An international study of literacy and numeracy among 24 industrial nations has made me feel guilty.
The guilt isn’t so much direct as vicarious: I didn’t actually make anyone illiterate or innumerate, but I might have put the jinx in.
Judge for yourself: I have lived in the USA for 15 years and in England for 25, the last 13 of which featured a timesharing arrangement with France. Before going to America I had spent six months in Italy.
Well, it just so happens that the four countries cursed with my malevolent presence all found themselves close to the bottom of the table.
In the chronological order of my life, Italy ended up at No. 24 in literacy and 23 in numeracy; the USA at 18 and 24; England at 22 and 21; France at 17 and 19. At the same time Holland, where I often go to see friends but where I’ve never stayed longer than a few days, finished in the medals: bronze for literacy, gold for numeracy.
Now, I hope my friends elsewhere don’t take umbrage, but England is the only country with which I’m involved emotionally. Putting it in the language of real life rather than tabloid reports, I like quite a few countries, but England I love. That’s why I hate to see what’s happening to her.
Grave as my guilt is, there are those who are even more responsible. Conservative politicians and papers immediately set out to score points by blaming Labour for this unfortunate situation. Specifically, they singled out Messrs Blair and Brown, along with their entire cabinets, everything they stand for, the horses they rode in on and the air they breathe.
Sure enough, those chaps made the problem far worse than it had been. But they didn’t create it.
What created the problem was the wanton, criminal demolition of grammar schools and the creation of comprehensives in the mid-60s. That evil deed was also perpetrated by a Labour government, but at the time Tony was still at school (a prestigious independent one of course). It’s also useful to remember that the saintly Margaret Thatcher, in her tenure as Education Secretary, shut down more grammar schools than any dastardly Labourite ever did.
Overnight England’s education was converted from being the envy of the world to being its laughingstock. By turning schools into a laboratory for social engineering, the Bollinger Bolsheviks, most of them privately educated, concocted several generations of functional illiterates.
Consequently, England is the only country in the developed world where those aged 55 to 65 showed better literacy and numeracy than those aged 16 to 24. This wouldn’t have anything to do with the introduction of comprehensives in the 1960s, would it?
This giant social experiment removed from the lower classes their traditional social and economic hoist: good education. A clever child, regardless of his background, used to be able to go to a grammar school and emerge ready to take on all comers in the workplace rough-and-tumble. Even more important, he’d acquire the intellectual, aesthetic and spiritual refinement that separates us from animals and Millwall supporters.
The whole thing flew in the face of the universal law to which there are no known exceptions: any state embarking on a vast programme inspired by ideology will produce results diametrically opposite to those intended (or rather declared).
A war on poverty will make more people poor. A war on drugs will increase their use. A ban on handguns will lead to more handgun crime. An attempt to redistribute wealth will destroy it. Policies aimed at reducing the income gap between bosses and employees will widen it. An all-out effort to end all wars will lead to more, and bloodier, wars.
And an attempt to introduce equal, comprehensive education will always result in equal, comprehensive ignorance. Hence it will reduce social mobility and cast in iron every privilege conferred by wealth.
If you’re seeking empirical proof, just look at the other report published in today’s papers. Social mobility in England is among the worst of all developed nations, and surely our idiot-spewing education is the principal culprit.
When will the bastards learn that people aren’t guinea pigs or other test animals? We aren’t to be used for experiments and trials. Any state is evil that treats people as material, rather than an end in itself. Please, will somebody tell Dave.