When schools, like the one where I teach English, first closed in March 2020, there was a palpable sense of excitement akin to that end of term feeling in July. The Dunkirk atmosphere appealed to the love of morally superior authoritarianism so entrenched among left-liberals, their competitive need to be seen taking everything more seriously than ‘deniers’.
The only problem was how to keep on condemning a Tory Government, the key requirement for any state school teacher. So powerful is this professional standard that I’ve heard 20-something woke robots bemoan being brought up under Thatcher and suffering inner city riots – one of whom attended Roedean.
Luckily, most teachers quickly became experts in virology, epidemiology and immunology, fit to rival even the great Robert Peston. One science teacher attended our first briefing in what appeared a full beekeeping suit – actually, a NASA ground-crew uniform bought in Florida. This is the same colleague who once asked me how it felt to be in the “minority who voted for Brexit”.
What about the pupils?
Their fears – as young people in an unprecedented situation – got almost no discussion amongst staff. It was made clear that a full online/virtual bombardment of ‘teaching’ was expected. It’s true that some staff made great efforts with previously identified vulnerable children and with key-worker children. But overall, the emphasis on pastoral care was incredibly low.
Very few agreed with me when I argued that lockdown for schools was wrong, that teaching was impossible for most pupils other than face-to-face, so that pastoral care was the priority for us – especially for those from the poorest families. Most seemed to argue that lockdown should continue indefinitely but that the huge damage done could be endlessly attributed to the Government.
Their greatest anger was with the apparent effectiveness of the vaccination programme, especially the idea that Boris Johnson deserved any credit for this. And any tardiness in online deliveries – with positive fury for some poor delivery driver crawling up their path at midnight, gasping with exhaustion but not wearing a face mask.
And the long-term effects that I’ve seen?
What struck me – even when teaching restricted groups during lockdown – was how deadened the pupils were. Back in the classroom, energy and exuberance had been drained, their responses seemed exhausted. There was an almost heart-breaking fatalism. The ubiquitous masks and constant testing were horrendously dehumanising. My Year 7 daughter (in another school) had a teacher scream at her and friends:
WHERE ARE YOUR MASKS? It’s thanks to selfish kids like you that I haven’t seen my mother for over a year!
Small wonder something fundamental has changed in how they view adults. They’ve lost some element of trust and underlying respect, which explains the widely observed worsening in behaviour. Of course, other things are also to blame – not least the isolation and loss of social experiences. But I think, under all that, they’ve lost a lot of confidence in supposed ‘grown-ups’.
I remember saying – in March 2020 – to the last class I saw before lockdown (a ‘difficult’ Year 11 group I adored, but never saw again): “Don’t worry – this country has been through so much – and always got through it. Don’t be scared.”
Maybe this was phony Churchill stuff, but too many had seen adults behaving in a panicked way. I thought of my parents’ account, that their childhoods weren’t badly affected by the outbreak of war in 1939 – how their teachers had stayed calm. In fact, my father said hardly anything was made of it, much to his disappointment.
I’m a natural sceptic. I’ve always been angered how little teachers understand what being sceptical really means. About 10 years ago, I noticed many of my colleagues started to claim their opinions were ‘evidence-based facts’, dismissing those who disagreed with them as holders of wildly emotional prejudices. It was odd, since most had no experience of any activity involving empirical evidence, let alone scientific research.
After the 2016 Brexit referendum, this bogus stance increased massively. One chap loftily proclaimed that only people with “academic expertise” should have had the vote. Instead of arguing with this antidemocratic view, I asked him what his qualifications were – and why he assumed they would place him in the voting booth. They weren’t that impressive, in an era when getting an arts degree is easier than obtaining a GP appointment. I had to arrogantly inform him that, whilst I (Chemistry First and DPhil from Oxford, since you ask) would get a vote, he likely wouldn’t, on the hard evidence of his meagre qualifications. If he found my undoubted conceit ‘offensive’, then perhaps it’d be best not to make such a conceited demand in the first place.
And then Covid struck…
Anyone who read the Guardian and ‘knew the evidence’ hogged the limelight. It was impossible to discuss the issue, without lectures from those suddenly elevated to professorships of Virology, Epidemiology, Acute Medicine, Pathology, Immunology… you name it. Coming from a medical family, it was a delight to continue my second-hand medical education.
To be fair, this wasn’t restricted to teaching. A poet friend of mine, in email discussion, pasted articles from the BMJ, The New England Journal of Medicine and Nature. I have no medical training, so I asked him to explain what he was bombarding me with. He seemed incapable of doing so.
I’m currently struggling through Robert Musil’s modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities. This is an exemplar ‘novel of ideas’, set in 1913 Austria. The central character is a rich wastrel womaniser who’s also a distinguished mathematician and polymath.
He gets involved in interminable committee discussions on how to commemorate the 70th jubilee of the Austro-Hungarian emperor. But the main focus of the novel is analysing how scientific thinking (Musil himself was trained in science) contrasts with social and artistic ideas, progress and social advancement. In short, Musil is concerned with exactly the central issue that Covid seems to flag. Namely, how – if at all – can technocracy fit with democratic accountability and, ultimately, validity? How can we avoid a tyranny of declared experts, some of whom will crush (often using ‘useful idiots’) those who know that science works by being unsettled, that it has never been a process of shouting ‘the science is settled’, of shutting down debate?
This applies to many hot button issues right now: climate change, Brexit, the war in Ukraine, gender identity, issues around race, and so on. Most of our governing elite, like my teacher colleagues, pretend to be scrupulously evidence-based, to have banished emotion and prejudice. Simultaneously, they are filled – often to a fanatical extent – with just such emotion and prejudice. A terrifying combination.
The only hope lies in restoring genuine rational and sceptical debate. It’s vital that pupils get to learn this. Sadly, the entire approach taken on Covid, of imposing extreme measures, pumping out propaganda, silencing opposition and crushing dissent, has taught them the exact opposite.
Eric Blair is a pseudonym.
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Good. Excessive respect for authority is largely to blame for the nightmare of the last 2 years.
If the next generation are now primed to be mistrustful of authority, then that is at least a silver lining.
Free societies are built from a healthy mistrust of power and authority.
I have zero confidence in the sheep that went along with all that.
Maybe the pre-schoolers and the yet unborn can and will develop sceptical skills and behavior eventually, but not the current lot in school.
Least of all the deluded tree hugging 15 year+ old, who should have rebelled but prefer to mask up even until today.
Your last sentence says it all
All this and more is why we took them out of school in October 2020.
From the age of fourteen, suffering “lessons”, I remember thinking, “when I have children of my own, will I want to put them through this?!”
Well, “bubbles”, endless applications of alcoholic handwash, speciously comparing covid with polio, not being allowed to play with their friends – it was all the final straw.
From what I can see about how our kids have improved, and how many other children we know have become insecure, worried and less than healthy, we did the right thing.
I have a very similar article in me, thanks for this one! We are not alone – actually we are the vanguard of the New Enlightenment.
Stay sane, “Eric”!
Well done…one of the saddest things during Covid, from my perspective anyhow, was how little fight there was in parents in relation to their children.
I’m way past the age of having kids in school, but I know if I had I would have been there all the time protesting and complaining, and trying to persuade other people to not let schools walk all over them and their children….I’ve found it heartbreaking watching people go along with this con, in every sphere, but especially in parents, many of whom have badly let their children down. I include some of my own family members in this, who, if I’m honest, I will never be able to think of in the same way ever again.
True. And Brits have put up a particularly woeful show here.
It was very easy for their kids to avoid masking, testing and the GT.
In contrast to the continent, where the therefore fighting parents faced and lost lawsuits and were threatened with jail and loss of custody but still took the risk.
Exactly. I remember telling people that under British Law they could exempt themselves from the masks etc., and how we should not take this for granted, given that most other countries had made no such provision… Use it or lose it…
The day we made the decision to take them out, I remember one occasion with “fondness”…
The playground was full of parents, waiting to collect their children. Staring vacantly at each other, standing dutifully in their two metre distanced spots, they were vacant and silent. And glaring at me militantly for breaking the rules by choosing to sit under a little shelter with one or two other parents, out of the drizzle.
The children from my seven year old son’s class filed out. He came to sit with me for a moment, then went to play on the “trim trail” (a large, wooden playground structure). By this time the drizzle had subsided.
My nine year old daughter came out next, and immediately joined him. A few other children took their lead and played alongside, happily.
“GET OFF THE TRIM TRAIL THIS MOMENT! GET OFF NOW!”
The roar came from the headmistress, seven or eight months pregnant, marching from the back door in a very straight line, diagonally through the ranks of obedient parents towards the playing children, and breaking all the “distancing rules” as she did so.
They all froze. After a moment, my kids strolled nonchalantly to me.
“Oops, teddy died,” they said quietly, in unison. I immediately started sniggering with them both, and together we walked home, laughing about it all. Good times, ironically!
Nice, feelgood anecdote, thanks. I’m pretty sure your kids are going to be just fine by the sound of it!
I hope so! But they have seen their fair share of mum and dad getting furious. But we generally apologise afterwards
At least they understand WHY.
The education sector is populated by the most lamest halfwits, I’m afraid to say.
“Their greatest anger was with the apparent effectiveness of the vaccination programme, especially the idea that Boris Johnson deserved any credit for this.”
That’s sorted at least.
Their main problem now is that Labour was and is even more zealous on all the catastrophic things the Tories did.
Not that they are openly ready to admit all that, only sub-consciously.
The modern left are absolutely deranged, completely batshit crazy. 100% emotion, 0% logic. To understand how these people think all you need to do is read the comments in the Guardian. This article, linked from a DS piece yesterday, is a perfect example – https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jul/01/herd-immunity-covid-virus-vaccine. These latte-drinking tw*ts WANT another lockdown, they WANT to have to wear masks, they WANT people to be forced into being jabbed. Most disgustingly of all, they WANT children to be sacrificed so they can feel safer during their f*ckin zoom meeting. The so-called ‘Guardian Picks’ should be used as clear and irrefutable evidence as to why some people should not be allowed to exist in a civilised society.
Allow the lot of them, I say.
“Never interrupt a fool”
I sometimes force myself to read these type of articles and BTL comments just to remind myself that I am still surrounded by completely irrational, illogical, virtue signalling tw*ts, and that if circumstances were different most of these people would stand idly by whilst we were herded onto our cattle trucks in the name of “safety”.
One self descriptor I have noticed many of these pro-lockdown Guardian types use that boils my p*ss is “Extremely Clinically Vulnerable”.
What the f*** does that mean? Are you posting from an ICU? Why are you outside anyway? This term didn’t even exist before, now half the country regards themselves as ECV.
Talk about a victim mentality, exactly the opposite ethos to the people who post on here, (I would imagine).
No victims here, foosty. We hate having people to blame for our misfortune! Which is why having to blame almost everyone for enabling all this horror by going along with it all is so goddamn painful…
Even before all of this nonsense our philosophy was, “govern”, our own lives, have as little to do with the state as possible, (a bit like the Amish, but with electricity, gadgets and football
)
Turns out everybody wants to be nannied, infantilised, and herded.
What kind of society have we made?
The interesting thing to note here is how their subject matter becomse evermore miniscule: At first, we were all imprisonend because of a new and dangerous virus. In December 2020, Chris Whitty invented the justification for the next round of imprisonment, namely, new and dangerous variants of a no longer so new virus. This kept the shitshow going for another year. In winter 2021, they were finally forced to admit that their new and dangerous virus wasn’t dangerous after all and another lockdown didn’t happen despite all the usual suspects were calling for one and predicting an apocalypse if there demands weren’t met. When the mask mandate was lifted, the WHO COVID special envoy predictic something catastrophic was about to happen within at most two weeks. Nothing did. Now, we’re on the next step of the ladder, they’re talking about variants of a variant of a virus and I’ve already read about the 4th order (in the USA), the variant of a variant of a variant of a virus.
The pattern is always some minor change of something is detected and then, all the old stories get rotated through once again (Much more transmissible! Maybe more deadly!) as it’s again being claimed that we’re facing an absolute unknown and hence, must act with the utmost caution. Today was a sunny day and I’ve seen unmasked people on a boat on the Thames who were playing Bob Marley at a volume. To professor Altmayer, that’s conclusive evidence that “just live with it” is too thin a recipe and, currently, not very workable or successful because we are trapped on a rollercoaster in a horror film.
That this horror film exists only in the stories he keeps telling while there’s abolutely no evidence of one anywhere in the real world is of no concern to him. He’s an expert and facts just bounce off him.
I left my job as an engineering college lecturer in June 2020 as I wasn’t going to abide by forthcoming COVID theatre rules. I then took on private tutoring.
Feb 2022 I returned to lecturing part time. First day there I was told if lecturers don’t ware a mask how can we expect the students to wear them. I exempted myself and no more was said. When mask wearing was no longer regulated some lecturers still kept wearing them. I have so little identification with them.
Now I’ve left again. I’ve scuppered my CV by presenting two critical thinking student assignments I would propose concerning the value of vaccines and masks. I doubt any education establishment will go near me. So private tutoring will be my future.
Good for you – thanks for your contribution to the struggle
We should set up a Free School together, with ‘Eric Blair’.
Thanks for sharing this. I’m a secondary school teacher who similarly took a stand and fought back as far as I could. This extended to:
I still have a job! (although there were some hairy moments). If any of this tyranny returns in the autumn, as I suspect it will, I’ll do the same again. There’s no decision making to be done here. If you are for the right thing, you do the right thing.
Very inspiring. Thank you
Great stuff.
The kids will remember you. And for the right reasons, I know.
Well done; maximum respect from both of us! x
Thank you. What’s odd and I think telling is that far from becoming a pariah of the school I’ve become more respected I think. I think deep down most people can recognise that the whole thing was off, even if they can’t say it out loud or admit it to themselves. I’d decided by the start of 2022 that I was going to be outspoken to the adults as well as the kids; I think we should all be doing that. I got accused of being an anti-vaxxer by one parent but it never went anywhere; I think she was scared to actually get into a debate about it so it remained a bitchy thread on the local Facebook chat (which of course I never saw because I’m not on Facebook!)
Normies!
Emperor’s new clothes; the whole thing.
indeed!
You’re a flipping star. Well done to you.
thank you.
I empathise and can endorse with all that Eric Blair has said .
atmosphere, with merchandise and music, food, drink, fashion show, chance to win a hundred pounds from the visiting wellbeing org, bracelets, an afternoon drag queen story time and so on. My colleagues who are adept did an amazing job.
Whilst last week having my ‘risks slapped’ by SMT!!
I have been told to stay silent in RSE because my belief is that babies are naturally born and I feel the term ‘assigned ‘ is dishonest ideological manipulation of the young. In addition I have said that pronouns and gender ideology is not scientific but a concerning ideological construct and may damage rather than help! I have been silenced. When I mentioned the word inclusion it was suggested that because I had not had the vaccine, I had been infact included and that there was enough evidence from staff complaint to ‘exclude me’ so this would be my fate if I did not keep these concerns for children’s welfare to myself!!! But I could go talk to them at any time in private.
Pride had a party
Yet the children were masked, staff masked, In a very ordered led way for a long long time. I wore a screen visa only.
WHERES YOUR MASK THE MASK POLICE ARE COMING ( a usually lovely person said)
If you are 11-19, which would you prefer, PRIDE or covid ?
If you are me, which do you prefer, keeping your job or the upset of losing it
If you are me which do you prefer friends or none
My colleagues are good just something has got hold of everyone that is bad.
or is it me .
spelling mistakes everywhere but that’s how I feel.
I don’t think the children in schools stood a chance or stand a chance. They are the future teachers!!!
Masked in covid but free free free free in the party of pride ??? Just making myself clear.
which would children therefore like…. A lot.
‘I have been told to stay silent in RSE because my belief is that babies are naturally born and I feel the term ‘assigned ‘ is dishonest ideological manipulation of the young. In addition I have said that pronouns and gender ideology is not scientific but a concerning ideological construct and may damage rather than help!’
Right on. While not a hill I’m prepared to die on, like covid ‘vaccines’, I am 100% with you, and have watched over the last few years the way that certain children are groomed into gender politics leaving them confused and at odds with their own bodies. I find it disgraceful quite frankly and cannot believe the harm that is being done – quite deliberately, with useful idiot teachers encouraging it with their ‘safe spaces’ etc. we will have a generation of seriously messed up people I’m afraid. The future looks extremely bleak.
Thanks for reply .
Present day younger teachers already totally immersed in the Marxist ideology perhaps don’t realise?
They are all lovely, talented but are quick to ‘inform’ on their fellow colleagues if dissent or another view is detected .
Tricky hill to get up never mind die on !
A clue please? What is ‘SMT’ and ‘RSE’?
Thank you
RSE — relationship & sex education
SMT — senior management team (probably)
The former is especially curious. Children don’t go to school to be taught about relationships & sex, that’s something they supposed to learn in the real world as one doesn’t need to have specially trained experts for that — everybody (or almost everybody) has relationships and sex. The reason why it’s part of the curriculum nevertheless is because real word relationships and sex are not to the liking of the people behind this. Afterall, that’s overwhelmingly about mixed-sex heterosexual relationships, these being a social construct invented to perpetuate the domination of violent man over weak and marginalized women which would ideally be overcome completely. It’s also by far not gay enough to accurately represent the teaching classes.
Sorry Judy
Relationships and sex education which replaced sex education, under the curriculum umbrella of PHSE Personal Health Social.
And SMT is Senior Management Team in a school. I will try copy a video to show what is happening.
I’ve decided that the influential, Guardian-reading group in control at the moment are all suffering from what I’m calling Disaster Movie Syndrome, – they all think they’re playing the hero in a Hollywood film.
Your standard disaster movie always starts with our hero being the only person to see the incoming catastrophe, be it an asteroid, an erupting volcano, a flood, or even rampaging dinosaurs. They then struggle to convince the ignorant masses, or central government of our impending doom. We side with them in their anguish as they confront idiots and deniers at every stage.
Just when all seems lost they find fellow heroes and together they overcome all to save humanity. Examples are made of the deniers – the audience enjoys seeing the idiot being eaten by a dinosaur as he sits in a toilet with his trousers around his ankles, or the man who stays in his house only to be washed away in an apocalyptic flood.
Finally our heroes overcome every human and physical obstacle to save the world, only then getting the recognition they think they deserve and they are feted and celebrated.
So, Sage, Imperial College, MP’s, most of the media, and all the other Covid zealots think we’re in that disaster movie and they are the heroes in this story and are saving the world at whatever cost. Meanwhile their opponents are the idiots and deniers who deserve their public humiliation.
And it ends as always, with thousand’s of extras dead but, as an audience, we will forgive the collateral damage because we’re addicted to the narrative.
You’re right, people love the drama of it all with them at the centre.
Good analogy!!
I envy you being the ‘audience’ do you live on a spaceship looking down. Are you untouched by what did you say the narrative?
It is real not a movie or a book.
Beam me up Scotty
Apologies for reposting, just in case anyone didn’t see this the other day it’s very important.
Something else, (some) teachers are fanatical about, (but not Crisisgarden obviously
)
https://twitter.com/FatEmperor/status/1542463974117183488
Brainwashing and not true
Someone should try to nail these people for false advertising: The phrase A boy can become a girl (and vice versa) is manifestly untrue. A boy can never become a girl. Through a combination of lifelong pill taking and so-called cosmetic chirugy, it’s possible to halt the natural development of the body of a boy and make it resemble the body of a woman to some degree if all goes well. If not, the victims is going to become an intentionally crippled invalid facing a lifetime of pain and inconvenience.
Teachers should have been provided with honest science. Instead this gov’t health authorities used scare tactics throughout the first two years of covid. Jail would be too good for these authorities.
I know a teacher, Head of Maths, at my local upper school who said to me that he would rather they close the schools than close the pubs if it came down to a choice. Says it all really.
Sunday afternoon, District Line, affluent West London: young woman well dressed pale complexion (no sun exposure since 2019) couldn’t tell age because she was masked up plops gracefully beside me and my two children. I asked in a concerned tone “Are you infectious?” She replied no so I asked then why are you wearing a mask; she said “to keep safe a bit longer”, to which I said “well masks don’t do that and all you are signalling to everyone else is your infectious“. She spent the remainder of the journey that we were next to her, sitting nervously on the edge of her seat, eyes darting around and around very nervously as seen by my partner sitting opposite her.
Don’t let them get away with this shit without being challenged.