“These ‘educational missionaries’ spoke of schools as if they were monasteries. By limiting the idea of education to formal school instruction, the public gradually lost sight of what the real thing was. The questions these specialists disputed were as irrelevant to real people as the disputes of medieval divines; there was about their writing a condescension for public concerns, for them ‘the whole range of education had become an instrument of deliberate social purpose.’ (emphasis added).”
—John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education
—John Taylor Gatto, Underground History of American Education
As a possibly last series of connections to map, I am returning to Robert Graves’ buddy William Sargant, who worked at St Thomas’ Hospital from 1948 to the end of his career as head of the department of psychological medicine. In 1962, Sargant found himself a new assistant in one David Owen, a neurology and psychiatric registrar who had only just qualified as a doctor. Two years earlier, Owen had joined the Vauxhall branch of the Labor Party and the Fabian Society.[1] The reason this is relevant is that Owen was allegedly complicit in allowing Jimmy Savile access to the psychiatric hospital Broadmoor, where he (Savile) abused countless patients over a period between 1968 and 2004 (when Savile had use of a personal set of keys to the hospital). According to The Daily Telegraph, Savile’s “involvement at Broadmoor was rubber-stamped in 1974 by Dr. David Owen, now Lord Owen, who was health minister.” Thanks to Owen, Savile “came to be in charge of Broadmoor for a period in the 1980s when he was put in charge of a task force to run the secure hospital.”
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