"Educational Conscription"

Several developments on the campaign against extending compulsory education, focused via the new collective blog.

1) We have three additions to our list of contributors:
- Tom Paine of Last Ditch fame, one of the most vociferous supporters of liberty in the blogosphere;
- celebrated blogger Not Saussure. NS has an excellent post on the topic here — it is sober, thoughtful and erudite, as is his wont;
- Roger Thornhill of NeueArbeit Macht Frei, whose jolly blog title helped to inspire the campaign image (apologies re Godwin's Law, but sometimes conditions are serious enough to break a few rules of etiquette).

There are some more invitations in the pipeline, so we may get a couple more appointments to the board.

2) An e-petition has been started; there is a link to it from E-C, under "Resources".

3) Also under Resources, there's a link to a pro forma letter to MPs and Councillors.

Thanks to fellow blog and campaign administrator Surreptitious Evil for helping me with all the work of setting this stuff up. He's an organisational whiz, and I wouldn't have been able to do it without him. Thanks also to primus-inter-pares mediocracy-reader Paul, who designed and engineered the flashing banners. (Paul, we look forward to your post as guest contributor in due course. England* expects that every man etc.)

If you care about liberty (and even if you don't, but disapprove of the proposal to force 16-18 year olds to continue with what the government is pleased to regard as "education", whether they want to or not), please:

sign the petition, and encourage others to do so

send a letter to your MP

send a letter to your Councillor

link to our campaign (use of the image is not required)

leave comments on the campaign blog

write a post about the topic on your own blog

if you don't have a blog (or even if you do) consider writing a post for the campaign blog as a guest contributor

leave your comments on the Green Paper online (leaving disapproving comments is, in my opinion, far more to the point than answering the questions, some of which are rather weaselly).

C'mon people, let's make some noise.

* It really is England in this case, as it appears Scotland and Wales are excluded from the proposals.

[reproduced from mediocracy blog]

We have our first hammer

The campaign to oppose the extension of compulsory education now has a collective blog: Educational Conscription. (Hat tip to Perry de Havilland of Samizdata for inspiring the name.)

Please support the campaign by linking to the blog — if possible, using the image at the top right, which is intended to convey the authoritarian character of this ridiculous and menacing proposal. We also have a revised banner (see above), courtesy Paul.

We are working on adding a petition site.

We are also preparing pro forma letters to both (a) MPs/Councillors, (b) party leaders and education spokesmen, which we'll upload in due course for others to use.

We (so far, Surreptitious Evil and myself) will be inviting a couple of people to join the blog as contributors, based on who looks most likely to be interested. We should also like to invite posts from other bloggers, which can be sent by means of post comment or email.* The approach of the blog is intended to be calm-polite-angry rather than ranty-swearing-angry. We think that will ultimately have more impact.

Key question to consider:
Should people who are currently regarded as old enough to lead conventional adult lives (have jobs, rent lodgings, get married, drive, etc.) be suddenly regarded as young and irresponsible enough to have their liberty removed?

* In those cases we'd like to be able to have some editorial input, but we will let authors see any edits for approval before posting.

[Reproduced from mediocracy blog.]