An Ill-Disguised Power Grab

Taking the Log Out of One's Own Eye

The Ministry of Education is engaged in a power grab.  It is seeking to acquire new, additional grounds to de-register private schools.  It is proposing that private schools lose registration unless they maintain "adequate physical and emotional well-being of students" ostensibly to the same standard as government schools.

What could be wrong with that, we hear you ask?  "Heaps", as the dung merchant said.

Here is one submission made to the Ministry on the matter:

Education Consultation

Ministry of Education

PO Box 1666

Wellington 6140

Thank you for seeking views on the proposed change to the registration criteria for private schools. We wish to focus exclusively upon the matter of student “emotional welfare”.

One central question is begged in the proposal to empower the Minister to deny registration for (or to) a private school over inadequate “emotional welfare” lies here: by what standard will the Minister determine that the emotional welfare of students would be, or is, at risk in a particular school? How will the Minister define “emotional welfare” is another way of putting the issue. (For the avoidance of doubt, we are using the title “Minister” to cover whatever officials within the Ministry that will be involved in the registration or deregistration of a private school.)

Will the Minister proceed to determine whether a private school is fit for maintaining the emotional welfare of students after consultation with the respective Board of Trustees, Principal, senior school management team, staff, and parents involved in the school? Or, will the Minister make a determination by consulting only with himself? Or will the Minister have recourse to a panel of expert therapists specialising in the “emotional welfare” of young people? Or will the Minister succumb to a facile following of medical-fads-ju-jour?

The Minister and senior officials at the Ministry will be aware that the history of state intervention in such matters is not exactly covered in glory.

We are mindful of the once vaunted treatments of clients in institutions such as Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital and the subsequent resiling from those treatments as being cruel, inhumane, and harmful. It pays not to forget that many of the children “treated” at Lake Alice were referred there by the then School Psychological Service!

Moreover, as a nation we are about to commence an investigation into the abuse of children in state care, entitled Inquiry Into Abuse in State Care, because of numerous claims of official government malpractice emanating from the (now grown up) children in state care. The state care they were subjected to involved and included the contribution of the Ministry and government schools.

Therefore it is reasonable to be extremely skeptical about the Minister's ability to assess the “emotional welfare” of students in schools in New Zealand. If this power were given to the Minister we would not be surprised to find that within a few decades there would be, not just government inquiries into Ministry malpractice on this matter, but also extensive claims for compensation.

We have already seen cases where schools have acted to procure abortions for female students without the knowledge of their parents, let alone their consent. What will be the long term emotional damage resulting from such actions by the Minister's schools? How many claims for compensation will the Minister face? In the light of these circumstances, we remain deeply skeptical of the Ministry's ability to determine the “emotional welfare” of students in its own schools, let alone private schools.

In addition there is the current official enthusiasm for promoting “transgenderism”, despite an abundance of medical and research-based evidence that the long term consequences of this fad are destructive to young people.

One of the world's experts on this trend is Dr Paul McHugh, forty years the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School—twenty-six of which were also spent as Psychiatrist in Chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital. He writes:

When “the tumult and shouting dies,” it proves not easy nor wise to live in a counterfeit sexual garb. The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people—extending over thirty years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered—documents their lifelong mental unrest. Ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to twenty times that of comparable peers. [Paul McHugh, Transgenderism: A Pathogenic Meme]

When it comes to transgenderism, what will be the Minister's stance? How will it fit into his determinations on “emotional welfare” of students? By what standard will the Minister make a determination? Is his Ministry prepared for the widespread public backlash that will doubtless occur if the “grim facts” described by Professor McHugh are replicated in New Zealand?

McHugh writes:

Most young boys and girls who come seeking sex-reassignment are utterly different from [Bruce] Jenner. They have no erotic interest driving their quest. Rather, they come with psychosocial issues—conflicts over the prospects, expectations, and roles that they sense are attached to their given sex—and presume that sex-reassignment will ease or resolve them.

The grim fact is that most of these youngsters do not find therapists willing to assess and guide them in ways that permit them to work out their conflicts and correct their assumptions. Rather, they and their families find only “gender counselors” who encourage them in their sexual misassumptions. [Ibid.]

Will the Minister make himself captive to the “gender counselors” and thus end up doing great harm—as indeed was historically done when its students were subjected to shock “therapy” whilst in Lake Alice? How can the Ministry reasonably assert its ability to determine the “emotional welfare” of students in its own schools, let alone in private schools, when, as we expect, the forthcoming Inquiry Into Abuse in State Care will record the implicit (and even explicit) consent of school authorities to the harms done to children under state care in the past.

W fear the greatest risk facing the Minister (and students and parents and private schools) in the matter of assessing the “emotional welfare” of students in private schools could well lie with the Ministry itself. Its history and track record on these matters is not creditable, to say the least. To make its assessment of “emotional welfare of students” a ground of de-registration of private schools, without proper checks and balances, when the Ministry itself has failed so egregiously in its own schools in the the past, defies common sense.

We are stunned by the irony reflected in the Ministry's invitation to comment on these proposed changes when it states:

This proposed change is intended to provide more certainty for private school students, and their families/whanau, that they can expect the same standards of physical and emotional safety at private schools as students in other educational institutions.

As we have pointed out, it would appear that the standards of achievement in physical and emotional safety in government schools lack a great deal. Private schools have to do much better if we are to serve our students and parents as they deserve.

The essential issues to be resolved are:

• How will the Minister define “emotional welfare” What is to be ruled in? What is to be ruled out?
• What independent, external checks and balances will the Minister be subject to during the process of examining the “emotional welfare” enjoyed by students at private schools?
• What means of appeal to an independent ombudsman-like, or similar independent, review will be available to the student, the school, and the affected parents when de-registration looms?
• What recourse will be afforded private schools, pupils, and parents to qualified medical expertise when a school comes to the view that the Minister's assessment of “emotional welfare” is grounded neither in fact nor in medical best practice?

Without these matters being addressed by the Minister we are not at all confident that the interests of students in private schools will be enhanced, given the poor historical record of the Ministry in looking after the “emotional welfare” of students in New Zealand schools.

The sad track record and history of failures in “physical and emotional safety” of students in government schools must not be allowed to be repeated in private schools.

Cordially, etc.