline of noticing, of staying with another person’s experience, of holding their reality in mind. And no one seemed to notice, or care. 

What I was seeing — or rather, what was vanishing — was a form of attention. Not just focus or vigilance, but something older and more human. The effort to see someone in their full, contradictory reality — not as a data point, a red flag, or a procedural category. 

Increasingly, we’re asked to trade that kind of attention for something simpler, more measurable. Tools like Senso make that trade easy — and invisible. They train us to scan for risk, not to remain with the person. Moral attention is the ground of judgment, the beginning of care. It is also a stance of active presence: an effort to refuse reducing the person in front of us to the signals a system is designed to detect. 

As Simone Weil wrote: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” It is not just noticing — it is the effort to see someone else as they are, without turning away. 

That kind of attention brings people together. Sociologists have long recognized that moral life depends not only on individual decisions, but on shared structures of attention — what Émile Durkheim called the “collective conscience”, shaped by ritual, proximity, and mutual recognition. In schools, hospitals, and social care settings, these structures once meant knowing names, noticing changes, and responding to need before it was formally flagged. In the best institutions, good judgment was relational, not procedural. When those structures weaken — when proximity is replaced by process — something shifts. The moral weight of a situation is no longer felt; it is processed. As judgment is replaced by assessment, the capacity for care erodes.

Without that effort, institutions can log risk but cannot enact responsibility. They become unable to see people. This is partly because systems like Senso reshape how people pay attention. Instead of helping staff stay present with what’s in front of them, they train users to follow protocol. The presence of the system creates the illusion that the job is already being done — and so, for many, the impulse to notice or intervene quietly weakens. Senso may be useful, but the risk of complacency is built in. It rewards what can be flagged, not what must be recognized. And it teaches students to act as if they are being watched, even when no one is — a habit that replaces trust with performance. 

I noticed the change in myself almost immediately. I hesitated before typing certain words — even in professional contexts. I second-guessed what I included in safeguarding reports. I was more aware of being observed than of who I was trying to support. 

And I’ve felt this displacement in deeper ways. My wife and I struggled to have a child — we had to go through IVF. Pregnancy was one of the flagged terms. During that time, I searched for information at work, during breaks. That should have been private to us. It wasn’t. I will never know who may have seen those alerts. 

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I know colleagues who struggle with mental health — some with histories of depression, trauma, or self-harm — all of which could easily trigger the system. I spoke to people about this. At first, they brushed it off. But then something dawned on them. You could see it in their faces: that slow shift from indifference to unease, as they realized their ordinary life — the rough edges, the unguarded moments — had been pulled into a framework no one had asked for, and no one had consented to. 

Sometimes we’re told the software works. The head, with a touch of pride, said most alerts were meaningless — and shared what she seemed to think was a funny story: a teacher preparing for a school production of Oliver! had repeatedly been flagged, for typing “Fag” as shorthand for Fagin. But then she added, more seriously, that once a student researching suicide had been flagged and supported. In that moment, the tool had helped. It was good that it existed. 

Of course it was. But this is the logic of instrumental ethics: justify the structure by pointing to a rare success. Focus on the outcome, ignore the culture it creates. One good intervention becomes the alibi for the entire framework. 

But the tension is real. When a tool helps prevent a tragedy — even once — it becomes almost impossible to oppose. Who wants to be the person who blocked something that might have saved a life? That’s how these systems spread: not by malice, but by the steady pressure of caution. 

If we let rare successes outweigh the quiet damage they produce, we risk building institutions that can no longer sustain trust, judgment, or genuine care. A tool that prevents harm in one moment cannot excuse a culture that forgets how to see. The broader harm — the unraveling of trust, of moral attention, of the space for private experience — goes uncounted. 

This isn’t unique to Senso. And it isn’t unique to schools. Techno-rationalist tools prioritize consistency, efficiency, and measurable outcomes over human judgment. They’re designed to streamline decision-making, not to deepen moral awareness. And once you begin to see how they displace moral attention, you see it everywhere.

I’ve always felt uneasy when friends tell me they use apps that track their children’s location, read their messages, even let them listen in on their surroundings. One enthusiastically claimed, “It’s amazing!” But it isn’t. It simulates attentiveness while displacing the human presence that moral attention requires. 

I found out that one boy in my class had this kind of app installed on his phone. His parents approached me after school — not to ask about his day, but because they already knew, in granular detail, everything he’d done and said. Including a conversation I’d had with him that afternoon, which they quoted back to me. 

I was horrified. Not because they meant harm, but because they couldn’t see what had been lost. The ordinary fabric of relationship — curiosity, trust, even the joy of being surprised by who your child is — had been replaced by data. They weren’t parenting him. They were managing him. 

And in doing so, they left something behind — not deliberately, but carelessly. A quiet trail of moral damage: the fraying of trust, the flattening of relationships, the unspoken message that being known is the same as being watched. Not just for their son, but for others too. They had entered their son’s private life — and his friends’, and his teachers’ — without even realizing it, because they’d already outsourced the need to look. 

The same logic is spreading into workplaces. A friend told me his company monitors Slack activity to detect signs of burnout. There’s no conversation, no check-in — just an algorithm scanning for dips in productivity or changes in tone. On paper, it looks like concern. In practice, it reduces well-being to a pattern of keystrokes. The message is clear: we’ll watch over you, but we won’t talk to you. We’ll detect the signal, but we won’t sit with the person. 

And there’s an irony here. Many of these technologies — from school safeguarding software to corporate wellness trackers — are sold with the promise of freeing us to focus on what matters: relationships, creativity, care. The software will handle the rest. 

But moral attention doesn’t remain neatly available once displaced. It gets rerouted, co-opted, commodified. The same culture that hands over moral responsibility to automated processes is the one that floods our remaining attention with platforms built to capture and exploit it.

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We tell ourselves we’re buying time. What we’re buying is distraction. A school automates its safeguarding to “focus on pupils”, but the system itself redirects attention, away from human judgment and toward process. A company automates wellbeing checks so that managers don’t have to ask. Parents install surveillance apps so they can worry less, and then find themselves scrolling through timelines designed to keep them worried. What’s lost isn’t just focus, but the ability to attend in any meaningful way.

I did raise concerns about Senso. When I spoke to the head and deputy, the response was polite at first — a warm wash of flattery, the kind that’s meant to settle you down. But there was something else in it too: a subtle attempt to steer the conversation before it began. A little soft power. A little quiet manipulation. A little whiff of gaslighting — as if I’d misunderstood, or was being overly sensitive.

When I pushed further — isn’t this surveillance? — the tone hardened. “No, it’s not! It’s a safeguarding tool,” the deputy snapped.

I remember saying, Sure — and this is a chair. But if I smash someone over the head with it, it becomes a weapon. A thing isn’t just what it’s called. It’s what it does — and what it makes possible.

In hindsight, I probably lost my temper a bit too. Not dramatically, but enough to feel the room shift. The sense that I’d stopped playing the game — and that this conversation was now something to be ended.

I left the meeting furious. For a while, I seriously considered typing the most obscene, provocative, and wildly flaggable phrases I could think of — purely to flood the software with alerts. I didn’t do it. But the fact that the thought was so tempting seemed to prove the point: the system wasn’t fostering trust or responsibility. It was inviting petty rebellion.

If this is the future of care, it comes at the cost of attention. What emerges is a culture of vigilance that undermines the moral core of the work. Techno-rationalism and institutional drift teach us to monitor and manage, not to attend.

Moral attention is fragile and easily displaced. It requires a person willing to stay present with another — to hold their experience, their complexity, their risk, their humanity in mind. A tool can log behavior, but it cannot attend. It can flag risk, but it cannot discern intention. It can generate vigilance, but not care.

When institutions lose moral attention — when their people are trained out of it — they perform responsibility but no longer embody it. They can process signals all day long, but they can no longer really see.

And when you work in such a place, the dissonance is constant. You see thoughtful, decent people outsourcing their judgment — not because they don’t care, but because the structure encourages them not to. It’s not cruelty; it’s drift. The gradual substitution of moral attention with protocol, of discernment with detection.

Sometimes it’s framed as efficiency. Sometimes it’s necessity: a way to save money, stretch thin staff, or avoid paying people properly in the first place. Sometimes it’s just about keeping up — institutions adopting whatever looks modern, whether or not it helps. Technology and automation might be able to support care, but they cannot replace it. And over time, people stop trying. Not because they don’t care, but because they’ve been trained out of noticing. The pattern shifts, but the effect is familiar.

Senso did not respond to a request for comment. But before we install the next solution, we should ask: does it train us to see more clearly — or to look away?

Now, though, this ancient school has fallen in with a very different kind of radicalism: that of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party. Purchased by China Financial Service Holdings (CFSH) in 2017, UnHerd has discovered that this Hong Hong-listed company has direct links to both the CCP and the Chinese state. Nor is Thetford Grammar, deep in the East Anglian fens, particularly unique.

Over recent years, Chinese investors with strong links to the Communist Party have bought dozens of independent schools right across the country. No less striking, some of Britain’s most illustrious schools have opened branches in the People’s Republic itself, with each new acquisition sparking worry among senior officials in Whitehall.

Shadowed by similar acquisitions across the Atlantic, including New York Military Academy, the alma mater of President Trump, it all speaks to China’s soaring geopolitical heft — right at the heart of the West’s educational establishment. No less important, it hints at a sophisticated campaign of foreign influence across global education, with the British government ominously slow to react.

With fewer than 200 pupils, Thetford is not a big school, one its head Amanda Faye says is “fully committed to delivering a high-quality British education, rooted in our history and tradition, while preparing young people to thrive in today’s global society”.

That cosmopolitan perspective is arguably clear in the attention the school has enjoyed from China over the last decade. Consider CFSH’s directors, several of whom have enjoyed successful careers in state institutions. Zhang Min, its executive director, worked for over 20 years at the state-owned China Construction Bank. Chan Chun Keung, for his part, is both a long-time CFSH non-executive director, as well as a consultant to the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese — an innocuous name, but an organization controlled by a body called the United Front Work Department (UFWD).

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Like Mao before him, President Xi Jinping has described the United Front as a “magic weapon”. This makes sense: both at home and abroad, it deploys its multi-billion dollar budget, as well as a tangle of affiliated bodies, to impose ideological conformity on Chinese citizens and those of Chinese descent abroad. It also mounts aggressive foreign influence operations, targeting both institutions and individuals. One recent example involves Prince Andrew, whose friend and business partner Yang Tengbo, now banned from entering Britain, was said to have been a leading UFWD operative.

Beyond these institutional links, meanwhile, there is evidence that people connected to Thetford Grammar have had direct contact with Chinese apparatchiks. In 2019, for instance, a school trustee called Peng Kai traveled at least twice to the central city of Changsha. A British citizen, with extensive business interests in the UK, he was there to discuss Thetford’s plan to establish a kindergarten and elementary school in China. On the afternoon of 23 December, Peng did just that: with several Communist Party and UFWD officials.

The trustees’ plans to expand Thetford have since been realized, with Faye telling me it currently has two such Chinese affiliates. But what does that mean for the school itself? Some educationalists aren’t concerned. Speaking last month, Julian Fisher, a former teacher at a Chinese branch of Harrow, insists that trends of the sort seen at Thetford are innocuous. If a school is facing closure, he said, accepting Chinese ownership made sense, even if it meant “introducing a noodles option at lunch”. The new owners wouldn’t “push curriculum or approach too heavily towards China,” Fisher added, “perhaps aside from adding the Chinese GCSE, introducing table tennis and celebrating Spring Festival”.

Faye echoed these sentiments, stating that Thetford’s Chinese owners “have no input into the way my staff teach, nor the content of the curriculum at any key stage”, and that she had never discussed this with them. “Like many schools,” she adds, “we celebrate cultural diversity through assemblies and curriculum topics. Chinese New Year has featured alongside assemblies on other world faiths and cultures.”

Others, however, are less relaxed. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior Whitehall official tells me that the purchase of schools in Britain by Chinese “state-linked businesses” is part of a conscious Communist Party strategy. “The Chinese state is trying to exert influence through private schools,” he says, “and it isn’t even being discreet about it.”

Clues to the possible deeper significance of Thetford Grammar’s change of ownership can be found in a pair of key documents, both published in Mandarin and both unreported until now. The first, entitled “China Education Modernization 2035”, is a formal policy statement issued jointly by the Communist Party’s Central Committee and the Chinese government. To quote the 2019 document, its purpose is to show how education should advance the cause of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as described by the Party’s current dogma, known as “Xi Jinping Thought”. This, the document argues, will encourage “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

As the paper continues, exporting Chinese educational concepts will serve the Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi’s all-encompassing plan to make China the world’s supreme power by 2049. To this end, foreign schools should be encouraged to develop partnerships with schools in China. At the same time, the document adds, China should also establish “overseas international schools with Chinese characteristics”.

This blend of education and ideology is similarly stark in another document, this one entitled “An Action Plan of Education For International Understanding”. Appearing in 2020, it was published by the Center for China and Globalization (CCG), a Beijing think tank that has close ties to none other than the UFWD. And as the CCG report makes clear, buying schools abroad has an underlying political purpose. “The internationalization of China’s education must transcend mere capital outflow,” it says, and “should fundamentally represent an export of cultural ethos”. The ultimate goal, it adds, quoting the unnamed operator of a school abroad, is “to export China’s exemplary educational concepts through school acquisitions”.

As the “Action Plan” makes clear, meanwhile, this focus on primary education represents a change of strategy. Traditionally, Chinese educational policy abroad has focused on the Confucius Institutes, with over 500 launched at universities the world over. Over recent years, however, that number has fallen sharply: after Western politicians and journalists raised concerns about their influence. The CCG paper seems to acknowledge this, referencing “successive setbacks” faced by the Confucius scheme.

To avoid similar issues in future, the document instead argues, China’s effort to “go global” with its schools should reflect “an educational philosophy grounded in international understanding” — while also “preserving space for infusing Chinese culture and characteristics” on students. Overall, the document says, China must “accelerate the development of overseas schools with Chinese characteristics” by using private capital to purchase institutions in Europe, Asia and America. The report then lists some recent purchases: including Thetford Grammar.

Taken together, says Sam Dunning, director of the UK-China Transparency research group, the documents “provide clear evidence there has been high-level consideration of the strategic opportunities presented to the Chinese Communist Party by Chinese investors acquiring British schools”.

What’s in no doubt is that Chinese investors have happily taken the policy documents’ recommendations to heart. According to Venture Education, a Beijing consultancy, there are now some 73 “sister schools” in mainland China, affiliated with 30 independent schools in Britain. These encompass some of the most prestigious institutions in the country, including Dulwich College, Fettes and Harrow — which has no fewer than eight Chinese affiliates.

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That’s shadowed by the over two-dozen British schools owned by Chinese entities, with Thetford Grammar joined by Malvern St James and Wisbech Grammar, among many others. One notable example is Kingsley School in Bideford. It is owned by China First Capital Group, a management consultancy which is itself partly owned by the government in Beijing.

Not that Britain is alone here, with Beijing funding initiatives at over 180 public schools in the US. That’s mirrored in the private sector: not least when it comes to the New York Military Academy. About 60 miles north of Manhattan, and just up the Hudson River from West Point, in 2015 it was sold to a nonprofit foundation backed by Vincent Tianquan Mo, the billionaire owner of China’s largest estate listing and search website.

That 2015 purchase attracted extensive media coverage. But the Mandarin internet reveals Mo’s extensive links to CCP bodies — including the ubiquitous United Front Work Department. In 2018, for instance, Mo was among 50 digital entrepreneurs who attended a UFWD conference at which President Xi outlined his thoughts on internet security: a euphemism for online surveillance and censorship. For his part, Mo stated that “more strategic guidance” is needed for online creators. Though he sold the Academy in 2025, Mo remains on its advisory board, even as his successor as chair has also praised Xi’s leadership.

And if Congressmen are now warning about rising Chinese influence in American education, their British counterparts are moving in a similar direction. In July, the China Audit, a high-level Foreign Office review, identified numerous ways in which Britain is vulnerable to Chinese influence. Most of its report is classified — yet the Government has issued a new National Security Strategy which states that “resilience” to Chinese threats must now be enhanced. It singles out the need for “guidance” to those involved in private education where China is a “partner”.

Discussing the Audit in Parliament, the then-Foreign Secretary David Lammy announced a £600 million increase in intelligence service budgets. But this, the Whitehall official tells me, is nothing like enough. “You are right to be worried,” he says, “but the British state doesn’t have sufficient resources to plug this hole in the dyke when there are so many other ones. Although we have upped the money to increase our focus on China, we are still struggling to keep up with a much better-resourced adversary.”

All the while, the broad financial picture means that more acquisitions are likely, as independent schools struggle to cope with the new imposition of VAT. With 50 such schools shuttering their doors already, Chinese buyers are waiting in the wings. What this might mean for schools like Thetford Grammar remains to be seen.

The choice of ephemeral, ideological, and genre fiction in the YA category for study in school isn’t rare. It plagued both of my kids throughout their private middle school educations. And it’s shutting down debate and turning kids away from authentic learning.

When my daughter started at a different New York City public school three years ago, the entire incoming freshman class was assigned a piece of transgender agitprop for young adults titled The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives. This book manipulatively told kids that their acceptance of transgender ideology was the key to preventing horrific crimes. Later that year, she was tasked with making serious exegesis on the differences between the Ursula K. Le Guin story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and a rejoinder by woke fantasy writer N.K. Jemsin. As if a dystopia designed to prove a particular point provides meaningful evidence on human societies. This summer, an informal polling of my son’s group chat found one teen assigned a different Shusterman book by his school, and everyone else independently reading classics and books for actual adults (David Copperfield, The Devil in the White City, Dracula, the last with the notation “highly recommend to y’all it’s quite disturbing though”).

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In an era of rapidly declining literacy and the decimation of education by artificial intelligence, schools that assign terrible YA literature are hastening the end of reading and critical thought. This isn’t just because of the obvious identity politics behind the choice of such books, though works like Punching the Air, from my son’s list, is stunningly anti-white for a book taught in a city public school. Even worse are the low quality and trite ideas, which actively repel kids from real learning.

To unpack these books a little: Shusterman’s Unwind, the best of the bunch, takes on the abortion issue. It’s set in a dystopian America, after a “second civil war,” called the Heartland War, in which Pro-Life and Pro-Choice forces have battled it out until reaching a terrible compromise: Abortion is illegal, but parents have the option to “unwind” their children when they reach their teens. What follows is a Hunger Games-ish adventure in which Connor, a young man whose parents have decided to unwind him, tries to escape his gruesome fate.

The book is fairly readable — Shusterman is a proficient mass market fiction writer — and might appear to offer some grist for intellectual discussion. One can imagine a classroom debate on the similarities and differences between ending a child’s life at 13 versus ending it in utero. But this is lazy, simplistic, and not fit for a classroom. We don’t kill and dismember our own children at 13; a world in which we did would be monstrous and unrecognizable. So how useful is the comparison, really, in shedding any light on the issues at play in the abortion debate? The book employs the same technique that’s currently degrading the public discourse, in which egregious analogies are used to win moral arguments. Ideally, kids in school would learn to not think this way.

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Shusterman may be intending to stir up controversy, but a pro-life message is not really his intention, either — if it were, the book likely wouldn’t be taught. His ultimate point is to suggest that both sides of the abortion issue are deranged, and that no one really knows the right or wrong of it. It’s an appropriately feel-good answer for a work of popular fiction but offensively bland and incurious for academia. A school would ideally have the history of human thought, scientific debate, and moral and religious philosophy to draw upon in addressing the complexities of abortion. Instead, they’re teaching kids that it doesn’t really matter and there’s nothing to learn here, using a clumsy analogy from a fantasy world as evidence.

The Epic Crush of Genie Lo is less ambitious — so unambitious, in fact, that Asian representation seems to be the only possible reason for its choice as a school book. This is a novel in the Harry Potter model, in which Genie, an ordinary overachieving Asian high schooler in the Bay Area, discovers that she is the reincarnation of Ruyi Jingu Bang, a demon-fighting entity from Chinese mythology. The demon-fighting plot is tedious, the love interest cliché (“He had the cheekbones and sharp jawline of a pop star…”), and to the extent that there’s a larger message, it’s about Genie’s personal development — she has to live up to her enormous powers, and accept the fact that even being a superhero might not get her into Harvard.

The book is boring and badly written, has no aesthetic value, and could easily give children tasked with it the impression that they don’t like to read. Its fantasy world also engages in a relentless, charmless flattening of human history and human experience, with deities whipping out cell phones and banter along the lines of “You died and then came back to life, get with the program.” Resurrection, Chinese gods, ho hum. How about introducing kids to some of the Chinese source material for these legends, or any of China’s wondrous and strange classics instead?

And then there’s Punching the Air, another deeply manipulative book lent moral authority through its affiliation with Yusef Salaam’s story. In it, a sweet, innocent, mother-loving black art student named Amal is falsely accused of beating a white teenager into a coma, and then is convicted and sent to juvenile prison. The free-verse construction allows it to be atmospheric and vague about the details — such as who actually beat up the white kid — yet rich in implication. Amal is an “old soul,” doomed before he was born by his skin color, and traveling a “Pipeline” (one of the poem names) from slave ship to prison. “White Space” and “Blind Justice” (two more poem names) are to blame. The level of the analysis of these incidents can be demonstrated by a representative poem: “All because/ we were in the wrong place/ we were in the wrong skins,” contrasting with “All because/ they were in the right place/ they were in the right skins.” And so on. The book ends with Amal meeting a prison abolitionist and hoping to be exonerated.

It’s difficult to determine whom the book wrongs more — black kids, being presented with this bleakly deterministic future, or their white peers, the monolithic enemy. It surely fails to represent the lively and interactive race climate in Gotham schools, in which blackness and black culture are the arbiters of cool, and it’s downright ludicrous to imagine a group of affluent white kids kicking a group of black kids off a playground, as is the case during the book’s inciting incident. It also freely traffics in the glamorization of prison life that’s popular with young readers of all races. Amal makes beats in prison — of course he does. The school should interrogate the mythology of the prison-to-rap-star pipeline, not promote it.

The real victim, however, is academic rigor. These books’ arguments are lazy, and they present sacred cows that kids know they can’t argue about anyway. There is nothing in them to inspire children or draw them into the world of reading. Most students assigned them will ChatGPT the summary instead — and honestly, they won’t be missing anything.

“Pray, charge your glasses, gentlemen
And drink to Harrow’s honour!
May fortune still attend the Hill
And glory rest upon her!
The world outside is wondrous wide
But here the world is narrow
One magic thrall unites us all:
The name and fame of HARROW.”

By the time I first heard those words I could already see that the “name and fame” of the school concealed a grimmer reality. Its boarding houses, in which 60 or 70 boys lived away from their parents with barely any adult supervision, seemed to me cauldrons of dysfunction. At the state comprehensives I’d attended before going to Harrow on a scholarship, its rigidly hierarchical culture — in which older boys were allowed to discipline (or, in practice, simply bully) younger boys — would have been unimaginable. Few ever sought official protection against their tormentors, either because they accepted their predicament as normal or feared the consequences of being branded a “grass”. In one case during my time at Harrow, a group of boys in my boarding house dared to report a particularly vicious senior pupil for acts of appalling abuse. Rather than involving the police, the school — possibly mindful of press attention — simply expelled him, leaving him free to find victims elsewhere.

And yet, if at 16 I had been capable of absolute self-honesty, I would have admitted to myself an awkward fact: that whenever I heard “Stet Fortuna Domus”, with its rousing tune like the anthem of a Right-wing military junta, a part of me felt precisely the “magic thrall” it invoked. I may have decided, shortly after arriving at Harrow, that I was a socialist who’d like nothing better than to see the whole place burn down. But when I considered that every day I walked the same cobbled pavestones as Byron, Churchill, Peel and Palmerston, I couldn’t quite suppress a throb of pride.

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But then, one of the remarkable things about schools like Harrow is their ability to command the loyalty of students they make thoroughly miserable. Just ask Charles Spencer, whose new memoir A Very Private School details the chilling physical and sexual abuse he endured at an exclusive “prep” school called Maidwell in the Seventies. Spencer portrays Maidwell — overseen by a cane-wielding headmaster and staffed by a sinister crew of paedophiles and predators — as akin to something from the darkest tales of that other graduate of boarding school trauma, Roald Dahl. When Spencer says that he and his contemporaries were scarred for life, it’s not just a metaphor: one of them, he reports, can still see the wounds from his headmaster’s cane on his 50-something-year-old backside.

However, perhaps the most startling line in the book comes in the epilogue where — having spent 270 pages detailing his memories of flogging, sexual assault and other “unfathomable sadistic rituals” — Spencer admits that when Maidwell opened a co-ed pre-school in the early Nineties, he promptly enrolled his daughters there. True, this was before he had an “epiphany” about how his school experiences had affected him and decided to emigrate with his children to “spare [them] a classically English upbringing”. Still, it may seem puzzling that it took entering therapy for Spencer to see just how deeply his time at Maidwell had damaged him.

Then again, the 9th Earl Spencer was merely continuing a centuries-long English custom whereby members of the ruling class suffer bitterly through their education only later to expose their own children to similar experiences. He can trace his own lineage of “forced abandonment” all the way back to 1716, when an eight-year-old John Spencer was sent away to Eton. “These psychologically hobbled victims would invariably perpetuate the madness,” writes Spencer of his ancestors, “sending them to the same schools they had hated in their time.”

What can explain this endless recycling of generational trauma? A clue may lie in psychological studies of “hazing” rituals in US campus fraternities, which have shown that the more upsetting and degrading they are, the more group loyalty they inspire. Victims are forced to rationalise their experience as meaningful trials imposed by a benevolent community. In the context of English boarding schools such cognitive dissonance can become a powerful catalyst for class solidarity.

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By Matt Rowland Hill

This may help explain why, even after what he survived, Spencer flirts with the notion that it is not the practice of sending children away from home to sink or swim at boarding school that is damaging, but certain badly run institutions. The culture of bullying I witnessed at Harrow in the early 2000s belies his breezy claim that the system “evolved significantly” after he left. Even George Orwell, who nobody can lightly call naïve, ended his classic account of boarding school horror — written some 30 years before Spencer went to Maidwell — by claiming that “the present-day attitude towards education is enormously more humane”. Both Spencer and Orwell succumb to a comforting thought: surely, surely things can no longer be allowed to go on the way they used to?

And of course, since your childhood defines your sense of what’s normal, it’s extraordinarily difficult to see clearly how it may have (to quote a certain poet) fucked you up — particularly if virtually everyone else in your social world had the same experience. Neither your own upbringing nor your child’s is an experiment that can be run twice. And if there are negative outcomes, who’s to say they wouldn’t have occurred in different circumstances? If they had gone to a different school, would the boys who were abused in my boarding house have suffered the ordeal they did? Would the boy from my year who, in a tragic case that became national news, picked up a knife during a psychotic episode still be in Broadmoor, and would the teacher’s daughter he attacked with it be dead?

I’m not aware of any similar stories concerning my former peers at Cedars Upper School in Leighton Buzzard, who by comparison to the boys at Harrow struck me as paragons of mental wellbeing. But neither did any of them go on to become a prime minister or canonised poet, or to achieve the kind of distinction (if that is the word) enjoyed by more recent Old Harrovians like disgraced financier Crispin Odey or culture wars influencer Laurence Fox.

And this points to the simplest reason for the perpetuation of a system that, generation after English generation, has succeeded in producing one emotionally stunted winner after another: by some very obvious measures, it works. Some psychiatrists have come to speak of “boarding-school syndrome”, but none seems to have considered that the problems with intimacy and vulnerability it involves are symptoms not of the system’s failure but of its success. The traumatic lesson taught by these schools — that the world is divided into the strong who dominate and the weak who are dominated — is part of the syllabus.

One individual who came to feel nostalgic for school days he once hated was Winston Churchill, who during the Blitz in 1940 returned to Harrow, where the boys eulogised him with a specially composed verse of “Stet Fortuna Domus”:

“Nor less we praise in sterner days
The leader of our nation
And CHURCHILL’s name shall win acclaim
In each new generation
For in your fight to guard the Right
Your country you defend, Sir
Here grim and gay we mean to stay
And stick it to the end, Sir!”

I admit I am still moved by the story that, with the Luftwaffe circling overhead, the war leader wiped away a tear at those words. And I have always been impressed that, in a wonderfully Churchillian touch, the prime minister himself asked to amend the first line from “darker” to “sterner days”. What I didn’t notice until I looked up the words to quote them was the double meaning in that capitalised “Right”. It seems to me now that in these lines you can find the whole essence of the system Harrow belongs to. It’s all there: the stern spirit that impelled Churchill to stand firm against Hitler, and that has helped countless boarding school boys stick out their smaller ordeals; the identification of a new generation’s elite with the greatness of the past; and the elision of the school, the country, the “right” and the “Right”. Stet fortuna domus, indeed.

Harrovians still sing those words at the event that has been rechristened for Churchill every year, just as we did 20 years ago, and just as I have no doubt they will to the last syllable of recorded time. But can conditions in these schools possibly be as awful as they were in my day, or in Charles Spencer’s, or George Orwell’s? When, 40 years on, today’s pupils write their memoirs of boarding school, will they too reveal the scars the system imprinted on them? A part of me struggles to believe it. I am told that the top British private schools — booming, despite Labour’s plans to tax them, as the scions of a new global elite queue up to fill their places — now abhor bullying, competing with each other to recruit full-time counselling staff. Perhaps this makes sense: tomorrow’s ruling class will presumably need to wield power with a softer touch than those who ran the British Empire. And in any case: surely, surely things can no longer be allowed to go on the way they used to. Can they?

One might expect, then, that the creation of a raft of new universities and schools focused on doing something different would seem like a fundamental necessity. After all, young people are deserting college in droves, with enrolments down by 15% over the past decade; in the lower grades, it’s common to hear talk of “zombie schools”, the product of more than 20% of pupils being “chronically absent”.

And yet, the emergence of these still-small shoots have terrified the educratic establishment. Some claim the shift in emphasis towards classics and civics, now occurring in places such as Florida’s New College, is “sinister development” by nefarious Right-wingers. Similarly, the teachers’ unions have resisted a number of moves to create charter schools — which increase choice in the public system — because they are part of a “war on schools”.

In some cases, the defence of failure is breathtaking. Blue states such as Illinois have worked to all but eliminate charters, even as the Land of Lincoln boasts 53 schools where not one student can do grade-level math and 30 where none can do so in English. These schools are overwhelmingly in Chicago, where a significant increase in spending per student since 2019 seems to have made no impact.

Yet Chicago’s failures are wholly representative. The most recent National Assessments of Educational Progress found that only 27% of eighth graders are proficient in reading, 20% in math, 22% in geography, and a mere 13% in US History. The Covid lockdowns may have accelerated the deterioration, but scores have continued to decline since the pandemic ended. IQ scores, which had been rising for decades, are now falling even among college students.

More influential here is education’s gradual radicalisation, which has its origins at the top of the food chain. Already in 2018, one study of 51 top-rated colleges found that the proportion of liberals to conservatives was generally at least 8 to 1, and often as high as 70 to 1. Five years later, nearly three in five US professors admitted to self-censoring to avoid offending administrators and students.

The ideological stance of elite colleges is often justified with reference to their enlightened commitment to social justice. But in reality, the educational system has become more elitist and less connected to the rest of society. We are a long way from the massive expansion of higher education during the mid-20th century, largely through the GI Bill and later the National Defense Education Act, as well as post-war efforts to expand universities in the UK and across Europe.

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One clear factor is the soaring cost of a university education in the US, which, even after adjusting for inflation, has risen by 180% since 1980. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and Yale collectively enrol more students from households in the top 1% of income distribution than from households in the bottom 60%.

Even at the secondary-school level, many state systems choose to put their markers on progressive indoctrination. California’s K-12 system, for instance, fails to educate the majority of its students: less than half meet national standards for literacy, while only one-third do for math. The state’s solution is basically to lower standards; well before students possess knowledge of the basics and the scientific method, the math curricula includes an emphasis on “social justice” and mandates programmes steeped in climate catastrophism.

It is no surprise, then, that the education system fails to produce the workers needed by employers. The latter, in particular, note a lack of “soft skills” in young workers, such as the ability to think critically, as well their “unrealistic” expectations about work. Even as business schools, particularly elite ones, push such themes as critical race theory, roughly half of all major corporations are now eliminating college degrees as a perquisite for hiring.

“When you hear these things,” Arizona State professor Paul Carrese tells me, “you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” Yet, despite all this, he also suggests that “we are at the end of a downward spiral”, where “loss of confidence in education has become a wake-up call”.

For the most part, new institutions that seek to provide an oasis in America’s education desert are being set up in reddish states, including in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee and Ohio. In some places, these function as departments; in others as separate parallel schools. At the University of Texas, for instance, the new Civitas School seeks to take advantage of the wholesale desertion of civics education by the professoriate.

And in others, there are moves to create entirely separate universities, most notably the University of Austin (UATX) and Ralston College based in Savannah. The emergence of these institutions reflects in large part the alienation of the donor class; in recent years, many major donors have cancelled their gifts to elite colleges and are instead funding new schools within and outside the current educational hierarchy.

A parallel revolution is also slowly taking shape at the secondary-school level. For years, it has been clear that Catholic schools have out-performed public ones, and are having a particularly positive impact on inner-city males. Kids who went to these schools are twice as likely to graduate from college than their more secularly minded counterparts, notes Tulane sociologist Ilana Horwitz. Overall, students attending Catholic schools also easily out-perform public schools, with their average score in the fourth grade roughly 1.5 grade levels ahead.

And yet, the truth is that Catholic schools are hampered by the church’s financial issues and face limits on their expansion; private Christian schools, which continue to enjoy steady growth, are very much the exception. The big game-changer, then, could prove to be the rapid rise of publicly funded charter schools, whose numbers have doubled since 2005, while the student count has grown by more than threefold. Even though some of these schools have been infected by progressive ideology, they have consistently outperformed their traditional public school rivals in terms of academic results.

At present, these alternatives are little more than pinpricks in the colossal edifice educational system. Yet they could augur a beginning of a concerted attempt to rescue education from the educators and their prevailing ideology. Universities and secondary schools were once engines of upward mobility and civic culture. They must become that again — or risk isolation, decline and, ultimately, irrelevance.

Amazingly, Mrs Hodge survived — though any lingering public acceptance for “system-build” blocks, assembled from pre-fabricated concrete panels, hoisted into position and then bolted together, did not. Across the country, new tower and slab blocks became “hard to let”, to use the contemporary officialese, as potential tenants simply refused to move in. The Thamesmead Estate, completed in 1968, was only 40% full by 1974. Across London in Haringey, 55% of housing applicants wouldn’t move to the Broadwater Farm Estate within five years of its completion in 1971. Castle Vale, which opened in Birmingham in 1965, was so unpopular that by 1981 one-third of the apartments were empty.

Today, journalists are debating what the Department of Education did or didn’t know about the concrete RAAC crisis in school buildings. But the scandal cannot be blamed entirely on modern politicians: the seeds of this crisis were sown 60 years ago. Why was it acceptable then to build so shoddily? And what does it tell us about the philosophy of place-making and how we choose to live and build?

Let’s go back to the construction of these schools, and the corresponding homes and hospitals, in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. It was a brave new world. British cities had been bombed by the Luftwaffe and tarred by 200 years of coal-consuming fireplaces. The NHS was young. Anything and everything Victorian was besmirched with the heavy legacy of war and ornament. All over the country, tall, well-aerated Victorian schools and hospitals were abandoned for more modern constructions with cleaner lines, flatter roofs, more car parking and a simpler, machine-age aesthetic.

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What could be more natural than to build modernity out of modern materials and methods? Why sully the future with bricks that need hand laying or wood that needs crafting or joining when new, lightweight, low-cost concrete can be poured and shaped in (at least nominally) automated factories? And why build sloped roofs to let the rain run off, as humans had done for 1,000 years, when modern materials could defeat the weather?

This mania for modernity infected every aspect of housing policy. Sheffield’s iconic Park Hill housing estate was modelled, according to Roy Hattersley, the chairman of the housing committee, on the Unité d’Habitation in sunny Marseilles, designed by the Swiss high priest of architectural modernism, Le Corbusier, who had famously proclaimed that houses were “machines for living”. Surely schools and hospitals could likewise be machines for learning or curing, undistracted by corbels or columns, pilasters or pedestals?

This was certainly cheaper: no fiddly bits to fix, no craftsman to employ. The seven firms that dominated the construction market pushed this agenda mercilessly and oiled it with parties for public officials. Some even offered backhanders and bribes. Architects and public officials convinced themselves that it was also morally better, responding to the “spirit of the age” and to the unprecedented needs of “modern man”.

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But, and here is the rub, it was all total nonsense. Baloney. Unevidenced. Spurious. Faux science. A triumph of assertion over observation, of faith over facts, of hope over reality. In ripping up all organic experience, in defying the weather, in experimenting recklessly with new materials for fundamental parts of buildings, the “modern men” of the Fifties and Sixties made two fundamental errors.

First of all, they forgot that humans are not machines: they are emotional beings with hopes and fears, with needs for community and for belonging, for beauty and for purpose. Despite 70 years of trying, people have still not been able to attach themselves to a modernist building aesthetic that treats them as cogs in the machine not souls to be nurtured. As the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster put it 60 years ago, the modernist vision “presupposes a barrenness of spirit to which, despite every indication of its ultimate achievement, we have not yet quite attained”. We still haven’t. In every single visual preference survey conducted across multiple countries, between 70% and 90% of people prefer streets and buildings which are more organic, more sinuous, more textured, and that don’t necessarily conform to the machine-age aesthetic created two generations ago.

This is more than a question of taste: it is about the way people live. In fact, much of the data on health and wellbeing suggests that architecture affects how well people feel. Consistent evidence now shows that we get better faster and more reliably in more beautiful, natural hospitals than in the ghastly, climate-controlled white boxes we have created over the last 70 years.

Post-war architects were shockingly dismissive of public preferences. Le Corbusier had exhorted his acolytes to take courage from Louis XIV or Napoleon: “Golden moments when the power of the mind dominated the rabble.” The British architect Maxwell Fry agreed. He warned that architects should address “ourselves only to those capable of understanding us, and let the rest go hang”.

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The post-war building boom had a second problem: innovating with building design is different to innovating with how you design your cars or phones or coffee machines. Buildings are meant to stick around. The great advantage of tried-and-tested materials and forms is that, if they are still with us, we know they last. No innovator or engineer, no matter how brilliant, no matter how well-intentioned and thoughtful, can truly be certain that their wonder material or form will survive in the real world, as the tragedy of Ronan Point and the current concrete scandal both show.

One of the first post-war schools, Hunstanton Secondary Modern School, offers another example. After opening in 1954, it suffered from many years of poor performance. The critic Martin Pawley wrote in 1984: “It is in a class of its own for glazing failure, heat loss, acoustic reverberation and maintenance.” Sadly, he was wrong. Many other post-war buildings have been just as bad.

That’s not to say that we should not innovate in the buildings we create. Of course, we should — all the time. Ceaselessly, energetically and ambitiously. But in doing so we should be respectful of the weather, of common sense, and of observed reality. And we should be humble about how we use new materials when we are not certain of their staying power.

New buildings should get better, not worse, with the centuries; as we get richer, new buildings’ utility, beauty, and longevity should improve not degrade. Sadly, we still get this wrong too often — and in some “traditional” designs as well as modernist ones: thin veneer bricks so brittle that rubberised mastic fault lines with a lifespan of 20 years are necessary to absorb the movement; short-lived plastic trays to collect the rain, which then seeps out through unseemly weep-holes.

No parent should say, as I do today, “thank heavens my children use school buildings constructed in the 19th century not the late 20th century”. That we are tearing down shoddy buildings created in living memory only goes to show the fickle nature of architectural progress.

After an altercation with a member of staff in the summer term, he didn’t return for the rest of the year. Instead, he spent much of the time with his dad, a labourer who picks up jobs on farms and building sites, doing what sounded like back-breaking work from the time he would normally get up for school until long after he would normally get home. He loved it — he likes getting on and doing things, and being useful rather than being treated, however sensitively, as a problem.

Kieran is one of many such problems. And as more than 100 schools threaten not to reopen this term, their plight looks set to be ignored once again. One in four English children are persistently absent from school; one in 50 are missing more than half. Among pupils in years 10 and 11, a third  are missing the equivalent of at least one GCSE’s worth of school.

Often, these cases are referred to mental health teams like the one I work in, which were set up to address common problems around behaviour, anxiety and low mood with brief self-help treatments. What happens in practice, however, is more complicated: schools, faced with scant resources, often end up referring children out of a need to be seen to be doing something, and low attendance often features.

Kieran, for example, had an Education, Health and Care plan (EHCP) — the highest level of support for special educational needs — for dyslexia and ADHD. His mum begged his teachers to let him sit certain classes out, so he could focus on a handful of core subjects rather than skip school entirely, but there wasn’t much they could do — in the name of inclusivity, the school is expected to provide a full curriculum for all children, including those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

Kieran was, in effect, a victim of a doggedly one-size-fits-all approach which maintains that everything can be fixed with education. It started with Blair, who believed in sending half the population to university: his argument was that academically clever people went to university, so if everyone went to university, everyone would be academically clever. Britain’s next wave of reformers, Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove, held that a traditional knowledge-rich curriculum would impart more information and better life chances to English children. Pisa results indicate that it probably has, but that average contains multitudes, and some of them aren’t coming into school. And it isn’t just the children with diagnosed special needs that suffer — it can be a pretty bleak experience for those who simply aren’t academic, too.

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Ella is 13 and softly spoken. She is in Year 8 and missed a lot of school last year. She gets headaches which were probably caused by anxiety — it is very common, especially in children and adolescents, for anxiety to manifest somatically in the form of physical aches and pains or nausea. If you ask Ella how things are going, she will reliably say that she is ok, home is great and school is tricky. She isn’t being bullied, and she’s too well-behaved to get into trouble — she just gets stressed out by school. Ella is in the bottom set for everything, and while the groups are smaller and the teachers do their best to make the work make sense, she knows she isn’t doing well at it.

Ella loved being at home in lockdown. She liked being able to do schoolwork in her own time, because it takes her longer to work things out than others. She liked being able to hang out with her cousins, and help out on her family’s farm. Like Kieran, Ella has a strong sense of her values and what she wants to do with her life. School is barely relevant to it.

A team like mine could work on some of Ella’s worries; helping to build up her confidence. But what you can’t cure therapeutically is the empirically observable knowledge that you’re stuck doing something you are bad at. If the core of your anxiety is a belief that you’re not good enough, there’s nothing more effective at feeding that belief than not being good enough at the only thing you have the opportunity to do for most of your waking existence.

In an under-resourced system optimised for academic exam performance, pastoral teams can do their best to find out about the interests and motivations of non-academic children, but they can’t rewire the curriculum. In response, activist groups, such as Not Fine In School which represents families of mostly neurodiverse children who are out of school, argue that the current model, far from being inclusive, is failing many children. They advocate for a less punitive approach to pupil absence — at present, local authorities can fine parents over children’s low attendance — and more rights for parents in determining the best educational provision for their children.

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By Kathleen Stock

The preference of many children is to be able to self-direct with one-to-one attention when they need it. The obvious place to do this would be at home; but unlike the US, where a strong culture of home-schooling is has resulted in better outcomes than those of state-educated children, the Department for Education collects no outcome data for home-schooling families and the education establishment is, at best, sceptical. Moreover, there is very little support for families where both parents are working. Some US states, by contrast, help fund home-schooling with tax credits or deductions.

Instead, the axiomatic assumption in Britain is that school is best, and any misalignment with the school system is an individual pathology. We defer to the language of “anxiety”, which has become a catch-all term for all distress caused by an aversive experience. But this can be unhelpful for a number of reasons, especially where school avoidance is a feature: it can pathologise ordinary difficulties, undermining children’s self-confidence and self-efficacy; it can mistake the distress that many autistic children experience in the school environment for something that can be straightforwardly treated with exposure; it also assumes that the individual, rather than the environment, is the problem. 

We could, for instance, describe the frustration of being stuck in a lesson you are unable to participate in as anxiety, and we could do the same with the sensory discomfort of the classroom, but those aren’t irrational fears and they can’t be fixed in the same way irrational fears can. And even when those children are coping with the demands of being in the school environment, they tend to emerge with little to show for it. Pupils with an ECHP are working on average three years behind their peers by the time they leave school; only 13% of children with special educational needs leave with GCSE passes in English and Maths.

One way of looking at this is to see children who are statistically less likely to do well at school as voting with their feet and staying away. The education establishment would argue that this is precisely why it’s so important for them to be in school — to “close the gap” in their attainment compared to other children. But I am not convinced. In The Cult of Smart, the Left-wing writer and ex-teacher Freddie DeBoer argues that academic ability is largely heritable and that the increasing amount of pressure and money spent on trying to close achievement gaps have little impact. We justify wildly disparate outcomes in wealth and well-being as being merit-based — if you work hard in school, you deserve better in life — when the outcomes are determined more by luck than hard work.

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DeBoer’s solutions include ditching the assumption, beloved of cognitively blessed elites, that academic attainment signifies moral goodness, and allowing children to opt out of the academic curriculum at age 12. David Goodhart makes similar arguments for the UK in Head Hand Heart, arguing that a cognitively minded ruling class has failed to take skilled manual labour and caring professions seriously. What do we signal about the work we value as a society when we tell children that the only things worth learning in their formative years involve memorising and decoding information?

In the current system, we pretend that everyone can jump through hoops of academic cleverness, which are the only hoops worth jumping through. When that doesn’t work, we pathologise the individual and blame the teachers, who should be able to skilfully engage all children in the class, no matter how large their spread of aptitude and interest for the subject.

Kieran and Ella have been having a miserable time in an environment ill-suited to their needs — it was that, rather than any irrational error of thought, that dented their attendance. The only thing they were taught was that they had failed.

Yet for the past two years, he has hardly been seen. Stuck at home during the pandemic and shackled by his family’s financial insecurity, Shaikh abandoned education in 2021. Since then, he has been working on haulage trucks, transporting goods to nearby cities as a “cleaner”, assisting the driver and maintaining the truck. Once an outgoing teenager, now Shaikh only visits home every few days, often for just a few hours between trips. His childhood, as he knew it, is over.

Shaikh’s story is far from unique. Three years on from the pandemic, the entire world is still reeling from its effects. But in India, the restrictions were particularly extreme: in March 2020, when the whole world was shutting down, the Modi government imposed what became one of the world’s harshest lockdowns. With just four hours’ notice, more than a billion people were confined to their homes — and 1.5 million schools were closed. The country’s 247 million children were then condemned to “online” learning, little more than a euphemism in a country where only a quarter of students had any internet access. The long-term social effects of lockdown are slowly becoming apparent across the world — but in India, where education was already stratified by savage disparities of wealth and resources, its crippling consequences are already devastatingly clear.

In the region where Shaikh lived, smartphones and the internet were even scarcer than the Indian average. Local activists say internet coverage stood at less than 5%. “That’s when we realised that it was futile to think that we could deliver education digitally in rural India,” says Rahul Bais, who set up Swarajya Mitra, a local not-for-profit that campaigns for children’s rights. But while those on the ground like him realised the futility of online education, the Indian government pushed ahead. In a statement in August 2021, the Modi government highlighted the steps it had taken to ensure “no loss of education” during the pandemic. Topping the list was a government website named “DIKSHA” which hosted material such as school textbooks, educational TV and radio programmes, and YouTube videos.

Except, in areas like Wardha, none of it could reach students. S.S. Athawale, the principal of a government-funded secondary school in the area, the Dr Devidas Karale Vidhyalaya, explains: “Of, say, 100 students, only 20-25% of the children’s families had mobile phones. But 10% had analogue phones, and the 10% who had smartphones had no money to top-up their data. So, we were really able to reach only 5% of the children, depriving the remaining 95% of even basic education.” And even when students had both smartphones and the money for a data plan, the patchy internet connectivity in their villages stymied their efforts. Many students, faced with the seemingly indefinite interruption of their education, simply lost interest in their studies or turned to work to support their struggling families. When schools finally reopened for offline education in 2022, students in Shaikh’s position never returned.

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And the effects of this are already tangible. A countrywide study, the 2022 Annual Status of Education Report, which surveyed more than 700,000 Indian children, found that children’s basic reading abilities had deteriorated to levels last seen in 2012, while their basic arithmetic skills had also regressed sharply to levels lower than in 2018. In another survey of school teachers in Jharkhand, one of India’s poorest states, 53% admitted that most of their pupils had forgotten how to read and write.

Shaikh’s story echoes across the villages of Wardha. Overnight, the pandemic forced many children to become adults. In the tiny village of Kinhala, just a 20-minute drive from the state highway, the single road barely sees any traffic. Instead, throughout the day, the road sees a steady stream of young children, mostly girls, walking up and down the street with steel pots. The village’s common source of water is a well, around 600 metres away from the village. Children who dropped out of school now find themselves huddled around the well several times a day, waiting for their turn to draw water.

Among them are 16-year-olds and best friends Amruta Shelke and Nikita Dabhekar, both of whom are no longer at school. Shelke’s mother passed away after an illness two years ago, coinciding with the pandemic. Since then, she has had to shoulder the burden of running the household while her father Prakash works in the family’s farm, cultivating cotton and soybean. “He looks after the farm while I take care of the household duties like cooking and cleaning and tend to the cattle,” Shelke says, standing outside the hay-roofed cattle shed adjoining her home.

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Her friend Dabhekar has a similar story. Her father died during the pandemic, threatening the family’s financial stability. Debhekar had no choice but to work full-time as a labourer in the farms, earning £1.50 a day for a seven-hour shift. For years, Dabhekar had been straddling the world of labour and education — she would work for a week or so, before going to school for a couple of days and then back to work. But the pandemic disrupted this cycle of intermittent educational forever. She hasn’t given up on her education yet. But, she says, “we’ve just not been able to make enough money, so I have to keep working”.

Although similar stories abound across the region, official government data stubbornly refuses to reflect the self-evident crisis. Last year’s government report claimed that more than 785,000 additional students were enrolled in schools at all levels, from pre-primary to secondary, between April 2021 and March 2022 when compared to enrolment the previous year. But this claim relies on dubious data-keeping practices, as local teachers and principals admit. “Even when we know that a student is unable to come, we keep their names on the rolls because, that way, they’ll be easily able to come back whenever they want,” said a teacher at a secondary school in the area, who did not want to be named.

According to his mother, Shaikh himself, who has not been to school since 2020, is still on the school’s rolls as a student, and is officially in the tenth grade. Students like him only visit school to appear for examinations and are often allowed to go through the years without a strict test of their abilities. Teachers insist that such steps are taken out of compassion for students, but local activists say this “compassion” also conveniently allows schools to escape scrutiny for their absentee students.

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Bais argues that many in Shaikh’s position have at this point lost interest in schooling, having instead tasted the freedom that earning a salary brings. And others are put off returning by the sense that they have fallen irretrievably behind their peers. “We tried to re-enroll students who had dropped out, but we realised that they were too anxious about how other students around them would make fun of their ignorance,” Bais says. “The pandemic has shattered their confidence.” Shaikh’s mother Rehana, who had steadfastly refused to let her children work, have had no choice but to acquiesce to their children’s wishes. “My son tells me when we need money, no one will help us. So let me go and earn,” she says.

In a country that is both the world’s largest democracy and an aspiring superpower of the coming century, the long-term implications of this silent crisis could be stultifying. “After the pandemic pushed children into earning a living, many children started wondering why education was even necessary,” says Bais. “They would see their parents were doing similar work. As a result, many children asked us, ‘if we have to grow up and do this exact same work, why even bother finishing our education?’” Three years later, this is the true effect of lockdown in rural India — one that will take years to remedy.

***

The Children of Nowhere is released today.

But in many of America’s deep-blue cities and suburbs, stringent Covid measures are still the norm, especially for schoolchildren. In New York City public schools, for instance, all students must wear masks at all times, including outdoors, except while eating or during designated “mask breaks”. Palo Alto, the hometown of Stanford University, makes kids wear mask outdoors at recess. And LA public schools, responding to new evidence about the uselessness of cloth masks, recently required children to wear surgical masks or N95/KN95s.

These measures are premised on the idea that America’s children must be shielded from exposure to Covid-19. What kids really need, however, is a return to normal. And when it comes to infectious disease, normality means a world where they are routinely exposed to, and overcome, viral illness. For children, getting sick and recovering is part of a natural and healthy life.

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By Vinay Prasad

It has become common to criticise restrictions for children on the grounds that they harm mental health and social development. These concerns are valid, but it is important to emphasise that a more laissez-faire approach to kids and Covid makes public health sense, too. Dropping masks, quarantines, distancing, and all other mitigations will allow children to develop the kind of broad immunity gained by living a normal life.

Shielding kids from exposure only increases their future risk. This is partly why the UK does not vaccinate against chickenpox. Serious complications from the disease are rare among children, and the circulating virus allows adults to be naturally boosted against reactivation-driven shingles. By rebuilding population immunity among the least at-risk, moreover, we help buffer risk for those most vulnerable.

With Covid, the nadir of risk is between 5–11 years old — an age where children develop more robust and durable immunity from infection than adults, even with asymptomatic silent infections.

Some parents may think this sounds like a call to put their children at risk of serious illness or death. But it is important to remember that exposure to Covid-19 is inevitable. Vaccines protect against severe disease and side-effects such as MIS-C, but they cannot stop breakthrough infections, and the rapidity of Omicron’s spread suggests that no matter what we do, we cannot avoid the virus. In January, Anthony Fauci admitted as much, saying that Omicron will eventually “find just about everybody”.

The epidemiologist and researcher Francois Balloux puts it this way:

https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1486449517503389707?s=20

This idea is not as frightening as it may sound. We know that even unvaccinated children generally do well after Covid-19 infection. A study from Germany found that among healthy, unvaccinated children aged 5–11 who became infected with the disease, just 2 in 100,000 ended up in the ICU and none died (16 in 100,000 received ICU care later for MISC-C). Even children for whom vaccination is not yet an option are at lower risk now than they were last summer: the Omicron variant resulted in 66% fewer hospitalisations than Delta in a study of children younger than 5 years.

In some countries, this data informs policy. In Norway, for instance, parents of 5–11 year-olds can get vaccines for their children if they want them, but vaccines are only recommended for children with serious underlying conditions. This is not because vaccines are ineffective but because, according to the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, “the risk of a severe disease course at this age is small, and the need for vaccines for children and adolescents is limited”.

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For children who are vaccinated, however, exposure at the lowest-risk age — roughly between kindergarten and middle school — could also be the safest way for young people to develop superior “hybrid” immunity. Last week, the CDC released a large study demonstrating that natural immunity is superior to vaccinated immunity and that hybrid immunity is superior to both. Vaccination provided a 19.8-times reduction in hospitalisation risk, but prior infection provided a 55.3-times reduction and a combination of the two conferred a 57.5-times reduction. Other studies suggest that hybrid immunity confers better cross-variant protection than vaccines alone.

And so schoolchildren, already at the lowest possible risk for severe Covid-19, have now exited what should be their last winter of restrictions. Many have already recovered from infection or been vaccinated, meaning that their risk has dropped from low to miniscule.

“Normal” has been an option for adults — it’s time to allow children to resume normal life, not simply because their exclusion is unfair or hurts them socially and psychologically, but because it is immunologically in their best interest. Parents must consider that exposures are how we best protect our children against the variants of the future. In fact, it is reckless to let children age into a more serious encounter with a disease best dealt with while younger.

This view is shared by the authors of a May 2021 paper in The British Journal of Medicine, who wrote: “Once most adults are vaccinated, circulation of SARS-CoV-2 may in fact be desirable, as it is likely to lead to primary infection early in life when disease is mild, followed by booster re-exposures throughout adulthood… This would keep reinfections mild and immunity up to date.” In fact, Norwegian authorities believe that natural infection will better protect children than vaccines that rely on out-of-date variants of the virus.

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Scientific tyranny has captured America

By Jacob Howland

For parents worried that dropping restrictions will put their children at risk, the way forward is to realise that many of the protective measures we’ve been relying on, including masks — and especially the cloth masks that many American schoolchildren have been wearing for over a year — were never as protective as we’d thought, and are no match for omicron.

Some parents understandably fear the consequences of long Covid in kids, but the largest study to date is profoundly reassuring. Children who tested positive for Covid-19 were only 0.8% more likely to report long Covid symptoms, such as fatigue and muscle weakness, than those who had never tested positive. As the authors of the study concluded: “Long Covid in children is rare and mainly of short duration”.

Anxious parents should also put the risks in perspective. Children in many parts of Europe have been subject to less draconian restrictions than their US counterparts — without disastrous results. And while the death of any child is a tragedy, Covid-19 is less deadly to children than many other risks we accept as a matter of course, including drowning, vehicle accidents, and even cardiovascular disease.

Yes, diseases will continue to circulate, as they always have done. Schools are not sterile, nor should they be. Immunity is built through illness. If we can’t return our children to normalcy now, knowing what we know about the small risks facing children and the serious harms inflicted on them by pandemic-era restrictions, there is a real risk, at least in the more progressive parts of America, that the current arrangement will become the new normal. And that is a risk none of us should be willing to take.

Editor’s note: A previous version of this article misstated the findings of a study from Germany on hospitalisation risk among unvaccinated children age 5-11. The correct figure for ICU admissions is 2 in 100,000, not 8 in 100,000. We have also added the figure for MISC-C risk and linked to the paper, which can be found here. We apologise for the error.

The first two orders were aimed at the classroom. One promised “to ensure excellence” in schools by taking steps to “end the use of inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory, and to raise academic standards”. The other affirmed that whether or not a child should wear a mask to school was up to parents, not schools. Youngkin knows what was clear to anyone watching the Virginia gubernatorial race: that his focus on the question of who is in control of the state’s classrooms — whether they are open or not, and what is being taught when they are — was what delivered a Republican win in a state that voted for Joe Biden by 10 percentage points just a year earlier.

While many Virginians with school-age children were angered by long-term school closures during the pandemic, the promotion of a divisive “antiracist” pedagogy and the abandonment of the meritocratic pursuit of academic excellence, Youngkin’s opponent, Terry McAuliffe, sided with the teachers’ unions. Youngkin called his campaign events “parents matter” rallies, while McAuliffe chose Randi Weingarten — the union head honcho and public enemy number one for parents of children who, in many cases, missed more than a year’s worth of in-person schooling — as a headline speaker for his election-eve rally. In one debate, he uttered a self-incriminating mantra: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” He never recovered.

Much of the debate that followed the Virginia result centered on whether it was school closures or the pedagogy for which Critical Race Theory has become a shorthand were the bigger factor. Some on the Left leapt on the fact that the anti-CRT campaigner Christopher Rufo is explicit about his intent to weaponise CRT against Democrats. An analysis of the Virginia results by Michael Hartney, a political scientist at Boston College, found that Youngkin did better in areas where school closures had been more extensive.

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But this post-mortem fails to understand just how tangled the issues are. The anti-CRT backlash was a product of remote learning: parents saw what their children were learning and, in many cases, were not impressed. Anger at a progressive reckoning was understandably intensified by the timing: renaming schools, paying thousands of dollars for a Zoom lecture from Ibram X. Kendi and abolishing standardised testing at a time when classrooms were closed, grades were slipping and the poorest students with the least support were being hit the hardest. Taken together, these questions boil down to control: who decides what happens in America’s schools?

Needless to say, classroom issues are not limited to Virginia. And for many Republicans, Youngkin struck on a winning issue ahead of the midterms later this year. Party strategists hope they can win back a cohort of college-educated suburban voters they lost during the Trump years. Some panicked Democrats also appear to realize this: since November, parts of the party have dropped their previous passivity towards the teachers’ unions. But whether or not Democrats learn the right lessons from 2021, parents of school-age children have been identified as a crucial slice of the electorate. They are worried and frustrated. And they have mobilised. They have joined campaign groups, attended school-board meetings and run for office. And they are set to decide races across America.

Writing in The Atlantic recently, one parent explained how a broader disillusion with the Democratic Party was triggered by pandemic schooling: “until recently… [I was] a loyal, Left-leaning Democrat, and I had been my entire adult life. I was the kind of partisan who registered voters before midterm elections and went to protests. I hated Donald Trump so much that I struggled to be civil to relatives on the other side of the aisle. But because of what my family has gone through during the pandemic, I can’t muster the same enthusiasm. I feel adrift from my tribe and, to a certain degree, disgusted with both parties.”

Another parent, a progressive who lives in Northern Virginia, an affluent, heavily Democratic part of the country, explained to me his disgust at the support for closures from his political allies. “I’m a Left-winger and the people who were the most pro-closure were all on the Left,” he said. “Everything they were pushing for was antithetical to liberalism. School closures were hurting the most at-risk kids: people whose parents aren’t a lawyer like me… The hypocrisy of these people was incredible. They claimed to care so much about underprivileged people and yet were ready to throw them under the bus.”

He says he knows many lifetime Democrats who voted for Youngkin because they wanted schools to return to normal for their children.

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If candidates and political consultants are plotting ways to win over the parent vote, education activists hope that the pandemic will prove to be a decisive moment for American schooling. “Covid didn’t break the public school system. It was already broken,” says Corey DeAngelis, the national director of research at School Choice Now. “But, for almost two years now, it has shone a spotlight on the main problem with K-12 education across America, which is a massive, long-existing power imbalance between the public school teachers’ union monopoly and families.”

Parents are voting with their feet. Enrolment in New York City’s public school system has dropped by 5% since the start of the pandemic. Homeschooling increased by 50% in Virginia in the 2020-21 school year. Nationwide, more than half a million American children have left public education since the start of the pandemic. The school-choice movement is flourishing. Public support is at an all-time high while 18 states have expanded school-choice measures. The number of states with an education saving account programme, which DeAngelis calls the “gold standard” for school choice and which allows parents to receive public funds for education if they withdraw their children from the public system, doubled from five to ten last year.

The question is whether anger over education at the moment will trigger a long-lasting change in education politics in America, or whether business as usual returns once anger over school closures subsides. I suspect it will do the former, just as the effects of the pandemic school closures will likely do lasting damage to the mental health and educational outcomes of America’s children.

Organisations started by parents to pressure their school systems offer a counterweight to teachers’ unions now have an institutional momentum of their own. Choice-enhancing policy changes will not be repealed overnight. Parents stuck dealing with at-home learning for more than a year will not easily forget who was revealed to have a veto power over their children’s education.

Perhaps above all else, the spread of anti-racist dogma in public education — and the prioritisation of progressive genuflecting over academic excellence — will mobilise all but the most progressive of parents.

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Of the many hasty symbolic changes made during the racial reckoning of 2020, the one I keep returning to is the decision by KIPP, the country’s largest network of charter schools, to retire their national slogan, which, until the summer of 2020, was “Work hard. Be nice.” It isn’t just impossibly inoffensive, but it strikes me as a pretty good motto: who wouldn’t want their kids to live by those words? But according to KIPP, the four-word mantra needed to go because it “supports the illusion of meritocracy”  and because “working hard and being nice is not going to dismantle systemic racism”.

After the pandemic passes, that toxic ideology will remain. It seems so anathema to human nature that a counter-revolution feels inevitable. In fact — as Virginia is demonstrating — it is already underway. And it is parents who are its foot-soldiers.

Appealing to what James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager, has dubbed “faculty lounge politics” — with its emphasis on Critical Race Theory, racial quotas, transgenderism and defunding the police — has become an obvious flaw in their political strategy. These positions might prove popular in certain sections of the media, but not so much among the public.

The Virginia results made evident these failures, particularly on radical education and transgender policies. A state that was on the verge of becoming a deep blue bastion, largely based on the affluent Washington suburbs, moved to the Right in part due to resistance among parents to a new progressive education agenda that prioritised issues such as race, slavery and gender. State-wide polls taken just before the election showed Governor-elect Gregg Youngkin beat Democrat Terry McCauliffe by 15 points among parents.

Yet educational excess was not the only policy area that hurt the Democrats. Overall, the election was won in the Northern Virginia suburbs where the GOP reduced the large Trump deficit in half from 2020. Here, as across the state, the sagging economy and rampaging inflation will have dominated this election; exit polls show that taxes and economic worries were even larger factors than education, pushing voters towards Youngkin.

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Not surprisingly the egomaniacal Trump and his minions will claim credit for the GOP gains — Republicans also won Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor race, the state Legislature and possibly the Attorney General — as their own. This is true in part, the Republican base in the state’s rural hinterlands overwhelmingly opted for Youngkin.

Some on the Right will no doubt view the elections an expression of “buyer remorse”, paving the way for a Trump restoration. Yet Trump, according to the national  polls, remains barely more popular than the hapless Joe Biden, and would still likely lose Virginia. He would probably lose many of the affluent suburbs and, unlike Terry McCauliffe, would stimulate progressive voters and minorities to the polls.

In some sense Youngkin may have found the secret sauce for post-Trump Republicans — genuflect to Dr Demento, but don’t have him over for dinner, or brunch, or even in your state. While the Democrats focused on Trump — Biden cited Trump’s name 24 times during a campaign appearance on McAuliffe’s behalf last week — Youngkin sensibly zeroed in on the issues that matter most to your regular suburban family: public safety, schools and taxes. He realised that even moderate, liberal parents do not want racialism brought back into the schools, even if it’s introduced not by neo-Confederates, but impassioned social justice warriors.

His message helped him raise GOP shares, particularly among younger and middle aged voters, where Trump had been trounced in 2020, by double digits. He made a less impressive showing with minorities, who account for roughly a third of the state’s population, although he did win 30% more African-American votes — a key constituency in the former Confederate capital of Richmond in particular — than Trump. The GOP also was wise to nominate a former Marine and Jamaican immigrant, Winsome Sears, for Lieutenant Governor, who may have out-performed Youngkin in the race. Nominating and even electing racial minorities may be dismissed as “tokenism” by many, but ignores the fact that many minorities, and particularly immigrants, are more culturally conservative than the average American.

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Yet Youngkin’s challenges, and those of the national GOP, remain enormous, including a national media which will follow and magnify every Gubernatorial misstep. His path to success could easily be thrown off-course by the extreme agenda of the Right, which too often matches in many ways the authoritarianism of the progressive Left. Texas, where the Right seeks to undermine local powers and is focused on issues such as abortion, could be a negative model in more centrist places like Virginia, and other bellwether states.

But these challenges are chopped liver compared to what the Democrats now face. Clearly    the far-Left agenda is not popular even in safely blue areas. In a sharp reversal from early in the pandemic, the desire for more government has fallen to barely 40%, while support for the huge Green New Deal remains tepid at best. On Tuesday, Minneapolis overwhelmingly rejected a police defunding initiative and Eric Adams, a former cop and centrist-sounding Democrat, became Mayor, succeeding the unpopular Leftist Bill de Blasio while defeating his ideological heirs.

The problem the Democrats face is that the progressive agenda now increasingly dominates the party, with even the redoubtable Nancy Pelosi seeming to be led around by boisterously socialist members of the caucus. Along with their powerful allies in the public employee unions, they have tied Biden to a radical programme that would embrace CRT, undermine America’s still-large energy industry, support steps to densify the suburbs and turn against Israel. Suffice it to say that these are not winning positions in much of the country.

Increasingly, the progressives and Biden are increasingly desperate. They seem desperate to impose a radical agenda now, in part because they fear the country, which rejects many of their priorities, will destroy their tiny majority, itself a gift from Trump’s idiotic post-election behaviour, next year. Meanwhile, Biden’s assumed successor, Kamala Harris, has polled badly or worse than her boss.

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Successful parties intuit when to shift Right or Left and focus on issues with wide appeal. But Biden seems intent on stumbling through his Presidency as he carries the agenda of those, like Senator Bernie Sanders, who opposed his nomination. McAuliffe may have run a bad campaign, but he also was a victim of the remarkable incompetence, and poor communications, coming from the White House.

If the Democrats are to succeed, what they need is an answer to GOP populism that does not focus on cultural issues. Rather than pin Donald Trump on his tail, they should have gone after Youngkin’s background as co-CEO of the ultra-connected private equity fund Carlyle group. Fundamentally, non-racial social democratic programs of expanding health care, an infrastructure programme focused on roads and bridges, a clear strategy to deal with China all could work to expand, not shrink, the party base.

But this is not the path they have chosen. They still hope that by reviving the Trumpian ghost, enough centrists will go their way. But this will never work: you can’t win the centre while clinging on to the least popular parts of the progressive agenda.

Judging by the stream of recent headlines, petitions and open letters, parents of 12 to 15-year-olds could soon be heading for a showdown over the “right to be vaccinated against Covid”. The UK’s Chief Medical Officers this week announced a plan to offer them jabs — despite the Government’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation’s advice that the direct benefits for healthy children were too marginal.

And while parents will be required to give their consent for their child to be vaccinated, a child will be able to override their parents’ refusal providing he or she is deemed to have “enough intelligence, competence and understanding to fully appreciate what’s involved in their treatment” (otherwise known as being Gillick competent).

Covid-19 has always been a crisis in search of a culture war, and the response to this announcement has been no exception. When such luminaries as Gillian McKeith and Laurence Fox, and groups with titles such as Family Defence League and Lawyers for Liberty, start advising parental resistance, you know it’s about more than the scientific specifics of just one jab. Suddenly it is about personal freedom, the rejection of state interference in family life and the principle that a parent should decide what is right for their child. It is about where you stand politically and how you want to be perceived.

I’ll be honest: I do not want to be standing alongside Laurence Fox. I know which “side” of this debate I am meant to be on — which one suits both my political persuasions and my parenting style. And it is that, more than any in-depth medical knowledge, which tempts me to declare myself fine with my own children overriding my consent (were it not for the fact that this in itself constitutes a form of giving consent — the eternal paradox of liberal parenting).

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I find the idea of a child ending up in mediation with their own parents over the right to be vaccinated not just unlikely, but bizarre (the idea of slammed doors, mealtime sulks, plaintive cries of “but EVERYONE else has had one!”). Yet for others, the anxiety is real, with schools being inundated with letters from parents fearful that vaccinations will take place behind their backs.

Perhaps I’m unusual, but ever since I was allowed — just allowed! — to take my firstborn home from the hospital, I’ve been sceptical about the idea that parents know best.

Parental decisions are informed not just by love, but politics. We know this, though we tend to tell ourselves it is those other parents — those of the opposing political tribe — who are getting it wrong. This inconsistency is particularly glaring in current debates on the treatment of young people with gender dysphoria. There are parents who support social transition, the prescription of puberty blockers and/or the use of binders, and parents who don’t — with both sides insisting they are motivated by an understanding of their child inaccessible to anyone else. In accounts of raising trans children, or opposing a child’s desire to transition, “I know what’s best for my child” merges with “any loving parent in my position would make the same choice” (or, at the sharp end, “any parent who would not make the same choice obviously wants their child dead”).

It is uncomfortable to admit that your love, and what is in the “best interests of the child”, is tainted by your own background, self-image, friendship groups and even personal traumas. Yet I know mine is, even when I think I’m right. Indeed, it is by watching the Covid vaccination debate play out that I’ve felt, more than ever, how much more attractive it is to cling to our slogans rather than admit how little we know.

I have my own self-defeating list of things that I, as a parent, should and should not be allowed to do. Not allowed: smacking children; restricting access to contraception and abortion (providing safeguarding checks are made); vetoing access to good sex education (I decide what “good” is). Allowed: vetoing access to dodgy sex education (I decide what “dodgy” is); intervening where a treatment constitutes self-harm (I decide what “self-harm” is).

I know this is provisional and shaky, riven with qualifications, making the bodies of my children (and yours) a testing ground for my politics. I do think there are areas — such as the administration of physical punishment, or the use of breast binders — where it is possible to make a more objective case for harm being done, but the template of “parents’ rights” is unhelpful. With the proposed Covid vaccinations, the situation is different still; the play-off is not between potential losses and gains for one’s own child, but potential gains for other people, perhaps even yourself.

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Here we have an example where the primary beneficiaries of a treatment may not be — indeed, most probably are not — those receiving it. As a result, the simplistic concept of individuals, or their parents, knowing what’s best for them falls apart. Writing in The Independent, Victoria Richards argues in favour of “competent” children making the final decision on vaccination using the principle of “knowing best”:

“Some children under the age of 15 will be deemed “Gilick competent”, some won’t… Parents or carers know their children best — so chances are, you know which camp your child would likely fall into. If you’re a parent who’s vaccine-hesitant, I can understand why you might feel upset – even angry — about such a scenario. But what I really feel is that we should trust our kids; many of whom are mature, intelligent and information-savvy well before the age of 12.”

I think my children are mature, intelligent and information-savvy; the trouble is, I don’t think the debate over having a Covid jab is a test of these qualities. This is a complex situation, hijacked by narratives about state control, science and freedom. It is also one in which moral pressure is being exerted on children, one that might come from schools, but which could also come from parents who want their children to be vaccinated. Coercing children — however subtly — to do something with their bodies which isn’t primarily for their benefit is questionable. But so, too, is making that body the site for spurious, abstract arguments about liberty and parental infallibility. Neither side is coming off well.

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Richards goes on to invoke the principle of “my body, my choice”: “We can’t very well teach our children that they have the right to say “no” to unwanted physical contact one minute, and then demand they kiss an aged aunt the next… And if we are teaching our kids that their bodies (rightly) belong to them, then that should go for whatever it is they decide about the vaccine, too.”

But this is a reversal of our usual message regarding consent, because the focus is on the right to say “yes”, not “no”. There’s something telling in the way that liberal leanings push us towards making the dominant message “you have the right to override your parents if they say no”, rather than “you have the right to override them if they say yes”. It smacks — just a little — of an uncomfortable political division on consent, whereby some of us only want to focus on the giving rather than the withholding. For all the accusations of illiberal moral panic one might throw at those raising alarm about the vaccine, “my body, my choice” is a slogan that would seem to me to apply better to the children saying no for themselves. Suddenly, unexpectedly, I find myself veering, ever so slightly, Laurence Fox-wards.

I am not going to fight with my children over the vaccine; they want to have one and I will not stop them. But there are bigger questions to ask, not just about what influence parents should have, but what we are using our children for. Children have been asked to make significant, necessary sacrifices for adults; it is not necessary to use them to fight our own culture wars.

That the systems that held entire populations captive, and which enslaved and killed millions, and were run by little men who were worshipped as gods, are deemed too trivial to study is really quite remarkable.

Indeed, if you ask Google “do they teach about communism in schools?” the results on the first page will consist mainly of archival and scholarly papers about educational programmes during the 1950 and 60s. Well, those and some much more recent articles about Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who in late June signed a Bill mandating that all high school students must learn about “political ideologies such as communism and totalitarianism, that conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy essential to the founding principles of the United States.”

Why now? Speaking at a press conference in a middle school, DeSantis attacked teachers who praise Mao Zedong and denounced Che Guevara as a “total communist thug” before adding “We’re going to be pushing back on a lot of the whitewashing that’s been done.”

Lenin, of course, would instruct us to ask cui prodest? DeSantis is a Republican who has many Cuban immigrants in his state, not to mention voters who have escaped other Latin American leftist regimes, so attacking communism is certainly good politics in Florida. But at the press conference DeSantis was careful not to frame the study of communism in purely historical terms. He also gave space to Ana Bouza, who fled the Sandinistas in Nicaragua at age 16, escaping at first to Venezuela, before moving again to Florida — only to have her granddaughter inform her one day that socialism was “not… that bad.” DeSantis himself is only 42, and so was two years old when uber cold warrior Ronald Reagan was elected. It seems, therefore, that his concern is that ideas once thought confined to the dustbin of history might yet have some life in them and be at risk of spreading.

He is not necessarily wrong. A decade on from the Communist Party USA’s enthusiastic embrace of Occupy Wall Street, the acceptance of “socialism” in America as something non-radioactive continues to advance. A Gallup survey in 2019 found that socialism was as popular as capitalism among young adults, while Bernie Sanders, who did not shy away from the term, was the last of Biden’s challengers to drop out of the Democratic Party presidential primaries. DeSantis himself has young daughters, so perhaps he is worried that the day is coming when they read the glowing profile of Rosa Luxemburg in Teen Vogue, then run away to join the LARPing kombucha-drinking revolutionaries in America’s whitest big city.

Indeed, I sometimes wonder if some aspects of the so-called Great Awokening that caught so many observers off-guard might not have been so surprising had more people known something about radical left regimes of the 20^th century. Much has been made of the parallels between last year’s summer of statue-toppling iconoclasm and China’s Cultural Revolution, but that is only one example.

If you have even a cursory familiarity with the history of the USSR and its satellite regimes, you will not be shocked when self-proclaimed progressives turn out to be censorious prudes fearful of ideas, nor will you be amazed when liberals fail to defend their principles and go along with things that they don’t believe, “hiding, for [their] job’s sake, the rattle of bones”, to quote Aleksandr Blok. Nor would you be surprised to learn that Left-wing authoritarianism exists, contra the parochial studies seeking to prove otherwise.

That said, I am not sure that a pure focus on hardline totalitarian communism is necessarily the best way to educate people about the false promises of bogus utopias. As Czeslaw Milosz observed, people take the reality they live in as something “natural” and “cannot believe that one day a rider may appear on a street he knows well, where cats sleep and children play, and start catching passers-by with a lasso.”

Thus were I to design a curriculum, I would certainly teach about Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, but I would also teach about the herbivorous phases of socialist regimes, when they were working as well as they ever did — and yet still there were shortages of the most mediocre goods, and people were still forbidden to travel abroad or listen to foreign radio stations, and religious believers were still subjected to crude propaganda, and there were still armies of snitches informing on their neighbours, and a cassette copy of Deep Purple’s In Rock that had been taped and retaped hundreds of times over was a precious commodity that could make you the envy of all your friends. (In fairness, I would also teach that in these conditions of bad government and permanent shortages, solidarity and kindness between individuals can flourish.)

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And none of this is to include, say, the successes and failures of post-war socialist parties in Western Europe. But even if DeSantis emphasises the excesses of communism at its worst, that is a great improvement on what we have had up to this moment, which is pretty much nothing. My main critique of this law is that it is required at all; but Florida also has a law mandating the study of the Holocaust, so this is not an innovation. The classroom is not the public square, and governments can and do decide what is taught in them. Indeed, DeSantis may have started a trend — hot on the heels of his press conference, the Arizona House voted in favor of a similar bill.

And yet, I wonder if this moment when some students in America start learning about communism might not also mark the moment when the subject jumps the shark. American elites have long treated anything that smacks of “anti-communism” as terribly déclassé, thanks to the legacy of McCarthy, and there is a strong whiff of that in the coverage of DeSantis’ bill on purported news site The Daily Beast, which ran a story with the headline Florida Guv’s School Crackdown is a Red Scare Throwback.

In addition, the fact that this type of bill was pioneered not just by any Republican governor, but by DeSantis, who is a staple of hate-click media content targeted at progressive audiences, means that it is all but guaranteed to be sucked into America’s uber-degraded culture war discourse. At the same press conference where DeSantis announced that young people in Florida were going to be learning about communism, he also spoke about two other bills — one related to civics education, and another which requires public universities to “annually assess intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity” on campus. The first of these was not very controversial, but the second certainly was, and DeSantis also signed an early law banning “Critical Race Theory” or CRT in schools, which was even more so.

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By Daniel Kalder

Now you would think that reasonable people on both sides of the political aisle might be able to agree that teaching children to think of themselves as oppressor and oppressed on the basis of their skin colour, or to use curricular materials where “whiteness” is depicted as a pact with Satan (to pick just two examples), is more than slightly batshit, and likely to do more harm than good. But when other Republican-controlled legislatures followed DeSantis’ lead and banned CRT, the debate over the extent of extreme wokeism in education and whether simply banning it is the most effective response got sucked into the polarisation vortex and rapidly degenerated into the moronic inferno of culture war kayfabe.

Media workers at progressive corporate content mills argued that since little children were not literally studying the works of theorists such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, the parents railing against CRT across the country were all Fox News-hypnotised racists who in truth just wanted to ban all discussion of slavery and Jim Crow, etc. Even by the standards of today’s American media, with its epic 29% trust rating, it was quite the display of gaslighting. Some valiant souls attempted to study the laws on their merits, but they were few and far between.

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America's cultural revolution is just like Mao's

By Xiao Li

And so I fear that if bills requiring students to study the history of communism do catch on among Republican-held state legislatures, you can rest assured that the same media workers will rush to boost their detumescent ratings with hot takes denouncing DeSantis as the new McCarthy.

Meanwhile your more elite click chasers will commission solemn editorials from academics comparing Evil Conservatives to Putin, and Twitter will light up with long threads arguing for a more nuanced take on Stalin, who beat Hitler and was also “a great listener and collaborator during discussions.” And besides, isn’t America uniquely evil because racism and Trump? Meanwhile, Right-wingers will start arguing that socialised healthcare leads directly to the Gulag.

Of course, in communist regimes even this degraded level of debate would be inconceivable, so perhaps I should be grateful? Even so, I fear that the Culture War is rotting more brains than the Cold War ever did. What is to be done, indeed?

But when a word gets used so relentlessly, it begins to take on a certain legitimacy — and even begins to crop up in the minds of people who loathe it. Indeed, it even happened to me recently after I read a number of pieces in the American press claiming that “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) was a bogeyman of the Right. Now here, I thought, is something that is definitely gaslighting. Surely these people must be trying to drive readers mad by making assertions that are so clearly untrue; presenting one vision of the world and then denying that it even exists. If this is not “gaslighting”, then what is?

In the New York Times last week, Michelle Goldberg claimed that the current wave of concern across America about CRT had simply been whipped up by a clever propagandist — and that, as a consequence, CRT had become a maddening debate. In particular, she said, “the phrase itself had become unmoored from any fixed meaning”. Elsewhere she criticised people of being guilty of a “moral panic” and said that she was “highly sceptical” of the idea that CRT is being taught in schools, before going on to explain that “antiracist education” isn’t “radically leftist” but just “elementary”.

This slew of claims demonstrates the problem at hand. For in CRT we are not talking about some hidden theory; we are talking about a school of thought which was openly heralded within American academia and has now been forced upon the wider world. Yet just at the point that it has infiltrated the public sphere, Goldberg and others claim that our understanding of CRT has become confused — as if an ideology that is wilfully obscurantist ought, in fact, to be straightforward and agreed upon.

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How Critical Race Theory captured the Church

By Giles Udy

In the Washington Post and elsewhere, this debate has come to define American politics in recent weeks. Most prominently, Joy Reid of MSNBC has taken to claiming that CRT is not being taught in schools, is not what its critics say that it is and is both too complex for people to understand and also an exceptionally obvious demand for social justice.

What prompted such a desperate defence? Well, American parents have finally woken up to what is being taught to their children. At one prestigious Manhattan school, the headmaster even resigned after a group of parents complained about a number of school initiatives, ranging from “racist cop” re-enactments in science lessons to classes about “decentering whiteness” and “white supremacy”.

But now, just at the moment that the American public are starting to push back, supporters of CRT are stepping away from their creation, pretending that concerned citizens have misunderstood it, or are railing at a mirage.

The aforementioned Reid, for instance, recently interviewed a leading CRT scholar — indeed the person who reportedly coined the term — Kimberlé Crenshaw, who has described the backlash against CRT as an effort “to reverse the racial reckoning unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetime”.

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Antiracism won't save you

By Tomiwa Owolade

There is, to put it simply, a lot going on here; clearly, today’s discussions about CRT are unclear and disingenuous. But if there is a reason for this, it is that CRT’s decades-long advocates are no longer being honest. In their 2001 work Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic described CRT as a “movement” consisting of:

“A collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism and power… Unlike traditional civil rights, which embraces incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

So this is not a hidden campaign. Its thought leaders did not try to hide the revolutionary, activist nature of their “discipline”. They boasted about it; the activism was the point. The purpose of CRT was never simply to throw around ideas — it was to change America, and by extension the wider world, by applying these new racial rules in the widest possible way.

So why the sudden reversal? Why the sudden retreat into contradictory forms of self-defence? The reason, I suspect, is clear: the ugly little game that has been playing out in American academia is — like many a theory before it — not surviving its first encounters with the public.

In that sense, at least, it faces a similar problem to that experienced by Marxists. On paper, Marxist academics were able to make grand claims about how to make an equitable society. But try it out on the public and they soon learned that what worked on paper did not work in practice

A similar, if so far less bloody, discovery is being made with CRT. Yes, its advocates may believe that they have come up with a system to create universal justice. But applied in American schools, for instance, all they come up with is a system which causes untold pain and ugliness.

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The day American justice died

By Bret Weinstein

Earlier this year when Grace Church School in Manhattan was in the headlines, people could see this for themselves. In private the headmaster conceded that there was a problem with the racial games he was forcing on all of his students. “Problematising whiteness” may seem fine in theory, but in practice it creates discord. As its headmaster reluctantly conceded, there are a lot of white children at his school; and if you “problematise” whiteness then you problematise them. Crenshaw, Reid and their fellow CRT supporters failed to account for that — and now this failing of theirs has plunged America into chaos.

In the meantime, their response has been to run for cover, camouflaging themselves with every technique possible. They say we don’t understand them. They say that CRT doesn’t really exist — or that it is all too complex to explain to ordinary people. But the simple fact is that CRT does exist, as a very large number of Americans have discovered. As for CRT’s bad reception, there is only one group to blame: its creators. It is their fault, not ours, that their ideology’s first mass encounter with the general public is proving such a failure.

In a boarding school near the Kentish coast, a ruffian sneaks along the corridor, hunting for the rare stamp that will make him rich. In a Home Counties village, a tousled-haired schoolboy lies awake, putting the finishing touches to his scheme that will win the war for the Allies. Many miles to the north, a boat pulls away from Wildcat Island, bound for fortune and glory. And far across the oceans, a group of schoolboys tremble in terror, as their South Sea captors prepare to sacrifice them to their idol …

Such is the world of the classic British children’s story: the world of Billy Bunter and his Greyfriars chums, William Brown and his fellow Outlaws, Titty, Roger and the rest of the Swallows and Amazons, Jennings, Molesworth and the Secret Seven. For more than half a century, such stories dominated the imagination of millions of readers. You can still buy second-hand editions of Richmal Crompton’s Guillermo el Detective, and wonder what on earth readers in General Franco’s Spain made of them.

When I was growing up, the books of Frank Richards, Arthur Ransome and Richmal Crompton were still everywhere, just about. Our local library groaned with stories in which middle-class British children spent their weekends in the barn across the fields and their weeknights sneaking out of the dormitory for some stolen tuck. Raised on the virtues of teamwork and courage, the boys grew up to become hunters, naval commanders and Spitfire pilots. I never found out what happened to the girls. For a boy in the early Eighties, to have been caught reading Mallory Towers would have been social suicide.

I thought of these splendid and now largely forgotten books when I read that a new star is about to join the constellation of children’s writers. Marcus Rashford, footballer and saint, has written a book, or at least put his name on a book by his collaborator Carl Anka. I don’t want to be rude about it: if it encourages football-crazed children to read, so much the better.

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Books won't save you

By Sarah Ditum

I’ll be as rude as you like, though, about Meghan, Duchess of Sussex’s forthcoming children’s book The Bench. Catchy title! According to the publishers, it aims to evoke a “deep sense of warmth, connection and compassion”. It sounds ghastly. What sane child wants to read about connection and compassion, when they could read Billy Bunter Butts In instead?

My own defiantly non-compassionate copy of Billy Bunter Butts In, first bought for my mother in 1951, is beside me right now. As far as I remember, it’s the first book that I read after lights-out, under the covers with a torch. I was risking my pocket money, but I simply couldn’t contain myself. Would the Fat Owl of the Remove be caned for failing to do his Georgic? Would Stephen Price of the Fifth manage to get his bet on for the two-thirty? And who would win the titanic showdown between plucky form captain Harry Wharton, the colonel’s son, and Herbert Vernon-Smith, cocky son of a millionaire stockbroker, the legendary “Bounder”? (Don’t worry: I won’t give the result away.)

Purveyors of Californian compassion might think this a dreadful book for a boy to be reading in the early Eighties. But I was in good company. In their heyday between 1910 and 1940, Frank Richards’s Greyfriars stories, which ran in the Magnet magazine, were the single most popular narrative in all British fiction. Then as now, some people deplored them. When V. S. Pritchett’s father discovered his son’s stash of Magnets, he burned them in the fireplace and told him to read John Ruskin instead. But Pritchett could not help himself. “One page and I was entranced,” he remembered. “I gobbled these stories as if I were eating pie or stuffing.”

Later, recalling his days teaching the sons of “shopkeepers, office employees and small business and professional men”, George Orwell reported that almost all read the Greyfriars stories and “were still taking them fairly seriously when they were fifteen or even sixteen”.

And in his book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, the historian Jonathan Rose quotes a colliery winder’s son, a Camberwell labourer’s son and the disabled son of two Yorkshire millworkers, all of whom loved the stories. On the South Wales coalfield, a butcher’s boy called Aneurin Bevan made a weekly pilgrimage to the newsagent’s for the latest Magnet. Like many other parents, Bevan’s father, a miner, banned them from the house. But the NHS’s founding father bought them anyway and hid them underneath a local bridge.

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You can't silence D.H. Lawrence

By Frances Wilson

In his famous essay “Boys’ Weeklies”, Orwell argued that these stories formed one of the great bulwarks of British conservatism:

“The year is 1910 — or 1940, but it is all the same. You are at Greyfriars, a rosy-cheeked boy of fourteen in posh tailor-made clothes, sitting down to tea in your study on the Remove passage after an exciting game of football which was won by an odd goal in the last half-minute. There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound. Over in Europe the comic foreigners are jabbering and gesticulating, but the grim grey battleships of the British Fleet are steaming up the Channel and at the outposts of Empire the monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay…”

Actually, they’re not quite as reactionary as you might think. The working-class scholarship boys are far brighter and more likeable than the aristocrats and stockbrokers’ sons, and they all go out of their way to shield their Indian chum Hurree Jamset Ram Singh (er, “Inky”) from the “colour prejudice” of their American classmate Fisher T. Fish.

But in essence Orwell was right. Greyfriars is a deeply conservative place, unchanging and hierarchical, menaced by an endless stream of loafers, ruffians, footpads and foreigners. I bow to nobody in my love of Billy Bunter, the “schoolboy Falstaff”, the jam-sodden embodiment of greed, laziness, stupidity and cowardice. Though when I was looking for a bedtime story for my son, even I drew the line at Billy Bunter Among the Cannibals.

Bunter wasn’t my only favourite. The first story I ever wrote as a boy was an illustrated sequel to Swallows and Amazons, rather undermining the innocence of Arthur Ransome’s original by equipping the characters with automatic weapons. But today I would give the gold medal to Richmal Crompton, the shy, unmarried invalid whose William Brown stories sold some 12 million copies between 1919 and 1969.

Originally written for middle-class mothers and published in women’s magazines, they chronicled the adventures of a mischievous 11-year-schoolboy in a Home Counties village. And if you’re looking for an antidote to connection and compassion, a repudiation of everything Meghan and Harry stand for, they are perfect.

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Where it all went wrong for Labour

By Dominic Sandbrook

For generations of readers, William and his fellow Outlaws Ginger, Henry and Douglas were as familiar as their own friends and family. Then there was the supreme villain for any 11-year-old boy, the terrifying, invincible Violet Elizabeth Bott, a monster of narcissistic self-pity. ‘I’ll thcream and thcream until I’m thick.’ That would make a good motto for somebody.

William himself is an inveterate culture warrior, an unashamed lover of flags and statues, the personification of the anti-woke spirit. Although he chafes under parental authority, he reserves his greatest contempt for idealists, do-gooders, artists and intellectuals. In one story, a League of Nations enthusiast arrives in the village and implores the boys to give up their weapons as a first step towards world peace. William pretends to go along with it, tricks his enemies into disarming, and then seizes their catapults and air rifles and turns them on his foes. Connection and compassion are definitely not his thing.

In another story, with a general election looming in 1929, the children organise their own mock election. Henry, the gang’s brainbox, lays out the position:

“There’s four sorts of people tryin’ to get to be rulers. They all want to make things better, but they want to make ’em better in different ways. There’s Conservatives an’ they want to make things better by keepin’ ’em jus’ like what they are now. An’ there’s Lib’rals an’ they want to make things better by alterin’ them jus’ a bit, but not so’s anyone’d notice, an’ there’s Socialists, an’ they want to make things better by takin’ everyone’s money off ’em, an’ there’s Communists an’ they want to make things better by killin’ everyone but themselves.’

No political scientist could put it better.

At first, attracted by the thought of so much violence, William flirts with the idea of Communism. But eventually he stands as a Conservative, influenced by his father’s friend, a big game hunter from the African veldt. The day of the election comes. Addressing the other children, William simply lists the man’s kills: buffalos, lions, elephants, even hippopotamuses. At last, slowly, grandly, he reaches his peroration: ‘An’ this man is a Conservative. He votes Conservatism at gen’ral elections.’

He wins in a landslide.

Crompton’s best stories date from the war. In one story, William half-hears his family discussing Norway’s Nazi puppet Vidkun Quisling at breakfast, and becomes convinced that a man called “ole Grissel” is at large in the village, preparing the ground for ole Hitler’s invasion. Later, he arms his friends with an air gun, bows and catapults, and scours the lanes for enemy parachutists. An actor appears, dressed for an entertainment at the local aerodrome. The Outlaws knock him senseless and call the police. The man denies everything. But William has a crushing, unanswerable riposte: “If you aren’t a parachutist, why are you dressed up as a woman?”

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Football and the decline of Englishness

By Dominic Sandbrook

Is there any hope for such stories today? Probably not. Given the ultra-woke instincts of most children’s publishers, I suspect they’re sunk forever. There is too much stoicism and not enough self-pity, too much pluck and not enough diversity. I certainly can’t see Meghan enjoying Billy Bunter’s outings to Egypt, China and the South Seas. As for William Brown, his attitude to anti-racism campaigners, curriculum decolonisers and mental health professionals doesn’t bear thinking about. Sad to say, the only reason Richmal Crompton hasn’t been cancelled is that so few people still read her.

For me, though, her stories will live forever. Bunter and William will be charging around my imagination till the day I die, or at least until I lose my marbles. And when I think of Orwell’s imitation, I can’t help smiling in recognition:

“Lord Mauleverer has just got another fiver and we are all settling down to a tremendous tea of sausages, sardines, crumpets, potted meat, jam and doughnuts. After tea we shall sit round the study fire having a good laugh at Billy Bunter and discussing the team for next week’s match against Rookwood. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever…”

The irony, of course, is that Orwell loved them as much as anybody. He’d have had no time for The Bench, would ole George.

The French — as they always do — believed this was masochism at work. Le vice anglais was the perverted and twitchy consequence of bringing up the English elite in violent boarding schools, where they learned to love illicit drubbings. The historian Clive Emsley’s view that beatings in all schools were “understood as a tried and tested means of discipling and civilising the unruly boy, and to a much lesser extent, the unruly girl” rings truer, because it is a far less imaginative explanation.

Finally, in 1987 the licence teachers had to beat schoolchildren was withdrawn. Le vice anglais was no more, just like bear-baiting, absolute monarchy and the Empire. Are England’s schools any less cruel for it?

That, on the face of it, is a ridiculous question. But given that schools have effectively been abolished for almost a year now, it is worth thinking about what they are for, and what they actually do to the children under their care.

The pandemic revealed that the first purpose of school was not to educate children, but to hold them in place while their parents worked. Labour markets and schools are not distinct things. The British government closed schools later than its European counterparts, and was reluctant to do so for most of March 2020. When schools are shut, they take a bite out of the economy, too. Whether children actually want to go to school is secondary to their parents needing to go to work.

But why wouldn’t children want to go to school? Le vice anglais, cold showers and spam fritters no longer exist, do they? Well, sexual harassment, revenge porn, and garden-variety bullying is pretty routine today in English schools. In particular, sexual harassment in mixed-sex schools keeps getting worse. Charities, think tanks and the Guardian say that the solution is more sex education — more school, even though this is a problem that exists largely because of school. Outside of prison, which most of us manage to avoid, school might be the only place where many people will experience physical violence, or torture.

Then there are the more mundane forms of cruelty, like boredom. If you have ever worked in a school — if you haven’t but you manage to combine the attributes of a High Court Judge, a Welfare Officer, and a Prison Guard, then you ought to apply now — you will know that many, if not all, pupils are bored to the marrow. At the school I worked in, it was not uncommon for some of them to simply fall asleep at their desks. The teaching profession is obsessed with the idea of “engagement”. If only teachers can produce the right tasks, develop the most involving activities, then pupils will pay attention. But for a good number of pupils, it is not the activity, the lesson, or the teacher that fails to engage them — it is the fact they are being forced to go to school against their will.

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Sink schools rob kids of their futures

By Julie Bindel

They are forced to do tedious tasks, watch tedious videos, and listen to tedious teachers. Huge cliff-sized chunks of irrelevant material are dropped on them from a great height, for obscure purposes. Once they have learned to read, and learned basic mathematics, and learned how to stand in a line without starting a brawl, what exactly are most of them there for? To learn about the water cycle? To learn how to read a map? They can google the water cycle, and they have GPS on their phones. Children are technology-literate in ways that their parents and teachers don’t really grasp at all. The educational system — like so many others in the last decade — has been outflanked by technology to the point where it looks obsolete.

As a result, pupils report becoming more and more bored with secondary school as it grinds on. Up to a third of Year Nine pupils in 2016, for instance, said they felt bored at school. Experts have long recognised this, but they blame it on hormones, rather than the fact that for many children, school work is irrelevant to their interests and unsuited to their abilities. No wonder. If I were locked in a room and forced to watch someone I wasn’t wild about — say Paul Mason — blather on about something I found boring — like the life and thought of Rosa Luxemburg — I would begin to seethe a bit.

If you then told me that I had to ask Paul for permission to go to the toilet, or that the person behind me would begin to start prodding me with a broken ruler sharpened to a fine, stabby point, I would start to feel seriously frustrated. That’s precisely what school is for millions of children. Institutionalised, legally-mandated, financially wasteful frustration, overseen by teachers who are, politically at least, just like Paul Mason.

And then we tell these Year Nines they have to endure it for four more years after the point they have given up on school entirely. The English used to flog children’s bodies, now we flog their minds instead and call it progress.

The writer Scott Alexander understands, calling it “child prison”. School, he argues, “forces children to be confined in an uninhabitable environment, restrained from moving… in a state of profound sleep deprivation, under pain of imprisoning their parents if they refuse.” Recently, the critic Lorna Finlayson wrote that “the real purpose and priority of the school system was to instil the habit of obedience, of deference to our superiors.” Finlayson left school at 13 and never looked back.

I do not know if Finlayson or Alexander are right. But their arguments resonated with me. At school, I spent most of my time daydreaming, or arguing with teachers, or turning up late for lessons, or walking during the once-a-term cross-country race, or doodling in my exercise book, or watching the clock.

And I had it good: I wasn’t being bullied and I managed to gouge far more sick days out of my sympathetic parents than most of my peers could. There was real, unaddressed misery around me, and like all the worst misery it was completely pointless. It happened because it happened.

When I went back to work at a school before the pandemic, I saw that little had changed, except that Facebook had been swapped for TikTok. The routine cruelty with which children treat each other is punished when teachers discover it, but impossible for them to stop. Getting used to cruelty is the point, and considered by adults, even if they wouldn’t admit openly, a sad part of what it means to “grow up”.

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The War on Terror returns home

By Will Lloyd

Abolishing schools is, it’s fair to say, a fringe position. Still, the facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings rebuke to abolishing schools, or even significantly rethinking the way they operate, is obvious. What are you going to do with all the free-range children you’ve created? In reality, most of them could go to work. The idea of children at work conjures an unfortunate image of David Copperfield weeping in a bottle factory. But it is sentimentality to think that to send them out into employment is crueller than keeping them locked up in school. I taught many pupils, boys in particular, who would have been far better off earning money and carving out a role for themselves in the world. Children who actually wanted to learn about the periodic table and read (urgh) Carol Ann Duffy could, of course, stay in school, and benefit from the enormously reduced class sizes.

Conservatives will naturally object to this most of all, because it sounds radical. Abolish schools? What next? Abolish prisons? Abolish the monarchy? As Emsley relates it, underneath the English practice of beating up schoolchildren lay an assumption that our ways were best, and the unique characteristics of our punishments were “part of the successful arrangement of the British constitution”. It was pure Burke in defence of pure stupidity, and a similar logic is in play with schools today.

Let’s take one example. Why do schools start early in the morning, even though teenagers have a different circadian rhythm to older people? Because that’s the way we do things. No more questions.

I do think, though, that it’s much more radical to entrust childcare to the average teacher than to abolish schools. Maybe the most flouted piece of legislation in this country — other than the one that says electric scooters can’t be used on public roads — is the part of the 1996 Education Act stating that governors and councils must ensure that the promotion “of partisan political views” is forbidden in schools. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.

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Why child labour beats school

By Ed West

Over the past 11 months, parents have seen far more of their children’s education than ever before. The stuck-in-the-dark-ages lessons, packed with uninspiring content, led by too many for whom the profession is a last resort. For the first time, parents and children can be on the same page. They can see how much of the education sector is backwards and pointless. They can see how much needless anxiety it is causing children.

Traditionally, problems in the sector are solved by throwing money at them and hoping they go away. In this spirit, the Government announced last month a further £300 million of new money for catch-up summer schools. It doesn’t have to be that way. Give the money directly to parents to cover childcare costs and pay for private tutors, not to teachers who think that Greta Thunberg is a better “role model” than Admiral Nelson. Liberate them. Let a million teenagers go to work, to start filling those places left by the foreign workers who’ve fled the country. Let a million home-schooling cooperatives bloom. Let’s see so much of what we put children through at school for what it really is: cruelty that became invisible. Consign it all to the same dustbin as le vice anglais.

Such stamina seems almost alien today when, for the majority of British office workers, a glass of wine at lunch on a Friday is regarded as positively risqué. And that was before pubs were shut and people started working from home. But now that Dry January is officially over, what if Churchill was actually on to something? To be more precise: what would happen if we drank alcohol throughout the day and maintained a functional level of mild drunkenness?

That is the premise of Another Round, a riotous new film from the Danish director Thomas Vinterberg with a terrific central performance by Mads Mikkelsen. The story revolves around four jaded, middle-aged secondary school teachers — all men — who latch on to a scientific theory which claims that humans are born with an alcohol blood level that is 0.05% too low. To remedy this, to reach mankind’s optimum level of productivity and happiness, they take it upon themselves to drink throughout the day, using breathalysers to make sure they stay at the correct level.

It all sounds a tad deranged — and, of course, things quickly get out of hand — but the actual hypothesis explored in the film is drawn from real life. It is, in fact, the brainchild of Finn Skårderud, a Norwegian psychiatrist, psychotherapist and author. And he’s hardly a complete crank — he’s an international celebrated expert on eating disorders and even works as a psychiatrist for The Norwegian Olympic Committee.

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The English have always been drunkards

By Ed West

Does that mean his theory holds any water? Would we be happier and more productive if, as one of the characters does in the film, we started sipping from a bottle hidden in your office’s stationery cupboard?

It seems highly unlikely. But in Silicon Valley, the concept of micro-dosing — taking tiny amounts of LSD or other psychoactive drugs on a regular basis — has become popular in recent years, not just with hippies but with successful entrepreneurs. They report feeling more energetic, more creative and generally more at peace with themselves. Could the same be true for alcohol?

Not if you ask the vast majority of doctors. To start with, they claim, the idea that we have any level of alcohol permanently in our blood — let alone one that is too low — doesn’t make physiological sense. Yes, a number of animals in cold climates do have some alcohol in their bloodstream to effectively act as a de-icer. And there is something known as “endogenous ethanol production” in humans, where your stomach digests carbohydrates and produces an effect similar to fermentation, causing trace levels of alcohol. But it’s not a meaningful amount. Unless you’ve just had a G&T, your blood is naturally free of alcohol.

Still, even if we don’t suffer from an alcohol deficit, could we still benefit from increasing our levels by 0.05%? In terms of physical health, the scientific consensus also appears to centre around a “no”. That’s why, back in 2016, the UK’s chief medical officers reduced the recommended weekly amount men should consume from 21 units down to 14 units — roughly six pints of beer.

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By Tanya Gold

For some doctors, however, even this modest limit is too much. “Basically, consuming alcohol is dangerous to health,” says Rudolf Schutte, a senior lecturer in Medical Science at Anglia Ruskin University. Meanwhile, Peter Anderson, a Professor of Substance Abuse, Policy and Practice, thinks that “there is no level of alcohol consumption that is risk-free.” But if you stick to 14 units, “the evidence shows that the lifetime risk of dying from an alcohol-related condition is about 1 in 100”.

And surely that’s the key thing. It’s a risk. But so too is crossing the road or, during a pandemic, entering a supermarket or jumping on a bus. The question is: how serious is that risk?

David Spiegelhalter, Professor of Understanding Risk at the University of Cambridge, has become something of a household name during the pandemic — at least in my house, he merits a cheer whenever he comes on the radio. He compares that 1% risk of dying to other everyday activities: “An hour of TV-watching a day, or a bacon sandwich a couple of times a week, is more dangerous to your long-term health.” He tells me that there are a lot of “exaggerated claims” about the harms of moderate drinking. In short, if you derive a lot of pleasure from a glass of wine every lunchtime, it’s a risk worth taking.

Of course, to maintain a blood alcohol level of 0.05% during working hours, the four men in Another Round need to drink a great deal more than one glass of wine during the day. (The drink drive limit in the UK is 0.08%.) But then again, they never pretend that their physical health will improve by being permanently, if lightly, sloshed. They argue it’s for the good for their psychological health.

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What Lockdown and Prohibition share

By Mark Forsyth

“This film is about being alive and being activated when you are dwelling through your midlife crisis,” Vinterberg, the director, said in a recent interview. And as Martin, the character played by Mikkelsen, points out, various great men spent much of their waking hours slightly drunk: Ulysses S Grant, Winston Churchill and Ernest Hemingway.

But while it’s true that Hemingway occasionally went on heroic benders, he didn’t drink while writing. The accusations that Grant was a full-blown alcoholic were mostly spread by his political enemies; it’s likely he was a moderate if persistent drinker. As for Churchill, he was less of an old soak than he was often portrayed. It was Hitler who called him an “insane drunkard” and Churchill himself sometimes thought it beneficial to burnish his own mythology.

However, one drinking habit of his that I did find deeply civilised was his fondness for kickstarting the day with what he called “mouthwash” — a weak whisky and soda, which he would take from about 9.30am and keep continually topped up. But the whisky (simple Johnnie Walker, no fancy malt) would only just cover the bottom of the tumbler; the bulk of the drink was fizzy water. For the morning, at least, Churchill was the embodiment of Another Round’s idea of perfection: just enough low-level inebriation to take the edge off and fire your imagination, but not so much that one made mistakes or felt tired.

Matt Field, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Sheffield and an alcohol and addiction expert, agrees that “alcohol serves a number of purposes”. It may not be good for your physical health, “but it can help you relax and it’s a big part of social occasions”. Interestingly, he points out that “the benefits of regular drink-free days are relatively understudied”. Even so, he still recommends having days off.

Still, perhaps the wisest advice comes from Churchill himself: “I’ve taken away more out of alcohol than it’s taken out of me.” As for whether that’s borne out in Another Round, I couldn’t possibly say.

I was 18 when the infamous Section 28 became law in May 1988, prohibiting the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities. I don’t know where all this promotion was taking place but it wasn’t at my Cleethorpes comprehensive, which had covered sex education in one baffling, strictly science-only lesson. Homosexuality wasn’t mentioned, let alone advertised.

In 1989, Stonewall was founded and, thanks in large part to its careful, determined work, British society began to change for the better. Life became gradually easier and happier for lesbians, bisexuals and gay men. It was a slow process.

Fast-forward to 2006. I am 35, the artistic director of Queer Up North International Festival, and I have commissioned an educational theatre production addressing the issue of homophobic bullying in secondary schools. Stonewall is co-producing the project and I have been spending hours on the phone to teachers up and down the country, trying to persuade them to let Queer Up North and Stonewall into their schools.

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The calumny that LGBT people are a risk to children is alive and well, and I don’t want what I write here to give succour to those who perpetuate it. But here’s the thing: the Stonewall of today is not the Stonewall I so admired a decade ago. If I were on the phone to those teachers today, I’d advise them not to have Stonewall in their schools.

The government also appears to have spotted that something is wrong. It has issued guidance prohibiting schools from working with external organisations that “reinforce damaging stereotypes, for instance by suggesting that children might be a different gender based on their personality and interests or the clothes they prefer to wear”. The government doesn’t say which organisations it has in mind, but several established LGBT organisations — including Stonewall — produce materials that would appear to fall foul of the new rules. 

The original Stonewall proceeded from a premise which gradually found support across the political spectrum: that the experience of same-sex desire is morally neutral and therefore not a just basis for discrimination. Stonewall’s campaigns to equalise the age of consent, overturn the ban on gays and lesbians in the military, and secure civil partnerships and equal marriage, all gathered social and political support on this basis.

But since beginning to campaign on trans issues in 2015, Stonewall has faced more complex, specialised questions than in its first 26 years, during which it campaigned solely on matters relating to sexual orientation.

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The foundational proposition of modern trans politics is that sex — boundaried, binary, and stubbornly unchangeable — should be replaced with the more malleable concept of ‘gender identity’ — the belief that we all have an innate, irreducible (and unverifiable) sense of our gender, unrelated to biological sex.

The marginalisation of sex in trans activism sits uneasily with the centrality of sex to lesbian and gay activism. I’m a gay man which means I experience sexual desire for male bodies — not for people who ‘identify as’ men (who could be male or female). But the solidarity between LGB and T people has tended to mean more to us than any underlying conceptual frictions; Queer Up North had this solidarity at its heart and trans artists and performers were central to the work we did. 

But when Stonewall decided to campaign on trans issues as well as sexual orientation issues, these conceptual frictions had to be resolved into a coherent policy platform. Stonewall’s response to these complexities was to adopt wholly the precepts of trans politics; the de-emphasis of sex and the promotion of innate gender identity. This has led to some contorted positions with damaging real-world effects.

For example, it has led Stonewall to reconfigure homosexual desire. This is not immediately apparent from Stonewall’s glossary, which, for example, describes a lesbian as a woman who is attracted to other women. But the glossary doesn’t offer a definition of ‘woman’ because Stonewall is keen to dodge the implications of its replacement of biological sex with self-reported gender identity — namely that a woman is a person of either sex who ‘identifies’ as a woman.

It follows inexorably that lesbians must now accept that — to use the phrase beloved of trans activists and their woke allies — “some women have penises”. You don’t have to know much about lesbianism to appreciate that the absence of penis is fundamental to the concept. When a group of lesbians protested at London’s Pride parade in 2018, Stonewall showed them no sympathy. This issue is causing distress and anger for many people, including young women just finding their feet in the lesbian community.

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Its new policy platform has also led Stonewall to look both ways on the issue of gender stereotypes. On the one hand, Stonewall produces excellent materials encouraging young people to explore their lives beyond the boundaries of gendered expectations. On the other, its promotion of gender identity reinforces those same gender stereotypes; a biological male who reports having the gender identity ‘woman’ cannot explain the claim without gender stereotypes. This is not a problem within the specific domain of trans politics, but Stonewall now claims that everyone has a gender identity, and therefore everyone identifies, in some way, with gender stereotypes. While Stonewall continues to make this claim it will continue to be on the wrong side of the government’s new schools guidance.

Having adopted such radical, far-reaching new policies, rather than seek to persuade wider society of their value, Stonewall has sought to silence opposition and enforce submission by labelling heretics — such as women who want to retain the sex-based rights secured by the 2010 Equality Act, and lesbians who reject the concept of the ‘female penis’ — as ‘transphobic’, placing them on the same moral level as racists.

A substantial, and increasing, number of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people have had enough of Stonewall’s dogmatism. The founding in 2019 of the LGB Alliance, a grassroots, lesbian-led lobbying group which rejects gender identity, is responding to the demand for alternative thinking.

Stonewall’s brand is powerful — but brands are illusory, and Stonewall’s masks the socially divisive and damaging effects of its current policies. Politicians, schools, NGOs and major corporations routinely subcontract their judgment on LGBT issues to Stonewall, persuaded that whatever Stonewall says is ‘best practice’ must be right. But they should learn to be more cautious, because the new Stonewall is a vastly different organisation from the one which gradually earned their trust.

Wearing their primitive breathing apparatus sets, Fourt-Wells and Stocking were sent down into the acrid smoke with an instruction to locate the seat of the fire. They were never seen alive again. Their bodies were eventually found among piles of frozen meat packets and animal carcasses.

The incident became the catalyst for a powerful campaign led by the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) to modernise equipment and safety procedures. The union called for breathing apparatus sets to be equipped with low-pressure warning alarms and audible distress devices, and for a better system of monitoring firefighters while they were working in such hazardous conditions. The campaign was a success. Government and fire service bosses were eventually forced to concede that the demands were eminently reasonable. As ever, it had taken a tragedy to spark change.

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The FBU’s campaign was a commendable example of a trade union looking beyond the battleground of pay, and lobbying for the safety of its members at work. 60 years after the event, I hosted proceedings as a plaque dedicated to the memory of Fourt-Wells and Stocking was unveiled at the spot where they fell. We will never know the number of firefighters whose lives were saved — and, mercifully, whose names it was never necessary to inscribe on such plaques — thanks to the union’s efforts.

Other trade unions can justly lay claim to having been instrumental in bringing about a safer working environment for those they represent. The annual number of workplace deaths has been dramatically reduced from an average of over 4000 at the beginning of the last century to fewer than 200 today. This is why anyone who tries to persuade me, a lifelong trade unionist, that unions have no business interfering in such matters is liable to get short shrift. History shows that trade unions are overall a force for good when it comes to safety in the workplace, and we shouldn’t forget it.

All of which brings me to Covid-19. At all times and on all matters, trade unions must strive to ensure their demands are measured and pragmatic. Crucially, union leaders must always seek to take their members — and, where possible, the public too — with them. This is even more the case when the issue at hand is one that is politically contentious.

In that vein, it is surely vital, when assessing how best to keep a group of people safe during these times, to start from the point of acknowledging that the virus poses a meaningful threat to only a small minority of people — almost exclusively those who are either elderly or suffering from underlying medical conditions, or often both. For the vast majority who contract it, Covid-19 is not a serious virus, let alone a killer one. Most will experience either mild symptoms or none at all. In fact, as of 16 September 2020, the number of Covid-related deaths in England involving individuals under the age of 60 and free from existing medical conditions stood at just 308. And, for several of these, it is possible that Covid-19 was not the thing that actually killed them.

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So it is against this background, and out of genuine concern for the credibility and reputation of the trade union movement, that I express alarm over the manner in which the leadership of some unions have taken unreasoned and insupportable positions in their approach to the virus.

Look, for example, at what is happening in our universities. Last week, the leader of the University and College Union (UCU) — which represents lecturers, academics and support staff — reiterated the union’s call for a ban on face-to-face teaching until the Government had curbed the spread of the virus. That the level of risk to those on campus is infinitesimal wasn’t enough to stop the demand being made. And given that universities are already in turmoil — as a consequence of mass self-isolation, threats of disciplinary action against those caught breaching social distancing rules, and the prospect of Christmas on campus, the demand, though not without its supporters, has caused exasperation among some students and members of staff.

Several universities, presumably motivated in part by an earlier threat by the UCU of strike action, have already switched to online-only teaching, leaving some staff feeling adrift and angry. A lecturer from a university in the Midlands told me this week of the deep sense of frustration felt by him and his colleagues after their impending return to physical teaching was abruptly blocked on safety grounds. Of eight members of departmental staff, only one had expressed a desire to avoid face-to-face lessons.

For most who do it, teaching is more than just an ordinary job or source of income: it is a vocation. Many educators feel that if someone is going to prevent them from doing what they love, there had better be a compelling reason.

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Professor Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist who has attracted prominence and acclaim for her criticisms of the lockdown approach, believes those demanding a ban on face-to-face teaching have called it seriously wrong. “The risks are not sufficient to justify us not doing our duty — which is to teach our students. To not teach them is a dereliction of duty,” she told me.

Of course it is right that trade unions pay close attention to emerging risks and seek to shape any institutional response. No one could reasonably argue against robust measures to protect the genuinely vulnerable in any scenario. But what possible merit is there in a strategy that strives to keep healthy lecturers and students apart out of fear of a virus from which, should they contract it at all, the overwhelming majority — if not all — will make a full recovery?

After the Summer brouhaha over the question of whether and when children should return to the classroom — an unnecessary and near-hysterical ruckus in which the teaching unions this time had a hand — a similar excess of caution has infected our schools. Such is daily life now for many children, they could be forgiven for assuming that a world of facemasks, social distancing and relentless hand-washing was the natural order of things. Never mind the risks of contracting Covid-19; we are in danger of creating a generation of OCD sufferers who think the environment around them will always be fraught with danger. Again, the sense of panic has not been commensurate with the level of risk.

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On one level, the over-reaction of the UCU and others might be seen as entirely rational. After all, the Government and media have done such an effective job scaring everyone witless, those demanding the most draconian and extreme measures might genuinely believe they are saving lots of lives.

The brutal truth, however, is that one thing has been missing throughout this entire debate: proportion. Safety in the workplace, as anywhere else, should be about implementing sensible and proportionate control measures to alleviate risk. It is this principle which underpins health and safety legislation. Instead, we have arrived at a point where, for many in positions of authority, any risk at all is too much and, where it exists, drastic action is required to eradicate it. That attitude serves no-one. Society becomes afflicted by paranoia, and individuals lose their ability to quantify risk — an essential skill in the armoury of any human being.

The easy thing for a trade unionist like me would be to go along with it all. After all, as long as most union members are still drawing a salary, why should it matter?

Well, it matters because the education of our young is being harmed, not to say our economy devastated, livelihoods destroyed and civil liberties curtailed. And when unions themselves are part of a crusade whose demands are utterly out of proportion to the risk, it behoves those of us who care about the movement to warn them to pull back, lest they alienate large numbers of rank-and-file trade unionists and incite wider public scorn over “bloody intransigent unions”. What a tragedy it would be if so much of the historical good done by unions in preventing death and injury in the workplace was overlooked as a consequence of the overzealous and irrational demands of a handful of leaders.

These are very minor problems, obviously, compared to tens of thousands of dead from a frightening disease. But in the Chivers household they’re very salient, and it would be dishonest of me to pretend they’re not a factor.

So. I wanted to look at the elements that go into a decision to reopen (or not reopen) schools; what the evidence says; and what the trade-offs involved are.

First: there’s been a lot of attention lately on a strange syndrome that appears to be associated with Covid-19 in children. It’s an autoimmune condition, similar to a condition known as Kawasaki syndrome; the body’s defences overreact and cause severe inflammation, especially of the coronary arteries. It was first spotted in Bergamo, Italy, and Prof Liz Whittaker of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) told a briefing that Bergamo would normally expect to see about five cases of Kawasaki syndrome in a year, while they saw 10 of this similar condition “in five or six weeks”. Since then, about 75 or 100 have been seen in the UK.

It’s got a lot of press attention and Matt Hancock, the health secretary, has said he is “worried” about it. But — without wanting to minimise the seriousness of it — it is very rare. Whittaker’s colleague Prof Russell Viner told the same briefing that even including the Kawasaki-like cases, children are at extremely low risk. “The deaths tell us all we need to know,” he said. “You can count [children’s deaths from Covid-19] on two hands, out of [a total of] around 30,000.” There have also, he says, been fewer than 500 hospital admissions for under-18s in the UK, compared to hundreds of thousands for adults.

That doesn’t make the deaths that did happen any less awful, but it does mean that each child is not at significantly greater risk than they are going to school anyway, from accidents or other illnesses. As Viner said elsewhere, about 160 or 170 children die in car crashes each year: “Those deaths are tragic but also rare. How do we manage those?  We take steps to prevent these deaths. We buy child seats, we use seat belts, we sometimes buy better cars. But we don’t stop driving. This syndrome is much, much more rare than car accidents involving children.”

Every paediatric specialist and epidemiologist I’m aware of says that the risk to children is minuscule. But, obviously, that’s not the only factor involved. We want to know the risk of children spreading the disease; and, equally importantly, we want to know the costs of children not going back to school.

I’m not going to pretend to be able to give you a definitive answer. But I’m going to go through the factors to give you a sense of why it’s so complicated.

First: we need to know whether kids have the disease in great numbers. Dr Sanjay Patel, a paediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Southampton, pointed me to a study that came out in Spain last week, which tested 60,000 people for Covid-19 antibodies. Distressingly it found that only 5% of Spaniards had had the disease — suggesting that, if those numbers are accurate, despite Spain’s awful outbreak, they are still nowhere near herd immunity. 

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More hearteningly, though, it found that only about 1% of babies, 2% of one-to-four-year-olds, and 3% of five-to-nine-year-olds had it. Earlier studies in Iceland and Italy found almost no children infected at all. 

The economist Emily Oster, who like me is very interested in all of this because she wants to send her kids to camp, also points to an interesting study which found that in the Netherlands, 6.5% of people who turned up at their GP with flu-like symptoms tested positive for Covid-19 — except for young people. The under-20s actually did have the flu.

That said, the Office for National Statistics released some data recently, looking at live virus rather than antibodies, which found children were no less likely to have the disease than adults. Other work finds that children have viral loads comparable to that of adults. 

So children may have the disease less than adults, or they may not. It’s not clear. If they do, it’s probably only somewhat less — half as much, or so — not orders of magnitude less.

But that’s still not the only question. The next question is — if children do get infected, how likely are they to pass it on?

There are reasons to be hopeful. An un-peer-reviewed paper in Australia, released on Monday, found very little transmission from children in schools. And there’s been some attention on some more Icelandic research which I am extremely keen to believe: a company running the testing and tracing in that country has so far failed to find a single example of a child passing on the disease.

Patel thinks the situation is unlikely to be that extreme — “it’s not that children cannot be infectious; that just doesn’t make sense and isn’t likely to be true”. But there are, he thinks, good observational reasons to think that children are less likely to spread it.

First, he points out that there haven’t been any outbreaks in schools and nurseries among the children of key workers, or in countries such as Iceland where the schools stayed open. In Denmark, the spread of the disease accelerated briefly after schools were reopened, but quickly fell back to where it had been. Patel points out that all these schools have maintained social distancing, which may have kept the disease from spreading, but “you can’t expect totally robust social distancing in nurseries and primary schools”.

And besides, to some extent, if it’s working, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s the social distancing or something innate to children that’s stopping the disease from spreading — although if it’s the latter, it may mean we can end social distancing in schools a bit sooner, which is good because those pics of children playing two metres away from each other break my heart.

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So, we don’t really know whether kids get the disease at the same level as adults, and we don’t really know if they pass it on as readily, although there are encouraging hints on both fronts. Dr Aubrey Cunnington, a paediatric infectious disease specialist at Imperial College London, is extremely cautious: “The bottom line is we really just don’t know whether children are going to spread this virus to each other, and to their families and the community, once we reopen schools.” 

But that’s still only half of the story. The other half is — what are the costs to keeping children out of school? If there were none then it would be simple: just keep them at home. Obviously, it’s not simple.

There are economic costs — there are nearly nine million children in UK schools, meaning that millions of parents will have to take time off work to look after them. And those economic costs are real and damaging to people’s lives. But they’ve been addressed elsewhere, so let’s look at the direct costs to the children.

Sam Freedman, CEO of the education nonprofit Education Partnerships Group and former executive director of Teach First, breaks down the impacts for children in three ways. They are: direct educational cost; impacts on socialisation; and risk of abuse at home. “People who are on the ‘keep everyone safe until September’ side of things are underestimating the negative impact on kids,” he says.

If children don’t go back until the start of the new academic year in September, they’ll have missed around 22 weeks of school since March. “People tend to think it’s only a few more weeks, it’s how much difference can it make, but what I’m worried about is the loss of learning over that period,” Freedman says. You can detect “learning loss” — kids forgetting what they’ve been taught — over the six-week summer break, so a near half-year gap would be presumably much worse. And, as with so many things, it will be unequal — “some kids will be fully homes schooled and having a great education, for most it’ll be worse than being at school, and for some it’ll be nothing”.

For younger children, like mine, the actual stuff you’re learning in school might not seem so important — they can colour in pictures of Pokémon just as happily at home. But the socialisation side is even more paramount. “It’s so important at that age,” says Freedman. “My daughter is four; if she doesn’t go back to school until September, she’ll have gone 15% of her life without seeing a child her own age.” Cunnington agrees: “socialisation at that age is key, and you can’t do it with your parents.”

And of course there’s the abuse factor. I don’t know how common it is, but, Freedman warns, “it’s probably a lot more prevalent than most of the middle-class people arguing on Twitter realise”. 

So, getting children back to school is important. But at the moment, the plan is to start with three school years — Reception (age four to five), Year One (five to six) and Year Six (age 10 to 11) — from 1 June. Then the impact will be assessed, and assuming no major change in the spread of the disease, other years will be brought back.

But by then it’ll be only four or five weeks until the summer holiday. And presumably children won’t be going back full time — one school I’m aware of is planning half the children in Monday and Tuesday, a deep clean on Wednesday, and the other half in Thursday or Friday. Something like that will have to be implemented everywhere to allow social distancing. “Half a day for four weeks is not a lot in the scheme of things,” says Freedman.

Other countries such as Italy, which have summer holidays from June, have simply said they will restart after the summer break, and Freedman wonders why the government isn’t bringing forward our summer holiday; it’s not as if anyone has any foreign holidays booked. But perhaps there are good logistical reasons for it, and it would be better than nothing — there may be some repetition of what’s already been taught this year that can reduce learning loss; it would be good for socialisation; it would give parents and kids some time apart and thus hopefully reduce abuse.

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Cunnington adds that some contact with teachers means that those teachers can provide children work for the rest of the week, and also that from a safeguarding point of view even contact just once or twice a week would be a useful way of checking up on at-risk children: literally just asking them if everything is OK at home, or in other ways seeing if they’re not doing well, could be very useful.

The main thing, though, is that none of this is once-and-for-all. Freedman is watching other countries with interest — not just Denmark and Norway and Iceland, where the outbreaks were so limited that they do not make a good comparison, but other hard-hit states like Belgium, the Netherlands and France. “Our debate is very parochial,” he says. “Every country is having this debate. Watching the impact is what I’m interested in. If we get to the end of May, and France or Holland seem to be seeing a significant increase in infection rate, that’s a strong argument for us being cautious. If they aren’t, then it isn’t.”

Patel, likewise, says that we can be cautious — “it’s not just once we’ve made the decision we can’t go back. It’s doing it tentatively, with clear testing, tracing, and isolation in place”. He appeals to a sense of collectivism – parents are understandably worried about the risks to their children, he says, but the harm to other children by keeping them off school could be even greater.

“We have to be entirely honest with the public, that we don’t have the answers yet but doing nothing is not an option,” he says. “There is a very small risk for the child, grandparents can’t do drop-off, parents can’t aggregate at school gates: it’s not a green light to do anything, but if we do it sensibly then we can get our country back to some new sense of normality, and reduce the harm from the educational and wellbeing health perspective.”

As I said at the top, I’m keen to see my children back at school, for selfish reasons, for work reasons, and for their sake. I entirely understand those — I know several — who go the other way: the IFS recently found that 50% of parents wouldn’t send their children in, even if schools reopened.

But if it’s done carefully, and with acknowledgement of the huge uncertainties and a close eye on the experiences of other countries, it could be done safely, and could reduce the real damage that gets done. I hope we manage it. I want my kids back at school.

When she was pregnant with her daughter Biddy, and on the run from her abusive former boyfriend, for example, she worked in a seamy Soho peep-show. Numerous clients took a perverse pleasure in ogling her expanding, naked form (the author spares us no gruelling detail: one particularly charmless crack-head barked the instructions: “Turn around and spread. I want to see that baby’s head”.)

Just as the reader is reeling from the crudity of the clientele, Carraway – as ever – complicates things with details of the unexpected. The day before she is due to leave to have her baby, the peep-show boss and other girls unveil a surprise: a baby shower, with a cake and a room crammed with gifts from the ‘regulars’ such as a buggy, sleepsuits, a Moses basket (“one man even gifted me his ex-wife’s breast pump just before he ejaculated into my booth.”)

Poverty is no place for the squeamish. One of the most useful things about money, it appears, is that it buys you some distance from the bodily fluids of strangers. In its absence, they’re everywhere: the traces of urine or bloodstains on old mattresses in rented accommodation; the ancient semen that is simply recirculated with a desultory mop around the peep-show floor; the blocked toilet and the pan of vomit in the women’s refuge that mysteriously appears every morning.

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Carraway herself does not seem very squeamish, particularly as a writer. There’s a lot in Skint Estate which is shocking, sad and scary, as well as funny and painfully honest.

The author exposes herself, knowingly, to the judgement of those in more secure situations, while demonstrating an intimate understanding of how those judgements operate. (At one point she describes herself, having adapted her accent and fallen in with a posh coterie of prosecco-quaffing Maida Vale mums, joining them in tut-tutting at a group of young working-class mums having an impromptu picnic with their babies, Maltesers and cans of beer. Afterwards, she feels ashamed.)

She writes, for example, about fleeing domestic violence with her young daughter. She went to live with a well-off man, Kingsley, who had formerly been imprisoned for assaulting her but to whom she is, in some ways, still close. It is not a wise choice, as her female friends tell her at the time, but then wisdom is sometimes a luxury available only to those with other options. Exhausted by financial precariousness, she takes up Kingsley’s unusual offer of posing as his wife in order to secure an inheritance from his father (Kingsley is now gay, and his father is homophobic).

If that sounds like a 19th century plot, then so is the economic situation in which this single mother finds herself: eking out low-paid jobs as a sex chat-line worker, a ‘secret shopper,’ a ‘web psychic’ and a ‘kiss ’n’ tell girl of misery porn’ supplying real-life stories to women’s magazines, but still not making enough to avoid the trip to the foodbank.

For a time such concerns abate, and Carraway temporarily enjoys a fixed roof over her head, and an abundance of branded items which she details with self-mockery mingled with the memory of desire: Boden clothes, a Rangemaster oven, Farrow and Ball paint, Le Creuset pans.

The author argues, accurately, that these are the means by which social acceptability is signalled, albeit a fraudulent kind of acceptability. Then again, it’s easy to dismiss the importance of brands if they’re financially within reach: when they’re not, they mean so much more.

But when Kingsley kicks off again, the safety suggested by the brands is destroyed: “WHORE has been sprayed across my Farrow & Ball No 26 ‘Down Pipe’ bedroom wall in red spray paint.” Even when things are bad, Carraway can’t help spotting little ironies: “He tries to break the Le Creuset pans, but they are very durable. They have a lifetime guarantee.”

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The intimate details of poverty aren’t discussed much in society, largely because – to generalise – the people who currently tend to write books and articles aren’t regularly exposed to such hardships, and the people who are exposed to such hardships don’t tend to write books and articles.

There is, of course, the noble journalistic tradition of immersing oneself in poverty for the purposes of writing about it, undertaken most successfully by George Orwell in his Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. But whatever insights such books deliver – and Orwell’s delivered many, including the unforgettable image of his landlord’s filthy thumb-print on an approaching slice of bread-and-butter – they cannot fully reflect the central panic of those who are trapped in the poverty cycle: that they will never, ever escape from it.

It is no coincidence that Carraway especially likes the writing of the US author Charles Bukowski, whose books, like his life, are full of financial uncertainty and an existence proudly played out beyond the boundaries of respectability. Like Bukowski, she keeps an authorial eye open even in the midst of howling chaos, mesmerised both by the potential awfulness and warmth of other people.

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Skint Estate, however, is also a sign of a recent phenomenon: that the publishing world is finally cracking open, after a long hiatus, a decisive conversation about class. It arrives just after Lowborn, the novelist Kerry Hudson’s powerful memoir of her peripatetic working-class childhood, being moved from one insecure dwelling to another by her troubled, heavy-drinking mother. Hudson’s book is written from the perspective of someone who has now escaped poverty, beginning: “Shall we start with a happy ending? I made it. I rose.”

Along with the tangible hardships and dangers she left behind – “sink estates, burnt-out houses and ice-cream vans selling drugs at the school gates” – is the weight of communal judgement that still falls upon the poor: “The names still ring in my head everyday: chav, scav, lowlife, NED, underclass, lowborn.” In her new lifestyle as an author, she can afford to eat well, enjoy films and books and can “heat my flat in the winter”. But there remains a sense of psychological dislocation: “I find myself unable to reconcile my ‘now’ with my past.”

Carraway and Hudson are two very different writers, and their experiences and voices are distinctively their own, but a couple of similar points arise from the histories they describe.

Both had ‘difficult’ mothers, although Carraway’s was more cruelly violent, both beating Carraway up and also rewarding her as a child for physically assaulting her own father as he slept. Hudson says of her grandmother – a former beauty who looked like Elizabeth Taylor in her youth – “my grandma was the most terrifying woman I’ve ever known” whose charm could easily turn to ice. Her mother, not ready for motherhood and largely adrift from Hudson’s father, struggled with depression and the erratic hope of fresh starts offered by unpredictable men.

There was love in the mix, too, although complicatedly expressed. For a child, it is the mother – so often harshly judged by society – who is nonetheless the last line of defence against a hostile world. But when the mother proves unreliable, buckling under wider pressures, what is it that keeps a struggling child afloat?

The lifebuoys, ideally, should be offered by wider society: the availability of social housing of decent quality, good state education with after-school provision, caring teachers, free school meals for children on low incomes, free or subsidised leisure activities, libraries that are geared towards welcoming children and encouraging reading. Such things were once imagined as the bedrock of a civilised society, and yet many of them – social housing and library provision in particular – have been steadily eroded, while teachers report trying to do their best for children in increasingly adverse circumstances.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, The Sunday Times carried a report on conditions in London’s Broadwater Farm housing estate, where the admirable headmistress of the estate’s Willow Primary School explained how she and her staff dreaded holidays, as many of their pupils would simply be kept indoors to keep them away from wider dangers of drugs and gangs. An accompanying photograph of accommodation for one family of six, a single cramped room with damp and ragged wallpaper, called to mind a Dickensian slum.

More from this author

Why has the diversity debate left white working-class boys behind?

By Jenny McCartney

The relatively modest leisure activities which come so easily to middle-class children – swimming, bowling, trips to the seaside or camping – are frequently unaffordable for families who are barely making ends meet: the parents can spare neither the money nor the time from work, often in jobs which do not provide holiday pay. A crowdfunded appeal will open up more opportunities for the Broadwater Farm children this summer – yet there are similar stories from streets and estates all over Britain.

There are some thoughtful initiatives happening: Hudson goes back to Hetton-le-Hole near Newcastle to revisit one of her old schools – where, unusually, she felt welcomed and not ‘embarrassed about being poor’ – which has just undergone ‘poverty proofing’, a process set up by a charity to help children from poorer backgrounds not feel excluded by details that adults often overlooked.

One significant source of embarrassment was at not having “the latest, expensive water bottle” – something the children were keenly aware of among themselves – which the school solved by introducing a standard, school-branded water bottle instead. Yet the great sweep of government policy, particularly in areas such as housing, has been travelling in the opposite direction: towards the entrenchment of social inequality.

Why is it so? Part of the answer may be that policy begins in culture, the government’s instinctive reading of the public mood. For many years the prevailing cultural attitude towards those on the poverty line has been one of suspicion bordering on contempt, with middle-market tabloid tales of chavs and scroungers milking the system, being amply rewarded with benefits for irresponsibility.

Programmes such as the Jeremy Kyle Show selected the poor and vulnerable and held them up for mass ridicule and moral lectures. Even talent shows such as the X-Factor relied upon a mood of mockery, singling out any ordinary person who dared to believe they were more talented than the panel of judges perceived.

Suggested reading

How Jeremy Kyle undersold humanity

By Giles Fraser

In a world in which branded goods were increasingly used as a signifier of who and what you were – to a much greater degree, say, than when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s – to be unable to afford them took on a measure of stigma. The policies of austerity fell most heavily upon those who could afford it the least. Housing costs soared while affordable housing stock shrank.

At the same time as the cultural and political climate turned chilly for the working-classes, a new development entered the jobs market: the ‘gig economy’ and the ‘zero-hours’ model of employment rendered low-paid incomes more unpredictable, and ate away at many of the old securities, such as paid holiday and sick leave.

Despite high employment, we have seen the re-emergence of the ‘working poor’: according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the in-work poverty rate is now the highest it has been in the past 20 years. For young graduates without family money behind them, the rise of the unpaid internship often barred them from the first step on the middle-class jobs ladder. Money made the world go round, unless you didn’t have it in the first place.

Suggested reading

Warehouse work needn't be worthless

By Polly Mackenzie

The publishing industry, up until very recently, has often seemed keener to discuss inequalities of gender and race than those of income and class (although frequently all such questions are intimately intertwined). That changed somewhat with Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass (the writing of which was crowdfunded), a searing account of growing up in a precarious household in working-class Glasgow which won last year’s Orwell Book Prize.

One of the things that McGarvey noted was how often the middle and upper classes spoke about the poor, and how little the poor talked for themselves. When they did, they were encouraged to emphasise shockingly personal stories rather than put forward any wider political critique (McGarvey’s own mother was an alcoholic and drug addict, who died aged 36). Class, he said, remained the “primary dividing line” in society.

Writing a memoir from the margins of poverty and family dysfunction is a courageous act: while reading Carraway, Hudson and McGarvey you can often sense the authors steeling themselves for criticism, fearing that – by exposing a troubled family history or their own complicated struggles to survive – they are somehow betraying those closest to them while rendering themselves dangerously vulnerable.

Those self-protective reflexes were learned in childhood, and for good reason. Hudson recalls how terrified she was of writing Lowborn, because children in impoverished, tough childhoods quickly learn to cover up abuse or neglect with silence, and it’s a hard habit to break in adulthood: “when I sit down to write it feels like an actual physical force is stopping me”. To speak in your own voice is automatically to invite judgement.

Suggested reading

My social mobility shame

By Darren McGarvey

Carraway is particularly sharp on parodying all the bizarre little nuances of class sneering that stalk her as an adult: “I am a terrible, scrounging, despicable little woman – when I celebrate my birthday at the Harvester, I visit the salad bar an unacceptable amount of times … I’m so disgusting that I’ve never even been to Center Parcs.”

The new writers on class are braced against their work being consumed as “poverty porn” or “misery memoirs” but they clearly hope for something more from it. They are asking to take up space in the public imagination, for their histories to be heard and considered, and perhaps to contribute to a wider movement for social change.

In a broader sense, that ground is also covered by the new anthology Common People, edited by Kit de Waal, in which 33 writers “reclaim and redefine what it means to be working class”. Being working class does not, of course, have to mean a parent with addictions or a childhood facing homelessness – many of these stories are decidedly joyful – but each one investigates a memory or a conversation that is not routinely heard.

One such is Daljit Nagra’s tender story of his academically gifted schoolfriend Steve, and the cultural factors that led to Steve – a white working-class boy – abandoning school at 16 while Nagra carried on to higher education “driven by a migrant psychology to succeed to a status higher than my parents”. They are still friends, and there are more insights in that moving story alone than in many a doorstop policy document.

It is one of the most insidious effects of class snobbery that it has tended to promote an image of working-class people as estranged from cultural expression, as if the arts automatically belong to a sphere that is never fully considered theirs. Yet this latest wave of working-class writers are demanding to be listened to, telling their own stories with freshly compelling, poetic, poignant and sometimes furious voices.

I hope that it is more than just a temporary phenomenon, and that a fundamental cultural shift is underway. Perhaps thereafter a changing culture will finally speak truth to policy, and this time ask the question: “Can things be different now?”

Further reading

The Amish: America's most sophisticated users of technology

By Peter Franklin

However, that’s not entirely true. Indeed, mainstream western societies contain thousands of communities where the decision to allow or prohibit certain technologies is made collectively. They’re called schools.

Of course, in schools, “collectively” means hierarchically – the teaching staff making decisions on behalf of the pupils, as they very much ought to.

Katherine Birbalsingh is the influential headmistress of the Michaela Community School in West London. Posting on her blog, she leaves no one in any doubt as to her policy on one particular technology – the smartphone:

“The same goes for that smartphone. We are clear that if we see or hear a phone, we’ll confiscate it. And we’ll keep it for a long time. The kids are clear. The parents are clear.

“So guess what?

“No one at Michaela ever takes out their phone.  I can count on one hand the number of times a pupil has deliberately taken out their phone in the past 4 years.”

This isn’t just a self-defence mechanism against distractions in the classroom or the sharing of harmful online content in the playground; it is consistent with the school’s guiding principles:

“At Michaela we have a quote on the wall that says, ‘Freedom comes from self-control.’

“Many people think that freedom comes from a lack of control. But at Michaela we believe the opposite: it is only by mastering one’s base desires that one can be free to embrace real freedom and genuine choice. Only with knowledge can one know freedom of thought. Only with practice can one know freedom of expression.”

Further reading

How smartphones make our young people unhappy

By Peter Franklin

Michaela’s crusade against smartphone addiction doesn’t stop at the school gate:

“But even [after school], we try to support our pupils and parents. We give them a series of boxes to tick (to give a sense of achievement) if they manage to stay away from their phone for 3 hours in the evening. This frees them up to do their homework, talk to their families, or simply read a book.

“Parents are SO grateful. In fact, we sell brick phones at reception as an alternative to the smartphone. We understand that parents like the security of being able to contact their child after school. Mobiles are a convenience of the 21st century. With a brick phone, you get the advantage of being able to contact your child without allowing them through the doors of hell…”

This is truly inspiring stuff. Supporters of civil society often speak of the importance of independent local institutions as a check on the over-mighty, centralising state. However, they’re just as important as a check on the most powerful private corporations – especially those in the digital sector, whose reach into our lives rivals that of government.

Social media is the ultimate mimetic product – something you’re made to want because you think everyone else wants it too. Schools, churches and other community institution have a vital role to play in creating spaces where social media is very much not wanted – thereby breaking its mimetic spell.

The tech giants should watch out for the little platoons!

Further reading

Facebook, Jesus and the serpent of social media

By Peter Franklin