A friend passed on this article to me and I just found a copy online on the Daily Mail website. I thought UK readers may find it interesting, particularly those of you who homeschool. I'm afraid it's a scarily accurate prediction of the way our country and government is heading at the moment. And boy, it makes me want to get out there and do something to stop those power-crazy, money-grabbing, freedom-slaughtering oppressors of the innocent.....grrrr!!
You can't hear the jackboots, but this is still oppression
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
We used to think that Communism would arrive in this country on the bayonets of Soviet soldiers, if it came at all. We never realised that it would instead materialise amid our freedom and prosperity, step by tiny step, in the form of bureaucratic interference and political correctness.
As one of the few British people who has actually lived in a Communist country (Moscow in the early Nineties, since you ask), I know better than most what such societies feel like, and how they work. And in the past two weeks I have seen several developments in Britain which seem strangely familiar.
The first was a proposal to refuse school places to children who had not been given the MMR injection. I have no idea if the MMR is safe or not. But I know many thoughtful and well-informed people who believe that it damaged their children, or fear that it might do so. A free country would not blackmail individuals in this way.
The next was a sinister report from the 'Department for Children' demanding that prying officials be empowered to force their way into the homes of parents who prefer to educate their sons and daughters at home.
This is our all-powerful State's angry response to a growing rebellion, by mothers and fathers who are sick of seeing their children bullied, neglected and miseducated in the state education system, and rightly think they can do a better job. How can the commissars in charge of the Western world's worst schools be fit to judge how well a parent is teaching her own child?
The pretext for this invasion of privacy is a baseless suggestion that home education could be used as a cover for child abuse. Well, so it could, and so could piano lessons, dentistry or newspaper delivery rounds. But these are not subject to Comrade Balls's new inquisition. Why not? Because they don't challenge his desire to march all children into egalitarian comprehensive sausage machines, notorious as they are for violence, ignorance and drugs.
Interesting, isn't it, that on the one hand these new Stalinists want to deny school to the children of dissenters, and on the other to force dissenters to send their children to school. I suspect that what they really want to do is to prosecute both groups, and these moves are a step towards that. The common theme is the desire to tell people what to think.
But there's a third development which should also scare us. Two thirds of British pre-school children are now left in nurseries as their mothers are marched off to wage-slavery.
Well, you might like to know that Vladimir Lenin once described such nurseries as 'the germ cell of the Communist society' because they stole children from their parents and placed upbringing in the hands of the authorities.
Private life, the family home, freedom of conscience and action, have never been so menaced. But because this oppression is not accompanied by the crash of goose-stepping jackboots, we don't see it for what it is. It is time we did.
