Can modern children really trust what they are being taught in their schools?
I well remember my shock, aged around 12 years old, when I first read in a school science textbook the distressing news that the world’s supplies of oil were due to run out in approximately 30 short years’ time, a period when I hoped still to be alive. It was not only power and heating-supplies that would be affected by this looming shortage, the textbook warned: in chemically-processed form, oil was used to make everything from textiles to plastics, rendering modern life essentially unliveable. It turned out even some forms of rope were manufactured using oil-derivatives, making it impossible to so much as hang yourself, once society collapsed by the time I reached my 40s.
Then, however, I noticed something which seemed to make the whole situation even worse. According to the copyright notice at the front of the textbook, it had first been published 10 years beforehand. So, presumably, this meant humanity now had only 20 years left of life outside the neo-Dark Ages, not 30 at all! Therefore, when it came to answering the subsequent comprehension question, “How many years until the oil runs out?” I asked my teacher if I was supposed to actually write down this smaller number instead. “No,” I was told. “The answer’s still 30.” I didn’t understand. Had mankind suddenly found some more stores of untapped oil in the interim? Say, around 10 years’ worth? Explanation came there none.
This, by the way, was approximately 30 years ago now. And yet, strangely enough, the oil is still here – but only for a limited amount of time. According to some current estimates, we now have around – ooh, let’s see – yes, that’s right, about 30 years’ worth. In 30 years’ time, I suspect, this number may remain curiously exactly the same.
Class Action
I do not mean to imply that Earth’s oil will not one day run out for real some distant day eventually, simply that the school textbook responsible for teaching my younger self this news was spreading alarmist notions that it would do so in a much, much shorter timeframe than was actually the case, presumably for unspoken politico-environmentalist reasons.
Things are way worse in Western classrooms now, though. Three decades later, the valuable resource which actually appears to have run out is any last reserves of restraint amongst those who would politically and ‘scientifically’ indoctrinate our young. This was clearly demonstrated by an alarming investigative reporting exposé in the Times last week about a so-called ‘illegal school’ named Universallkidz (spelling isn’t on the curriculum there) operating in Stockport, whose teaching materials, staff and syllabus content were presented as being, to use the technical pedagogical term, absolutely bleeding mental.
The clear implication of the Times’s report was that children attending the place were at severe risk of coming to harm or being indoctrinated neck-deep into totally anti-scientific, politically extreme ultra-weirdness. Well, maybe some 2020s schoolkids are indeed being placed in danger of such appalling, adult teacher-led, classroom abuse and intellectual and moral grooming. Just look at the following piece of loony claptrap being pushed to teens today under the name of – hem-hem – ‘sex education’:
Mmm – what delicious recipe were the teachers hoping the kids in question would end by cooking up between one another at 3.30pm behind the bike-sheds? Apparently, the desired sexual menu was intended to be largely chocolate-based:
That’s right – these insane child-groomers are teaching their captive under-age charges how to lick one another’s arseholes clean with their own bare tongues! How utterly appalling! Ofsted (or indeed the vice-squad) should move in and close them all down immediately!
Except, of course, this particular piece of insanity does not come from any kind of ‘illegal school’ at all, let alone that of Universallkidz, where nothing even approximately one thousandth so disturbing or unhygienic is actually being taught to innocent infants.
Instead, these worksheets were leaked online by a whistleblower in 2022, when they were exposed as being promoted by the leading U.S. teaching union the NEA (Nonces Eating Anuses?), who evidently thought there was absolutely nothing whatsoever wrong with them. The whistleblower responsible for publicising these rimming instructions to appalled, urgently-toothbrush-and-mouthwash-purchasing parents was Christopher F. Rufo, a leading anti-woke U.S. journalist who has performed miracles over the past few years exposing the blatant propaganda being pushed to kids in Western schools in order to turn them all gay/trans/Green/jihadi/Marxist/antisemitic/constitutionally unemployable.
This Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing
Rufo mainly focuses upon such nonsense going on in the U.S., but, sad to say, such problems are now apparently – to use the Leftists’ own favourite word against them – systemic here in the U.K., too.
In Scotland, there is an entire literacy scheme named ‘Read Woke’, aimed at teaching kids their LGBs and CRTs alongside their far less important ABCs. And I have shown elsewhere that in 2022 a new Green curriculum for U.K. schools was launched by something bearing the über-Orwellian name of ‘The Ministry of Eco-Education’, aimed at transforming every last schoolchild in the country into Chris Packham Jr.
Look at this 2023 report from the think tank Civitas if you want to see how far the whole woke bum-rot of kids being taught how to eat ass in class really goes. A previous essay of mine about the Brazilian Marxist pedagogue Paulo Freire will fill you in on the underpinning pseudo-intellectual ‘justification’ for deliberately ruining our kids’ futures in this way.
With all this in mind, let us look anew with a more critical eye at the Times’s recent exposé of Universallkidz in Stockport. I do not wish to dispute that, if the report is accurate, several 100% loopy things about Third Eyes and the alleged healing powers of crystals are being taught there. All I wish to demonstrate is that, in many ways, some more-or-less equally 100% loopy things of a disturbingly analogous nature are now being taught in British mainstream state schools too.
Universall Knowledge
According to quotes attributed by the Times to the school’s Headmistress Ladan Ratcliffe, who had formerly worked in ordinary state education for 20 years before setting Universallkidz up in 2020 after experiencing some kind of enlightenment during an anti-lockdown rally, her new institution was intended to “de-indoctrinate” pupils from “all the lies” they were being taught by “the system”.
In the Times’s paraphrasing of Ratcliffe’s views, she felt “mainstream schooling sapped the life out of children, turning them into weak-willed and compliant adults”. The infants were therefore to be deprogrammed by some more commendably non-compliant adults pushing odd New Age notions to them instead, including such topics as “sacred drumming, moon cycles and homeopathy” and “traditional Chinese medicine and philosophy”.
The school’s other teachers were depicted as cranks and crackpots who refused to accept the former existence of dinosaurs, thought we were living inside a giant Matrix-style computer simulation whose programmers had accidentally filled it with far too many blue Ford Escorts, theorised Anne Frank’s diaries were fakes, or guessed contrails from aircraft were a secret Deep State plot to give people dementia (in the case of Joe Biden, the perpetrator accidentally appears to have become the victim).
Overall, the place was said to be an embodiment of “conspirituality” – that is, “conspiracy theories and spirituality”, merged together – and some of the madder stuff taught there does indeed sound completely stupid. And yet…
Bugs in the System
One of the Times’s biggest concerns was that the children were being primed to think ill of Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and their sinister World Economic Forum (WEF) body. Some of the specific anti-WEF ideas told to the kids about the WEF did indeed seem ludicrous, such as the notion expressed by one history teacher that, “if Schwab and Gates have their way”, we’d all be forced into eating cockroaches some day soon, which was why I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! had been invented, together with its famous insect-eating ‘Bushtucker Trials’ section: “So it doesn’t look as mad when they say ‘Right, it’s time you all start eating cockroach’.”
In its specifics, this is indeed rather improbable – I’m a Celebrity was surely just invented to make easy advertising money from an ever-profitable mass audience of morons. But, nonetheless, the WEF and others really have been promoting the mass consumption of insect-life of late, on the grounds of ‘sustainability’ (albeit it should be noted that ‘promoting’ is a somewhat different verb than ‘forcing’). But what might it be about the nature of the current, non-cockroach-based, global food-supply that makes it so purportedly ‘unsustainable’? Another teacher, named Red, told the Times’s undercover reporter his own theory:
The pupils here won’t have to be woken up, because they’ve never been asleep. [Because we teach them foraging] they’ll know how to find their own medicine, find their own food when the shit hits the fan. Because they [e.g. the WEF] are going to force a famine on us. Look at what they have been doing with farming. They are going to force a famine on us, and we will be eating each other.
I’m sorry, but, far from being completely lunatic, that line of thought simply shows evidence of logical thinking and an ability – sadly lacking in many contemporary politicians and teachers alike, it would seem – to extrapolate outwards from current circumstances. As recently demonstrated on the Daily Sceptic, if the current insane headlong push for Net Zero by 2050 does indeed go ahead as planned, then there is little other logical outcome than that millions, if not billions of people will die, substantially due to starvation caused by the centrally enforced collapse of CO2-emitting agriculture and nitrate-based fertilisers, i.e., the replacement of one hypothetical human mass extinction event by another, alternative, self-made and not at all hypothetical one.
Fortunately, of course, Net Zero by 2050 will not happen, as it will prove practically and politically impossible – voters tend to rebel when told to die en masse for their own good by their supposed elders and betters. The whole thing will, I predict, end up being like the much-promised exhaustion of the world’s oil supplies I was cautioned about as a child, i.e., hanging perpetually around 30 years in the never-arriving future, like some perpetual Green Sword of Damocles.
Nonetheless, that same basic image of forthcoming mass starvation and societal collapse clearly is one that is being taught in other, wholly non-illegal, U.K. schools on a widespread basis. Based on what they had heard in their lessons, one 2023 poll of British Sixth-Formers found 53% believed it “likely” the world would end in their lifetimes. As a result, over half of all U.K. child psychiatrists now report getting patients whose symptoms of distress and anxiety are caused or exacerbated by the alleged looming climate crisis these very same kids have been learning all about endlessly in class, right from early primary school.
If it is psychologically harmful for an alleged weirdo conspiracy theorist like Red to dubiously tell his kids Bill Gates is going to starve them all to death for fun, why isn’t it also considered thus for a state school teacher to equally dubiously tell his kids carbon dioxide is going to do the same?
By preaching to his classes that environmental apocalypse is coming, isn’t Red essentially just doing the same as more mainstream Western teachers are now doing to their own students, just from a rather different fake perspective of disinformation? If society really does collapse sometime soon, as Greta & Co keep promising us, then the Universallkidz crew would actually have done rather well to have learned how to forage, won’t they? It’ll certainly stand them in better stead than a GNVQ in Travel and Tourism.
A Confederacy of Dunces
Ah, but Universallkidz is an inherently ‘anti-science’ establishment. We can tell this, as one of the teachers told the Times reporter he was a fan of Duns Scotus, the medieval Catholic theologian whose ideas were later rejected by Renaissance humanist and proto-Enlightenment thinkers:
Knowledge was intuitive for Duns. He said that true knowledge is that which is revealed to us by God. Revelation through intuition. But at the same time you’ve got the rise of modern science and it [Duns’s name, satirically re-spelled as ‘Dunce’] came to be an insult, to mean stupid. So I say, I’m bringing Duns back. I’m a dunce.
Ha ha ha, he sounds like a total nutter: that’s purest Gnosticism, isn’t it? Well, maybe it is, and maybe this man is indeed off his rocker, but if so then can someone please explain how such sentiments are different, in practice, from today’s endless crap about kids being taught they possess some kind of metaphysically ill-defined inner core of gender-identity within their tiny young bodies, as ‘proven’ by all those now infamous highly scientific classroom diagrams of ‘Genderbread Persons’:
Gender identity is “the chemistry that composes you”? Well, that must be science, then, right? After all, it uses the word “chemistry”. What further proof do you need?
But how is a confused five-year-old supposed to know this ‘chemical’ inner gender-identity core is really there? Well, he or she just looks deep down inside and senses it, intuitively. You know, just like Duns Scotus would have done, if he had ever decided to self-ID as being a genderqueer medieval cake-person. Go to the top of the class, kid – that’s what we do with the real dunces in British schools these days!
Honestly, what’s worse, teaching impressionable and innocent schoolchildren to search out their fictional inner gingerbread-genitals, or some worthless – but ultimately harmless, I suppose – bollocks about Third Eyes and magic crystals? It’s no wonder the Government want to put a mental health nurse in every secondary school now: the curriculum itself is making all the pupils mentally ill, arguably deliberately so.
These days, I have to say that, given the choice, I wouldn’t particularly want to send my children to either Universallkidz or the average, Stonewall-captured, CRT-pushing, Net Zero-crazy state school equally. Fortunately, I don’t have any children, because, 30 years ago I was told all the oil was going to run out by the time I was 40, so underwent a voluntary process of Greenpeace-funded castration aged 14, in order to spare any hypothetical future offspring of mine the ordeal of existing in the hellish future world of Mad Max, but without all the immoral, petrol-guzzling, big spiky war-cars.
If, unlike Philip Larkin, you do have any kids yourself, of course, then in order to genuinely prepare them for the likely nature of life in future 21st century Britain, I would suggest actually enrolling them all in the nearest underground ‘illegal school’ instead.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
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It is truly frightening what’s going on.
https://brownstone.org/articles/their-victory-is-not-set-in-stone/
Yes indeed, it makes you wonder whether we should be more afraid of Putin or these weird ideas,? Does this also happen in Schools in Russia and China? I am not a fan of either of these countries but it does make you wonder?
Definitely more afraid of these weird ideas. Putin looks positively saintly by comparison! You might find it helpful to watch ukcolumn.org – they do a live news program at 1pm Monday, Wednesday and Friday (viewable afterwards too) – well worth watching if you want to keep up to date on what’s going on in our world.
I’ll second that. Like DS and TCW they are in no one’s pocket depending on membership income and donations. Brian Gerrish (ex Royal Naval Lieutenant Commander) is a national treasure. He has been doing sterling work over the last thirty years in calling out the real enemy within without fear or favour.
We’ve been watching UKC for two or three years now (can’t quite remember when we discovered them) and find them invaluable.
I think many of us on here and elsewhere have been aware of the stuff in that article for quite a long time. ———-The only hope is exposure. When tyranny is exposed like eg in the 20mph zones in Wales, then the people who have more power than they realise rise up and simply refuse to allow it. ——-We need the same for the Net Zero tyranny and for the free speech tyranny.
What do you expect from the State? I was told every day in every class that the Ice Age Cometh. Still waiting. Now 40 years late, it is globaloney boiling.
They teach endless propaganda, not critical thinking.
Child grooming is a criminal offence, many laws exist to protect children. None of them enforced. Endless agencies exist for children’s welfare, these useless toffs do nothing and many are part of the problem.
Home school or Catholic Private School. About your only choices.
Catholic schools maybe ok now ( I don’t know ) but until recently a Christian education involved being taught all manner of supernatural occurrences which may or may not be true but in any case are unprovable and to be taken entirely on faith.
A Christian education also involved being taught that humans were inherently sinful, had fallen from grace, but could be saved (only) through belief in a Christian god. And those who didn’t believe would burn in an eternal fire.
Let’s face it, there is really nothing new here. Adults since time immemorial have sought to shape the minds of the young around whatever beliefs they held. And there has never been a shortage of bizarre beliefs and abusive education.
Kids in a panic because they are led to believe the world will end is a National Disgrace. The whole climate change eco politics masquerading as science has to scare people or they will never be able to coerce them into the behavioural changes that are what the issue is really all about. It isn’t and never was about the climate. But when people and especially children are subjected to endless brainwashing by Politicians and a bought and paid for media, and with disgustingly the state broadcaster playing a leading role then it is no surprise that there are very noticeable side effects of the misinformation used to convince us all NET ZERO is essential for our and the planets well being. ——–I ask every subscriber to the Daily Sceptic to answer this question. ——What percentage of your friends and family think that everything they hear about storms, floods, droughts, wild fires and sea levels is true and that we face a climate emergency? ——-My answer is that about 2 thirds of them do, and not only that but they will refuse to even discuss the issue because they think discussing it is “conspiracy theory”. Which tells you something very important, that the propaganda works.
Scary, isn’t it?
I take small solace from the knowledge that …. twas ever thus.
Heck, many still actually believe a wise and brave chap who dared to speak truth unto power rose again and ascended into heaven and will return to judge us all… Not saying it’s impossible, but…
Please note this is not directed at people like me who believe that most, if not all, forms of scripture are assemblages of human thought which have stood the test of time and provide good structure with which to live one’s life.
I’m not for a minute condoning any of this. But can someone please tell me how this is different from a religious education from the past?
How would someone brought up in say a Christian school in the past have reacted to being told that the entire canon is probably mostly made up. With a curious open mind? I doubt it. They would have retreated to the concept of faith and it’s importance in living an exemplary life.
All that has happened here is that we’ve dismantled one set of religious beliefs and they’ve been quickly replaced by a new set of religious beliefs.
The lesson surely is that humans seem to need to believe in some confected higher purpose.
And it’s seems to be clear that without it we don’t do very well, either individually or as a society.
Perhaps the best we can hope for is that our irrational beliefs aren’t too destructive.
It’s fascinating really.
Fascinating. Sometimes horribly so.
“Quickly replaced by a new set of religious beliefs” ——Yes notice how everything connected with the environment and climate is shrouded in religious language. We face “Armageddon” There will be a climate “Apocalypse”. Non believers are all “heretics” etc. Climate change is a pseudo religious cult where everything is about the will to believe. It is all faith and emotion with little fact or reason.
Jesus Christ is never irrational
Whenever the state effectively mandates something (e.g. “education of the children”) it then becomes responsible for it. Almost immediately, that something is then lost, and is replaced with something absurd and, in this case, downright vindictive and dangerous.
Other people spending
Other people’s money on what
Other people tell them are
Other people’s problems.
Recipe for disaster.
We moved to France and are paying a very, very modest amount (easily less than one tenth of what one would have to pay in England) to a little organisation started by concerned parents (call it a school if you will) where the three permanent teachers – wait for it – teach useful skills. And that is it.
And they’re all awake. So are the parents. Even the parents of an apparently beautiful, sensitive, intelligent girl who is still wearing the blasted face nappy. It breaks my heart to see her, but she is surrounded by caring people who totally understand the problem and do not make a big deal of it. But the teachers are still strict with her in the right way and make it very clear to her that she should be participating as fully as she can. With all Amazing Grace, I believe she will climb out.
I believe it is a fight back from the 6% who are attracted to Minors, following the closure and control of their previous hunting grounds. Ironic that the schools who used to harbour these folk are now being targeted again by ‘outside companies’ and the lack of safe guarding concerning these companies.
Indeed. I said some years ago, when as a parent governor I was made aware of the creep of this dangerous ideology into the curriculum, that I felt the school, and the school system in general, was being invaded by pedophiles.
And I should add, the invasion was being supported – wittingly and/or unwittingly – by the state.
Well that material above is just disgusting, but unfortunately we’re seeing examples of it being taught to kids everywhere. Parents need to be vigilant and find out what’s happening at their kids’ school. We need to get all gender identity/queer theory toxic garbage out of the education system and go back to the basics of ‘the birds and the bees’, which is primarily the responsibility of the parents anyway.
I wonder if the tranny tyranny baton will be passed to the next leader of Clown World, Scotland. It does make you laugh, people like Yousaf and Khant and their abject fakeness. They’re both Muslims but how many Muslim trans people are there? How long do you think a trans person would last in Pakistan or Saudi? Well, unless they were okay living as a sex slave, perhaps. Talk about desperation for votes and political point-scoring. It’s pathetic brown-nosing, is all. If even NHS England can finally declare sex is a biological fact, will this be reflected in Scotland going forward too, or will there still be men incarcerated in women’s prisons, because they feel ”unsafe” in men’s?
”For six years now, women’s rights campaigners from across Scotland, including JK Rowling, have begged SNP ministers to listen to them, sometimes tearfully, occasionally with a flash of frustration if not downright anger, but always politely. Their argument is that the SNP’s policy of embedding trans ideology in schools, the NHS and justice system, is not ‘progressive’, endangers women’s sex-based rights, and risks the mental and physical well-being of young people. They did not embark on a “toxic culture war” as Yousaf alluded to, but instead simply pointed out the science – human beings cannot change their sex at will.
When Yousaf took over from Sturgeon last March, he had a chance to repair the damage done by his mentor. He could have reached out to women’s groups such as For Women Scotland, and listened to women’s concerns. Instead he doubled down, recently describing women as “cis”, a term favoured by transgender activists to suggest there are two types of women – those of us born female and those men who decide they are women. Yousaf treated Scotland’s women with contempt, and his protestations of inclusivity in his resignation speech are empty words, likely drafted by special advisers to rescue what they can from another political catastrophe.”
https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/humza-yousafs-adherence-to-trans-ideology-played-a-part-in-his-political-demise-will-next-snp-leader-stand-up-for-reality-susan-dalgety-4609309
The terms ‘cis’ as the opposite of ‘trans’ is a term from chemistry. As such it sounds sciency so it must be real.
Amusingly, in this context, ‘trans’ means opposite and ‘cis’ means same side – how inappropriate.
Even more amusingly, most people first heard of ‘trans’ in this context in relation to trans-fats which are, of course, terribly bad for us. I reckon this has potential as a near-ubiquitous insult.
Do you suppose HY has perpetrated those policies out of contempt for non-Muslims – his way of grooming a contemptible people?
Let’s all be honest and call this out for what it is, its Paedophilia sponsored and assisted by the state and the teachers in our schools who “teach” this to children. They are groomers the intention being to make young children hypers——sed.
What does it have to take for Parents to demand that schools stop this and that the groomers are prevented from having any contact with children.
That would involve parents standing up to the state against the abuse of their children.
But parents demonstrated that they aren’t up to it very clearly during covid when in droves they allowed their children to be gagged with face masks and injected with experimental chemical concoctions.
The sacrifice of children at the alter of some supposedly higher power at the behest of established authority has been with us for a long time and hasn’t really gone away.
Endless alcoholic hand wash causing cracked skin and bleeding knuckles was the final straw for me, in October 2020.
That letter to the head and her deputy was the easiest letter I ever had to write.
Absolutely! I couldn’t agree more with every word you have written!
Amazing what has been achieved over the past 14 years during which a succession of Conservative PMs have assured us they had the right policies and a responsible approach to public spending.
Amazing, huh. Or not. Batten down the hatches, because under Labour it’s gonna be on steroids.
Hard to imagine how it could be worse, but I believe it will be.
Yes, it’s frightening to think about!
“I do not mean to imply that Earth’s oil will not one day run out for real some distant day eventually…”
It’s quite possible the planet creates oil faster than we can use it.
“homeopathy” and “traditional Chinese medicine and philosophy”…..Now contrast that with big pharma!
My 9 yo daughter got this from school. Apart from this it’s a good school, I don’t know where to start with a letter to them. Other parents in the group chat were saying they don’t mind them being taught biology! I despair.
This is not a good school and you should get your daughter out of it as a matter of urgency. This is gaslighting (aggressively denying that people’s experiences are real) and that’s a tactic of abusers in abusive relationships.
I hope this makes sense. I had some trouble wording it.
Or in layman’s terms, pissing on someone’s back and telling them it’s raining.
It’s not that simple but I don’t think I can explain this well. I’ll try, though. The idea is to control people by making them question their own sanity and the reliabilty of their own perception through constant denial of both from a position of authority until they cease to live in the real world but in fictional one entirely constructed by the abuser for his own benefit.
You should listen to RW. It’s not just what your daughter is being taught but what peer pressure she will be put under (especially if your fellow parents think this is normal). Get her out! My daughter bravely took her 11-year-old out before her scheduled move to secondary school – it’s not been easy (said granddaughter is now 12) – the younger you move your children into home education the easier it is for them. And very many home educated children do extremely well and tend to be far more self-motivated.
My daughters who are both teachers in their early 30’s, say that state schools are child abuse, run like prisons, and if they can’t afford school fees, they plan to home educate their children.
Anyone who hasn’t been in a state school recently has no idea of the amount of Marxist brainwashing that goes on inside.
See my comment above about my grandchildren all being home educated for these very reasons.
A very good article. I am familiar with most of what’s going on in schools currently (though the details of some of the sex stuff they are taught came as a bit of a shock!) – this is why five of our six grandchildren (the sixth is 22) are being home educated! As detailed in a reply of mine to a comment below, you might all find it helpful to watch ukcolumn.org who do a live news program at 1pm on Monday, Wednesday and Friday (viewable afterwards too) – well worth watching if you want to keep up to date on what’s going on in our world. Yesterday’s (30th April) news covers the Times reporter’s piece on those two ‘illegal’ schools very well, showing up the endemic hypocrisy of the Times. (Was the reporter’s name Tom Ball or something like that?). I hope no one here reads the Times – or, indeed, any mainstream newspaper!!