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Girl
Bullies
Girls are
far worse bullies than boys because of the psychological torment
they inflict on their victims, a seven-year study has found….
In a phenomenon which psychologists call "tall poppy syndrome"
, talented girls can find bullies trying to humiliate them.
Clever girls can find their exercise books ripped up or homework
spoilt. (From an article entitled 'Girls give boys a lesson
in bullying' from The Sunday Times of December 22, 2002, written
by John Elliott.)
What your
classmates can do to you is trivial compared with what can be
done to you by female teachers, headmistresses and other educational
experts (or even members of the local community in a position
to influence official agents of the collective). Their influence
over the circumstances of your life goes far beyond damaging books
and ripping up your homework. They can turn other people, including
your parents, against you by slandering you behind your back and
without your permission. Attention has not been drawn to the opportunities
for damaging someone's life provided to those who write secret
'reports' about them to a local authority, which may poison against
them any other state school they attend, or anyone on the local
authority's gossip circuit. Slanders in 'reports' are not actionable,
in fact they are protected from scrutiny. They are as pernicious
as medical notes and judgements which are supposed to be 'confidential';
that is, they may be communicated freely to other members of the
medical 'profession', but not to those outside it. Even the subject
of the notes and judgements has a 'right' only to such information
as 'his' docturd sees fit to give him.
A private
school makes reports only to the parents who pay for the attendance
of a particular victim at the school. Pernicious gossip may well
take place in the staff room, and one hostile teacher may poison
all the rest against a particular victim at the school, but at
least if the parents remove the victim to another school there
is no automatic and official channel by which lies and misinterpretations
may be transmitted. And private schools, which depend on fee-paying
parents, can hardly make a practice of slandering those parents,
though they may collude with them in plans to suppress the precocious.
'Tall poppy
syndrome' is by no means the exclusive prerogative of schoolgirls;
it is the principal element in the modern ideology, and has been
ever since the inception of the Welfare State.
Middle-class
families will miss out on the return of student grants. Only the
poorest students will qualify…. Chancellor Gordon Brown is
planning to bring back a limited version of the old grant system
with maintenance allowances to students whose parents earn less
than £30,000 a year. It means middle-class families will
not only face huge hikes in tuition fees but will also be deprived
of assistance with living costs. (From an article entitled 'Even
poorest students face £20-a-week cap on grants' from Daily
Mail of 23 Dec 2002, written by Sarah Harris, education correspondent.)
As usual,
concern is felt only for the 'poorest'. The educational system
has already for a long time been geared to provide increasingly
for the 'poorest' students - in every sense of the word.
In the same
way that the primary justification of businesses is supposed to
be the provision of secure incomes, with frequent holidays, for
employees, rather than to be run efficiently so as to provide
a stream of profits to shareholders, or efficiently produced and
delivered goods for consumers, so the function of the educational
system is nowadays seen as being to provide the maximum of exposure
to the propaganda of the modern ideology for the highest possible
proportion of the population, located at as low a level as possible
of the IQ range, rather than to provide anything that might be
of any value, either in itself or as opening up opportunities
for later life, for the small minority of the population with
IQs above about 130.
Even the Investors
Chronicle, which does not appeal to a wonderfully critical or
enlightened outlook, has started to print articles with titles
on the lines of 'Will education be worth the money?' and 'Is sending
your children to university a good investment?' (Investors Chronicle
20 December 2002- January 2003, pp. 56-57, written by Chris Dillow.)
The penny has become so heavy that it is starting to drop even
in the minds of the naive middle-class, which does nothing to
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