THE HOME AS A DEFENCE against the state
b y LU C Y S H AW
This talk was given in Walsingham on 7 December 2019 at a pilgrimage in defence of primary educators.
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ost of my children are at an age when they would, if they attended schools, be directly affected by the changes to the Personal, Social and Health Education (PHSE) curriculum, but home education will protect them from all but the most indirect effects of them. In a very practical way it is the most certain bulwark against the militant sexualisation of children which is being effected not only through this one subject, but also through many others. However, on its own it is not enough to avoid school. As parents we should be asking ourselves how best we can arm our children for the coming struggle which they in their turn will face, when they emerge from the safety of their homes. Education is in a state of deepening crisis. Teachers complain that many children start school unable to talk, or not potty trained. Other teachers insist that the point of school is to eradicate the so-called prejudices instilled in children by their parents. The view that many parents are failing so badly at bringing up their children that more unilateral intervention from the state, through schools, is a good thing, is very widely held. These phenomena have their origin in a common source: the idea that it is the job of schools, not parents, not only to educate but to instil culture and manners. This is not entirely a new idea. Indeed it was an essential part of the post-war evolution of grammar schools into the top tier of a selective school system: children from poor backgrounds were to be given an
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education and culture foreign to their family and background, to enable them to move into a different social class. The three-tier educational structure of the 1940s has now effectively disappeared, but this well-intentioned educational plan spread the idea, at first applicable to only one group of children, that the job of schools was not to pass on parents’ values, not even to correct those values or place them into a larger context, but systematically to replace those values with completely different ones, as a matter of meritocratic social engineering. Insofar as it was successful, it contributed to the situation often recorded in the popular culture of the 1950s: of parents and adult children who cannot understand each other any more, because the children had not only moved on from the places, pastimes, tastes, and attitudes they grew up with, but could even be ashamed of them. The notion of schools as value-transplant centres had precedents in the 19th century battles in Italy and France about Church involvement in schools, and even earlier in this country when Catholics were forbidden to be school teachers in penal times. But if schools were expected to teach Protestantism, patriotism, or secularism, it was not so much expected in previous eras that schools would be the primary cultural formators of children: that they would overturn or displace CAL X M A R IA E
