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':
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).
Comment: What a hodgepodge! Whatever happened to core curriculum and perhaps some critical thinking skills?
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':
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.
Present day students will be lucky if they can read and write and be able to use maths before they the leave the 'school' system. Personally, i did all my learning after i left school.
Present day schools are raising a generation of morons who will believe the exact opposite of reality and who will be easy pickings in the NWO future.