It was only one day after she’d left detestable Greg Potter for good yet he’d already managed to send three different officials to trouble her but he wasn’t stopping there for the day with his campaign of provocation.  David and Anna arrived home after school and reported that during their break time Greg had repeatedly driven slowly past them and had wound his window down, gestured that their throats would be cut and had just stared menacingly.  It had unnerved them both but worse was that, despite the fact Greg never takes the bus he did on this occasion - just to bullyrag Sarah’s two defenceless children.  They told their mother that the slime ball had sat behind them and had whispered, “Tell your mum I’m gonna slit her throat and leave her bleedin’ to death in Devil’s Bowl and then I’m gonna tie you two up and leave you hanging upside down, naked, one hundred foot down Goblin Gully.  You’ll be there all night freezing, hungry and SUFFERING before anyone finds you.”  They’d moved seats and had told a parent, but galling Greg had totally denied ever saying such a thing.

Sarah was boiling mad.  How dare he target his venom on her two innocent little kids.  She didn’t need to mull over the problem of school.  She knew immediately with one hundred percent certainty that the right thing to do was to pull David and Anna out again and teach them herself.  She was kicking herself for ever putting them back in but that hadn’t been Sarah’s decision; it had been Greg’s.  He’d managed to convince her that she wouldn’t have the time or energy to teach her own when Jason arrived on the scene.  What he meant was that he didn’t like David and Anna being at home and a newborn baby was a convenient excuse because he certainly had no intentions of helping in any way towards his son’s upbringing.  He’d made it clear that he wouldn’t even change a nappy.  And he didn’t; saying it was ‘women’s work’.  The strangest thing was tho, during more amicable times, Sarah heard Greg telling his mum on the phone that he thought home-education was a good idea and that if his future wife wanted to teach Jason and Jessica then he’d be all for it.  Yet in the next breath, during the heat of an argument, Greg would be insisting that children should be in school and that he wouldn’t allow Sarah to home-educate.

            Sarah recalled the reason that she’d removed David, when he was four, from reception class in the first place.  The teacher kept telling her, and lots of other parents, that children get behind if they don’t do extra reading, writing and numbers in the evenings at home.  Sarah reasoned that if she was expected to do the teaching, out of school hours, when David was tired and uninterested, what was the point of sending him to school?  Her memories of those early school days were of head lice infestation - three times in one year, David being kicked in his privates by a known thug and the school not doing a thing about it, David getting his uniform muddied and torn almost daily for two weeks because of ‘boisterous’ boys - the school being powerless to stop it, David’s jumper and coat being stolen and never recovered and of David not learning anything there except swearing, spitting and being cheeky.

            Sarah pondered the idea that school was just one big governmental lie - an abuse of children and a scheme to brainwash them into being obedient and good so that they can grow up to be slaves of society, unwilling and unable to challenge deceitful, hypocritical, self-serving, greedy, corrupt rulers.  She decided that no child learns anything of any use at school and that those kids who are so-called ‘successful’ at school get extra tuition at home to enable them to pass a few exams, which only prepares them to become puppets of society anyhow.  She questioned the brilliance and success of the school system when teacher morale was so low, when so many kids truant and when so many get expelled.  She considered it atrocious that the state doesn’t feel obliged to find a suitable alternative method of educating the kids it fails, preferring to allow its excluded and abandoned pupils to eventually become inmates of its young offenders prison system; and she found it abhorrent that some state officials choose to label legally home-taught kids ‘truants’ and that they waste valuable resources trying to get them back into school!

She firmly believed that the compulsory schooling law [just like all laws] were invented by rich people and aimed at the poor; the attitude of such snobs being that unless deprived kids are locked up all day, they’ll be on the street drunk and causing trouble.

            She felt damned angry that, despite having a generally happy school life herself and leaving with a respectable handful of ‘O’ levels, they were achieved only through useless ‘parrot-fashion’ learning and good exam technique which had little to do with understanding and interest; a fact which has recently been rectified by Sarah reading encyclopaedias and watching current affairs documentaries with David and Anna.  School was, for Sarah, a serious waste of time and was damaging in that it almost put her off learning for life.  It had taken a long time for her to realise that this is precisely the government’s hidden agenda.  After all, she believed, if everyone was educated to their best potential and if they were all aware of what’s going on in the world and if they were unafraid to use their minds, the government and all other political parties and councils would simply cease to be.

            Sarah mused that if adults were forced to attend an undemocratic and totalitarian, unhealthy, mean-spirited, prison-like institution six+ hours of the day, they’d soon revolt or resign and claim ‘mental cruelty’ compensation.  Yet millions of parents happily and ignorantly force their children through the incompetent and destructive school system in the mistaken belief that their offspring are getting a suitable ‘education’ in preparation for adulthood.  The truth being that the majority are being ‘educated’ mainly for factory or other low paid work with the more able pupils managing to find office work on leaving school if they’re lucky.  Sarah reckoned that the school culture was simply a pale, timid and genteel version of street culture - a sick, insane society, obsessed by violence and worship of dominance, materialism, luxury and power.

It was settled then; Sarah decided that since she’d dumped Greg, she’d stick with the courage of her convictions and not allow anyone again to influence her thinking, especially concerning the welfare of David and Anna.  And since she did not feel obliged to account to any agency in this regard, other than GOD who authorised their being in the first place, she decided to tell the Head tomorrow not to expect her kids in school for the foreseeable future.  David and Laura were over the moon.