This article was written by A.K.Chesterton who was the first Chairman of the National Front, and one of its founder members.  In this article, which was first published in 1971, the writer accurately predicts the outcome of the new liberal dogma which began to shape the opinions of naive and ignorant public servants at that time.

It may appear a lengthy article, but if you take the trouble to read it you will come to understand why so many of our children have been let down by schools and the politically-correct education authorities.

 

What has long been described as the world conspiracy is now openly proclaimed as the changing of attitudes - a term encountered almost daily in the world's press.  It has many aspects, but none more menacing than the attempt to cause chaos among youth and thereby wean it from the well tried and proved standards of the past.  This does not mean that everybody involved in the business is a revolutionary.  The conspirators have only to create a trend for cranks and careerists eagerly to rush in and hasten its momentum.  I do not know which category the deputy leader of the Labour Party belongs, but as a supposedly responsible leader Mr. Edward Short should surely not be encouraging the vicious attempts to demoralize the nation's youth. 

 

Note should be taken of utterances by him which, if not subversive, must be bordering on insanity.  Speaking at the Caerleon College of Education in Monmouthshire he delivered himself of statements such as this: " The old, externally imposed discipline made children into hypocrites and liars because when the disciplinarian was absent, whether he was parent, teacher or policeman, there was no discipline."  This is a monstrous generalization. Hypocrites and liars there have always been and always will be, but to suggest they are the end products of discipline is an absurdity so manifest that it scarcely needs refutation.

 

Mr. Short's own scholastic idea of bringing up children is beautifully simple. They should be " Free to talk and walk about as their common purpose demands," he told an audience, without specifying what he meant by the demands of some hypothetical "Common purpose".  " The gain from cutting down rule structures in communities," he said, "whether schools, colleges or universities would be well worth a little marginal chaos."   A little marginal chaos - it has indeed become a mad world when a leading politician is able to utter such claptrap and not be derisively hooted out of public life.  Would Edward Short be good enough to indicate the size of the marginal chaos that could be called little."  Were he in charge of a boisterous class of forty or fifty young hopefuls, free to talk and walk about as they pleased, and whose "Common Purpose", as it might well be, to take "the mickey" out of him, would he sit back congratulating himself that by non-intervention he was preventing them becoming hypocrites and liars?

 

The answer is perhaps simply that Short wishes to cash in on the trend.  His supporting argument would suggest nothing more serious.  Here in a nutshell it is. " Clearly, the notion that the teacher, parent or the priest knows what is best for the child is pushed much too far in our society. The principal determinants of what a child truly learns are his own interests and his own experience."

 

It would indeed be a teacher of superhuman ingenuity who managed to make sense of that fantastic concept.  What does it mean if not that the child knows better than the parent, teacher or priest what is best, and that all they have to do for him is to make a ring while he proceeds to promote his own interests and undergo whatever experiences he considers desirable? 

 

This kind of rubbish is not even new. Forty years ago no-discipline schools were enthusiastically run by pioneers such as A.S.Neill and Dora Russell.  Bertrand Russell in his autobiography confessed that the school experiment was a total failure, while Neill's books were surprisingly candid about what went wrong in his establishment.  One incident I remember is that when his wife lay dying in the house, he asked some rowdy pupils - if pupils they could be called - to make things easier for her by being less noisy.  Their response was to show their independence which they did by stepping up their row to yelling point.

 

What makes the present trend so sinister is that even as things are, with discipline still supposedly enforced, conditions in many educational establishments especially comprehensive schools - are such that keeping order has become a farce.  Only too often the bullies in the class dominate both class mates and luckless teachers. The latter, either from their own weakness of character or because of lack of support from above, have long since given up the notion that their job is to impart knowledge and are content if they can keep their classes intact until the bell sounds their release.  Chaotic though such a state of affairs undoubtedly is, there is at least the saving grace that those subjected to this little marginal chaos deplore it.

 

Were they and their charges trained to act on the assumption that the children were free to walk around the classroom and talk to their hearts content about some "common purpose" , without reference to the teacher's requirements, then the result would be sheer Bedlam.  Violence would be enthroned and youth made serviceable for the cause of world revolution.

 

I do not suppose that Edward short has the least idea that he supports such motives, but here more than any other sphere of public life ignorance is no excuse for folly.  A man aspiring to participate in government, even though he may lack a sense of history, should at least be able to read the signs of the times. Was Mr. Short sunk deep in coma when a certain Cohn Benditt spread revolt from Nanterre to the Sorbonne, whence it surged under the inane title of "Student Power" , to almost every university in the western world?

 

The lunacy has now reached the stage where the Edward Shorts in the land - those who are not conniving at the political contamination of youth and the destruction of the nation - must wake up and face present facts and what these facts portend. Let them for a start pay heed to a plan incubated by the militants at York, Aston, Reading and Bath Universities (representing more than 12,000 students) and placed before a National Union of Students conference.  The plan demands that violence and vandalism, without let or hindrance or punishment, should be accorded as a right to Britain's half a million students.  It expresses the view that they would be justified in attacking anyone standing in opposition to them.  Particular targets are named - for instance named college authorities who try to restrict them, "fascists and racists", and dons who do research for the Ministry of Defence.      

 

  

 

 

 A left - Wing Subversive student hurls a smoke bomb at Red Lion Square during the 1970's.  Virtually all public jobs are held by anti-British leftists today

 

 

 

Note the London School of Economics Banner.