Our education is in safe hands

“I needed to have the confidence and the courage to say this is fine, in fact it’s better than fine,” said Education Secretary Justine Greening.

Now I for one expect government ministers to enlarge mostly on their remit. Since for Miss Greening that’s education, one would expect, reading the above statement out of context, that she has done something in her area that required ‘confidence and courage’.

There’s no denying that something needs doing. Our predominantly state education is cranking out functional illiterates, and I only say ‘functional’ out of politeness. In fact, most pupils leave school not only completely detached from our civilisation but indeed unable to fend for themselves in the rough-and-tumble of economic life.

So let me guess. What gave Miss Greening the chance to display those marvellous qualities? I get it.

She must have started by identifying the problem, which is that 50 years ago our education stopped educating. Instead, cross-party subversives turned it into a workshop for social engineering, otherwise known as the comprehensive system.

Children were no longer supposed to be educated well – they were all to be educated equally. And in any field of endeavour, equality is the opposite of quality, for all their consonance.

So one would be forgiven for supposing that Miss Greening has committed the resources of her department to getting rid of that abomination, along with the demotic (demonic?) National School Curriculum.

Instead she must have reintroduced the old two-tier system that in the past made our education the envy of the world, instead of its laughingstock. She then must have declared that, rather than being seen as the aim of secondary education, universal literacy and numeracy are to be achieved at elementary school level.

Subsequent grammar schools will then concentrate on real academic subjects, such as maths, foreign languages, science, history, philosophy and theology – while secondary moderns will put more of an emphasis on skills useful in various trades.

Undoing half a century’s worth of educational subversion indeed must have taken much courage, and Miss Greening ought to be applauded. But alas that’s not at all what she announced.

Instead she vouchsafed to the gasping populace the invaluable information that she’s lesbian. That’s what to her isn’t only fine but ‘better than fine’.

Coming out, Miss Greening continued, was “the best thing I’ve done in many, many, many a year. And actually it gets better every day.” If so, her girlfriend should receive our congratulations, and British children our condolences. If the best thing the person in charge of education has done is airing her sexual proclivities, the tots are in big trouble.

A few questions are in order. Such as, why announce it at all? Most people, especially those reaping the harvest of our brain-washing comprehensive education, see nothing wrong in this or any other aberrant sexuality.

For them, the announcement is at best uninteresting. For others, those fossils who stubbornly stick to the standards accepted in our civilisation since Romans 1: 24-27 or, even further back, Leviticus 20: 13, Miss Greening’s confident and courageous revelation will sound mildly irritating.

So what’s the point? Miss Greening’s own explanation is rather unsatisfactory: “I needed to be true to myself about who I am, and I also felt I did and I do have a responsibility to the broader LGBT community.”

You don’t, love. You have a responsibility to your constituency and a broader one to your country, whose future largely depends on preparing children for adulthood. Let the ‘LGBT community’ look after itself; it has been doing rather well in that department lately, homomarriage and all.

According to Miss Greening, her aim was also to educate, as it were, her parliamentary colleagues: “You will only ever normalise this frankly when nobody is in Parliament feeling it is something they need to not be clear about. It does not and should not matter, but the reality is, for too many politicians they feel like it really does.”

I’d suggest that nobody expressing herself with such disregard for style and grammar is fit to be Education Secretary, but that’s a separate matter. At least now we’re getting warmer: Miss Greening’s reasons for her newly acquired honesty probably were indeed political.

Exactly what they were I don’t know. Perhaps her boss told her that, if she wanted to keep her cabinet position, she should come out before the opposition drags her out. Or else that her upmarket Putney constituency would regard sexual deviancy as a plus rather than a minus.

The earth-shattering announcement was first made last summer, attracting no attention whatsoever. Could it be that Miss Greening chose, or was instructed, to revive the issue in time for the snap election on 8 June?

Possible. I just hope that she doesn’t really regret, as she has indicated, the absence of homosexual role models at school: “I think it would have been really helpful for people like me growing up.” It would have been more helpful for all sorts of people to learn how to write English properly.

A lunatic in charge of the asylum. An arsonist running a fire brigade. And Justine Greening as Education Secretary.