David Davis

(Originally published on May 9th 2007)

This morning I had one of my most pleasant students over for an A-level Business Studies tute. we drank lots of coffee and talked about the definitions of many “business terms and buzzwords” that he needs to know of and use in the correct contexts when he writes his exam papers. (He hasn’t even been told except by me, to read the business pages of his newspapers, whatever ones they may be, even the tabloids, every day.)

This is an entirely amiable, “nice” young man, with a “normal” family background, and what he and his peers see as all the advantages of life in Blair’s New Britain currently going for him. He is averagely intelligent, whatever that means; but that is to say, that in my view he is capable of everything that a proper, rigorous pre “British-socialist” (as opposed to the much more rigorous socialist ones that existed and still to some extent exist behind the Iron Curtain) 1950s style education system can bowl at him. His horizons are only averagely narrow, and wider than many of his age group.

But something seems to have gone wrong with the amount of actual crunchy “hard” knowledge of the world that children are now expected to be aware of.  It’s gone down. I see two strands of strategy at work here. Firstly, the “curriculum” has been progressively and continuously truncated. For example, the latest GCSE “science” syllabus for 14-16-year olds, in operation this year, is hard put to contain any actual science. This is just the example that I know most about, although you would be scared at what’s in – and also what’s NOT in – the current Geography syllabus. Secondly, the “institutions”, by which I guess I mean the “universities”, have for about four decades been turning out the kind of graduates that think individual people are a “Resource”, that they ought to be told what to think, and that the curriculum and popular media (including the content and presentational style of the “Wireless  Tele-  Vision” News) ought to reflect the world-view of the coterie that’s running the institutions.

This generates a population of  people who, on the threshold of adulthood, have to be told what simple words and terms of description mean. Or, they “sort of know” what stuff means, but “can’t put it into words” (his and their phraseaology, not mine.)

Am I alone in thinking that the destruction of the most beneficent and powerful engine of education that has ever existed in the world – the broad universe of British schools and universities up to about 1960 both here and overseas – is under deliberate assault? And if I am right, then what is “their” motive? What is the use of a population whose members have lost the ability to articulate thoughts and abstractions? I know that statists hate us for inventing liberalism, and for degrading the realisable frontiers of tyranny through the ages. But, couldn’t they just “lie back and think of the Gulag”, and allow themselves to be carried along, glowing with self-satisfaction and prosperity, on the swelling tide of riches that will percolate down to them from the many crackpots who will harmlessly prosper in a capitalist civilisation, and in which their rantings will be of negligible account?