There have been a number of articles already around education, institutions, school and learning –

Institutionalised, Scheduled for Learning, Your Digital Informer and Further Education or Further Separation?

And others looking at the trail that led us there with A Working Strategy and A Rather Dark Enterprise, with many looking at what happens thereafter. Following a projected path and structure like in The Beautiful Mice, as it is meant to.

But currently, there are more headlines about schools and the pressures they are facing. With funding and budget issues, rules and targets to hit, and a new demographic taking over some schools meaning different skills needed for language and culture. New taxes being imposed on schools, resources being limited to a very narrow mindset being ‘allowed’ to persist. Anyone else with individual thought or reasoning appears to find themselves in the line of fire, unless of course, they have learned already to keep their mouth closed. Just as many did in previous generations, already seeing there were cracks appearing, and noticing the ‘system’ wasn’t entirely there for the benefit of the people.

Now though, it’s really quite obvious it isn’t for the benefit of the people, or at least not the native populations anyway. What we were used to as a stable society, providing infrastructure of healthcare, education, travel, employment and leisure, has been turned upside down. All of those things are being used now as a tool of control and to hold people to ransom almost. And weirdly, many have noticed that all those things are being freely given to new arrivals, in fact, some departments of the government are literally falling over themselves to be able to hand out someone else’s tax money. To everything and anything, except what it was apparently meant for.

Schools are mirroring society in their own smaller way, where once it seemed the other way round and school was the prep for the bigger society. It now seems that society is being turned into a school like mentality, where the people are treated like children as speculated in Holding Us Back. And perhaps where the 15-minute cities and town tie in with School, But Bigger, where it’s just one contained ‘happy family’ scenario as in the pretty and colourful drawings they use to propose their vision. But for real school these days, they are reducing teachers, activities, exams and increasing targets, systems and rules of thought. It makes me wonder why people keep sending their children to these buckled institutions, still believing there is a purpose as there once appeared to be. Still clinging to what they once represented? Thinking it will go back and be normal again? Because if you take your children out of mainstream school, I understand you then have to take full responsibility over their education and learning, and potentially not everyone thinks they are capable of that, and clearly some aren’t by themselves. Which is where community and family come in, or at least where they should, and used to.

But I understand the need to keep an eye on kids, with an even higher percentage of danger lurking these days than ever before. Yet many still slip through the cracks, even now with all our systems of registering, monitoring, keeping medical and educational records, with all the departments in place to ‘safeguard’ them. It seems they have lost control of the illusion that was in place for the longest time, and now they are very much being revealed to be part of the problem. Interfering in people’s lives and development as much as they can, to be necessary as the overseer, the feeder of all those things you think only they can provide. Once you look at the set-up of school, don’t you think it’s odd to expect children from a very young age to spend hours and hours cooped up with large numbers of other children they are not familiar with? Over and over again, for years. And once you get a bit older, it’s a bigger school, more people, more subjects, less time, more change – all at a crucial time when you yourself are going through great change. The time you miss with your family as you grow up, is something many don’t even seem to realise they missed, because it’s gone on for so many generations now, we hardly even question it. But if you could do it all again, knowing how fleeting everything is, and how fragile life can be, would you want to be put through the same mill as before?

(c) MKW Publishing