Between the statist devil and the deep blue sea of unfathomable ignorance

It's not often that I agree with a Government minister, but when they're duking it out with the teaching unions for who's the most zealous servant of the horned god, it can happen. So it was that on the one hand the minister says its okay for boys to play with toy guns and on the other the unions say that such things symbolise and cause aggression, and worse still are gender stereotyping. All this in a discussion about why it is that boys don't do as well as girls in the kiddie koncentration kamps they call schools.

In a sane world, such discussions would concern nobody but the unfortunate children of these particular adults, but in the Prussian factory system of today the morons actually have authority over most of the children in the land. In a sane world, someone would explain to them that boys are supposed to run around, grazing knees, climbing trees and fighting with one another - this is what young mammals do. It's called normal behaviour. Instead, these people seek to geld our youngsters, rob them of their gender, belt them into the straightjacket of enforced conformity and passivity, diagnose them with spurious pseudo-quackery, force ritalin down their throats - and then they wonder why, after years of experimentation, these kids leave school more ignorant than when they arrived and psychologically twisted to boot.

To escape from accusations of negativity, I will propose a few solutions: Firstly, abolish the Department of Education and every state-funded authority above county level: Secondly, institute a voucher system, handing power to the parents and breaking open the state school monopoly. Many further actions would be required, mostly at a local level, as the state's role is minimised and its monopoly power smashed into a multitude of pieces. As with so much else, in education the 'experts' are wrong, and we need to strip them of their commissions and send them scurrying back to their ivory towers. The answer lies not in the poetry of Rousseau but the prosaic commoners taking back responsibility for their children's upbringing and their local schools.