Donald Trump may not know what good education should be, but he certainly knows what it shouldn’t be: woke, subversive, unpatriotic, factually incorrect, contemptuous of tradition, obsessed with DEI, sympathetic to every perversion under the sun.

Hence things he and his people say on that subject, and things they plan to do, make me jump up and punch the air – or rather would, if my emotional makeup could accommodate such gestures.

The president-elect is planning to shut down the Department of Education, and I hope our own government will follow suit (fat chance). Trump doesn’t think the federal government should subsidise schools staffed with “people that hate our children”.

“We will drain the government education swamp,” he said during the campaign, “and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing.”

The department Trump sees in his crosshairs is different from its British counterpart. Our Department of Education is responsible for setting the national curriculum, a function that in the US is delegated to individual states.

The US Department merely administers federal funding for schools and universities, and manages student loans and various aid programmes, which takes up about four per cent of the federal budget. Trump’s people believe those functions could be better handled by other agencies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services, Treasury and Department of the Interior.

Administration not being my core strength, I have no view on such practical details. What concerns me is the quality of education, not how it’s managed or financed, although I’m aware that such technicalities may have a bearing on the quality as well.

My general principle is that any government agency that’s not vital to the country’s life ought to be abolished. Defence, foreign affairs, home affairs, treasury all definitely rate their own ministries or departments, whatever they are called.

Some other areas, such as transportation, health, energy and agriculture should be up for discussion. Education falls into that category too, but only if the appropriate department hasn’t compromised itself beyond redemption – as it has done in the US and in every Western country I know. In that case, it should be one of the agencies on their way out.

The presence of some others, such as departments of culture, sport, women, equality, levelling-up and so forth, is simply incompatible with any sensible definition of free and sane society. Their existence is thus a litmus test of freedom and sanity, and Britain fails that test abysmally.

So does the US, but the difference is that at least its incoming administration is planning to do something about it. We should be so lucky.

“Across the country, we need to implement strict prohibitions on teaching inappropriate racial, sexual and political material to America’s schoolchildren in any form whatsoever,” Trump said last year. “And if federal bureaucrats are going to push this radicalism, we should abolish the Department of Education.”

No British politician in the past 50 years, not even Margaret Thatcher, has ever spoken in such uncompromising terms.

To be fair, strong, unequivocal statements on any subject tend to be suspect in Britain for any number of cultural, historical and temperamental reasons. But I’m afraid we are beyond the threshold where gentlemanly British understatement could work. We need men of action who are capable of wielding an axe, not just cellotape.

Trump, for all his faults, is such a man, and I only hope he won’t chop his own toes off when taking a swing at the Department of Education. Doing away with whole departments in the US requires the kind of Senate majority the Republicans haven’t got, which is why Trump didn’t manage to shut down that Department during his first term.

Let’s wait and see, is my stock phrase whenever Trump’s plans come up in conversation. He and his people aren’t yet in a position to do anything. But I’d happily sign my name under everything they say about education, and I’m extremely economical with such endorsements.

The Heritage Foundation, a Trump-leaning think tank, described the Department as a “one-stop shop for the woke education cartel”. And Christopher Rufo, head of another conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, pointed out a pernicious oxymoron: “An organisation can prioritise excellence or diversity, but not both simultaneously.”

He is right. The whole modern ethos sits on the rickety foundation of such oxymorons, starting with the canonical liberté, egalité, fraternité. The central element of that triad invalidates the other two, which doesn’t deter French officials from proudly displaying that nonsensical slogan on every public building.

Mr Rufo’s statement was based on facts, not just general logic. To wit, the US managed only 18^th place in PISA rankings for maths, science and reading skills, 2022. In case you are wondering who will soon rule the world, the first six places went to countries in South East Asia, with China coming in second.

Trump obviously agrees with Rufo’s diagnosis and to begin with he plans to do away with the £1 billion budget currently enjoyed by educational DEI programmes. And he wants to cut funding for any school teaching the critical race theory or “transgender insanity”, which is laudable.

I’m slightly concerned, however, about what Trump envisages as the antithesis to such educational perversions. He is planning to accredit only teachers who “embrace patriotic values and support the American way of life”.

That sounds like replacing one kind of brainwashing with another, which I don’t think is a legitimate function of schooling – even if the values to which pupils are exposed are generally positive.

Raising patriotism to an absolute may turn out to be as damaging in the end as its opposite. “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” wrote Edmund Burke, which statement adds an important qualifier to Trump’s stress on patriotism über alles.

If I taught a relevant course, I’d try to teach pupils what features make a country lovely, training them to analyse their motherland and, for comparison’s sake, other countries to see which of those features are present. Then I’d leave it to the pupils to decide whether or not they wish to “embrace patriotic values”. Mindless hand-to-heart, eyes-to-flag jingoism shouldn’t take precedence over dispassionate analysis because it may cauterise pupils’ brains.

In this life we aren’t blessed with perfect countries, and most have bad sides alongside good ones, with only the balance differing from one to another. Youngsters should develop the critical minds to figure out which is which, and, if as a result they are critical of their country, fine. Provided such criticism is based on truth made up of accurate facts and sound thought, not, as it is now, on lies made up of ideology and ignorance.

That apart, everything Trump and his people are saying and planning looks promising. And I find their intention to scale down higher education especially appealing.

Today’s ‘educators’ tend to interpret the E in DEI as not just equal access to education, but as the same education for all.

They are sensitive to the inner logic of liberal democracy whose acknowledged ideal is the common, which is to say mediocre, man, a sort of arithmetically average stencil to which all of mankind should be cut. Thus, their ideal isn’t that everyone should have access to higher education, but that everyone should have higher education.

That being ever so unrealistic, they’ll settle for merely half of the population boasting university degrees. That intermediate goal has almost been achieved in America, where 46.5 working-age adults have such qualifications.

Few of them emerge educated in the true sense of the word, although some do acquire useful professions. Most, however, have their crania pumped full of woke effluvia and ideological nonsense. They emerge with a college diploma but with neither education nor any marketable skills.

The Trump administration plans to cut the number of university graduates in half, instead diverting funds from liberal-arts colleges to apprenticeships and training programmes. That’s a good idea, provided they don’t throw out the baby of the humanities with the dirty water of ideological indoctrination.

Any society needs not just doers but also thinkers, and an advanced course in plumbing isn’t going to produce them. Again, there comes my usual mantra of let’s wait and see. For the moment, we can only hear, and most of what Trump and his people say about education sounds good.