We need to ditch battery schooling for a free-range childhood

Restoring children’s health and well-being starts with us

A colleague recently referred me to the work of former headteacher and pedagogue John Abbott. She tells me he spent much of his adult life campaigning to raise awareness about what ailed our existing education system and how it was out of alignment with how we as a species naturally learn and grow.

One analogy he often used was that of battery hens and free-range chickens. Education today, whether at school or at home, tends to take a battery-hen approach, where one keeps the child contained within strict confines and feeds them with ready-made information according to a prescription. All inputs are designed to achieve the desired output which, in many countries, has been to create a passive and compliant workforce.

(As an aside, the book The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin refers to a 1904 report issued by the General Education Board in the US, one of the first foundations established by John D. Rockefeller, Sr. The foundation’s purpose was to influence the direction of education, “to create citizens who are educated enough for productive work under supervision but not enough to question or seek to rise above their class.[1]”)

Needless to say, there is a big problem with battery schooling, as there is with battery farming. Besides the cruelty of it, if a battery hen is suddenly released into the wild, it can lack the muscle to even stand on its own two feet, let alone flap its wings. Unprepared, the hen is unable to adapt to its new surroundings and is left extremely vulnerable.

Abbott, therefore, called for a free-range education, one that gives children the freedom to flex their muscles, explore their world, learn about risk and develop resilience in a changing environment. But what does a free-range education actually look like?

One person eminently qualified to answer this is my next guest on Tess Talks, Mike Fairclough. Mike is an author with a wonderful new book titled Rewilding Childhood. He is also the headteacher at West Rise Junior School in East Sussex, UK. As he makes clear in our conversation, this is no ordinary school. Water buffalo roam the land, together with chickens, goats, sheep and alpacas. The children, aged seven to 11, learn how to shoot, how to light and cook over an open fire, to forage, manage bees and skin rabbits. Alongside academic learning, they spend much of their time outdoors in nature, developing lifelong skills and resilience.

As Mike explains, children are natural risk-takers, they are comfortable with uncertainty and have an inherent curiosity about the world. Isn’t it extraordinary then, how we have ended up with a society where this free-spiritedness has been reframed as deadly?

Here in the UK during the Covid crisis, children were told that they were potential killers and parents duly tested them for Covid twice a week, every week, whether the children had symptoms or not. They were told don’t go out, don’t hug granny, don’t breathe freely, because any one of these activities could kill. They were confined to their rooms, isolated from their peers and, in some countries, were spoon-fed learning online through a screen. Battery-raised, in other words.

Anyone with half a brain and heart would recognise this as a terrible thing to do to anyone, let alone a child. But still, governments went ahead with their abusive policies and now data on the impacts are rolling in, country by country. So much could be said here, about the devastation to physical and mental health and development, the retardation in emotional maturity, reductions in concentration spans, rises in suicide attempts. For a comprehensive review of the data, please see Hugh McCarthey’s Substack which focuses on the impact of Covid-19 policies on children, in particular this article.

Having been locked up, masked up and terrorised, children were then told to get the vaccine, not for themselves but to protect others.

Mike and I spoke about this. He shared with me his frustration with those teachers who know what’s going on, know that the Covid genetic vaccines are harmful, but stay silent for fear of losing their jobs. I share his frustration. If you are a teacher – or nurse, or doctor, parent or employer, or anyone feeling they can’t speak up – I want to invite you to trust in the process of a better way.

When you speak up, you connect with your own inherent power. You become fuelled from the inside out, you find new connections with others on your wavelength, and you become independent from those who would seek to keep you small. You free yourself from the cage the system put you in, the food drip-fed to you through a tube, and you embark on your own adventure in the wild where you belong.

If that sounds scary, it is. But you also find there are those who have been finding their wings already, who are ready to help you find your own.

So, please speak up.

I am not saying it will be easy. Most likely it will be challenging. But it will be meaningful, life-affirming and deeply restorative to you and society at large. Our children need us to get out of our own cages so that we can trip the locks on theirs.

This goes for parents as much as for anyone else. Mothers and fathers, you may have noticed the State has increasingly been insinuating itself between you and your child. Perhaps your child has received messages from the local doctor inviting them to get vaccinated, or has to sit through presentations at school on how they really should get the jab to protect others. In the UK, a legal precedent means children aged twelve and up can be deemed competent to make their own decision on this, without having to inform their parents.

We need to fully inhabit our role as parents and stop outsourcing it to governments, teachers and other authorities that do not have our children’s best interests at heart. Sometimes this means saying or doing things our children don’t like, and it certainly means saying or doing things the State doesn’t like. If you’re parenting in a way that contravenes current government guidelines, depending on what country you are in, that’s a good sign you’re out of the cage and roaming free as nature intended. I note that Denmark is halting its Covid vaccination programme for children – that’s good news, but too late for those children already vaccinated. Even if you still hold the view that government is ultimately benign, you must acknowledge that it is often too slow to act.

I asked Mike if he had a sign-off message to give people. He wrote back with this:

"It's up to us to protect our children. Children are at extremely low risk of serious illness from Covid. The Covid vaccines pose known, very serious risks and have no long-term safety data. A child can still catch and spread Covid when vaccinated.

Just think about it carefully."

Please do join us this Sunday for a fascinating, life-affirming conversation about getting out of our cages and rewilding ourselves and our children.

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[1] Griffin, G., 1995. The creature from Jekyll Island. Westlake Village, Calif.: American Media, p.557.