horrific professing

A psychology professor, Thomas MacKay, got a story run in the Sunday Herald saying school uniform prevents teenage violence. Front page of today's Metro is about a terrible schoolboy gang murder in London, which on the evidence the story reported, was committed while wearing school uniform. There is the professor's stark answer.

So far from schools meriting respect as in his theory, such murders show also that herding children together like cattle into a jungle-like mass in day prisons called schools is desperately unsafe and destructive of civil order, let alone of personal wellbeing and belonging. It always was, this has always been apparent from all the history of bullying. I have a strong need to make the same case from the history of teachers misusing their power and having greedy ambitions that make the child suffer. But bullying and violence is the present issue this great big professor has argued on.

This professor is popular with politicians, he was praised in a book by Gordon Brown and he has been advising the SNP government on educational psychology. He even used to be head of the British Psychological Society. How rational is that?, 2 items the Herald story did not mention, are:
* that the professor is an Evangelical, which itself involves a psychology for proclaiming truth unsubstantiated out of thin air, and for needing to bend all psychology to match with the social attitudes in a few arbitrary ancient scrolls that oppress women and defend slavery,
* and that he has already worked in autism a lot.

Now, if he knows autism, how can he possibly not know about what are termed "sensory issues"? Our sensitivities to rubbing fabric and texture and heat, which make our bodies often biologically incompatible with narrow Victorian norms of dress and prove our physically real need for total freedom of dress. Autism proves all dress codes and uniforms a serious bodily harmful human rights violation. A sensory irritation undermines our ability to concentrate and to function well. Hence, any discomforting clothes are a serious medical assault on our bodies. School uniform trousers did violence to my body, and gender discriminatory too when girls get a choice over their leg cover and boys don't.

My physically real need of health and wellbeing, to wear shorts perpetually, has always been upheld by the local supported employment service, to employers and to the benefits/training system. An adult precedent of autism need can never be rejected by anyone or else they would commit a disability discrimination. But if this holds for adults, it holds for children too. It is national scale biological harming of children, that this many years into autism awareness, school uniform still exists.

Where are the big autism organisations' efforts to save spectrumite children and indeed all children, and adults in the type of jobs concerned, from the primitive body slavery of uniforms? and to stop the march of oppressive ideas like this professor's going without even media opposition ?

No oppositional letter was printed in the Sunday Herald, which thus appears to be in favour of pushing the professor's oppressive communist-style openly declared keenness to airbrush out individual identity. He openly wants the uniform to symbolise subjection to authority, in effect he openly admits it is a prison uniform. It will express values of violence to their own medical wellbeing, this he intends to make them feel respectful and positive towards adults, and this the Sunday Herald leaves unchallenged.

Not getting letters printed in national newspapers is quite normal or course, but the Sunday Herald can be a decent letter printer if you write a view that is already part of the predictable established package of progressive views. Thus I have had letters printed on proportional voting and on asylum injustice. But not on the moral desirability of exterminating tigers to protect human life, and not on this. The Sunday Herald shows an interest, not in unlimited critical thought, but only in selling already prexisting established safe attitudes on its side of politics.

Meanwhile, the professor himself can't be reached. So says Strathclyde university, for he has moved on from his visitorship there. So he is nicely shielded from ever getting notified of any medical objections to his oppressive ideas.

Maurice Frank