Our children are not the property of the state

Our children are not the property of the state

There is a tendency, developed or made more palpable over the past 50 years, that our children are first and foremost a state acquisition. The belief has perhaps been in greater evidence nowhere more than in the state education system, with its national curriculum designed to inculcate whatever values a passing government stipulates, and teachers trained in accordance with a prescriptive code which none dare abjure and no headteacher dare repudiate, lest they fall foul of the Gestapo at Ofsted. Any parental assertions of ownership, as with homeschooling, are increasingly viewed with suspicion, with such parents made subject to a level of monitoring usually reserved for suspected paedophiles. And the absurd belief that a parent ought to be informed about their child’s acquisition of contraception or their 14-year-old daughter’s application for an abortion is viewed as an unacceptable incursion into the child's 'right' to privacy, of which the state is now the self-appointed guardian.