David Paton is a professor of industrial economics at Nottingham University Business School. He’s also a lockdown sceptic and a member of the Health Advisory & Recovery Team. During the pandemic, he’s written articles about lockdowns, Sweden, the pingdemic and Covid forecasting. He tweets under @CricketWyvern. I interviewed him via email.
On 4th February, you wrote a piece for The Critic titled ‘Seven indicators that show infections were falling before Lockdown 3.0’, which argued that infections probably peaked before England entered full lockdown on 6th January. Could you briefly summarise the evidence you presented?
Working out when infections start to go up or down can be tricky for several reasons: not everyone with an infection will be tested, symptoms typically appear some time after the initial infection, and there will be a longer lag before an infection results in hospitalisation or death. These lags will vary from case to case and in an unknown proportion of cases, there are no symptoms at all.
The interesting thing about January’s lockdown is that every single indicator tells us that infections peaked well before the full lockdown was in place. Since my article in The Critic, two further pieces of evidence have confirmed this.
First, we now have the more formal analysis of mortality data by Professor Simon Wood of Edinburgh University, which concludes that infections were falling before each of the three English lockdowns.
Second, the ONS Official Incidence Estimates were published in mid-March and put the peak of infections between 20th and 26th December. By the time of lockdown, the ONS estimate infections had already fallen by 40%. These are estimates, but even the lower bound of the 95% confidence interval for 20th–26th December is higher than the upper bound for the week of lockdown.
In my view, saying infections “probably” peaked before the lockdown is no longer a fair reflection of the evidence. Rather, we can be “virtually certain” that they did.
This has important implications. It means that, like the first two lockdowns, the January national lockdown was not necessary for infections in England to start falling. Put another way, hospital admissions would not have continued to rise to unsustainable levels in the absence of lockdown. Of course, this does not answer the secondary question of whether earlier tiered-restrictions had any significant impact on infections. However, it is worth noting that infections were falling pre-lockdown even in regions like Yorkshire which were never put into Tier 4.
Then on 18th March, you wrote an article for Spiked titled ‘The myth of our ‘late’ lockdown’, which argued that locking down earlier wouldn’t have made much difference. In the article, you referred to “the discredited assumption that governments can turn infections on or off like a tap”. What did you mean by that?
For the past two years, Governments around the world have made policy based on the assumptions that: Covid cases continue rising indefinitely unless restrictions are introduced, restrictions and lockdowns inevitably lead to lower infection rates, and lifting restrictions always leads to cases surging. All of these assumptions are wrong.
Time and again, we’ve seen infections go down before lockdowns were introduced or, as in Sweden in spring 2020, Florida a year later and many other cases, without significant additional restrictions. In other cases like Germany and the Czech Republic in early 2021, we’ve seen infections continue to rise during strict lockdowns. Particularly striking for me was England last November when infections in London and the South East actually started to rise in the middle of our national lockdown.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that lockdowns and other restrictions have no effect at all. In some cases, they may lead infections to fall a bit sooner than otherwise, or somewhat faster. But even the evidence for some small, marginal effect is not particularly strong, especially when you take a long term perspective. And for many restrictions like curfews, vaccine passports, table service at pubs and the rule of 6, it is hard to identify any supporting evidence at all. At a minimum, Governments (and often their scientific modellers) overestimate the impact of their interventions, particularly on serious health outcomes.
For many people this is counterintuitive – surely lockdowns reduce human interaction and hence have a very large impact on infections and deaths? In fact, the reality is more complicated. People respond to rising infections and deaths by changing their behaviour voluntarily. And these voluntary changes will be concentrated among the more vulnerable, meaning compulsory restrictions do hit activity (and hence the economy) even more, but because the vulnerable have already limited their interactions, they have less effect on serious outcomes.
In addition, restrictions can have unintended consequences that may outweigh any benefit of the intervention. Who can forget the scenes of packed tube stations when the 10pm curfew caused thousands of people to leave pubs and restaurants at the same time? And if you shut pubs for months on end, it is no surprise that young people simply decide to meet up in unlicensed venues and private homes. I discuss other reasons why lockdowns are less effective than people imagine in this article for Spiked.
Economists are trained in concepts like trade-offs, cost-benefit analysis and unintended consequences. Yet “most either stayed silent or actively promoted lockdown”, to quote Mikko Packalen and Jay Bhattacharya. Why have there been so few critics of lockdown within the economics profession?
In terms of our value judgements and personal stances, economists are probably no less susceptible to fearmongering messages from Government and social pressures to conform than other people. However, you are right that we should expect economists to be more prominent in pointing out the flaw of basing a policy almost entirely on one outcome, i.e., trying to control short run infections.
There has been some excellent work by economists looking more closely at the cost and benefits. An early example is the work of Professor David Miles and colleagues, who estimated that the costs of continuing restrictions were likely far higher than any benefits. A more recent paper by Professor Doug Allen of Simon Fraser University in the International Journal of the Economics of Business concluded that, using mid-point estimates, the costs of lockdowns probably exceeded the benefits by a factor of 141 times. As a result, Professor Allen suggests that “lockdown will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in modern history.”
The reality may be even worse than that. Recent research by economist Professors Karli and Anthony Glass and colleagues provides evidence that the first English lockdown probably had the net effect of increasing excess mortality. In other words, even if lockdowns averted some deaths due to Covid (and we cannot even be certain about that), these were outweighed by the deaths caused by lockdown.
There are other economists who have spoken out about the damage caused by lockdowns. However, one worrying thing which cannot be ignored is the vilification many academics experience when they do speak out against the mainstream policy response. I have been contacted personally by academics who have been threatened with disciplinary action for discussing evidence against lockdowns in a public forum. Given this, it is perhaps no surprise that many economists prefer to keep their heads under the parapet. It is hard to suppress the truth for ever, and I suspect that as more research comes out on the high costs of our interventions and their limited (at best) effectiveness, history will judge the lockdown sceptics favourably.
Some people argue that vaccine passports are needed to encourage take-up of the vaccines. What do you make of this argument?
It is a fundamental principle of medical ethics that treatment should only be given if there is full and informed consent. To introduce vaccine passports as a way of blackmailing young people to get vaccinated is, in my opinion, reprehensible. Indeed, I find it remarkable that politicians openly admit this is their intention. That in itself reveals a moral vacuum among many of our leaders.
Although such an approach is wrong in principle, there is little evidence to justify it even on public health grounds. A policy of offering vaccination to the elderly and vulnerable has a strong basis in terms of the impact on serious illness and deaths. The public policy benefits on infection rates from broader vaccination programmes of the general population is less clear.
For example, a recent paper in the European Journal of Epidemiology found that increases in infections were not associated with vaccination levels across countries or US counties. This should perhaps not be surprising given the increasing evidence on how fast vaccine effectiveness against infection (not necessarily serious illness) wanes, and the fact that a large proportion of the unvaccinated have immunity from previous infection.
There seems to be little acknowledgement of the possibility that, for some people, the risks of vaccination, even if low, may outweigh any benefits. Take, for example, a healthy 20-year old male who has recently had Covid. Given the immunity from previous infection and the very low risks of Covid for his age group, any benefit (public or private) of vaccination will be vanishingly small. In contrast, he faces a small but non-trivial risk of heart problems, particularly after the second dose. It is disgraceful that public policy is pressurising and (in the case of healthcare workers) coercing people into getting vaccinated when they judge that vaccination is not right for them at this time.
Apart from being unethical, authoritarian vaccination policies are likely to have adverse long-term consequences for public health by increasing vaccine hesitancy and distrust among key groups. Dr Alex de Figueiredo and colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine have published some interesting research data on this. Vaccine mandates and passports may well increase take up to some extent, but the danger is they will cause some people to get vaccinated when it is not in their interests, whilst others in vulnerable groups for whom vaccination may be very beneficial will double down on their hesitancy.
The official reason given for offering the vaccine to 12–15 year olds, against the recommendation of the JCVI, is that doing so would “reduce disruption to education”. But that doesn’t stack up, does it?
No it does not. I wrote about this for the Spectator when the rollout was announced. The official modelling suggested that, by reducing the number of infections and subsequent isolation, vaccination would only save an average of 15 minutes of education per child. But even this ignored time lost from vaccination process itself during the school day, as well as time lost due to vaccine side effects.
There are also problems with the modelling which, remarkably, ignored immunity from previous infection and assumed 55% vaccine effectiveness from one dose for a 6 month period. A recent pre-print (which hasn’t yet been peer reviewed) by researchers from the UK Health and Security Agency finds that, for the first 9 days following vaccination, children experience close to 30% negative effectiveness: i.e. for 9 days, vaccinated 12–15 year olds are more likely to test positive than the unvaccinated. Effectiveness rises to 75% by 2 weeks but then wanes very quickly: just 4 weeks later, vaccine effectiveness is already below the 55% used by in the Govt model.
The authors conclude that if the aim is to prevent infection, “regular Covid-19 vaccine boosters will be required” for adolescents. We can wonder what the response of parents would have been if they had been given this information when the vaccination rollout for children started in October.
You’re a Brit. Given what we know now, what should Boris Johnson have done in March of 2020?
We now have copious evidence that Government lockdowns and restrictions have very limited (and in many cases zero) benefit in terms of reducing serious illness and death. But they cause huge economic, social and psychological damage. As we discussed earlier, it is now also clear that infections were already decreasing at the time of the national lockdown. This is important as it means that, in contrast to the messages being put out at the time, there was no prospect of infections rising to such an extent that health services would have been overwhelmed.
So Boris Johnson could and should have avoided mandatory restrictions and lockdown back in March. Apart from investing in health service capacity and capability, the more general policy focus should have been on providing accurate information and advice (especially for the most vulnerable) and voluntary guidance. Instead, the Government did exactly the opposite with messaging designed to create fear, attempts to manipulate behaviour and a very one-sided presentation of statistics.
For example, as early as 13th April 2020, it was clear from the “deaths by specimen date” which I presented daily in my Twitter feed, that deaths in England had started to decline by 8th April. Given the lag from infection to death, this was the first evidence we had that infections peaked before the national lockdown on 23rd March.
Without a doubt Government advisors were aware of this too. Yet for weeks afterward, they continued to talk at the daily press conferences about increasing death numbers, focusing on days when there was a particularly high number of reported deaths, even though many of the deaths had occurred several weeks earlier. Had they presented the data fairly, the case for continuing lockdown would have been fatally weakened. Perhaps Ministers saw their approach as one of political necessity, but it will cause long term lack of trust in Government messaging.
It is sometimes argued that politicians can be excused for going down the lockdown route in the spring of 2020, as they were facing a new virus and there were so many uncertainties. I disagree. In such circumstances it is more important than ever to hold fast to principles and ethics.
We need to remember that the Government took it upon itself to decide who we could invite into our own homes, and even our gardens. They shut down schools for millions of children for months on end. They criminalised public worship. They ordered millions of healthy young people to stay locked up in their houses for most of the day. That they did all this without presenting any strong evidence that such measures have significant public health benefits makes it even worse.
Irrespective of any benefits, for the Government to criminalise normal human activity for months on end is simply wrong. It should never have happened and it should never happen again. The tragedy is that, given recent events in Parliament, I am not sure that any lessons have been learnt.
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I can see home schooling becoming ever more popular, for those that can – pity the children of those that can’t.
Absolutely, which is why I suspect at some point in the near future they will ban home learning as they have in Germany.
Done by the Nazis, by the way, and never repealed. As we have seen under Mutti, Germany’s totalitarian instincts are never that far from the surface, which is profoundly sad given what they have also given to Western Civilisation
“To say I feel unwelcome on these group chats is an understatement.”
Don’t go on them, then?
He’s 25, everything is organised via text or group chat.
An interesting insight.
The fact is that the majority of public service workers view the public as an inconvenience. I believe most would actively avoid the public if they could. Unfortunately, teachers now actively avoid children. They are an inconvenience. They simply spread disease and waste teacher’s time. Time they should be spending with their mates. The only way through it is todo as little as possible and find any way possible to keep the kids busy on their own.
This is the same for every public service.
More generalised ignorant bollocks. It’s not a good look to advertise sublime ignorance.
It is not ALL public service workers…just MOSTLY. Consider frontline workers in hospital as dedicated and professional….then consider the majority behind the scenes, who would rather work from home.
Now consider frontline police officers, dedicated, risking their necks…then consider the majority of the “service”, who are working from home.
Then consider the council…the fire service…the many others.
This is not “ignorant bollocks”…you have no idea of my experiences.
It is not fair to say all teachers care more about their morning coffee than children….but some do!
Thank you for a more intelligent posting. I simply don’t like reactionary wokery any more than the trendy version.
No it’s not ‘ most’ any more than ‘most’ shopkeepers are out to short-change you.
I’ve been in the heart of the evil public empire – the NHS – for the past two weeks. Which gives plenty of time to observe. Contrary to some of the crap posted here, it is not a hotbed of idleness and ill intent. MOST staff are well- intentioned, hard-working and competent. A minority are superb, intelligent practitioners, whilst a few – a very few – need a bullet up the backside.
.. and I reckon that is normal in my experience of a large range of situations – contrary to the malcontents’ crap.
You’re likely to be talking about clinical staff. It’s all the jobsworth, irrelevant administrators who have no patient contact who are allowed to self isolate because they “have a touch of asthma”
It’s not a good look to advertise sublime ignorance.
Nor is it.
I don’t think that’s true for most teachers, although it does often seem to be the case that big institutions, both public and private, get caught up in their own internal processes and lose sight of the ‘customer’
The central lie is that ‘all points of view are welcome’ and being encouraged or taught.
I can stomach other views I disagree with, but only if my own is not being systematically undermined and belittled. It’s a question of mutual, reciprocal, respect.
‘Marginals’ have become the ‘mainstream’ by decrying discrimination, yet now violate Aristotle’s principle of non-contradiction, and ban the views of others (just as they claim theirs were).
It’s the classic ‘liberal’ double-standard.
Across America parents are fighting the corruption of their children head on, no holds barred.
Teachers are the vanguard of The communist movement, working overtime to indoctrinate the next generation whilst avoiding as much real teaching as possible.
In the same way Margaret Thatcher took on Scargill, a proper Conservative government would deal with these red propagandists.
But they won’t so it’s up to parents. Learn from America, fast.
The function of formal education has always been indoctrination & social engineering.
On its inception, it had a strong religious bent toward the right, which gradually moved to centrist scientism & now everything has drifted to the leftist ideology & technocracy, Education is politics.
The need for knowledge i.e. sciences, maths etc is more about politics & competition than standard of life, when the essentials of life are fulfilled, food, shelter, medical care, everything else becomes about keeping up with the Jones (societal pressure).
When you view images of “impoverished” children in developing countries, they look far happier & freer than western children. Competition to the top & social pressure to conform eventually results in a race to the bottom & mental illness, prejudice & class separation.
Education, politics, class, society are all about control, those that reach the top seek control to empower & enrich themselves, greed & ego is always the motive of psychopaths & only psychopaths are ruthless enough to reach the top a.k.a. elites, there is no such thing as an honest billionaire or politician, most of the lackeys that prop up this system are indoctrinated fools.
The planet really does go round in circles. I’d rather live as a caveman.
If the planet stopped going round in circles – or, to be accurate, ellipses – we’d be in big, big, big trouble.
I think you knew that’s not what I mean’t, however I bet you mock flat earthers?
No doubt you will assert the planet is round (a globe). But you only believe it is so because someone told you it is so, in an indoctrination centre or book. Prove the theory, yourself!
I don’t pretend to care, know or side one way or the other, but at least flat earthers have an inquiring mind & seek the truth instead of just accepting someone else’s word for it.
If you’ve ever flown to the “other side” of the world did you get a bit of a jolt as the aircraft flipped over edge to the “other side”?
No?
I expect you didn’t travel high enough to see the curvature of the earth either.
You believe all the images of the earth from space are fake too, right?
Or are particularly stupid.
‘I’d rather live as a caveman.’
If the Greens get their way, you will be!
i’ll be happy then
A trainee teacher who is capable of writing ‘who’s’ needs some more basic training, fast.
Arguably, you could say those of whom obsess about the conformity of proper grammar are the most indoctrinated.
Rules of grammar are essential for precise communication. Wafflers and marketeers obviously do not have such a requirement.
.oviously nOT
Quite – just as you would not employ a bricklayer unable to competently stick to bricks together, why in a non manual job, would you employ someone unable to construct a proper sentence? Nor would they know whether what they said was what they meant to say – language without grammar results often in gibberish
Ouch! (Points go to Annie, I think.)
Upticked. If you can’t express yourself properly, you can’t think properly. And who benefits from our not being able to think properly?
You would say that, wouldn’t you, you’ve been indoctrinated into believing it.
I don’t think doting i’s, crossings t’s or adding apostrophes in the right place really makes a lot of difference.
Well, that shows that you’re as thick as pigshit. Sir Humphrey loves people who are as thick as you, you’re easier to manipulate and to screw over- I alluded to this very point in the post to which you both responded and inadvertently provided evidence of the very point which I was making.
And I’ve resisted this further comment to the very last: I assume that you mean “dotting” rather than “doting”. “Doting” means something else entirely- perhaps you might look the word up in a hard-copy dictionary and find out what it means. Obviously you understand- I presume- what you mean, and you think the rest of us should as well. And it’s ts, not t’s; and is, not i’s.
There’s a serious point here. Sir Humphrey uses words very precisely indeed, as you would discover were you ever unfortunate enough to fall foul of a Court of Law. Sir Humphrey uses words very precisely indeed in the 2020 Coronavirus Act, which plainly lays our future out.
I can’t be arsed downticking you.
“He eats shoots and leaves.”
“He eats, shoots, and leaves.”
They mean exactly the same do they?
Obviously punctuation is pointless then…duh!
A quote from an earlier article in which Luke Perry linked-to http://www.bournbrookmag.com: “As a society, we have raised a generation in which a significant portion of those who attend university are babyish, sociopathic tyrants”.
Recently, as I visited a company with offices in a shared commercial building, a male receptionist in the building’s lobby blatantly flirted with me. This fellow was disgusting, campish, in his twenties, and the impression I got from him was that he thought it completely normal to flirt with a stranger at 10’o clock in the morning in his place of work.
A number of years ago I had reason to visit a major hospital in London. This hospital is just across the river from the Houses of Parliament. I walked into this hospital and approached a reception with a male and female seated at it. I spoke to the male, and immediately this disgusting little creature started to flirt with me. He gave me the clear impression he’d immediately go with me to a hotel room, if that was what I wanted.
The somewhat obese female receptionist beside him was even stunned by this little disgusting camp idiot’s open flirting. She sat there staring at him with her mouth open in amazement.
I was taken by surprise by the first camp flirter in the hospital. But not by the second male flirter in the commercial building, I made my disgust clear to this debauched fool. And he actually seemed to be a little bit sore about being rejected.
I found both incidences nauseating and a sad reflection of modern British society. I can say with a high amount of certainty that if I complained to their employers about the conduct of these two toe-rags, it would probably be me who would be found in the wrong, I’d be accused of not being diverse enough, or of being a systemic homophobe.
In case anyone thinks I’m subconsciously chuffed about these debauched campies making passes at me, I bring their attention to Stephen Port, the homosexual Grindr killer.
Stephen Port is probably the ugliest and most debauched looking creature that ever graced this planet. Take a look at Port’s picture here. If you met this vile POS coming towards you on a sidewalk, you’d cross the street so as not to be close to him.
Yet, a high number of young homosexual men found Port “beautiful” enough to willingly accompany him to his home, where they willingly “made love” with him. So, I don’t view it as a feather in my cap to have debauched young homosexuals make passes at me in a hospital or commercial building a 10 a.m. As per Port, some of these chaps would fornicate with a long dead and half decayed sheep.
The quote from Bournbookmag about “babyish, sociopathic tyrants” is only one small part of the story of the sickness in modern British society. It’s a story that is going to get massively interesting in about 25 years’ time when the Muslims have the upper hand in the UK.
The Muslims will adopt a different method in the way children will be taught in future Britain. And it will be hard to argue that their method is any worse than the crap that’s being taught to British children today.
Things have a surprising way of turning out, I suspect you’re right in that they won’t go as planned by neoliberal globalists.
Agreed. We are watching the debasement of masculinity in the young. Was interesting reading your article as it was not clear in first few paragraphs whether you were male or female. Then it was clarified, and sent the article in a certain direction, rather than another direction.
Rule #1 of politics. If you don’t set the doctrine, then somebody else will.
The problem with the concept of laissez faire, is that the other side doesn’t believe in it and they most certainly won’t leave things be.
All points of view are not valid. We don’t discuss the argument for child sex for example.
There needs to be a firm decision made on what teachers are taught and expect to teach if they want a wage from the public purse. All for the same reason you have nuclear weapons. Not to use them, but to make sure the other side doesn’t use theirs.
It’s a bit out there I know but why can’t teachers just teach a subject ,treat everyone the same and that’s it?
Then they wouldn’t be doing their job of engineering society the way their masters intended.
Well… that’s what I’ve done every day of my 15 year teaching career, so that sort of thing definitely does go on!
Isn’t that the sign of successful indoctrination, both teacher & pupil both think they’re doing the right thing, the right way, the only way!
You’re doing a fantastic job !
or, here’s a suggestion. shut the schools, release the children from the day prisons, and let the ‘teachers’ get real jobs instead of just herding the young ones around when the bell goes.
That’s what a lot of us try to do! However even in the sciences we are being asked to identify opportunities to bring Equality, Diversity and Inclusion into our schemes of work (to be fair mostly this involves writing documents that will never be consulted again unless OFSTED appear over the horizon)
This is moderately weird:
‘But it isn’t just CRT that has been required learning; there have also been sessions on ‘equality, diversity, and inclusion’ that have covered myriad elements of the woke ideology, including a morning on sexual inclusion that, as a gay man and in a position of relative authority, I found myself fundamentally disagreeing with almost the whole way through.’
He had to point out he was gay to justify the fundamentally disagreeing.
Meaning, that if he was a straight man, he wouldn’t really be in a sound position to be disagreeing, because, see, straight men wouldn’t get it. They would disagree because they’re backwards or bigots or something.
But ooooh a gay man disagrees, gosh it must really be awful.
Shoot me.
Is there much different between this and the ‘I’ve had my 2 jabs but I support those who don’t want to have any’ we get (if we’re lucky) from people in the public eye?
Ha! Well, I’m a secondary school teacher of 15 years and could write a book about the ridiculous and tragic things I’ve witnessed during the so-called pandemic. It’s no surprise to read about the wokey nonsense promoted on the course, I’m glad I did my training before this became ubiquitous.
The lazy, ignorant thinking described by the trainee foreshadows the kinds of nonsense he will be confronted with his entire career.
But I would say to the trainee teacher: You have a choice. Either get out now and pursue alternative provision which I think more and more people will be turning to as things get worse, or stay and become a dissident on the inside which what I try to be. Children need to hear alternative points of view, especially because I’m sorry to say it but teachers can be incredibly thick and will generally just parrot whatever they’re told to say. During the ‘pandemic’ I’ve seen it as my duty to counter the ridiculous assumptions from other teachers (and parents) and while this has been hard (and risky) the kids have generally really appreciated it and on many levels, they know my version of events makes much more sense.
Of course any fledgling totalitarian system will aim to indoctrinate the young as a necessary component of its subjugation. If the trainee teachers eyes are open, which they seem to be, the he has a duty to confound and frustrate this. Get to work!
Kudos crisisgarden.
Bravo Sir/Madam
This is not teaching, it is indoctrination.
I was in a humanities classroom recently invigilating an exam and discovered, alongside the climate change posters, a large one about the UN Sustainability Goals. Needless to say it was very quietly peeled off the wall and disposed of
This is what I did with those pestilential notices about the so-called pandemic. I took down one notice that said a children’s playground was closed, obviously placed there by some local authority jobsworth.
The next day I checked and children were playing. It was never replaced.
Seems to me this young man who is clearly child centred would make an excellent teacher, sadly I suspect he’s unlikely to pass muster as he is able to think for himself and question that with which he does not agree, unfortunately that’s not what they’re looking for these days.
We have been given required reading assignments of papers written within a Critical Race Theory
That isn’t the issue.
What is an issue is the context within which this stuff is presented. Is it presented within a genuinely critical framework of debate and alternative analysis? And if not, why not?
Many, many moons ago when I did a PGCE, such critical thinking was just the norm, with an energetic assault on any ‘taken for granted’ assumptions – as should be the case in any educational setting.
Of course, in those days, it was the ‘traditionalists’ that wanted to stifle debate with simplistic notions of ‘authority’.
When I did a PGCE 20 years ago critical thinking wasn’t encouraged (and this was for FE). The big thing back then was the idea that each child had their own ‘learning style’ and we had to encourage them to find out what it was and cater for it. I was openly dubious about the value of this (and sure enough we soon got kids saying ‘I can’t do this exercise, I’m a visual learner’) but was told very clearly that I had to go along with it, or else. In essays it was very much the case that you had to parrot the current educational fashion. Learning styles have now disappeared (for now – they’ll probably be back), our latest thing is helping students with their long term memory, which seems a bit more appropriate in a subject that involves terminal exams. I was disappointed with the PGCE overall because I thought it was a vocational course, and it’s true that a reasonable part was spent observing or doing teaching, but the rest of the time we were being taught by the university lecturers (do as I say, not as I do, in many cases) learning (mostly) psychology. I guess that’s where the CRT would come in these days.
20 years ago? That’s ‘now’ time, bludgeoned by years of neoliberalism crap.
I’m not sure that ‘learning’ psychology is possible, since it’s not a science but rather a bunch of ‘experts’ arguing their differing corners.
And I write that as someone who has taken a more than passing interest in the subject.
Surely its time to start exposing and humilitating the teaching profession and the education bodies in a massive, no holds barred campaign of truth highlighting exactly what is being done here with a focus on the role these brainwashed idiots are playing – that children are being experimented on with these genetic injections for no valid reason and that this is a recipe for premature death and a lifetime of illness from a “genetically reset immune system”, as Robert Malone put it, among many other things. Its time for the teavhers to face reality. They must be targeted and exposed in grand fashion for their role in destroying the health and lives of those they are supposed to be a guiding light for. No teachers need to be involved – they need to be publicly shamed with facts and advertising in a very public way.
Dr Robert Malone: Vaccines’ Toxic Spike Protein Can Damage Heart, Brain, Vessels, Reproductive & Immune System
https://www.bitchute.com/video/iEq4rYL4l0Gc/
The teaching profession have been subject to the same brainwashing as all other sectors of society – and vacuous pontificating hasn’t, and isn’t going to, change that
Im calling for them to be publicly humiliated and exposed for what they are doing. As we stand here and now that is not happening. They are facilitating the murder and maiming and psychological destruction of children, they are forcing them to wear masks and take tests, and as we all know here, there is zero rationale for doing this on any level. Its about time they felt some pain for their crimes. I would say publicly humiliating them and exposing them as being sadistic and cruel in their approach to children is a worthwhile exercise. But I guess youre changing the world from the comfort of your keyboard as usual, so no need for real world action, because RixkH says dont bother
I agree completely. Primary schools should be the next target as I’m sure they are about to try and give the go ahead for children as young as 5 to be maimed. I raised objections at my (secondary) school, and had success that was limited to ensuring that other staff were told to not promote the shots under any circumstances. My youngest is at primary school; if it becomes a ‘vaccination’ centre, they will have me to deal with.
I mentione it before, but something like playing the recent Robert Malone presentation through a loudspeaker, outside schools, then hand the transcript to the parents to get them on board. People need to understand that this is a ttruly abhorrent form of child abuse, murder and torture. Once that penny drops, all hell will break loose. Humiliate them with facts, try to win over the other parents. A more subtle approach as I appreciate people dont like making a scene, even though its important sometimes, would be to just hand printed copies of that speech to parents. With a note saying how the teachers are causing this and encouraging it, and how they refuse to listent ot even the inventor of the jab tech. People need to make waves, big waves
‘We have been given required reading assignments of papers written within a Critical Race Theory (CRT) framework that draw subjective and unscientific conclusions from a sample of three people which are taken at face value, and elevated to a position of ‘truth’ (an entire afternoon of ‘teacher training’ was dedicated to discussing the ‘findings’ of this paper).’
I’d encourage people to read the paper mentioned above/linked in the article. It is saturated with anti-white racism. Proper racism. In the meaningful sense of the term. The paper is question-begging from beginning to end. It is the classic pseudo intellectual neo-Marxist garbage we see throughout mainstream society today. The author presupposes the categories of Critical Race Theory and proceeds to diagnose all statements from respondents in terms of these categories. One example:
‘Of the participants who did indicate that they thought their own ethnicity was relevant, many also showed evidence of Colourblind racism and a belief in a meritocracy. Only a small number of the White participants showed any understanding of their own White privilege:
We should understand others’ ethnicities, however it shouldn’t affect our teaching practice as we should treat all children as equal.
‘There is an important distinction between discriminating between children and discriminating against them. Discriminating between children is something that teachers do all the time in order to meet the various needs of the children in their class (Gaine, 1995). In order to avoid appearing racist, teachers will attempt to treat all children as ‘equal’, but in doing do are enabling the continuation of structural racism within schools. Not noticing a child’s race or colour is also a denial of White privilege (Gaine, 1995).’ (My bold)
1. Do you see how utterly vacuous this is? ‘White privilege’ is taken for granted throughout this overtly racist paper. Read any of these anti-rational Critical Race theorists. They never offer an attempt to establish ‘White privilege’; they simply assume ‘White privilege’ based on nothing more than the predominance of ‘Whiteness’ in society and its institutions. That’s it. It’s is assumed in lieu of argumentation.
2. Note that the respondent’s belief in treating all children as equals is ‘marked’ as ‘Colourblind racism’, another of those presupposed categories just begging to be proven instead of assumed. And note how ‘a belief in a meritocracy’ is portrayed as bad.
Do you see how this works? No matter what answer a respondent gives, there’s a predetermined label ready to apply to that answer. These pseudo intellectual charlatans are utterly bereft of logical and rational argumentation.
‘In order to avoid appearing racist, teachers will attempt to treat all children as ‘equal’, but in doing do are enabling the continuation of structural racism within schools. Not noticing a child’s race or colour is also a denial of White privilege…’
So a teacher who treats children equally must be doing so to avoid appearing racist. It can’t be because the teacher actually has a moral conviction that it is good and important to treat all children equally. Of course not. They’re racists at heart and are in denial of their White privilege.
Moreover, note that real, actual equality appears to be a morally repugnant concept to the Critical Race theorist. Could it be that the Critical Race theorist doesn’t have room for such a concept in their toolkit?
So you see how intellectually vacuous this whole racket is. And to further highlight this, consider this. If the author of the paper were to see this post, rather than interact with the substance and substantiate her own position, she would default to the toolkit and say I’m being ‘defensive’ and therefore demonstrating my ‘White Fragility’. In other words, she would apply her ready-made categories and, once again, assume what she needs to prove.
This is how Critical Race Theory works. It is built on sand. It allows the Critical Race theorist to avoid inconveniences like logic, rationality and argumentation.
While it’s far from being the end of the world, it would be preferable if a 25-year-old trainee teacher knew the difference between ‘whose’ and ‘who’s’.
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