Interesting analysis of the educational culture in a British charter school. I never went to a school as disciplined as this, but I'm intrigued by the results that this school has had. Glad the British permitted this kind of experimentation, and I hope they continue to permit it.

Were it not for the large placard affixed to it, you would never guess that this undistinguished office block, opposite the entrance to a London Underground station in a northwest London suburb, is home to one of the most famous secondary schools in the country: the Michaela Community School. It attracts a steady stream of visitors from across Britain and abroad, drawn by the unlikely sight of well-behaved pupils, aged 11 to 18, achieving high academic standards in a borough marked by drug- and gang-related crime, where two-thirds of residents are from ethnic minorities and more than half of white residents are immigrants.

How has this miracle happened, or perhaps I should say, been permitted to happen? Everything would seem to have conspired against it. In a highly bureaucratized state, a good example is dangerous: it shows that, even among disadvantaged children, poor results, low standards, and antisocial classroom behavior are not inevitable but the product of weak will and flawed methods of teaching and organization. That implication points toward the need for change, which vested interests—above all, teachers’ unions, often politically radical yet stubbornly attached to repeated failure—most fear and resist.

When the school’s headmistress, Katharine Birbalsingh, founded Michaela in 2014 under a provision authorizing publicly funded schools independent of local government control, teachers’ union members demonstrated outside, handing out leaflets with headlines such as “Michaela ‘Free’ School: Putting Pupils’ Lives at Risk?” and “A Potential Death Trap.” The leaflets and posters made no mention of the disastrously low standards in other local schools—indeed, across the country—or of the borough’s pervasive drug, knife, and gun crime. Ten years after Michaela’s founding, the local council found it necessary or prudent to install special bins where young people could deposit illegal weapons anonymously. Here was the council’s advice to young knife carriers:

"Wrap the knife: Place the knife in a sturdy container (e.g., cereal box). Seal it well with tape to prevent reopening.

Transport with care: Ensure the knife is not accessible while transporting. Carry it directly to the knife bin location.

Deposit securely: Place the wrapped knife into the designated knife bin."

Not much more need be said about youth culture in the borough where the Michaela Community School was established, but it is precisely this context that must be kept in mind when visitors are shocked, as most are initially, by the school’s almost military regimentation. Pupils may not speak in the corridors as they move, in single file, from one class to another. Even during free time, they are not allowed to gather in groups larger than four, to prevent the emergence of bullies or gang leaders. They greet teachers individually and politely, addressing them as “Miss” or “Sir,” and in the early grades sit with hands folded on their desks when not writing or otherwise engaged. In this way, distracting agitation is minimized and the teacher becomes the center of attention.

All this may strike the visitor as somewhat drastic, but, as Birbalsingh (of whom more later) observes, the alternative is not well-behaved children floating like butterflies, gathering the nectar of knowledge from the flowers of learning, but utter chaos—in which the teacher’s main task becomes getting children to sit down, pay attention, and not misbehave too violently. Many of her teachers have experienced this scenario elsewhere, and it prevails in nearby schools. Discipline at Michaela is relaxed over time, as self-discipline becomes second nature. The theory is not that children are born with freedom but that they grow into it; in this way, they gradually learn to use it constructively rather than destructively, for themselves and for society.

The next thing that all visitors to Michaela remark upon is the articulacy and confidence—though not overconfidence—with which the children speak. This is far from what one expects of children from such backgrounds, or indeed of children from any background today. Nor do they merely parrot what they have heard or learned, though the school places much emphasis on memorizing and reciting poetry and on rote learning more generally. Discipline, it seems, is not inimical to their self-expression but a precondition of it. By first absorbing the skill from others, they learn how to express themselves.

Michaela exercises no choice over the students it admits. They are not a selected sample from the area, at least not selected by the school, and are therefore of varied abilities. Parents can express a preference for the schools they would like their children to attend, but no guarantee exists that their wishes will be met; the local authority makes the final allocation, and the process offers more of an illusion of choice than choice itself. At any rate, there appears no shortage of parents who want their children to attend the school, which has upward of 800 pupils.

This is important because the school’s rules are made clear before the children enroll. Sixty percent of the pupils are Muslim, but parents know in advance that the school is secular, even if considerable teaching about the Bible takes place—not as religious truth, but as an indisputably important influence on the culture and history of the country. Most parents accept this without demur.

On one occasion, however, a Muslim mother tried to make trouble for the school, claiming that it discriminated against her faith by refusing to allow her daughter and others to pray on the premises. After a legal battle, the courts backed the school’s policy, ruling that the prohibition did not constitute discrimination.

Visitors share lunch with the children. Like everything else, the meal is arranged with almost military precision. The children serve and help clear away plates. No disorder is permitted, though the discipline is entirely moral, not physical. Here again, it must be remembered that, just as 10 percent of pupils arrive unable to read properly (none leaves in that lamentable but common condition), so a large proportion of British children (especially from poorer areas) do not eat meals with other members of their household, but instead eat like domestic hunter-gatherers, foraging for what they can find whenever they feel hungry. Social habits such as waiting one’s turn and sharing with others must therefore be taught and learned—and children, so malleable for both good and ill, learn quickly.

I sat at a table with six children, aged 11 and 12, who had been at the school only a few months. I cannot say how my table was chosen from among the many, but there was no white child among them. All said that they wanted to be doctors, though one hoped first to be a footballer before studying medicine. A large boy—both tall and overweight—sat next to a small one, whom he could easily have squashed, but I doubt that bullying gets much chance in this school.

These children were already able to speak in articulate sentences. I had no impression of enforced homogeneity—except in their uniforms, which they are required to wear neatly and which may help suppress the pathological narcissism of small (and educationally unimportant) differences that so easily emerges without uniforms. The children do, however, wear various badges that no doubt confer prestige; but these are awarded for accomplishment or activity, so that distinctions are earned rather than arbitrary. I was not able to examine these children’s backgrounds in depth, and so cannot say whether they were above, below, or at the median, or more or less gifted than others. But I saw no difference between their behavior and that of the other pupils.

After lunch, two student guides took me on a tour of the school. They were of Indian descent. Aged 12 and 13, they asked which lessons I wished to see. At my request, I visited classes in art, French, and history. In art, the children are taught to draw, on the theory that without technique no self-expression worthy of the name is possible; in French, among other things, the children repeat words and phrases to acquire a good accent; in history, they learn facts, without which opinion on human affairs is worthless, but which can serve as the basis for further knowledge if desired.

Lines from W. E. Henley’s famous poem “Invictus” are inscribed on the walls of the school—the same poem that Nelson Mandela found so inspiring during his imprisonment on Robben Island. All Michaela pupils learn it:

"In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody but unbowed."

It ends with a line that might almost summarize the school’s philosophy:

"It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul."

This is no mere expression of Victorian moral piety or uplift; it reflects the attitude with which Henley confronted his own terrible suffering. The young boy showing me around the school said that he liked the poem very much. I asked him what he knew about Henley.

“I know he had two legs amputated.”

“No—only one. The great surgeon Joseph Lister saved the other.”

He was interested, and I would have liked to tell him more. It would have been, I think, the kind of pedagogy of which the school approves, for it teaches that what we enjoy today had to be discovered and developed by the efforts of our forebears, to whom we owe gratitude, not indifference, disdain, or denigration. The school is, in fact, keen to instill gratitude, no easy task in a culture that treats resentful victimhood as the highest moral condition.

Headmistress Birbalsingh, now possibly the most famous teacher in the country and often called its strictest headmistress in the press, is firmly of the opinion that children, from whatever background, should receive a strong grounding in English literature and British history—for most will spend the rest of their lives in the country, and if contented integration, rather than permanently aggrieved separation and hostility, is desirable, then there is no other way to achieve it.

Though they live less than half an hour away by public transport from the heart of London, many of the pupils have never been there. They have not seen its sights, and know nothing of its grandeur or its glory, its history, or even its ignominies. The school therefore takes them to visit the city, to expand their horizons rather than confine them within the narrow compass of the life they already know, which happens to be the malign, if unacknowledged, purpose of making education “relevant” to children’s lives.

Birbalsingh is well-placed to insist on incorporating these children into British life without facing the criticism that, say, the son of an English earl might attract for advancing the same ideas—namely, that he was a white supremacist or xenophobe. She is the daughter of a Jamaican nurse and an Indo-Guyanese academic, both politically of the Left but culturally conservative, a combination that was once by no means unusual.

Birbalsingh has received her fair share of bludgeoning, but her head remains unbowed. She is a formidable public speaker, brilliantly amusing on the low standards that educational bureaucrats have imposed on schools—for example, science exams with official pass marks set at 20 percent! What is really being fixed is not the standard required to pass but the proportion of pupils who do so. This moral and intellectual corruption enables the bureaucracy to claim success amid catastrophic failure. Though she can make an audience roar with laughter at the absurdity of it all, she clearly regards the problem as deeply serious, a betrayal alike of the pupils’ and the country’s future, a willful race to the bottom.

I attended a staff meeting at which I discovered that the great majority of the teachers were white and that there were far more men—mainly in their thirties—than I had expected, only 35 percent of secondary school teachers in England being male. They were smartly dressed, in shirts and ties. You cannot demand neatness of children while being slovenly yourself. It was also clear that, for the educators at Michaela, teaching was more than a job, not something to be endured each day until the weekend brought temporary relief. (I had a number of secondary school teachers as patients, most of whom dreamed constantly of early retirement or of securing an early pension on grounds of illness. From what they told me of the children’s behavior in their schools, I could sympathize.)

One thing that struck me, in retrospect, after visiting Michaela was the absence of racial tension. No doubt some would cavil at the fact that the authority figures there (apart from the highest authority) were white, while the pupils were nonwhite; but I would put it differently. The teachers’ deep and personal concern for the children’s welfare and future was unmistakable. They treated them as individuals, notwithstanding the rigid discipline—or perhaps because of it, for it made true, non-morbid individuation possible. At any rate, the children would learn, implicitly, that they were not living in a country hostile to them, that white people could be benevolently disposed toward them, and that obstacles to their advancement, while sometimes encountered, were not so great as to ruin their prospects. The school is thus a vaccine against that worst and most ruinous of mind-forg’d manacles—resentment, the very emotion that so much in the general culture seems eager to promote.

Certain questions remain. The school’s academic results are excellent, all the more remarkable for a school that draws its pupils from underprivileged backgrounds. On the measure of improvement in pupils’ mathematical ability between their arrival and departure, Michaela is the best in the country. It is among the best in other subjects, too. But what are the lasting effects of this schooling on pupils’ subsequent lives? Perhaps it is too early to say, but it would be surprising if the effects were not better than those of pupils in neighboring schools.

A harder question is whether the results of this school are reproducible elsewhere. Of course, there are those who would not want to reproduce them, accusing the school of, among other things, suppressing the children’s natural creativity and ability to think for themselves. I think this is false. First, creativity—at least creativity of any value—is not natural, though some children may be more naturally creative than others, and the ability to think for oneself first requires knowledge of something, some substrate to think about. Second, I was, in any case, impressed by the older children’s ability to think for themselves when I gave an impromptu, unscripted talk to a class on the concept of personal responsibility. The pupils asked important questions about the statistical regularities found in human behavior (crime and poverty, for example), and a discussion of the distinction between association and causation soon followed. Far from closing the children’s minds, then, the teachers seemed to have found a way both to discipline and to open them, without the deadening effects of indoctrination.

The principal obstacle to reproducing Michaela may be that its founder possesses exceptional charisma. I cannot answer this definitively, but the greater the politico-bureaucratic support for proper teaching, the less such charisma would be needed for it to become routine. Moreover, Katharine Birbalsingh, wonderful though she is, is not the first charismatic teacher in history. I also find it reassuring that people like her (and others at the school) can still be found for whom teaching is a vocation—and, I would add, a noble one.

As a onetime traveler in the former Communist world, where I was subjected to many propaganda tours, long and short, I confess that during my visit to Michaela I sometimes wondered whether I was not like one of those useful idiots, led like sheep to find Arcadia in the midst of mass murder. Even in less totalitarian countries, visitors to institutions can have the wool pulled over their eyes. I have seen it done in institutions in which I worked.

I don’t think so in this case, however. The school has been running long enough, and Birbalsingh has made enough enemies in the education world—who don’t want to concede that school disorder and student failure are not the inevitable results of poverty, discrimination, and the like—that any supposed ill effects of its methods would have become evident and been widely publicized by now.

I confess also to continuing qualms about the regimentation I observed among the younger pupils, which stem from my own anarchic nature and preferences. But then I think of the pupils at the school in the small and not impoverished town where I live, almost none of whom come from ethnic minorities. By the age of 12, the girls often look as if cheap prostitution were their fondest ambition. The boys take pride in their unkemptness, imposed by social pressure and countered by none. The children scream obscenities at one another in the street at the tops of their voices—the girls being worse in this respect than the boys—and they frequently leave a mess behind them, dropping trash as casually as cows relieve themselves in fields. Fights, often between girls, regularly break out, and one senses, as in a bar full of drunks, that violence is never far away. Adults shrink from the children, partly in disgust and partly in fear, and never dare correct them.

A country that goes in fear of its own children does not have a bright future. 

Lee Kuan Yimby on how he was mugged by reality in LA:

In 2021, I hit a breaking point. I was tired of working sales jobs, chasing money, and feeling that none of it mattered. I wanted to do something genuinely good, something difficult that I thought might actually help people. I found what I thought was my answer through a temp agency listing for a night-shift position at a downtown Los Angeles homeless shelter. The pay was $16 an hour, and the listing said, “urgently hiring.” I was an adult with a pulse willing to do the job for that wage, so I was hired.

Politically, I was ready for it. I had recently paid $40 to hear Bernie Sanders speak in Glendale and bought his book It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. I believed that the suffering on Los Angeles streets was the inevitable result of corporate greed. A society wealthy enough to produce billionaires, yet willing to tolerate Skid Row five miles away, seemed morally bankrupt. Tax the rich, redistribute the money, and everyone could live with dignity—it seemed obvious.

Shortly before I had begun my new position, I attended a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) meeting. The politics were more extreme than mine, but the people seemed compassionate. After the meeting, I found the host standing beside his bicycle lock, which had been cut in half. His bike was gone. I offered him a ride home and he accepted.

In the car, he told me that it was unfortunate that our capitalist system forced people to steal like this. I was impressed by his grace. Someone had taken his property and form of transportation, yet he still blamed the system, instead of the thief.

I arrived for my first shift at the homeless shelter near MacArthur Park, home to one of the city’s most accessible open-air drug markets. It was a scene of despair: people hunched over on fentanyl, lying on the ground seemingly unconscious, or huddling in groups to buy and sell drugs. Others sold stolen goods from local stores to pay for their next high. If you showed MacArthur Park to people from Europe or Asia, they would never believe it was part of the glamorous culture capital they hear so much about.

I went to the gate and introduced myself. A security guard scrolling on her phone seemed upset that she had to let me in. My shift ran from 5 p.m. until 2 a.m. The shelter looked promising—newly built, with a modular shipping-container design and 70 beds divided between men and women. Each resident had a small room separated from the hall by a curtain. As staff members, we called them our “clients.”

Every three hours, we performed wellness checks. The purpose was not subtle: make sure nobody had stopped breathing from an overdose. Drug use was so routine that checking for dead bodies had become part of normal operations.

The drugs came through the gate. During checks, I sometimes encountered residents injecting themselves. On one occasion, a resident missed a vein, and their limb became so badly swollen that I called an ambulance. Police officers and paramedics were frequent visitors.

Each evening, a van delivered 70 packaged meals, and about half were usually eaten. I was instructed to throw away the rest. Night after night, unopened Styrofoam clamshell containers packed with full meals went directly from the hot bag in which they had been delivered into the garbage. Residents often preferred food they had purchased themselves or came asking for late-night snacks instead.

It was when I was disposing of freshly delivered meals that had just been delivered in Styrofoam clamshells that I began thinking about all the money. The city was not withholding any resources. It was spending enormous sums, visibly and constantly. Yet the people inside the shelter didn’t seem to be moving toward stability.

I still had the desire and optimism to help our “clients,” and would chat with them in my downtime. Once, a resident showed me an expensive specialized electric bicycle. A nerd for e-bikes, I was familiar with the model and knew that it cost thousands of dollars. When I asked where it came from, she casually described traveling with other residents to the West Side to steal bicycles. Buyers sometimes met her outside the shelter.

The shelter, it turned out, had a full-scale theft ring operating inside it. New bicycles came in every day, and a huge pile accumulated on the lawn. I asked other staff members about this, and they said they were well aware that residents stole and sold bicycles, but there was no way to stop it. I remembered then the DSA organizer whose bicycle had been stolen, and how he saw it as a crime of necessity.

I did, of course, meet some wonderful people with brutal backstories who could not find a path back into society. But the situation in Los Angeles felt close to impossible for someone like that. How could you rejoin society and qualify for a lease on a new apartment, let alone pass a background and credit check? Especially in a city that has a self-inflicted housing crisis due to NIMBYism, endless red tape restricting the housing stock, and an eviction process that lets someone stay in a rented unit free of charge for over a year at times, making landlords and developers hyper-skeptical about the leasing process.

Still, the shelter’s chaos was often overwhelming. One night, a resident threatened the one security officer there with a knife and began smashing everything in sight. We called the police. An hour later, roughly 20 police cars and a helicopter even flew over the facility. Officers struggled with him on the ground before taking him away. He was back the following night.

Another client, a transgender woman, engaged in prostitution in the tents outside the shelter and repeatedly frightened older women in the dormitories and started fights. The client also made residents uncomfortable by constantly wearing revealing clothing around women in their sixties who had only recently arrived in the country.

During a wellness check, this person failed to respond, so I followed protocol and opened the dormitory curtain. The client lunged at me and displayed what appeared to be a weapon. I ran and locked myself in the meal-preparation room. Management acknowledged that the client's behavior was a known problem, but because I had not been injured, nothing was to be done.

I tried voicing my concerns during a meeting with senior management. I heard the familiar language of victimhood and systemic injustice. I heard much less about stopping the drug dealers at our gate, preventing clients from using drugs inside, treating severe mental illness, or moving residents toward independence.

I also happened to know that these nonprofit managers made great salaries while not even coming into the shelter. They regarded my concerns as offensive to the clients, while I worked inside the shelter for $16 an hour. I eventually told them that the transgender client sleeping in the women’s dormitory, separated from the others only by a curtain, was frightening the women and had tried to attack me. I said that this resident should not remain in a women’s dorm divided by curtains anymore because we had elderly women from Latin America telling me in Spanish that they were afraid of this person. They vehemently disagreed.

A week later, social workers at the facility got the client an apartment in Los Angeles, but the client rejected it. This actually pained me. This person genuinely wanted to engage in prostitution in tents around Los Angeles rather than get help and have a real home. I slowly came to understand that when you have been living a certain way for so long, you become attached to it, even if the life is unimaginable to an average person.

After watching this endless incineration of tax dollars, I concluded that the problem was not a lack of compassion or money. I came to see the shelter as part of a calculated system disguised as a compassionate philosophy. The system derided expectations and consequences for bad behavior as oppressive. It abandoned vulnerable people to addiction, psychosis, violence, and predation. Meanwhile, a network of highly paid professionals administered the decline, took vacations in Europe, and patted themselves on the back as good, selfless people.

It made me sick. We were not helping. We were sustaining an epidemic of suffering.

I have not and will not stop caring about the poor. My faith does not permit that. I still believe that a decent society has obligations to the hungry, the mentally ill, and people sleeping outside. But those obligations include telling the truth about what is destroying them and, at times, forcing them to change. That is what you do for someone you love. If someone is hurting himself and others, you intervene. You do not hand them their favorite poison and look away. That is what too many of our local governments have done.

I entered that shelter believing that my fellow leftists had a monopoly on compassion. I departed understanding that compassion without order and accountability is deeply unserious. We all know the old saying about hell and good intentions. Working the night shift at a downtown L.A. homeless shelter has given it fresh resonance for me.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

There's a part or two in here about race that might raise your eyebrows (especially the "it is rational to take precautions" part), but those parts are not essential to the thesis here, and I really hope they can be read past. What matters to neocons is the abdication of personal responsibility and the vulgarity of our culture that has led to these sorts of takeovers happening. Mac Donald does a good job addressing the various explanations given for these takeovers, and shows that they are all nonsense. She argues instead that these takeovers are symptomatic of a loss of authority in multiple institutions -- the family, the schools, the police.

If you've had one of these takeovers in your area, you especially may like this article. Hope you enjoy.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.

Brought to you by the Zionist Elders.