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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Just ignore the ruling, what they gonna do? Invade?
Withholding of funds is generally. the preferred method of enforcement.
Many lawyers claim the courts do not engage in legal activism or the invention of new laws where none existed before. Yet there has been no Treaty among member states to recognise novel ideas about gender and much else.
Lawyer activism it is and it is practiced here too.
you think there were more important things to focus on, instead the forcing of the majority to accept lies, is the ultimate tyranny
So, basically , we have to warp our societies outnof shape, ans pretend biological sex is not true, so that some manly lesbians and odd, homosexual men can feel good about themselves whilst they prance around on the world stage shouting ‘look st me! Look at me! Aren’t I self indulgent and totally narcissistic ‘
I don’t think this is so much about accommodating a minuscule part of society as it is about the radical transformation of society as a whole into, I don’t know what really, something very odd, very disorienting and deeply unsettling for most people.
It seems to me that that is what is being sought here, to keep people off kilter and confused. It makes people lose confidence in themselves which ultimately makes them much easier to manipulate and control.
I’m pretty sure that’s why it’s being done.
Indeed – the idea that powerful people care about “trans” people or any other fashionable “victim” group they claim to worry about is quite farcical.
I wholly heartedly agree
Isn’t it amazing how a law intended to bolster trade can be twisted to undermine social values.
Lawfare.
It isn’t happenstance that the world is drifting this way. Whenever I read of anything like this, or the many other agendas being pushed, I always straightaway suspect the UN ( we’re familiar by now with their Agenda 2030 ) and/or WEF are behind it, those collectively referred to as the ”Globalists”, basically. We half joke about the ”woke mind virus” as a social contagion but it clearly is being orchestrated by these shady but mega-powerful ‘powers that be’.
This author has put together this amazingly comprehensive essay on the UN and their plan for global governance. It’s the first I’m hearing about this weird ‘one world religion’, mind. Anyway, here’s an excerpt from section 5, ESG and the Social Credit System;
”As I explained in this article I did for Jennifer Bilek’s 11th Hour Blog, another way ESG is being pushed is through Collaberative initiatives, like those housed at consultancy groups like Business for Social Responsibility (BSR). An example of one such collaborative is the PGLE, or Partnership for Global LGBTIQ+ Equality, which is a coalition of 29 organizations committed to leveraging their individual and collective advocacy to accelerate LGBTIQ+ equality and inclusion in the workplace globally and in the communities in which they operate. In discussing its formation at the BSR19 Conference, former head of Ernst & Young, Beth A. Brooke-Marciniak said that a few years back she and some other businesses involved in forming PGLE had a private meeting at Davos with (at the time) Vice President Joe Biden to discuss their role in pushing this agenda.
According to her, Biden sat down with these companies, looked them in the eye and said, “You companies can do what we – government – cannot, and will never do. You have to change the world on this issue.” Heeding his words, that same group of companies supported by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and operating in direct collaboration with the World Economic Forum (WEF), launched PGLE in 2019.
Because their combined wealth exceeds that of most countries, the 14 companies that started the PGLE and the ones that have joined since are able to use their financial prowess as a powerful tool to:
https://lisalogan.substack.com/p/the-uns-master-plan-to-destroy-us?r=1hon7w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
https://x.com/AlanJones16178/status/1842405321610043903
Mogs, many thanks for a very interesting link.
It’s a bit of a behemoth, isn’t it? Not something most could sit and read all in one go, especially if you were to follow all of those hyperlinks, but fair play to Lisa Logan for spending a considerable amount of time and effort putting such a well-researched piece together. Had you heard of that strange New Age religious thing though? Perhaps that’s more pertinent to the U.S, as they have strange religions and cults over there.
Debauched.