If you really want parental choice you need a school voucher system but….

….don’t forget the administrative complications By Robert Henderson The “free schools” currently being promoted by the Coalition Government (in reality the Tory part of it)  has two flaws:  it mixes private enterprise and public service and is in practice something likely to be of interest to the middle-class .  If greater choice and diversity for [...]

LibDems make a mockery of elections

57 LibDem MPs were elected in 2010; 57 signed a personal pledge before the election to vote against rises in tuition fees. Yesterday 21 voted  against rises in tuition fees and 6 abstained.  The rest voted for the rise.  What is the point of elections? The LibDem arguments put forward by the likes of Vince Cable to [...]

Tuition fees and Coalition lies

The coalition are floating their penal proposals for student funding on several lies. Lie 1. The tuition fee  debt  will not affect the ability to get a mortgage because the tuition fee debt will not  be collected if a person’s income falls below the minimum contributory figure which is set to become £21,000. This is a [...]

How British higher education became corrupted

Education is a first rate example of how quasi-commercialism can corrupt. It was a pincer movement from the bottom and the top, from schools to universities. Prior to the end of the 1980s our universities had been funded for decades by the University Grants Committee (UGC) which was made up academics. The UGC received an annual [...]

IQ and a dysgenic Western future

 Since Hitler, unapologetic eugenics has been beyond the Pale in mainstream political and academic discourse, although it chunters along unnamed in abortions for the genetically unfit and raises its head occasionally in books such as The Bell Curve which explores the effects of differential breeding, mainly in the USA, and concludes that there is a risk [...]

Blacks: the odd man out?

Blacks occupy a special place in the relationship between IQ and social organisation for two reasons: they have the lowest average IQ and  the difference in IQ distribution between them and the other two broad racial groups (whites and Asians) is much greater than it is between whites and Asians, assuming the latter gap exists. [...]

How the IQ level of a society rises

 How natural selection works on the mind is still uncertain, but if the attributes of mind are substantially genetically determined then they must be subject to natural selection. If this is the case then natural selection would favour differences in mentality which are suited to particular environments. The mechanics of a rising average IQ would [...]

Intelligent Design is creationism in pseudo-scientific disguise

In the beginning was the argument from design.  This claimed that God’s existence was made manifest  by the intense intricacy, utility and beauty of the world, a state of affairs its advocates said could never have happened by blind chance but only through an intelligent creator. Analogies with God and watchmaker were most popular. The [...]

National Identity Theft

The Historical Association reports that history as a subject is dying in schools.  http://www.history.org.uk/news/news_869.html. This is no accident but the deliberate policy of all governments from the 1980s onwards. First, the idea of chronology was removed; themes replaced periods and children were  encouraged not to learn about  great figures from the past but to “empathise” with common folk [...]