As a teacher of 20 years’ experience in U.K. state high schools, over the last two and a half years I have been repeatedly struck with a mix of outrage and horror, and I often feel very alone in fighting this authoritarian new modus operandi of the human race.
I initially contacted children’s welfare campaign group UsforThem in Autumn 2020, because I shared and supported its views on the obvious and potential harm to children of coronavirus restrictions. With my direct links to a number of different educational institutions, I wanted to offer my experiences and anecdotes. I was delighted and impressed that this campaign group was rationally and successfully ordering its thoughts and arguments within a context that I could barely get anybody even to listen to me. Often I didn’t know where to start in debating other people’s actions.
I never countenanced complying with instructions for my family and me to ‘stay indoors’, to distance myself socially, or to isolate myself or any of my children. In fact, I never gave a moment’s consideration to doing any single thing which would adversely affect the quality of life we had strived carefully to build for our children over many years. We never stopped seeing those friends that would still see us, or our family; we never cancelled a Christmas, changed a holiday plan or backed out of going to the pub or theatre.
I never banged a pot or a pan in my garden. I never covered my face. I politely declined every enthusiastic exhortation to be tracked or to be traced, never leaving my personal details in any of the establishments I visited around the country. I never took any kind of test, vaccine or booster. Neither did I, in any way or at any time, deny the existence of Covid. I did wash my hands a bit more frequently and thoroughly – for a while. On a handful of occasions I accepted a handful of sanitiser, because fighting everyone, on everything, is really, really wearing. I always opened the windows at school and didn’t really mind being colder – it’s amazing to me how many staff fretted about the virus, poked and jabbed themselves repeatedly, kept their distance, but didn’t open the bloody windows! I marched in London to protest against school closures – twice. I wrote to my MP. I signed online petitions.
I challenged hostile staff and aggressive door policies at various Tesco stores in my area, a Waitrose, several other independent shops, and one very angry bus driver, and – usually – ‘won’. I stood up to McDonald’s for refusing entry to my son, and a private dentist clinic, and lost. I complained to my local authority as the employer of two haughty, haranguing and factually-flawed Covid marshals who skulked around my town, and was given the brush-off. I avoided anywhere with excessively aggressive, unpleasant signage – and still do. I am confounded by the lack of knowledge, professionalism, dignity, humility and respect that I have witnessed in so many fields; I cannot begin to imagine how this kind of prejudice and bigotry adversely affected really vulnerable people in our communities.
I took on my children’s different schools and college over a number of issues, including compulsory lanyard-wearing for facemask-exempt students, undue pressure placed on families and students to take LFTs, adults covering their faces beyond any mandated requirement for them to do so, and more. The way that my eldest son’s personal circumstances regarding face coverings were dealt with by his sixth form college was both deeply upsetting and immoral, as well as patently unlawful. When things became difficult for my 11 year-old, by now in Year 7, regarding pressure to wear a face covering in school, we kept him at home until the mandate was removed again. My Headteacher asked me in for chats about my exemption from wearing a face covering and, later, rumours circulating that I was a ‘Covid-denier’; our Safeguarding Lead needed some persuading that vulnerable children still covering their faces in June 2022 likely represents a worsening mental health problem.
As a teacher, I never stood in front of a single child who was being tricked, manipulated, forced or coerced to cover his or her face; I worked with my headteacher to find ways to keep me out of school at those times. Creating the lie that schools were places of danger or hazard for children, and sustaining that false impression for over two years, as well as the ludicrous, unproven notion that face coverings do anybody any good, were amongst the most offensive aspects of it all for me.
I do not know anyone who has been affected in any serious or long term way by the virus per se. And even if I did, even if the impact of the virus had been much worse, I would not have supported many of the restrictions advocated, supported and followed by so many. I just don’t believe we should remove freedoms to try to prevent the possible spread of a virus. It seems a crass and awkward thing to say, but nevertheless I believe it illustrates my point: if someone close to me had died of Covid, I am as certain as I can be that I still would not have supported removing freedoms as we did. I just don’t think my family or me are that important. I recognise that I seem to be quite alone in feeling that way.
It is now early July 2022 and I am exhausted. I still feel blindsided, poleaxed, by the events of March 2020 and everything that has followed. When I was 12 years old, I started a daily morning paper-round, and began a 30 year pseudo-obsession with media, current affairs and politics; I have had to turn my back on all that, as I have no interest in what the institutions of state have to say to me.
Such is the broken nature of state education as I now see it on a daily basis that when Robert Halfon (Chair of the Education Select Committee) asked me – three times – “and what can be done about it?”, I was unable to provide a satisfactory suggestion, beyond – with a hopeless shrug – “money”, oh, and “don’t repeat the mistakes“.
My children seem relatively unscathed as we protected them from as much fear and estrangement from normality as we could. My wife’s independent prep school, where she teaches, has mostly returned to its normality and life continues there, at least for now, more or less as before 2020. In my school, regular attendance has collapsed to unprecedented levels and has become a huge priority for us to tackle; behavioural issues, exclusions and mental health problems have soared; we have been collectively, suddenly overwhelmed and are woefully under-resourced, as are all our external means of support. A new form of disengagement has taken hold amongst swathes of previously hard-working, conscientious, able students. I can only presume that this is being replicated across every state high school, and that data will soon start to show the true scale of the problems our society has created.
I need a new career as I have essentially fallen out with my employer (the state), big time. I could do with some new friends, as it seems I remain quite seriously out of step with many of them, as indeed with the majority of the global population. I would like my family and me to leave the U.K., although that seems like a lot of upheaval, especially when everything, everywhere now feels so lacking in any certainty.
I fear a return of restrictions in the future, as I do not see the requisite level of regret that I think necessary to prevent it. I also fear the consequences of the inevitable financial crisis. I am deeply uncomfortable that humans seem to have become so fanatical about their ‘health’, specifically vis-à-vis one particular virus, and so disinterested in basic rights and freedoms.
I initially felt foolish when I couldn’t answer Robert Halfon’s question adequately. Sadly, on further reflection, I still don’t have a solution to offer him. But I don’t feel foolish; I just feel alone.
Fraser Krats is a secondary school teacher.
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Believe me Fraser, you are not alone. Great article. You have fought the good fight as best you can in your own way, and can hold your head high.
You’re not alone. This article matches my experience so closely I could almost have written it. In my secondary school, I also suffered the spectacle of relatively sane colleagues descending into madness during that dark period (which by the way I don’t think is over) and did what I could to challenge it.
. I have to say the children at my school seem very back to normal now and while there is a mental health crisis and a long waiting list to see a counsellor, they are for the most part full of the joys of summer and seem their usual selves. Children are very resilient.
I am really fascinated by what caused individuals to take the position they did, I suppose it’s a complex combination of life experiences and psychological make-up. I could see through it, sounds like you could too, but why wasn’t this obvious to so many others, especially when we’d seen the minimal effects that the alleged pandemic had on children?
Well. Solidarity
My sadness for them (and my own) comes less from the effects of the last two years and more for the future they are about to step into, but that’s another story.
My sympathies. While I am not involved in education in that field, as a retired professional engineer in the railway trade, it appears to me that many of the measures used are useless at best, and have the hallmarks of “something must be done” being touted to the ignorant. Although you don’t say which subject is your speciality, do any of you colleagues believe that “face coverings” can have any effect on such small compounds in a normal working environment, or do they just do as they are told?
As a tutor, I refused to tutor children in masks. I told the parents in an e-mail that it caused me ‘severe stress’. I did put up glass screen between us as a sop to certain parents. At least I could still see my students’ expressions!
I lost two sisters because the parents didn’t feel I was taking the ‘pandemic’ seriously. The mother advised me not to mark anything the students had written, for three days, as the virus travelled on paper…
I told all the parents I would not be having the ‘injection’ for ‘personal health reasons’.
Of course I’d then have emails of the sort ‘her Dad has tested positive. She hasn’t, but with you not being vaccinated do you want her to come…’ Yes, for FFS, please send her! (OK – middle two words excepted)
Teaching in schools is a stressful enough job anyway (I used to do it), and I cannot imagine what hell it must have been for you and others who basically ‘didn’t buy into it’. Utter hell. What could you do, other than make a Big Thing of telling the first children courageous enough not wear the things how lovely it was to see their faces again.
For many teachers, Covidians and non-Covidians, 20/21 must have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. The staffing crisis in schools is worse than it’s ever been. Children tell me how many teachers have left this year…local prestigious private school’s hauled an English teacher out of retirement to teach low sets GCSE Maths…
I often tried to find out who the 5-10% of teachers at my students’ school were that must have been non-‘believers’, but I think most unwillingly ‘toed the line’…when there was talk of a vaccine mandate for teachers in schools I resolved that, if that came into being, I would write to some I knew there, and offer them students from my waiting list (very long, largely due to school closures) to launch them on a home tutoring career.
Can you hang on in there, Fraser? Sane people in schools are needed now more than ever.
I am a tutor too empathise it was terrible for the children . Pointless abuse on them and some are deeply affected . I put some quotes from them on todays post x take care
Superb if somewhat depressing article but it encapsulates my thoughts on the matter very well. The key sentence, and one that worries me, is “I fear a return of restrictions in the future, as I do not see the requisite level of regret that I think necessary to prevent it.” You are definitely not alone, Fraser.
It brings tears to my eyes…
You are not alone, Fraser.
No, the masses don’t think very deeply, and yes, the masses always demand protection.
But there is no way on earth that this would have happened without a very concerted propaganda campaign (along with everything else).
Let’s plan their atonement, the b*stards who did this to us.
As an aside, I was talking yesterday to a retired secondary school Physics teacher, who’s just finished marking some 2022 Physics A’Level papers. He reported that he’d been able to complete the task much more quickly than expected, as the examination authorities had given the schools advanced notice of a very restricted range of topics that would be examined, because they recognised that the students had received such disrupted tuition over the past two years.
My friend commented that marking was made even easier because it quickly became apparent that the papers could be separated quickly into two categories, those from students that answered the questions comrehensively and accurately, and the rest, whose subject knowledge went little further than being able to write their own names!
Feeling alone and being alone aren’t the same. As others are pointing out, there are many who share these sentiments.
In fact your description of how you feel is almost identical to mine down to being sure I would feel no different if someone close had died of the lurgy.
I am on the same page with everything except one. I do have an answer to how to fix the state education system.
Get the state out of it. Give vouchers and let families decide. It won’t be perfect and ot might be messy initially. But the state does a terrible job of almost everything and schools are no exception.
Also, I see the disengagement of pupils from school as a good thing overall. It’s their way of expressing their scepticism, I think, or at least for some. Schools are endoctrination centres and kids opting out of that seems a sign of intelligence.
Hear f*cking hear!
I suppose this is the inevitable result when it becomes apparent to children that their government is trying to shorten or end their lives via vaccines, lockdowns and masks, ruin their education, and that many parents (and some teachers, although clearly not the author) support these actions and blame children for spreading viruses and making them or their elderly parents ill.
All of the people they are supposed to be able to trust and rely on, are working against them, it would seem.
I mean, that would spoil anyone’s day. No?
A thought provoking piece.
Nothing to do with teaching per se, but I noticed, quite early on, how many adults were frightened of ‘breaking the rules’ as they saw them, which of course makes them behave like some of the adults in this article. Endless discussions about what you could and couldn’t do, and shocked looks if I declared cheerfully (as I still frequently do) that it’s all a load of b******s. Even some members of my shrinking family have taken a step away from me now – perhaps they see me as a dangerous subversive!
In conversations with my father (who noticed in March 2020 that it was not a pandemic, but since refused to pull the curtain back further), I have taken to referring to myself, my wife and two children as RENEGADES. It has a more positive ring to it.
My sister got jabbed, despite being in regular contact with her, telling her what was really happening, so not much conversation there, sadly…
Renegade is a good word. I resorted to telling people that “I’ve always been a bit of a rebel” and on the whole most of them smiled and took it as a light-hearted comment ….. without realising just how “subversive” I really was being.
So now you know how things were done in other parts of the world in the past, such as East Germany, or a bit further back into the 1930s. Human nature hasn’t changed that much, unfortunately. It scared me a bit a year or two ago.
This comparison are more than a bit unfair: Both the German Nazis and German communists (What about the seriously murderous Russian bolshevists, BTW?) were engaged in what they believed to amount to saving a large majority of the settled population of their countries from some dreadful fate which was otherwise inevtably to be theirs. Corona’s wittnesses certainly didn’t have any ambitions of that kind. They essentially redefined human as dangerous biohazard without other important properties, split mankind into the groups of the essentials and the inessentials and brutally (yes, this is the right term) suppressed the members of the latter group to a degree nothing which happened in the 20th century ever came close to. While the essentials had certain privileges (like being allowed to socialise in the workplace), this wasn’t the case because the system was trying to save them from something but just because it was technically unavoidable.
With totalitarian national socialism or communism, people were in dire straits when they belonged to groups defined as the enemy or actively acted against what those controlling the system considered to be in its best interest. Under totalitarian Covidism, mere existence, basic bodily functions like breathing and sweating and basic human interactions like meeting others and talking to them became reasons for persecution by the authorities. Essentially, we were turned into a herd of more or less useful domestic animals in need of 24×7 micromanagement by so-called public health experts.
That the Covidians always claimed they never wanted to kill anyone, ie, that their numerous victims all died accidentally as side-effect of actions supposedly meant to accomplish something other than death, doesn’t make them nicer people than their more honest, more openly brutal and technically much more amateurish predecessors.
Not only the endless discussions about the rules but also the excitement about the vaccines – when are you getting yours? Have you had your booster? Everyone being as good boys and girls as they can be. Feeling smug they’ve had the vaccines and can now go and queue in airports to go on holiday abroad! Believing that having Covid after being vaccinated is OK as it would have been worse if they hadn’t had the vaccine. Still testing using the stash of LFTs in the cupboard but wondering what they’ll do when they reach the end of the supply.
I’m tired of it all…
Very good article and completely tallowing my experience.
Well done, Fraser. As Jo Starlin says below, you have fought the good fight to the best of your ability. And hopefully, UsforThem have been a help to you, enabling you to be in touch with other like-minded folk. You are definitely not alone. Leaving the UK wouldn’t really make any difference – the grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence, but rarely actually is and most countries of the world have been perpetrating all this evil on their populations, so there aren’t many places we can escape to anyway. For me, God is the only answer, reading the Bible, praying, and seeing that these times are increasingly approximating to the times forecast in the Bible as coming before Jesus’s return.
Hang in there. You aren’t alone, believe me. It’s tough not being one of the Believers. It’s lonely and isolating. I have no solutions and am surrounded by Believers. At the beginning I felt angry and determined not to be cowed by all the nonsense going on around me but two years down the line I’m exhausted and am aware that I have become withdrawn. I’m fed up listening to people saying they’ve got Covid again but it’s OK as they’ve had all their vaccines. I feel alien. I also dread what’s next in terms of mandatory Covid passports and vaccines.
I also live in Scotland which is a whole other topic…
All my friends fully bought into the propaganda (to a greater or lesser degree) and all have been jabbed. Finding out about Stand in the Park was a huge boost to me; I now have a group of acquaintances who are all sceptics and a really good support group has been created from several local SitP groups. I can’t recommend SitP highly enough.
You couldn’t have described how I feel any better thank you, and don’t worry you’re lot alone. There were hundreds of thousands on those marches you went on all feeling the same way and they still do if not more so.
Have you tried your local SITP group? There must be one near you they meet every Sunday at 10am, good for the soul meeting like minded people.
If it’s any consolation I’ve been banned from two vets now for my forthright views (okay I did question their intelligence but was never rude!) on their ridiculous unnecessary draconian rules.
Yesterday I drove past my corner shop only to witness the head or art at the local independent school walking in fully masked – depressing doesn’t even get near how I felt. Still chin chin!!!
Very good article. What is the matter with all our teachers. Are they all stupified and brainwashed? Every where I look there is another institution that is hell bent on destroying our society, not improving it.
Teachers (mostly, obviously those here are excepted) are products and unwitting proponents of the very same system which destroyed any capacity for critical thinking which they may have possessed. The ideal functionaries.
It’s so demoralising isn’t it Fraser? Although recently retired, I worked in the scientific field for a global FMCG company and have been astounded at the number of my peers with qualifications galore who’ve been totally suckered into the whole charade. I too have felt alone and it’s only due to the DS (that I thankfully stumbled across quite early on) and joining Twitter (which I’d never contemplated before) to follow like-minded people ie. critical thinkers and ‘proper’ scientists, medics, data analysts etc silenced by MSM, that has kept me going.
It wasn’t rocket science to me, to see what the response to the so-called pandemic was going to do to the kids (not to mention the economy and the health ‘service’) in the long term – yet the deluded masses didn’t seem to see beyond the end of their noses and were more interested in keeping themselves ‘safe’ by methods that were dictated to them and they chose not to question.
What a fantastic article and I salute you Fraser for your principled stand against tyranny. Your family and your students are very lucky to have you.
I did my level best to stand up to it, but did at times find myself complying with the mask mandate just because I didn’t want a row and I didn’t want to irretrievably fall out with a few friends I was determined to keep.
I am at the stage in life where I can survive without working (although I do still have “a little” job) so, if necessary I could have told them to poke their job ….. but by being careful to avoid difficult conversations with colleagues I navigated the coercion successfully. I am unjabbed and only did one PCR test which, since they didn’t ask to actually see the result, I kept in my handbag for months since it was negative so I could produce it if requested.
I had one family member die of Covid. He was in his late ’50s, a sceptic who was unjabbed, but was overweight and, I think, just very unlucky. But I know at least 6 jabbed people who have had strokes, heart attacks and pulmonary embolisms …. in several cases their lives were, at the very least, shortened by these events.
My immediate family is doing OK and for that I am very grateful. Although my sons are adult now, we stick together, support each other and we are a tight little unit. I have thanked God so many times that they were not teenagers when this was done to us. Although they never caused me too much grief when growing up, they were (like most) quite challenging teenagers and as a divorced single mum with two teenage boys I cannot imagine how I would have coped. I truly believe one of us would be dead ….. probably me!
I am so sorry for the families and young people who were not as fortunate as me. The appalling consequences of the lockdowns on our young people will last for decades, maybe their whole lives. And that, to me, is the most evil thing of a whole range of evil things that were done to us.
It is unforgivable ….. and I for one am not in a forgiving mood.
Dear Fraser, You have fought a tremendous fight and it’s no wonder you are exhausted. As many have already said, you are not alone. I share your anxieties about the future. I also have to send a big thank you to the Daily Sceptic for keeping us all in touch with each other.