LIFE FOR SALE, DIVIDENDS HUGE

I blame a great deal of what’s wrong in many societies one way or another on education.
If you live in underprivileged parts of the third world, the poor parts that comic relief envoys visit in order to show us what’s really going on, there isn’t education and that absence means there’s a huge gap between hoping, dreaming and reality.
But we don’t live in those parts of the third world, we live here, in the relatively affluent UK, and like a secretive shadow in Hell parts of our education service have been sold off. They’ve been renamed Academies and slipped into the private sector where one of the factors governing their very being is dividends for share-holders.
And what’s more, the present government wants ALL schools to be owned and run by private companies with shareholders.
Now let me slip back a bit, to my own childhood. I went to a moderately good school (though one or two of the teachers were allowed to use excess when it came to punishment of the more brutal kind), but I learned the most important lesson, that it was a good school. We were told it daily, in assembly and in throw-away comments by most of the staff. It became ingrained in us – we go to a good school, and as I say I still think it was moderately good.
But let’s be honest – there were despicable things about it. Yet the over-riding mantra of educational goodness tended to push thoughts of those aside and my mind accepted that it was a good school.
You see, if we are privileged to be taught in schools then we tend to have our attitudes and beliefs formed by the teachers. It’s how religion ridiculously still exists even though the basic notion of gods and heavens and angels is all arrant nonsense. And it’s the very kernel of the nut we take with us through life.
And if all of education is provided on the basis of profit and dividends then praise and worship of the wealthy and their off-shore bank accounts will become the songs that get sung in our hearts as we travel along life’s already tone-deaf path.
What they’re doing is pre-forming a future society so that there’s no room for anything but capitalist dogma. And capitalist dogma, my friends, stinks.
Now then, to save me time repeating myself you can pretend the above is about health and the National Health Service. It’s exactly the same thing. Private enterprise is very enterprising if there’s profit to be made. It tends to asset-strip when there isn’t.
And we’re sleep-walking, courtesy of the mindless morons with a vote who believe every word they read in a press owned almost exclusively by billionaires living glorious off-shore lives, into a nightmare world wherein we merely provide the dividends for faceless shareholders. Wherein that’s our only role. It scares the shit out of me.