Skool Daze

As the lockdown continues, people are inevitably talking about how and when to ease restrictions. There is talk of getting the kids back to school quite soon, which, when you think about it is like introducing super spreaders into every region of the country. Imagine; one kid has the virus, within a few days the whole school has it and within a week the whole catchment area is exposed. The kids shrug off the minor symptoms, but a generation of Conservative voters start dying off. I’m not sure if they’ve thought that one through. (Or have they?)

But when it comes to education there are wider issues to consider. Everybody gets arsey when a parent takes a child out of school for a week in term time so the family can go skiing without taking out a second mortgage to meet half-term holiday prices. But the schools have been closed for over a month already, what damage - or repair - might have been done to impressionable young minds who have instead been over-exposed to the thinking of some of their parents?

The kids are not preparing for or sitting exams, so it could be argued that they wouldn’t have been tackling any new material at this point, merely consolidating existing learning. But to be brutally honest, given the pitifully ill-educated state of many school leavers, getting them back in school now to learn more about how Britain is a racist, homophobic country of xenophobic war criminals, while simultaneously being a country of immigrants, is hardly going to assist in the country's future prospects.

Given that the average reading age of the adult population of the UK is that expected of an eleven-year old – and some estimates put it as low as nine – you might wonder what on earth they were doing for the thirteen years most of them now spend in school. And for many decades now, fully one-fifth are functionally illiterate yet manage to survive, procreate and pass on their worrisome genes to the next generation. As reading is the foundation of all learning, what the hell does the education profession think it is there for?

Maybe it’s time to re-open the debate about school-leaving age? Many resent being effectively detained against their will until eighteen when they could be out doing a lot of the work we now rely on low-cost immigrants to do. At sixteen kids can easily learn whatever it takes to stock shelves, pick crops, staff production lines and pick up some valuable lessons in being useful contributors to society along the way. Frankly, I’m astonished this hasn’t been seriously mooted before.

Another boon, for which the benefit could be incalculable, would be a massive reduction in the harmful cost to the economy of non-degrees. Exposed to the world of work an element of common sense might be inculcated in the population. On a national level surely this would be preferable to 50% of them continuing to absorb leftist doctrine as they progress from school, through gap years, through university, eventually emerging from the educational chrysalis not as bright, beautiful butterflies, but as ugly, dusty moths almost a decade after some of their schoolmates began paying tax, saving money and being part of the solution.

So, they’ve lost a few weeks, I doubt another few weeks is really going to make that much of an impact. It is reported that two-thirds of them haven’t logged into online learning during the lockdown; I expect that the third who have are not the ones who will end up semi-literate with Masters degrees in finger painting. And some of the greatest minds in history had little or no formal schooling. Education; the solution, or a big part of the problem?

Getting Tired?

It seems such a shame that we have to go over this ground again but seeing the news that Poland is reducing its retirement age, while we are progressively raising ours warrants comment. Now, we’ve always loved the Poles; we’re a lot closer to them in many ways than we are the French, the Italians and the incomprehensible garment-rending Germans. The Polish are patriotic, level headed and highly allergic to leftism, much like we used to be before politicians decided that the vote to chase was that of the helpless children.

So, while Poles have been doing the right thing and looking after Number One and migrating to the UK for better earnings, to then send money back home to keep their families and help their country, Britain has been engaged in a bit of garment-rending of its own. And, of course, once in the UK you can expect – nay you can demand – all that is due a British citizen. Thus all you need do is get here, plead hardship and the jolly old British system will rob its own to pay you to stay.

At least that’s how it looks to the indigenous Brits who see the segregation and ghettoization of communities who will not integrate – and where is the evidence that it is otherwise? The reaction of peaceful people is not to take up cudgels to but to budge over; white flight is a natural reaction to seeing your home territories turned into wastelands of neglect and overrun with the alien. It is not racist to want to live as you have always lived; even Trevor Phillips is now dismayed at how his Commission for Racial Equality was used to further an apparent agenda of population replacement and demonise all who raised concern.

Far from immigrants ‘paying the pensions of the lazy British’ we now have to work longer into old age to pay for the vast majority of minimum wage immigrants and their families in Britain. Why? Because we have been fed a steady diet of bullshit to facilitate that descent into serfs. We have been told simultaneously that the young British are workshy and that they deserve better. Instead of training our own and educating them to enter the workforce at an appropriate level we have told them they should go to university and amass debts they will never repay, gaining qualifications of little merit.

We have lowered and lowered school grades to maintain an appearance of attainment while managing somehow for our school leavers to be way down the league table in every subject. How can the English be 37^th in the world in... English? How can the nation which gave the world engineering produce so few engineers? How can the nation which gave the world science produce whole cohorts of school leavers who can’t even spell physics?

A graduate speaks...

The conspiracy theorists will say that this is a deliberate dumbing-down of the population so that we can obey a One World Order directive to flood the white nations with brown people and create a single universal mixed race. That is way too complicated and more than a little bit deranged. What has really happened is that over several decades our politicians have fallen prey to the idiot notions of equality and diversity and have pursued short-term policies to achieve those outcomes, oblivious to the harm they have done.

This is why Brexit. This is why Trump. And the panicked reactions of western governments to now try and suppress free speech, praise infantile left wing activism and deny, deny, deny all the harm they have done is because they are blind to the simple realities of the ‘uneducated’ (unblinkered) masses. Instead they are in thrall to their own delusions of competence and deal with the cognitive dissonance of facing reality by repeating their mistakes over and over again. The solution to the destruction that mass immigration has wrought is more mass immigration? We live in interesting times.

Educated Guess

Remember Michael Gove’s ‘experts’? The economic experts on all shores of the political quagmire that typifies this general election run-up have been crunching the numbers. Now, if there was any reliable way to slice up the financial cake in such a way that everybody got what they considered a fair deal surely these experts would generally agree. Not completely, obviously; some would favour a bit of top-down redistribution, others might go for a more laissez-faire, free market. But, on balance, if there was a way to conjure up the necessary funding to buy your votes you would think they would all stumble across much the same wheezes.

But no. Not only do these experts not agree, they outright refute each other’s projections. But it’s worse than that; if the competence of the experts is in doubt, what about the competence of the general public to understand the policies proposed? I’m guessing that if you go to work, pay taxes and spend all that is left to enable you to continue going to work you will be reasonably well-equipped to see beyond the Labour promises to pull financial rabbits from hats. On the other hand, if you have absorbed the lessons of comprehensive schooling you will believe that everybody can be rich by simply printing money.

State education is intended to produce reliable citizens, who can contribute something to society, not compliant voters, eager to cast their ballot in favour of the party promising free stuff. Those doing the promising seem to have so little regard for the recipients of the message that they are appearing in the media, making gaffe after gaffe and fluffing their prepared lines in the face of the mildest scrutiny. Their contempt it showing and they can’t even see it. If only they’d had a better education...

Enter more free stuff: Labour will renationalise railways, the Royal Mail and the energy industry. Free for all? Free-for-all, more like. All this, they reckon, will be paid for by increasing corporation tax, reversing inheritance tax cuts and, er, I’m guessing they will just borrow the other £trillion-per-annum. They will want to nationalise the already nationalised education system. They want to meddle even more directly in the manipulation of young minds, paying for this by taxing private education – that is a LOT of tax. I wonder what they have in mind for the history books?

Can you see how they did it?

Of course class sizes should de under 30. Ideally, they should be under 20. But they should also be taught by teachers with a genuine vocation and ability to get the best out of them, not driven by a need to churn out ‘cookie-cutter’ social justice warriors. Qualifications do not ensure competence; this is true in teaching as much as it is in any other arena – this brief Spectator article on MBAs is enlightening and rings oh so true. But as long as the educationalists are riddled with left-wing ideology, actually educating children will take a back seat to programming them and the costs of doing so will forever spiral, like the NHS, out of reach. Corbyn’s Labour manifesto wasn’t leaked – it  just escaped from the loony bin.

Class Act

Tristram Hunt has been on the warpath – or was that the towpath – over the government’s plan to (gasp!) not take any money from the education budget. How very dare they freeze budgets when any Labour government would automatically double them and pay for it from the fabulous wealth they would reap by holding rich people upside down by their ankles, stealing all their loose change and taxing the properties they just transferred into offshore trusts!?

This charge – that a freeze is a real terms cut when inflation is taken into account – is the only ammunition Hunt has because Labour should, just as with the economy, never be allowed to control education ever again. While Gordon Brown’s tax credits allowed employers to squeeze wages and simultaneously increase the tax burden on everybody else, and while Labour’s wilful acceptance of the EU’s open borders trampled on life chances for unskilled British workers, the children did not go unmolested. When Tony Blair said “Education, education, education!” he clearly meant something different from the rest of us.

Facilitating the furtherance of breeding and rearing by generations of hopeless under achievers should be addressed by The Equality and Human Rights Commission under the heading of child cruelty. I’m serious. A child born to stupid parents whose right to create life without the faintest clue as to how to care for that life is not human; it is bovine. Were those slow, lumbering beasts to go on and till the fields and turn the mill wheels it may be almost acceptable, but we import other, cheaper, cattle to do that for us and allow our domestic herds to wander, ignorant and pointless, procreating simply because they have nothing else to live for.

At least if we stashed the edu-tech and reverted to rigour and discipline in primary education we might have a chance of reversing the rot in a couple of generations but then why would any government be interested in policies that would only come to fruition after they were all wealthily retired or even dead? The grammar schools and the multi-tiered education system of my youth recognised and even celebrated the differences in aptitude and ability. Today, while ‘university’ graduates jostle for barista jobs or belatedly self-fund themselves into manual trade training, or settle for delivering pizzas, surely it is time for politicians to admit the unsavoury truth; we are NOT all equal.

But while we can’t all be rocket surgeons[sic] we can all graduate from the University of Life if only we are well enough prepared for the entrance exam. If you can’t read it is extremely difficult to learn. If you are innumerate the world will rob you blind, but if you acquire both those skills early they will be with you for ever… so why don’t we do that? Let's forget such nebulous idiocy as ‘citizenship’ and inculcating destructive notions of disproportionate sensitivity to differentness and offence and instead aim to get everybody over the first hurdle and equipped for the rest of the race.

Too kool for shkool?

Political correctness? Voter engagement? People power? Intersectional awareness? Who bloody cares? If there wasn’t something wrong with politics we wouldn’t bother to vote at all. If there wasn’t something desperately wrong with our current education system we certainly wouldn’t be voting for more socialism.

Lessons learned?

My timeline filled up last night with a debate on education to which I wasn’t really party, although I read most of the comments this morning and it was clear that the more literate contributor was all in favour of grammar schools, while the one with spelling issues bewailed his treatment as a second class citizen in what used to be called a secondary modern. I went to both, in that my ‘big school’ in a small northern market town was called Thirsk Grammar and Secondary Modern School, despite it being located in the village of Sowerby.

Anyhow, regardless of this quirk of geography, here we toiled at our desks with not a computer in sight, nor any form of what is now called edu-tech. The desks had inkwells and the teachers’ cupboards still contained stores of school ink, although we had by then progressed to cartridge pens. Biros, being the work of some form of handwriting destroying demon, were banned in order to save our souls. The teachers wrote with chalk on actual blackboards and had leather elbow patches on well-worn tweed jackets and not one of them attempted to be down with the kids.

Since then, of course, there have been many modifications to the education system, resulting in more and more spending, a progressively higher turnover of teachers and a steady decline in educational standards to the point where – if headlines are to be believed – British children without an academic bent are unemployable in the modern multicultural world, even as cleaners and hospital porters.

And yet, for all its modernity and high tech, flashing gadgetry, it is arguable that you can navigate life today far easier and with far less learning than it took a few decades ago. With all the world’s knowledge available via a smart phone, and goods and services searchable in seconds, all you need to make your way in the world is what the school leavers of half a century ago had in abundance; literacy, numeracy and good manners. Nobody needs degrees in David Beckham. Seriously, nobody.

As coincidence would have it, my old Royal Navy shipmate, Konrad, called last night and we ended up discussing apprentice training. He is writing courses for an engineering college and I am about to prep for a new class of electricians under training and we were both concerned that with each passing decade we seem to have to start further back. Once, an apprentice would start at fifteen and despite not being academically gifted could cope well enough with electrical science principles to pass the ‘mathsy’ part of the course with the aid of logarithm and trigonometry tables. Now, the calculator users turn up unable to explain a square root and somewhat resentful that we have to re-teach them elementary maths before we can get to the good stuff.

The teachers, well some of them, were striking last Thursday, out in support of other public sector workers against ‘the cuts’.  They should have a good look at what we used to achieve with so much less and go on strike to demand even more cuts. Less really can be more. Cut out all the unnecessary crap – the costly electronic whiteboards, the iPads, the gimmicks and much of the pedagogic propaganda. Particularly cut out the notion that all must have prizes. As more and more qualifications are handed out like cheap sweets it’s no wonder we now have graduates who are grateful to find work in coffee shops.

Time to make more bricks...

None of this, by the way, is the fault of the kids themselves, but a two or three generational slide into apathy and mediocrity across society must surely shoulder the burden of the blame. You simply have to select and stream and yes, you have to condemn also. Those who will not or cannot meet higher academic standards must not be allowed to drag down those who can. And if you can’t achieve that in a single school then yes, segregated schooling may be necessary. Even then, it will take another two or three generations until we restore the standards we had in the nineteen fifties, but it will be worth the wait; all in all we need plenty more bricks in the wall.

Textually Explicit

On Radio 4’s Today programme the other day was a textbook example of the sort of misleading claptrap promulgated by that eccentric breed of outsiders, The Expert. On a depressingly regular basis, experts tell us that what we have known for years is wrong. Gravity is a push, not a pull, the sun rises at night and sets in the morning and drinking thirty cups of strong sugary coffee every day before breakfast will vastly reduce the incidence of dementia… mostly because it will likely kill you before senility has a chance.

It has become fashionable to produce expensively funded ‘studies’ and ‘research’ which reveal that the counter-intuitive conclusion is now always the correct one. Thus enforced multiculturalism, far from being a recipe for strife, can only ever be a force for good and if it isn’t working in your part of the country that is only because you haven’t yet had enough multiculturalism. And dear old Tony Blair, as we are discovering, is rapidly demonstrating his true expertise as he seeks to put his theories about harmony in the Middle East into practice by assisting in the genocide peace process.

But sod the warring factions of a sunni disposition, we have a far graver ‘expert’ crisis on our own doorstep, nay inside our very homes, for ‘research has shown’ that texting may actually improve children’s spelling and grammar. Yes, you read that crekly: Txtspk, fr frm being a modern scRg is 2 B encRged… also leaving out punctuation and capitals can be shown to contribute to the positive development of childrens spelling and grammar skills according to the study by coventry university and the university of tasmania of course not everybody will be happy with the findings because of how very annoying it is especially when you have to wade through whole swathes of dense unpunctuated type several times like this here in order to discern the meaning i find it exhausting even typing without using punctuation and if i had to read everything in text speak i think I would have to resort to a killing spree…

What utter, unadulterated claptrap. This displays not only a total ignorance of cognitive and linguistic development and the difference between cause and correlation, it also show the naïveté of asking children – or psychologists as they like to call themselves - to comment on childhood phenomena. There may be a dozen things going on here, but proof that lazy spelling and no-existent grammar engenders better performance later in life is simply not one of them.

This is simply self-justifying tosh; the same sort of enquiry into developmental psychology that brought about the disastrous and destructive decades of child-centred learning and the notion that the kiddie-winks would become Nobel Prize winning physicists if only the teachers would become mere facilitators and leave them to get on with it. The kind of thinking that led to the ‘all must have prizes’ school of non-competition that causes many British kids to become unemployable after thirteen years of full-time education.

The Intertext - Answers on a postcard...

But hey, maybe I’m being too judgemental and reactionary here. Maybe I should lighten up, take a progressive view and get with the programme. After all, there may be funding available. Coming up: my research into how sitting on your big fat arse every day will help you live longer more fulfilling lives and how you are statistically more likely to win the lottery if you never buy a ticket. Ground-breaking research? Bollocks, more like.

Schools Out! (For the count)

The little concrete prefab hut still stands in the field that used to be the playground for what was once Sowerby Infant School. The prefab was one of my first classrooms and it had windows you could look out of, though there was little to see, unlike those of the classrooms in the main school building, which could only be reached by the teacher’s long hook. When the bell went for playtime and after we’d filed out into the yard, mayhem ensued, but in lessons silence reigned except by invitation.

In my time the old grammar school had become the Thirsk & Sowerby Junior School, which took on ages seven to eleven, at the end of which time we took the old Eleven Plus exam, the sorting hat of its age, which divided us into grammar or secondary-modern by delving into the workings of our mind. I know that I got one question wrong and that question was “What is the shortest distance between two points?” In those days there was no such thing as multiple choice and having never heard the expression before I was at a loss to conjure up the required form of words. Conferring with classmates afterwards only one inky swot had written the right answer but he couldn’t recall where he’d heard it.

I was caned three times in junior school and apart from one instance when I was bang to rights – talking out of turn – I maintain my innocence to this day. The teacher who administered the punishment – in full view for maximum effect – was later revealed to be a predatory paedophile with a taste for the boys in his charge. They've always been there. Otherwise, like all but a very tiny minority, we did exactly what was asked of us and performed our tasks in near silence. The windows in most classrooms were too high to be able to see anything but rooftops; only the windows of the newly erected Portakabin looked over the sports field but they were at the back of the room and any craning round would be instantly detected.

And then on to big school, with windows everywhere which, for some, proved irresistible, especially on upper floors as the view stretched all the way to the Hambleton Hills, the steep-sided slip face of the small rift valley of the Vale of Mowbray. Thirsk Grammar and Secondary Modern School was the first place I encountered aggressive misbehaviour and disrespect for teachers and almost all of it emanated from a recent addition. Before the raising of the school leaving age caused a proliferation of ‘Rosla’ blocks another Portakabin was pressed into service to contain, rather than educate, the remedial class.

Still a few years away from being as inquisitive as I later became I never questioned the etymology of ‘remedial’ and the word became a shorthand for the sort of unruly, troublesome, hulking teenagers you would go to lengths to avoid. Nobody wanted to get on the wrong side of ‘a remedial’ including many of the teachers. The poor sod who was their form master had clearly drawn a short straw indeed and was looked on with pity by staff and pupils alike. One year he didn’t return; we all assumed he had died from the strain.

So, for my entire school life apart from the odd high spirited heckling or the occasional ink fights (remember them?) disruptive behaviour was kept in check by a combination of stern but dedicated teachers and the notion that both teachers and parents were in cahoots to keep us in check. Those big side windows were a constant distraction and what pictures they showed but on the whole we sat in rows and shut our mouths and learned our lessons. Nobody wanted to be thought of as a remedial. But in my final years I saw the façade begin to slip and this slide into indiscipline had a name. Comprehensive.

The loser has to teach Year Nine...

Now, many decades into that experiment is it any wonder that much of what passes for education in British schools is reduced to crowd control? From what was once revered around the world – we used to laugh, heartily at the dire state of education in the USA – we have descended into the pitched battle described in a recent report by Professor Terry Haydn of the University of East Anglia. Turning the behavioural clock back is likely to be a near impossibility but unless something is done to restore classroom discipline we may as well accept that all state schools are remedial schools now.

A Piece of Paper

In the absence of any concrete policy to argue about, the subject of qualified teachers raised its diversionary head again yesterday as opposition MPs confused Michael Gove’s quest for educational excellence and competence with socialism’s insistence that all must have qualifications, titles or some form of accreditation – yes, we are all winners. Curious then, how they seem less concerned that parents, who produce the offspring that the state must then attempt to educate, should be suitably vetted and certified and examined and qualified. Of course, the last thing we need is politicians deciding what qualifications would be suitable to judge people fit to breed. But it’s not a bad idea, is it?

We routinely and robustly proscribe all sorts of natural human activity on the basis that it is counter to civilised behaviour. Humans steal almost by instinct – you have to actively teach children that theft is wrong, yet our supposed rulers regularly demonstrate that crime goes effectively unpunished. Maybe MP criminality is more acceptable than proletariat wrongdoing? Humans also cause intentional harm to each other with an astonishing regularity; you could hardly credibly state that murder is dying out, for instance. And one of the most basic drivers of human violence is the competition for mating rights. Surely, in the quest for responsible parents there should be obstacles to surmount, exams to pass and qualifications to be attained?

Of course, as in all things, one of the most difficult of human instincts to suppress is the opportunism – red in tooth and claw – that ensured our very survival as a species. Introduce a legal requirement for a parenting diploma and in the twenty years or so before ministers wake up to the abuses reported to them from day one by a multitude of whistle-blowers, bogus bratting colleges will spring up and award undeserved degrees in getting up the duff. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if an awful lot of lecturers will happily help their paying students with their ‘homework’. Yes, you say, wagging your finger at me, you would paint humanity in such a sordid light but, you see, unlike politicians, I am not seeking election and can therefore tell the truth.

And the truth is that no matter how you layer on the veneers of civilisation the animal within all of us will find ways to scratch it off and reveal the crude plywood beneath. It seems to me that some regulation is needed, but you can only go so far. You can prohibit the physical aspects of racism, for instance – making it illegal to discriminate on grounds of differentness and punishing verbal and physical expressions of the same – but you can’t eradicate antipathy; we haven’t yet perfected thought control. You can also mandate the acquisition of paper qualifications, but you’re on a hiding to nothing if you believe that everybody can justify holding them or demonstrate the actual worth that such parchment purports to confer.

But for some reason, despite all the millennia of evidence against, our rulers are obsessed with putting barricades in the way of reason and are too quick in creating structures open to abuse. Insist on teaching qualifications for all and I guarantee you that standards will not only not improve, they will probably go down as the unworthy will find ways of obtaining the closed-shop entry ticket, while assessing their actual competence will take a back seat for a while. It is as clear as day to those of us who live in the real world; why is it so difficult for governments to understand?

Testing times...

Maybe, rather than MPs insisting on forever regulating the rest of us, the rest of us should be quietly regulating them. Next year, if you hadn’t noticed, there is to be a general election. But why should we have to put up with candidates selected by obscure and often hereditary processes to fill party ambitions? I propose that only suitably qualified candidates be allowed to stand – no diploma, no hat in the ring. That gives them all a year to stop meddling, put in some hard graft, hand in their homework for scrutiny and revise for the big day. And we will all be marking the exams.

Those who can…

 The row over qualified teacher status continues with yesterday’s  motion for an Opposition Day debate,‘That this House endorses the view that in state-funded schools, teachers should be qualified or working towards Qualified Teacher Status while they are teaching.’ challenging, or at least giving the appearance of challenging, the coalition’s Free School programme. Labour’s Tristram Hunt has hinted that he may send his own children to private schools as so many hypocritical champions of state education do, thus avoiding any need to confront the outcomes of his proposal.

The debate was entirely predictable, of course, with both sides banging the drum, both sides claiming the moral high ground and both sides ignoring the grim reality that in the view of many, education in Britain is clearly a disaster and furthermore a disaster fifty years in the making. Watching from the inside, as a pupil, I saw my combined Grammar and Secondary Modern school deteriorate over a single school year as it became a Comprehensive just one year behind mine. Add to that incarceration, against their will, of thuggish fifteen year-olds now compelled to attend another year and it was as if the school just lost the will to live.

Teaching is a hot topic worldwide right now, so much so that a World's Top Teacher competition is to be launched next year: But on what basis will the winner be judged? Will their efficacy be assessed over, say, twenty years to show how the kids actually benefited? Or will it, more likely, be based on the number of theoretical pedagogic concepts that can be demonstrated in a twenty minute lesson? In which case it becomes just another example of the pointless exercises in self-justification so beloved of politically motivated organisations. It would be far better to run a competition to investigate and demonstrate just what has gone so horribly wrong in the last half a century to reduce our own state education system to the shambles it quite clearly is.

Or is it actually not a shambles at all but the intended culmination of a series of shadowy conspiracy theories? Is it a Leftie triumph, preparing the mediocre to live out their lives as a client underclass on benefits, creating a justification for immigration and helping to rub The Right’s noses in diversity? Or is it, as some may claim, a Rightie triumph whereby the children of ‘the poor’ are given only sufficient education so as to be useful workers for the children of the rich, as this parody in the Evening Harold illustrates? It’s the same, the whole world over, it’s the poor wot takes the shame, eh?

One thing is for sure and that is the years of steadily declining outcomes – employers and universities have been bemoaning the unpreparedness of their young intake for several decades now – can’t be just entirely accidental. It may be negative feedback originating in the nineteen-sixties obsessions with introducing radical new ideas, each diminished generation passing on their mediocrity to the next, but I somehow doubt it. No, I think there is something worse at the heart of all this – the expert. In a world where even the amount of sugar allowed in jam has to be regulated by government the obsession with pedagogy is almost inevitable. And in such a nebulous area as child development everybody is some kind of expert; which is to say, quoting William Goldman out of context, “nobody knows anything”.

During yesterday’s Commons debate MP Pat Glass said “Qualification is the very basis of a state-run education system.” (Qualification, not Competence.) And there we have it; as ever the argument is for closed shop, state-run institutions because as everybody knows, the state does everything better, doesn’t it? Power generation, health, transport, steel, telecommunications… what could possibly go wrong in a market whose providers and consumers are entirely controlled by such safe hands as the Department for Education?

But what use is education if, afterwards, we end up with adults not only unemployable, but unable to properly read and analyse the issues of the day and then engage in sensible debate? What’s the point if they are unable to discern economic fact from political fiction or earnest pledge from hyperbole? Why bother if we just end up with the same old tribes whose beliefs and votes are based on purely historical precedents; and inaccurate, corrupted history at that? Then again some people probably shouldn't be burdened with the vote no matter how well educated they are.

We don't need no education

One thing is for certain though: much as I rail against a lot of their ideology and unproven, fashionable education theory, teachers must have increasingly broad shoulders, for upon them they carry the hopes of the nation. Qualified or not, only those who CAN, should teach.

"Give me the child..."

It has been a charge levelled at graduates for as long as I can remember, that they turn up with all the gear but no idea, lacking what was once considered a pre-requisite for a useful working life – common sense. Long considered to reside in those with less lofty aspirations, the ability to sort the wheat from the chaff and get down to business is nothing more than habits acquired by experience to cut the crap and get on with the job. Given that child-centred education has for so many years mitigated against anybody taking personal responsibility for anything at all it’s little wonder that, once again, employers are bemoaning the quality of graduates, even as the so-called experts are tinkering around with what they collectively call ‘life skills’ and we used to call simply ‘living’.

There is no future in just doing a good job any more, it seems. No wonder bright youngsters are drawn to nebulous ‘consultancy’ jobs where instead of getting their hands dirty they can simply tell others from the safety of a remote desk how they should get their hands dirty. Instead of toting dat barge they can charge far more for spending their hours locked away in ivory towers drafting learned reports on how the colour of dat barge can synergise more intuitive outcomes and enhance life chances. Meanwhile dat barge remains untoted.

With unwavering certainty and against the evidence of experience and yes, common sense, the expert tells us mere mortals that diversity improves everybody’s lives, that the solution to overspending on welfare is to spend more on welfare and that important ‘life skills’ can be taught by ideology-stuffed young teachers who have yet to leave school themselves. Wielding teetering stacks of research papers, drafted in isolation and with no input from their subjects the theorists banish common sense to the status of misinformed, knee-jerk and counter-productive reaction.

And worse, those elected to lead us, lacking any coal face experience themselves, actually listen to these self-proclaimed, self-obsessed experts and simply zone out the rising hubbub of those who will have to live in their brave new world. In response to the common sense voices from the shop floor the experts hold their unstable high ground and sneeringly tell us that common sense is too simplistic, outmoded and represents a bigoted point of view. The future is bright, the future is expert and all the narrow-minded ‘common-sensers’ are no better than, humanophobic Luddites.

It doesn’t even matter that in the long term almost every ‘expert’ proclamation on social engineering is eventually proved wrong – sod common sense, let’s try it anyway - after all, it’s just another generation fucked over and there’s always be another one to experiment on.

Which brings me on to a current expert theory about early years education. Not content with simply not bothering to teach pupils the boring basics of reading, ‘riting and ‘rtihmetic the edu-alchemists are now saying we shouldn’t even start not-educating them until age seven. As Toby Young argues in his excellent article, this is driven by the usual Marxist meddlers and will produce a new generation of illiterates the like of which would have Victorian schoolteachers burning their mortar boards.

Toby’s argument (and you should read it in full) is so obviously correct that it will have lefties spitting into their frothy mocha-choco-lattés at the indignity and the effrontery of the bigoted bloody common-sensers and their damnedly un-nuanced reduction of a complex problem to a clumsy cause and effect analysis, which may have made the Victorians into the most advanced nation on the planet but will be inadequate in our glittering multi-faceted bright orange future… where many kids will nevertheless still leave school unable to read.

But for what possible purpose can those on the left want to turn out yet another batch of entitlement-obsessed, unemployable welfare fodder? Why would they even dare to propose more of the sort of social changes that have reduced a once effective, if not entirely satisfied society to one where even fewer have a chance of getting on? Why would they as they so caringly put it, rub our noses in it? For our benefit? Really? Whatever their deluded common purpose – and it’s by no means certain what that purpose really is - it defies common sense.

How to have brilliant kids

I have had a most excellent idea. Are you fed up with your kids lounging about, getting under your feet during the holidays, when they should be outside in the fresh air?  Do they tug on everybody’s nerves during school time, running you ragged and abusing the neighbours? Do you despair, knowing that they won’t get their grades, you’ll be constantly dragged down to see their heads of year and ultimately you just dread that thirteen-year old Speshal-Bru  is going to be pregnant before she sees her GCSEs?

Do you blame ‘society’ and the bad influences they come under for the way things turned out? Have they metamorphosed into your worst nightmare despite all that you have done to give them everything they demand and bring them up well? Or are you able to admit that you just weren't really up to it as a parent and you need a break from it all?

Well how about if your kids weren't the listless layabouts you have now but instead were bright-eyed and eager to please? How proud would you be if every day they brought home examples of yet another small achievement; some art, high marks in the homework they actually did by themselves, or complimentary letters from the headmaster? Would you be thrilled if they had a sense of purpose and knew what they wanted in life but didn't expect any of it to be handed to them on a plate and were determined to go on to high-flying careers?

Well there IS a way you can have all that – because, let’s face it, you deserve it, innit? Across Eastern Europe there are millions of children who wake at dawn and carry out household chores before walking five miles to school where they sit in attentive rows because they understand that education is a way to a better life. Raised in nuclear, two-parent families they understand the value of strong family ties and the timeless logic of the work ethic and would not dream of treating their parents as servants. So here’s what you can do.

Let’s say you have brought three lazy, fat, good-for-nothing wasters into the world through ‘no fault of your own’ and you've had enough of them. Well don’t waste another ounce of investment on them because they’ll never amount to anything. Instead, adopt three ambitious, polite and industrious Latvian kids and raise them as your own. You’ll be able to feel that swell of pride as they cross life’s finishing lines and achieve all those wonderful things your own don’t deserve to. There you go, simple.

British skools for Brutish kidz

What’s that? What happens to yours? Oh you still have to keep them under your roof; nobody else wants them after all. Yes, yes, feed and shelter them, buy them smart phones and trainers and all that guff and no, you don’t get to have a bigger council house. You see, what you now have is a working model of British-style Socialism scaled down to domestic level so you can understand it. Overcrowding, the displacement of your own by more worthy incomers and the knowledge that when the new kids grow up and strike out for independence you’ll still be left with a bunch of idle layabouts to feed.

If only Chris Bryant had explained all that properly yesterday, he might be carrying a wee bit more credibility today. Still, good luck in the job hunt Chris.

Another Brick - how bad was that?

In the late nineteenth century, Britain was still the world’s dominant power. A wealthy country, it recognised the drawback in having an uneducated population so in a series of acts beginning in 1870 it introduced state education, gradually compelling all children to attend school from 5 to 10 years of age.

It was quite normal for children to work to help support the family and very tempting for parents to keep them thus employed so the new law was enforced by Attendance Officers and the child catcher was born!  The school leaving age was raised to 11 in 1893 and to 12 in 1899. Rab Butler’s reforms raised this to 15, from 1947.

What brought about this train of thought about? On my rambles yesterday I came across the old Upper Wortley Board School built by the Leeds School Board in 1876. Later in the day I learned that my elderly neighbours had attended that same school and in a good old gossip-over-the-garden-fence we fell to discussing the good old days.

That red brick edifice is much like my first school. A grand school, a sturdy school. A school built to last, to do a worthy job for the good of all.  The smell of polish and piss and the sound of a headmaster fully engaged with his primary task, patrolling the corridors and maintaining standards. Children busily engaged in actually learning their lessons and dreaming of the day they could get out and get a job. A school fit for the engine of the world.

By 1918, when the school leaving age was 14, all men over 21 were allowed to vote (women over 30 – they had to wait another ten years for electoral equality) So, the average working man could have been gainfully employed for at least seven years before exercising an opinion on how he and everybody else was to be governed. Universal suffrage was a hard-won privilege and a vote was not something to be given lightly. From a platform of real-life experience they passed onto their children the surety that getting a good education would give them a better start in adult life.

Soon, all children will be compelled to remain in full-time education until the age of eighteen, yet there is a clamour for voting rights to granted at sixteen. For every parent who drools over their brood and extolls their virtuosity and wisdom there is an employer desperate to get a decent day’s work out of them, such is their sense of rights, unbalanced by any sense of responsibility. You would let these mere children vote? You would have to be mad to believe this makes any sense.

Because the dreams of old are long gone and the old, low-grade jobs for a school-leaving population (in so many ways less well equipped to do them now) are taken by economic migrants. The emphasis on teaching creativity and freedom and individuality consigns them to a life unlived. Unfit for unskilled work, unable to cope with higher education we are breeding a rabble of entitlement-obsessed, overgrown babies.

If you want to see how education is failing the young you need look no further than the school that has replace Upper Wortley. A school fit for what, exactly? Who in the world will proudly call that their alma mater?

Here’s an extract from Dan Hannan’s Telegraph blog from yesterday;

“The argument for the welfare reforms is altogether more prosaic. We have been spending more and more money without any noticeable impact on either poverty or inequality. Under the last Labour government, the welfare budget rose by an almost unbelievable 60 per cent during an economic boom. Yet the gap between rich and poor widened. Why? Partly because the benefits system deterred some people from getting onto the first rung of the employment ladder. Throughout the Blair and Brown years, 900,000 working-age Britons were permanently economically inactive while 200,000 foreigners a year walked gratefully into jobs as waiters, receptionists, cab drivers, farm workers and cleaners.”

The same argument applies in education – for all the billions of extra resources poured in the only noticeable impact has been a steady downward trend in the attainment and ability of what should be the primary source of our workforce. Just as the answer to welfare spending cannot be more welfare, the answer to poor education cannot be more poor education.

So let’s ditch progressive education and get back to the slate and the times tables. If you’re not academic – and most aren’t - leave school at fifteen and wash dishes, sweep roads, flip burgers or whatever you need to do to earn a crust and learn how the world around you actually functions. Until you can appreciate the worth of work, any work, you have no right to rely on the taxed incomes of those who do the dirty jobs to keep you idle and in false hope.

Oh and you don’t get to vote until you’ve reached 21. And passed an old eleven-plus exam.

Sunday Supplement.

Aaaaaand, relax.

That's what I'll be doing. After carrying our brave English lads to victory over the unwashed vicious Scots hordes yesterday at Twickenham. I have to confess to being 'all wored out'. For those of you paying attention I have also been trekking up and down the M1 hauling what I previously considered to be my meagre possessions to my new (old) home. It turns out I have what can only be described as a shit load of stuff. Where did it all come from?

Books, for a start. A voracious reader and a rapacious hoarder I have managed to hang onto virtually every book I have ever owned since about fifteen. So, that's, erm, a LOT of books. Why do I hang onto them? It's Ralph Brookes' fault. As our O Level English teacher he once asked the class how many books we had at home. I lied and raised my hand when he said "More than fifty?" He was trying to gauge the level of parental influence we may have been enthused by and I correctly guessed that more was better. I also remember being astonished when class swots Anne and Louise smugly asserted they had more than a hundred.

In truth, although I read at a furious pace and had done since first starting school, actual owned books were a luxury we just couldn't afford. And while my mother consumed magazines at an alarming rate - in Yorkshire some people still refer to a magazine as 'me booook' - my father read only the newspapers that delivered the horse racing results along with his daily dose of indignation against the mythologically rapacious Tories. (He has hated Margaret Thatcher from the very start yet neither he nor anybody else in the family has ever been adversely affected by a single policy she brought about. Quite the reverse, for they now live rent and mortgage free as a direct result of buying the council house I grew up in. There's tribalism in action.)

So, back to books. I regularly conduct a Ralph Brookes-style survey of my classes of electricians. All adult learners, almost all of them men, almost none of them ever confess to having read a book since leaving school. And almost all of them struggle to read accurately and with comprehension. The lack of this basic skill alone is what pegs them at a low level of understanding and thus a low level of life attainment in the workplace. Considering that for most people work is the thing that simply drains their energies, you'd hope that the tools to make more of it, to make it more engaging, to make it worthwhile would be valued.

All of which brings me onto Andreas Schleicher. He's one of the supposed forward thinkers shaping the way education is or may be implemented and a person who Michael Gove has roundly applauded as the most important man in English education. Here, right here, is the problem in letting the theorists, the progressives, get involved in important policy like education. Because they ignore, I believe, an important observation. Those who are able will get on and learn anyway, while efforts to engage those who are less able by making education 'fun' will result in ever more expensive ways of diverting the children who most need to be taught away from actually teaching them.

The notion of teachers as children's entertainers is not especially new, but it as and always has been, counter-productive and cost-ineffective to spend the most time and energy and financial resources on the least able. Of course, it is an uphill task to drill students in the basics when some arrive at primary school virtually un-house-trained and with no concept of discipline, but that's a clear argument for streaming. That way you can introduce curriculum widening earlier to those who can cope and concentrate on the absolute basics, including a few hard facts of life for those who would otherwise languish on the back benches.

So, give the kids a chance, eh? Teach them to read and you'll give them a better start than any number of citizenship classes and how-to-sign-on seminars. Art for art's sake, money for god's sake and reading for reading's sake... and not just the Sunday supplements.

Life's hard... then you die.

I just caught a snippet of what passes as 'news' on BBC Breakfast as I sipped coffee and planned my day.

Former schoolboy crush, Maggie Philbin was earnestly discussing the use of calculators in primary schools with a no-doubt lovely, but a bit wet and dithery teacher of the sort we'd have eaten for breakfast, back in the days when schools were for education rather than indoctrination. I believe the cases for and against the use of calculators are both settled and a matter of common sense; over-reliance on tools before you understand what they do is palpably not helping.

But the more interesting aspect of the discussion was their use of words; words and phrases like 'enjoy' or 'make lessons more fun' which put the emphasis on the teacher to entertain, rather than teach. Is it any wonder we have people who grow up to expect life to be one endless round of giddy delights, instead of the mixture of pain and pleasure we actually endure?

Some animals on earth seem to have a life of pastoral ease, grazing away until the predator pounces or old age or starvation or drought takes its toll. They shudder, roll over and die. Did they enjoy life? Do eggs taste better from happier hens? [Bad reversed joke alert: What's a hen do? Practice the oldest living religion - baboom-tish. Sorry.] What's the point of life? There appears to be no point whatsoever other than that which we make for ourselves.

And I believe we get more pleasure and reward in every sense from that which we achieve by our own efforts. People put up with unimaginable hardships to cross frozen continents, to climb airless mountains or starve themselves in search of enlightenment, truth and triumph. Schooling, formal and otherwise, should give us the personal tools to set out on our own journeys. Education should prepare us to meet the world, a world where shit happens and sometimes there is nobody at our back.

So, sod the fun. Teach them the skills and teach them that life isn't a bed of roses, a basket of cherries or a box of bloody chocolates. The fun comes after you've learned to deal with the other stuff.

Then you die.

Back to the drawing board

Well, in preparation for my triumphant return to home shores, it’s time to revert to UK blogging themes and get up a good head of steam for next week’s rants. Let’s see... PM inadvertently reveals possible good economic news during PMQs, to the chagrin of the feeble opposition benches? Nope, too flimsy, the Red Eds can wait. Hmm, what’s this about mortgages being harder to get? Old news.

Aha! Nothing like a recurrent theme to get my outrage glands secreting bile at the gush. Nobody with half a brain can deny there is something deeply wrong with British education these days and it turns out that is the nub of the problem; much of the early school intake possesses exactly that amount of brain. As with all social ills, I have been saying this for decades. Here’s the headline: 

“Chaotic homes creating children incapable of learning, says Gove: Teachers report five-year-olds still in nappies who cannot speak in sentences.” 

Before certain women go off on one, just because I am a man it does NOT mean I cannot have a valid opinion on this subject. I've kept my bloggy postulations away from rape, abortion, sexual equality and all those other subjects some of you will not allow men to debate, but on this I will have my say because it affects me as well. If we allow this to continue we will have a nation of sub-human, quasi-sentient, feral scum sucking the last few drops of succour from the few remaining domiciled tax payers. 

In calling for early intervention, the article says “...there are[sic] a group of children for whom the state has to intervene because they will grow up in circumstances so chaotic that [that] they are actively harmed by the failure to be in a nurturing environment [where] they can learn the sorts of habits which allow them [to] become effectively socialised.” 

I’d argue for intervention much earlier than pre-school. We should be intervening pre-life itself. We don’t need a generation of children in state care, we need a class of children not there; those parents simply must not be allowed to breed. You can go shove your human rights fairy tales right up your arse. There is no such thing as natural human rights, but there are very many human wrongs. And we will pay for these particular human wrong ‘uns for their entire life. Banged up, on welfare, on drugs, in rehab, on parole and dependent for their very survival on a combination of state handouts and crime. 

These nasty little bastards are only going to end up in jail anyway so why tolerate their existence at all? If you don't want a burgeoning criminal class (Guess what - too late!) pest control will be far more effective, far more quickly than any combination of 'caring' interventions. What’s that? You’re all too soft and flabby after years of socialism and the fictions of equality and individual worth? 

Can't make an omelette without it.

Then avert your eyes and stick your fingers in your ears, turn your backs for a few years and let the government assemble hit squads to go out and stamp on their heads at the earliest opportunity. I told you before that if we want our civilisation back we need to start with a cull. 

There! That’s better. Batsby is back! Have a nice day.

Back to the Future!

Conference was in full swing when suddenly, people started to clutch their heads and look around wildly. Some started to panic as the auditorium shook and a swirling vortex distorted their vision. Then there came surprising calm as, with a sound like a heavily labouring respirator, a blue box appeared on the stage before their eyes. Gasps! Was this David Blaine, attempting a new feat of banality with no apparent purpose? There was a stunned silence as a door appeared in the box and a strangely clad man stepped out.

"Greetings, Earthlings!" he said to an open-mouthed audience, then "I like calling them that." This last was said as an aside to his flame-haired companion. "Greetings. I bring you good news from the future!"

For a conference debating the very form that the future should take this was an answer to a prayer. They could look forward and see what their earnest intentions would bring about. For the first time they could set a policy course knowing what the outcomes would be. Almost everybody, to some unheard cue, leaned forward in their seats and listened.

"In the future, there is no such thing as multiculturalism. Everybody identifies themselves as either 'British' or 'visiting' and everybody looks pretty much the same. People do not fear the police or the judiciary and everybody rubs along pretty well, knowing the rules. Burglars are desperate people for they know they abandon their rights the moment they break in.

"In the future there is no European Union to speak of and Britain is independent of it. There is no Human Rights Act, no restrictive employment laws and employers are free to hire and fire fairly and as they see fit. Most adults are in work, many mothers happily stay at home and bring up well-behaved children who do them credit. The watchword is 'a fair day's work for a fair day's pay' and those who are envious of higher earners know that to achieve the same they must work harder or smarter, or both.

"In the future the National Health Service is the envy of the world, as is the British education system. Both have discarded the management-heavy inefficiencies and both medics and teachers strive to provide the best possible outcomes for their client base. Police officers and security guards are no longer required in A & E and the rare ill-discipline in schools is swiftly and effectively dealt with. Teachers and doctors are pillars of the community.

"In the future people will not be slaves to technology. People will not stumble about their daily lives, eternally plugged into the internet, their iPods, social media, games and the like. They will be civil to each other, hold face-to-face conversations and will no longer suffer the anguish and slide into dementia precipitated by a loss of electronic connectivity. In the future, you will be FREE!"

Say hello to the future!

For a moment, nobody broke the spell. Then a muted shuffling began as people turned to each other, uncertain how to proceed. Strangers cautiously smiled at each other and shook hands; some hugged and a few wept silently to themselves. The future IS bright; the future ISN'T Orange.

Then one brave soul addressed the stranger on stage. "Sir!" he said, "Tell us, pray, from what year you come, bringing such good news?"

The Time Traveller ducked back inside his blue box for a moment, the sounds of ratchets ratcheting and springs being sprung were heard before he reappeared and announced to the enraptured throng. "1958"

Real Men

Real men don't push pens across paper, or scribble with mice on screens. (Yes I've had the tools out today.)

“How hard can it be?” was the popular cry from DIY have-a-go heroes of yesteryear when, armed only with a few rusty old tools, most men could make a passable job of putting up a shelf, relieving a sticky front door or adding a [admittedly potentially lethal] socket in the kitchen . All to be quietly put right when their better halves discreetly called in a professional once hubby was out at work. But at least they had a go and believed they could do it. 

Nowadays more often than not, said hubby isn’t out at work anymore so there can be no excuse (although he’s unlikely to be an actual hubby). Yet despite having available an arsenal of cheap and effective power tools it is less and less likely that those little household jobs will be carried out, er… in house. 

According to ‘research’ we are less inclined these days to pick up the screwdriver and even resort to getting a man in to tackle flat-pack furniture. Oh the shame. Gone, it seems, are the days when men could change a wheel, top up the oil and fit a fan belt. We mourn for the shed full of sharp tools handed down from father to son – for a start you’d have to work out who the father was in many cases. 

Boy Scouts used to routinely carry sheath knives and could be expected to do their best to whittle a woggle at the drop of a beret, but the fear of youth knife crime has put paid to that. In fact the fear of violence has even spread to a bid to ban glass from some pubs. What is bloody wrong with us? 

Could it be that the breakdown of a normal, family-based society and absolute paranoia about safety and fairness and self-esteem at all costs is at the root of all this? With predominantly female teachers in their early years (for fear of the paedophile tag that attaches to males involved with young children) it seems boys are destined to grow into their majority with neither a feel for nor a love of proper, manly tools. 

Coupled with our enormous brains, tools set us far apart from other animals; it’s what makes us supreme. But some would have us throw much of that away. A lack of hands-on manual education leaves many young men inept and unable to comprehend how things work. And knowing how things work is the ultimate province of boys and men – ask James May. 

Boys – academically inclined or otherwise – should learn the feel of a plane on wood, the beauty of turning a tree into a chair. They should be getting down and dirty and learning how machines work – and skinning their knuckles in the process. They should be looking forward to the smell of the metalwork shop and earning a few scars instead of ‘designing’ shit on a computer; yet another classroom simulation when the real thing is what they crave. 

Yes, yes, equality, blah, blah – the chicks can have a go too - but I’m guessing there will still be few female mechanics, plumbers, builders and so on. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for anybody being able to do anything, but don’t take the piss, eh, girls?) 

But, thankfully, help is at hand. If the Greens get their way nobody will be able to afford proper tradesmen any more – they’ll be too busy trying to pay their super-taxed fuel bills – so, sooner or later the lads will have to have a go at fettling on their own. 

If we can get manual skills back into education we’ll have a route for the non-academic, who have been sold false qualifications for years. We’ll also be able to make inroads into educating our own skilled workers, instead of importing them from Eastern Europe. And let’s call a spade a spade. It’s plumbers and carpenters and roofers and decorators we need on the ground, not inflated titles like ‘engineer’ or ‘designer’ or ‘project manager’. 

Let’s make manual work, work. Let's put the Y back into DIY.

Skools for Fools

Now that my Marxist mentor has educated in me in the ways of high finance and I truly understand the path of righteousness, it seems I am ready for Part 2 of my transformation to true believer. Whilst I used to accept the notion of the existence of Marx, I thought it was a bit like Tolkienism and I never expected to meet an actual, card-carrying Hobbit. (Or do I mean tokenism; another popular leftist outcome?)

The Second Book of Ridicule sets out to right society’s wrongs and once again I find that all I once held dear is woefully at variance with the yellow brick road to peace and love and happiness for all. (Remember, all this is from a real life encounter with a true sage of the enlightened Left.) 

On education, I am now informed, equality is all. Apparently it is utterly elitist and morally wrong to divert resources to allowing some to become good at anything and mixed ability classes are the only moral option. As Snowball might have said 80 IQ points good, 100 IQ points bad… but some IQ points are worth more than others. 

Under the red reality no effort or expense will be spared until every child has reached an equal level of achievement. If that means an ever increasing spend on educational technology, classroom assistants and a constant re-writing of the syllabus and grading system then so be it. Only when every child scores an ‘A’ in the new Level Ordinaire Academic Fundamental Educational Result certificate can we say we have won. We need to turn out as many A-grade LOAFERs as possible. 

My grizzled old wise owl has taught me that such principles may be employed just as equably to solve all of our problems and salve all of our consciences. Regardless of what history, observation, calculation or common sense may tell you, Marxism tells you it is never wrong to rough out a philosophy on the back of a fag packet and then stick to it relentlessly. 

If I may be so bold as to extend the doctrine: 

In sport, all must win trophies. Take football, for instance: one day there will be only one football team in the land. (And it won’t be Liverpool.) All employment law will be made by the workers and all tribunals will find in favour of those horny-handed sons of toil. Criminal compensation will become exactly what it sounds like; after all it’s a brave man who would burgle his fellow and it can’t be easy getting by on a felon’s wage.

Cabinet colleagues prepare for PMQs

Finally, the sacred NHS will be run for the patients by the patients. This will apply just the same in the mental health sector; it seems the lunatics really ARE the right people to be running the asylum.

(I may need now to drink myself into helpless, bed-wetting oblivion in order to help me recover a healthy equilibrium. An enormous swing to the right may be what's needed. Watch this space as I go through the recovery programme.)

A Universal Truth

So, who knew? Going to second-rate universities to gain rubbish degrees in made-up subjects is no guarantee of a job? I've been saying this for years and years. (And years) If I'm honest I probably wasn't really university material either. But at least when I went up it was as part of a genuinely small minority to do so. Having a degree opened doors back then.

While I was there I encountered a mysterious breed of nocturnal creature – the MBA student. The Masters in Business Administration was a feared and coveted award and its shadowy apostles would work late into the night to meet ferocious deadlines. Most of the devotees were much older than we and being from overseas gave us our first contact with the fierce work ethic of the orient.

Twenty years later, when I took my own master’s degree, I learned that this once mighty ball-breaker had become almost the entry level for many management jobs and the often mediocre students frequently had little or no experience in any kind of paid employment.

At what point did the cart start dragging the horse? When did the system decide that if we opened up education to deliver infinite choices for niche courses with no prospect of employment, this would somehow benefit our workforce? Or the country, for that matter? 

Oh, silly me, neither of those have anything to do with it, have they? No qualification makes a blind bit of difference if the aptitude or the interest is not there in the first place; it’s all about pandering to the gods of diversity and inclusion. (And massaging the youth unemployment figures.) 

In the Olympic park right now are many athletes little more than children, who have sacrificed much to achieve their goals. They have put in true, hard work in pursuit of little reward, for few of them will go on to make a living out of their passion. Once we would have universally applauded their efforts, win or lose, but such endeavours mean nothing to the sort of idiot who tweeted hurtful scorn at young Tom Daley for missing out on a bronze medal in the synchro diving 

Twitter put on its best bonnet of outrage and went on the warpath, illiterate insults were traded for impotent threats, the subject trended worldwide and pretty soon the police were on the case. Really? Is this how we do things now? Is that what the Internet is for? 

Much has been made about how, in the ‘Information Age’, children don't need knowledge when they can Google everything. Strange, then, that all this technological empowerment seems to throw up remarkably few modern Leonardos, Faradays, Darwins or Brunels. I venture that it would take mere days for any of those great men to gain mastery of the keyboard and rather than be at a disadvantage against today’s tech-savvy kids they would wipe the floor with them. 

You can’t polish a turd, make a silk purse from a sow’s ear or improve a pig with lipstick. So let’s put away the cosmetics and pick up the scrubbing brush; scrub away all this entitlement bullshit and get back to some decent, honest hard work and discipline. 

Maybe then we’ll end up with a few more Tom Daleys and fewer of the sort of idiots who will believe codswallop like this! 

No, seriously... they are the future!

Reet Elite

It's school sports day once again and in the last race of the day - the whole school hundred metre dash - all the children are neck and neck. Parents watch with baited breath as they near the finish line. Then, one child starts to edge ahead. The crowd lean forward in their seats and, as one, urge "Slow down! Slow down!" But it is too late and Johnny's mother hangs her head in shame as Fast Johnny breasts the tape ahead of the field.

She'd brought him up to  be equal. She'd been fierce in her determination for him not to excel in any endeavour. What mattered to her most in life was bringing up the perfect, equal child. After all her efforts, she just knew he had to be the ultimate - more equal than all the rest put together. But, despite her best efforts he'd shown himself up to be - she spat the word - elite!

The word 'elite' has recently gained new currency as the number one pejorative hate-label for anybody looking to lay blame for perceived injustice. Here it is levelled, probably correctly in this case, against bankers. But it is tossed around freely to refer to political and religious elitism whenever an argument needs to be won (or at least drawn!). In education, so corrosive a term has it become that we end up with today's story about 29-Resit-Boy and a pitiful indictment of the blind rejection of anything so repugnant as individual excellence - all must have prizes.

Conspiracy theories abound regarding shadowy groups like the Freemasons, Opus Dei and the sinister-sounding New World Order. Today's Lords reform debate originates from the same fear of the power of elites. The Left frequently conjoin the words to mint the phrase 'power-elite', making it sound all the scarier.

So, where where do you want to stop your elitism? Were you ever a Sixer in the cubs? Is a 'Team Leader' a symbol of an oppressive hierarchical society? How dare households have a head? How would 'first past the post' voting work? Or PR for that matter? And - this is crucial - who would lead the fluffy little ducklings all in a row to swim in the park pond?

We've just had Wimbledon. And footie's Euro 2012. Yesterday was the F1 British Grand Prix and this month London hosts the Olympics - the most blatant worship of elitism.in the world.

You want equality? Really?