Is it ethical to home-school my kids?

Dear Ethan,

Marjorie Aimslin,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Dear Marjorie,

Is home-schooling ethical!? It’s essential. Aside from bottlefeeding them or allowing them to eat crisps, sweets, meat and non-Soil Association approved fruit and veg, sending your nipper to a redbrick building in which he will be taught such human-centric and Gaia-phobic nonsense as ‘history’ and ‘maths’ is the most abusive thing you can do to him.

A modern, mixed, bustling school – which is likely to include the sons and daughters of factory workers (how can we be sure they aren’t infected with asbestos?), famous footballers and even airline pilots and other climate criminals – is no place for such super-sensitive and planet-friendly children as ours, Marjorie. I made the mistake of allowing our eldest boy to attend a nearby comp for a few months. There was ALWAYS trouble. The other kids simply did not understand my boy’s reluctance to play football (he hates the idea of kicking around a pig’s bladder, okay?); to take part in gym (ropes are a no-no in the Greenhart family because they frequently contain a synthetic fibre called polypropylene which is made by the CHEMICAL INDUSTRY); and to sit through a history lesson in which the teacher very strongly insinuated that the Industrial Revolution was a good thing.

I was so proud of my boy for walking out of that class, yet the other kids threw pens, erasers and fun-sized Mars bars at him (using the sugary sludge that their unthinking parents put inside their lunchboxes as actual weapons), and the school branded him ‘disobedient’. ‘Yeah, civilly disobedient’, I retorted, and withdrew my boy from that den of educational vice and grotesque vandalism (you should have seen the graffiti in the toilets) faster than you could say ‘Sir, I feel unwell…’

Marjorie, it would take an entire Epping Forest worth of textbooks to tell you what is wrong with school education. That’s one bad thing already: textbooks. It gives me and my two boys sleepless nights to think of the number of trees cut down in the prime of their lives just so children can be provided with books on Shakespeare, science and sex which they don’t even bother to read, instead defacing them with obscene doodles and insane slogans like: ‘Woz I ere? Yes I woz.’ What’s wrong with the old oral tradition of passing on knowledge? With just telling people things, or showing them by making temporary chalk drawings on stone walls?

I have come to the conclusion that schools are factories of conformism, where children are DRUGGED UP with fatty foods and E-number packed drinks, BRAINWASHED to accept the poisonous idea that human knowledge is somehow superior to Gaia knowledge or dog knowledge or ant knowledge, and TRAINED through physical education to become fast-running, heavy object-throwing, competitive lunatics perfectly suited for the world of work in our capitalist/catastrophist society.

Marjorie, what I saw when I visited the educational zoo my boy attended… it sent shivers down my spine. This was in 2004 BCC – Before Celebrity Chef. Jamie Oliver had not yet grabbed the nation’s schools by their ketchup-stained collars and forced them to replace their fat-packed school dinners with Waldorf salads and turnip smoothies. In the lunch hall, I saw densely-torsoed, thick-limbed children wolfing on things called ‘turkey twizzlers’, twisted, rubbery, greasy bits of meat; they washed them down with various shades of fizzy pop, giving rise to a chorus of turkey-tinged belching, and finished off with big blocks of stodgy chocolate sponge swimming in a substance I had never known existed: ‘pink custard’. My poor boy was sitting on his own in the corner of the dining hall, protecting his non-plastic based lunchbox and his lunch of egg-free crackers with lentil-and-pea paste from the bulging eyes of curious children high on chemically-enhanced turkey flesh.

Later, I watched my boy take part in a sports day. It was like a scene from Hieronymus Bosch. Podgy-bodied children in ill-fitting sports gear ran across fields carrying spoons on eggs or with their legs tied together to imitate some kind of conjoined deformity. Other children hopped, skipped and leapt into sandpits, or threw spear-like objects into the distance, as if desperate to recapture the simpler and happier lifestyles of their superior ancestors, the Neanderthals. And all the while, the kids’ parents – the mums in pink tracksuits and hoop earrings, the dads in paint-stained jeans – cheered and jeered for their little Britney or Zoolander to ‘whoop’ the other kids ‘into oblivion’.

Of course, the worst part of the school was the classroom itself. In my boy’s class, there were actually TWO LIVE GUINEA PIGS in a cage. The children named them Posh and Becks and took turns feeding them. Of course they thought it was hilarious that my boy had never heard of ‘Posh and Becks’, and guffawed madly when he asked why two guinea pigs imprisoned without trial had been named after a word used to describe the upper classes and a brand of beer. But it was went on around the falsely imprisoned guinea pigs that was really sickening, Marjorie: in schools, children are continually and relentlessly taught that mankind is rational (as if!) and that his ‘rational’ way of viewing the world, through numbers, pie charts, historical facts and figures etczzz, is superior to every other way of viewing the world. Schools are Institutionally Speciesist.

Children are indoctrinated with maths and science, two crazed subjects that treat the natural world and its phenomena as things to be measured and observed by man. The arrogance! They are mind-warped with history, a masculinist and super-linear description of the evolution of things from the point of view of mankind (kings, generals, rioting mobs) and his various mad actions over the years. The narcissism! They are desensitised to the feelings of non-human beings in biology, where they cut open frogs (Institutionalised Amphibiaphobia) and look at cells through microscopes without taking into consideration the cells’ feelings or the question of whether the cells WANT to be looked at. The insanity! And they are taught various different languages, which is perhaps the most pernicious and poisonous part of the school curriculum since it twists children’s minds into thinking that travelling overseas and conversing in French, Italian or Swahili is a good thing, despite the fact that travel farts tonnes and tonnes of CO2 into Mother Earth’s already bunged-up sinuses. The horror!

Marjorie, home schooling is the ONLY solution to the terrors of the modern education system. Like Sheba and I, you should liberate your kids from the tyranny of turkey twizzler-fuelled bullying and government-approved speciesist education, and teach them to love nature, loathe man-unkind, and to run fast not in order to win, but for the pleasure of feeling Gaia’s wind running through their hair. Or if they are being chased by feral children driven wild by the taste of processed meat.

Ethan Greenhart is here to answer all your questions about ethical living in the twenty-first century. Email him at {encode=”Ethan.Greenhart@spiked-online.com” title=”Ethan.Greenhart@spiked-online.com”}. Read his earlier columns here.