Education: Britain’s New Equality

Clever children are saving themselves from being branded swots at school by dumbing down and deliberately falling behind, a study has shown…Schoolchildren regarded as boffins may be attacked and shunned by their peers, according to Becky Francis, professor of education at Roehampton University, who carried out a study of academically gifted 12- and 13-year-olds in nine state secondary schools…Boys risk being assaulted in some schools for being high-achievers. To conform and escape alienation, clever boys told researchers they may "try to fall behind" or "dumb down"….Clever Boys Dumb Down To Avoid Bullying in School, The Observer, 3/30/2009

Among socialism’s malignant gifts to societies it infects, the notion of absolute equality ranks as the worst. The closer a society gets to absolute equality, the more it begins to resemble previous nightmares in the defunct Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. As citizens begin to perceive themselves and others as absolutely identical, they begin to fall into the cogs-in-a-machine mentality of totalitarianism, the hallmark of fascism. Resistance, disagreement, debate, individual opinion all go by the wayside. It starts, as it started in many urban schools in the United States twenty years ago, with the relentless bullying of exceptional students.

Workplaces that go in that direction begin with much the same methodology. Enforcers, often with little more subtlety than street corner bullies waiting to run errands for the wise guys, are put into authority, with the right to scorn official policy (which might discourage such behavior), and administrative encouragement to go after anyone who might have an alternate opinion of how things should work in an office or in a factory. Their ignorance, and their tendency toward abusiveness and lying, which are severe restrictions on doing any job well, are employed to dumb down their colleagues, and especially to drive out talented people who might threaten the boss’s assumption of absolute authority. Adults can fight this if they choose too. We have little choice but to engage.

When this happens in a school, however, whole classes of children fall under the sway of thugs devoted to the idea that ignorance trumps education, and violence trumps intelligence. In their adulthood in Britain, one supposes that they’ll join the Labor Party. One can’t presume any superiority on this side of the Atlantic, though. This kind of social leveling is pedagogically correct in American public schools, the righteous cause of the NEA, as such the official education policy of the Obama Administration. Call it Preparation 101 for a gang of Chicago bullies taking over the U.S. government.

Luther