A LETTER OF FAREWELL TO OUR CHILDREN’S EDUCATION
Wed 4:18 pm +01:00, 19 Aug 2020
I hope this letter finds you and your family well as we arrive into our Autumn season. We have had really good weather for the last six months, quite unusual for Ireland.
I wonder did you receive my last letter in relation to my concerns as to where the education system was heading for our children. I’m sure you are worried too.
I received the school letter, yesterday, 17th August 2020 on the instructions for the return of our children to school and it broke my heart. This is a very sad time for the children of Ireland.
It must have been hard for you to write that letter and send it out to parents, knowing what was being offered to our children was nothing short of sending them to a concentration camp.
I am fortunate as a mother for thirty-one years to have had my three children educated in the wonderful, happy, safe environment that was the old Irish school system, where children were free to play, to hug and to be happy in school. They were protected by our faith and our morals while they received a great education.
I’m sure yourself and other Irish School Principles, have questioned our Minister for Education, Mrs. Norma Foley as to why our Government has now replaced that system, without cause or request from the parents of the children of Ireland, with this controlled regime of a one-way system in schools with brain washing, fear encouraging COVID signs in the schools. And what is their purpose?
Firstly, to expect a child to go to school and wear a mask that will prevent communication to and from the child to their friends and their teachers is socially, emotionally, literally and physically damaging to the child. I guess I don’t need to go into the studies of the mask that will also reduce the oxygen intake of the child and will only prevent them from concentrating.
Secondly, to expect a child to go to school and stay two meters apart from their friends and prevent them from hand shaking or hugging is socially, emotionally and psychologically damaging to the child. Not forgetting the extreme measures of sanitizing which will only serve to cause anxiety in our children while reducing their need for an immune system, which its sole purpose is to fight germs and bacteria, while keeping children healthy.
On reviewing the education quality, I see that the children will not be allowed their textbooks while in school, their beautiful written and illustrated textbooks that inspire our children’s education. It makes absolutely no sense to me to deprive our children of books that only serve to motivate our children in reading. I can’t help thinking that this is reminiscent of the book burning days in Nazi Poland in 1941. And I wonder, flabbergasted, at how on Earth after all what the people learned from World War Two, have we arrived back to that place of fear and control?
I see the children will still have to present their homework through the Schoolwise platform just as in lockdown times and that was unfavorable for the best equipped children.
I asked myself and my husband and my daughter, what is the point of our child returning to school at all? It seems she would be less psychologically damaged and better educated by a home-schooling system, than what is being offered by our Government at present. We have decided to continue home-schooling our daughter for this, her third year. I have paid our fees on-line and will be grateful for her school-work and correspondence to be sent through the previous platform.
It is on my sad realization, that this will be Yasmin’s last year in literal education. Despite being a child with learning challenges, through the hard work and dedication of all the teachers in pre-school, primary and secondary schools to date, Yasmin reached her expected goals. I now understand that the same education quality cannot be offered under this new system. But the future for my daughter and many other children in Ireland is very bright under their parent’s care. I worry about the children who will be left in schools with the COVID testing regime that is about to start, once children start to show symptoms of colds or virus. I worry too about the COVID vaccine that will follow. We are living in very dangerous times and I pray to God for all theirs and your safety.
It’s my conclusion after taking into account all of these terrifying new changes that I can’t subject my child to the hands of our Government.
Thank you for your wonderful kindness and support to date for our daughter.
Yours sincerely
Jean Murray
