Back to Conspiracy School Part 1 (Premium E330) Sample
Julian Fields, Annie Kelly, and Travis View examine the UK's surge in alternative home education centers, contrasting 37,000 students in 2015 with 175,900 recently. While some parents flee overcrowding or standardized testing, others cite ideological fears of state schools grooming children into deviant sexualities or subjecting them to satanic and Marxist indoctrination. The hosts highlight the Hope Community Sussex center, established in 2022, which teaches survivalist skills like using BB guns and government-approved knives for post-apocalyptic scenarios. Ultimately, the discussion reveals that while radicalization exists, many families leave due to complex, heartbreaking reasons unrelated to conspiracy theories, distinguishing the UK movement from its US religious right counterparts. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Why Families Choose Homeschooling00:08:38
The QAA
Podcast, Premium, Episode 330, Back to Conspiracy School, Part 1.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Fields, Annie Kelly, and Travis View.
Welcome, sweet and gentle listener.
It's Annie Kelly, your UK correspondent and England's first and only national baby speaking.
National baby!
Thank you.
I missed that jingle.
And it's actually in both of these professional capacities that I'm talking to you now, because our episode today is going to be about the British education system.
It's a Effects on the malleable minds of British youth, and the intriguing appearance of so called awakened home education centres on the scene.
I like this because it makes it sound like UK youth have an extra malleable mind.
Like, in other countries they're set, but in the UK they're soft brained.
Yeah, yeah, it is true.
These centres first began appearing during the COVID lockdowns and largely marketed themselves to parents within the anti lockdown movement, which at that point was still pretty politically diverse.
There were definitely loud conspiratorial elements who argued that COVID was a hoax or the vaccine was deliberately designed to be lethal, but there was also a pretty significant segment who didn't really think any of that, but just objected to the public closures and wanted a place for their children to learn.
But just as the anti lockdown movement gradually radicalised and became the COVID sceptic movement before branching out to a more systematic conspiratorial worldview, these home education centres soon began to address other popular areas of discontent with the mainstream education system.
Some of these honestly seem pretty reasonable to me, like overcrowded classrooms or the suppression of children's individual interests in favor of standardized testing.
Others, such as the belief that state schools are grooming children into adopting deviant sexualities and gender identities, feel a little more troubling to say the least.
As an alternative, these centers claim that they offer lessons which honor a more free thinking form of learning, one that respects a child's need for play, adventure, and the outdoors, with the added bonus of protecting the purity of their souls from satanic transgender Marxist indoctrination.
And from what they post on social media, it seems like a significant part of the curriculum involves teaching their young charges survivalist skills, and in particular, how to use weapons like BB guns and recurve bows.
Not enough pedagogy revolves around Mad Max.
Okay, this is how to finish a can of Stella you've found in a back alley.
This is how to stab a rat with a government approved knife.
Oh, they're very angry about government approved knives.
We'll get to that later.
Now, I imagine if you're an American listening to this, you might be thinking that.
None of this is particularly new or even really worth commenting on.
I remember even in 2004 American teen comedy classic Mean Girls, which is now over 20 years old, by the way, if you want to feel ancient, there were jokes about kids being homeschooled so they could learn stuff like this.
And on the third day, God created the Remington bull action rifle so that man could fight the dinosaurs.
And the homosexuals.
Amen.
Ah, yes.
That gag relies on the long running and robust tradition of homeschooling on the US religious right, and the fact that for many Americans, the gun toting survivalist homeschooler with regressive views on LGBT is hardly a new concept.
But it's important to stress that the educational landscape over here has always been very different.
Homeschooling, or as it's called here, elective home education, was largely the preserve of a tiny minority of families here until very recently.
In 2015, for example, there were only 37,000 home educated children in England, basically less than a fraction of a percent.
There's a few reasons for this historical difference between our two countries.
Some are cultural, such as the religious right being much less of a demographic presence here compared to the US.
Some are geographical.
We're a smaller country, and our rural areas tend to be a lot less isolated, so a school is usually never very far away.
Yeah, isn't the mayor of all small areas like that Andrew Tate?
Wait, what?
He teaches the kids there.
The homeschooling movement in the US only really kicked off among the religious right as a consequence of two Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 63, which declared prayer and devotional reading in public schools unconstitutional.
Yeah, interestingly, I actually read that apparently before then, the 60s, that homeschooling was considered to be a very left wing, kind of hippie liberal thing.
Yeah.
Teach you the history of South America and coups.
And then suddenly it was like, wait a second, we can't force the Jewish kid to do devotionals?
By contrast, in the UK, there is no constitutional requirement for the separation of church and state, and so it's perfectly possible here for a religious school to be run by the state and free to attend.
And while there have been some rumblings, no doubt from godless liberals, about how this essentially makes for a policy of state sponsored religious indoctrination, the truth is that this policy does actually have some fairly good consequences from a secular pluralist standpoint.
Namely, that parents who want a religious education for their child are much less likely to feel that their choices are limited to fee paying schools or just removing them from the system altogether.
But with all that being said, it's clear that something is changing with the popularity of home education in this country.
Remember that figure about 37,000 children being home educated 10 years ago?
In the school year that's just passed, that number had ballooned to 175,900.
Wow, that is pretty impressive, especially since your population hasn't grown nearly that rate.
Especially since no one's having kids in this country, yeah.
Now, I want to be really clear that I'm not suggesting that every single one of these children has been removed from mainstream education.
Because their parents are religious fundamentalists or have gotten red pilled.
I don't even think a majority have.
We'll get into it a little bit later, but part of the research I've done for this episode has taught me about the many complex, understandable, and sometimes just quite heartbreaking reasons that parents choose home education over what's offered to them by the state.
But there is at least one currently existing home education centre, officially established in 2022, which does very much cater to parents whose reasons for rejecting the education system can be chiefly summarised as.
Irreconcilable ideological differences.
That place is called Hope Community Sussex.
The Hope part is an acronym, it stands for Home of Positive Energy.
Here's how Hope advertises itself on their website Hope Sussex community has witnessed firsthand the positive effect community home education can have on children and their families, and it is wondrous.
Our mission is to support, enhance, and guide freedom loving families through the empowering and rewarding world of home education.
Sessions with tutors start at the incredibly affordable price of just £5.50 an hour and run all day Monday to Wednesday.
The groups are small, and as home educators, you can book directly with our independent tutors, attending as many sessions as you like out of the wide range of subjects on offer.
As we now begin the fourth year of our journey, our legacy is already taking shape with children that have previously attended Hope now flourishing at college as critically thinking, compassionate, creative, confident, and resilient young adults.
At Hope, we are incredibly proud of what we have achieved.
And extremely excited to be creating the reality we want a life and world full of love, truth, integrity, and freedom.
It's interesting because they're kind of taking the tie dye t shirt, an incredible symbol of, you know, kind of left wing, homegrown clothing, and turning it into an anti fax symbol that really isn't quite like that.
It's a bit like Chuck Norris constantly being like, yeah, I'm part Cherokee.
The Best Patreon Deal00:01:05
You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast.
For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.comslash QAA.
Travis, why is that such a good deal?
Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month.
For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries.
That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Pervers with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View.
It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.
Travis, for once, I agree with you.
And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.comslash QAA.
Well, that's not an opinion.
It's a fact.
You're so right, Jake.
We love and appreciate all of our listeners.
Yes, we do.
And Travis is actually crying right now, I think, out of gratitude, maybe?