This is the response to the Graham Badman proposals by a ‘Neil T’:

1. Do you agree that these proposals strike the right balance between the rights of parents to home educate and the rights of children to receive a suitable education?

Disagree

This disgusting war of attrition on a legitimate section of society, which has used every trick in the book, not to mention outright insults, betrays the total lack of decency, integrity, or even safety of this reivew and therefore also of this government. The totalitarian intentions that lie behind this attack on fundamental constitutional freedoms, for no credibly demonstrated reasons forces me to conclude that I can have zero confidence in it to do anything but harm. It has demonstrated to me that it is a completely illegitimate despotism, and I hereby withdraw my consent to its rule. IMO it is unfit to make any changes to current education law or practice.

The government’s role in education has become irredeemably toxic, and the state should get out of education, and repeal the insult of compulsory education altogether, restoring that unmolested natural impulse of the young of our species to learn what it needs to learn without coercion.

The education of my children is none of the government’s business unless it appears that I am neglecting my s7 duty. If LEAs understood and respected this law of the land since my parents generation fought and died fighting for ‘freedom’ while it was being drafted, then children would be protected as well as they can be, and far better than the current dangerously deficient fiasco of universal child molestation and destruction of their privacy embarked on by this government.

2. Do you agree that a register should be kept?

Disagree

N/A for reasons cited above.

3. Do you agree with the information to be provided for registration?

Disagree

N/A for reasons cited above.

4. Do you agree that home educating parents should be required to keep the register up to date?

Disagree

N/A for reasons cited above.

5. Do you agree that it should be a criminal offence to fail to register or to provide inadequate or false information?

Disagree

N/A for reasons cited above.

6a Do you agree that home educated children should stay on the roll of their former school for 20 days after parents notify that they intend to home educate?

Disagree

Absolutely not. Either parents are responsible for the education of their children or the state is. There is no legitimate reason for this incursion, other than to intimidate and dissuade parents from this course of action altogether, as HEers already experience from those schools and LAs which already assume they have such powers, and for which the Pupil Registration regulations 1995 were always a dead letter, no prosecution ever having been brought for the many breaches of a law never intended to be policed, but given as a sop to Education Otherwise to trick us into imagining that talking to government might actually get us anything we wanted.

6b Do you agree that the school should provide the local authority with achievement and future attainment data?

Disagree

The question makes no sense. Why would a school have anything to do with home education? The state system has no role in monitoring education that is not provided by it, nor should it have.

7. Do you agree that DCSF should take powers to issue statutory guidance in relation to the registration and monitoring of home education?

Disagree

I do not need permission from the government to home educate my children.
Why would any sane parent vote to give up such a fundamental freedom?, and that is what registration is. The state also has no statutory monitoring role, despite dishonestly claiming such a function, thereby misrepresenting its powers, and since it militantly and relentlessly determines to misunderstand what HEers do, it perpetually demonstrates its own profound unfitness to judge what it cannot and does not want to understand.

8. Do you agree that children about whom there are substantial safeguarding concerns should not be home educated?

Disagree

Is this a trick question? Children about whom there are substantial safeguarding concerns will by definition already be being seen by social services. If in the course of any such contact ‘if it appears’ that a child is also not receiving suitable education, then the LA is already well placed to invoke s437 and involve the LEA. Current protections and procedures therefore seem highly adequate. It is conceivable that a good education might be being provided despite specific welfare concerns for a child, so a blanket ban would seem unnecessary and crude.

9. Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises where home education is taking place provided 2 weeks notice is given?

Disagree

Our home is not a ‘premises’, its our home, and we are entitled under human rights instruments not to have it invaded. The so called home visit, which is really a non legally sanctioned state inspection of families by deception and misrepresentation of powers the state does not possess, should hardly predispose anyone to vote for making such unwanted and unhelpful intrusions legal.

10 Do you agree that the local authority should have the power to interview the child, alone if this is judged appropriate, or if not in the presence of a trusted person who is not the parent/carer?

Disagree

If this suggestion does not actually have its specific origins in a paedophile agenda, it might as well have. This suggestion invokes necessary child protection actions by any responsible parent against a negligent state (at best), that cannot manage to make its own institutions safe from harbouring dangerous child predators, and at worst, manages to look like a perverts agenda in the first place. This suggestion is beyond vile, and will simply never be tolerated by a large section of society. No decent government could propose such an outrage against families. Powers already exist to enter homes where serious welfare concerns exist, but to suggest this as routine for all families is to debase citizenship utterly, and put all children at a new and totally unnecessary risk.

11 Do you agree that the local authority should visit the premises and interview the child within four weeks of home education starting, after 6 months has elapsed, at the anniversary of home education starting, and thereafter at least on an annual basis? This would not preclude more frequent monitoring if the local authority thought that was necessary.

Disagree

The LA is entitled to make enquiries, and draw conclusions from non responders, or responses which only state that the parents are home educating and no more. It can then require information to be provided or serve an SAO. That is power enough, or would be if LAs understood the law they are supposed to administer.

HEers have been trying to humanise and get LAs to understand and respect the law, and the validity of what we do, probably ever since there have been LAs, and certainly ever since 1944, but with mostly little success, with one or two notable exceptions. It is pointless to contemplate greatly increased powers of intervention when so many LEAs are already local despotisms that act as if most of these powers already existed anyway. It is to shudder to contemplate what would befall us as a result of giving them these proposed new powers, even if they never exceeded them, but it is already no mystery to HEers, and we don’t believe it is any mystery to government either, which is the principle inciter to ultra vires despotism by LAs.

Government should be aware that the people will not be pushed in the direction of totalitarianism for ever, and that there is a line which government can cross that will not be tolerated, such rule, disobeyed.
For myself and many others I know, that line has already been crossed in this shameless and disgusting process, and as I have said before, and now reiterate, government does not have my consent to this process or any outcome from it. I will not submit to such tyranny. I will not obey this rule.

[…]

http://maire-staffordshire.blogspot.com/

My emphasis, underlined.

This is music to my ears, and of course, I agree with all of it.

We can but hope that this is the strength of sentiment in the vast majority of Home Educators.

Whoever Neil T is, he is a hero, no doubt about it. Blistering, flawless logic, delivered in the correct voice, with a clear declaration that all bets are off.

When these consultation responses are ignored, then the rage will increase exponentially as will the resolve to completely resist.

These people are making enemies of every last person in the country. There are not many people left who are not at the end of their tether. Everyone is fed up, everyone is harassed, pressured, squeezed and pestered.

And for what?

No one wants to be troubled with this sort of nonsense; I am sure that Neil T would much rather be doing something else than boiling his blood over Neu Liebour and its latest perversion.

The fact must be that these monsters crave disorder, ill feeling and violence. It is the only conclusion that a logical person can come to, since everything they do breeds murder, violence, chaos and disruption.

As I have said for years, no one should give them satisfaction.

Protesting in demonstrations merely puts you on cards like this (N.B. not that cards like this mean anything at all in the grand scheme of things; just ask the East Germans, many of whom appeared in their local equivalent. Decades later no one is affected by those records and they are just a bad memory, just as this card and the victims on it, in the long run, will not be harmed by this, when everything changes. In fact, cards like this are a symptom of the impending death of a nation, where ordinary decent people are criminalised because the state is totally illegitimate and completely corrupt: “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government” Tacitus. These cards are designed not only as police tools but to spread fear and to shut down people’s willingness to act. It never succeeds in the end, EVER.):

Whilst doing nothing to achieve your goals.

Whatever you might think the solution to any particular problem is, one thing is for sure, doing again and again what has not worked is insane, and everyone who calls for more of what does not work is… not helping.

These are the key parameters that anyone who wants to solve a problem needs to understand:

1. There is not enough money for them to do everything that they want to do.
2. There are not enough aparatchicks to enforce everything they want to enforce.
3. There are too many of any single constituency to control, whether we are talking about motorists, smokers, drinkers, Home Educators, motorcyclists, hunters or any other group of people made up of large numbers.

If you can get all the people in your group to agree to obey only common sense, and do disobey any order or directive that violates your rights, then essentially, there is nothing that anyone can do about it. Common sense and order will prevail and insanity and disorder will cease to exist.

Physical reality is consistent with universal laws. Where the laws do not operate, there is no reality — we judge reality by the responses of our senses. Once we are convinced of the reality of a given situation, we abide by its rules. We judged the bullets to be solid, the guns to be real, therefore they can kill. I know the bullets are unreal, therefore they cannot harm me.

Spectre of the Gun

This is what the hunting crowd have discovered; they keep hunting and nothing has stopped them. It is directly analogous to Neo’s not running anymore, turning around and saying very calmly ‘No’.

It is directly analogous to THX and SEN being shown by SRT that in fact, there are no barriers to escape, and if you try to escape, nothing will stop you.

Finally, there is no need for violence from you. Power is an illusion. If enough people say no, there is nothing that can stop them, in fact, bullets cannot kill what energises them because bullets cannot kill ideas.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Home Schooling, Yes yes yes!.