Standards are falling in this country. We're now below Japan, the US, France and Germany.Well, as the author pointed out, it's not investment which is at fault here.
Depressingly, they show that, despite the millions of pounds poured into narrowing the attainment gap between the richest and the poorest pupils, the UK is still more beset by problems of class segregation than many of its rivals.
The raw data reveals pupils in private schools are streets ahead of their state-school peers. The average reading score of a privately educated teenager in the UK is 553, while it is 492 for a state-educated pupil. (The OECD average last year was 493 points.)
D'you know what? I think it might be the 'narrowing the attainment gap between the richest and the poorest' bit which is causing the problem.With such an ideologically-blinkered approach to delivering education, how could anyone believe that standards were going to rise?
Look. The way to give children of the less well-off a better education is by raising the standards of state schools - and the teaching therein - to a level of excellence. This would entail spending more time on, err, education, rather than quite ludicrous flights of dogmatic right-on self-pleasure.
Unfortunately, this quite simply doesn't happen. Instead of trying to match the very best UK schools, the massed ranks of public sector educational administrators (egged on by hideous legislation, in their defence) prefer to litter - and I do use that word in its literal sense - the syllabus (syllabi?) of our kids with lashings of politically-correct garbage.
It's great for equality in the state system - kids are all as poorly-served as each other - but private educators, for example, plough on regardless with proven methods of excellence and an emphasis on core subjects which will exponentially benefit pupils as they grow. Like a savings account, the more you put in at the start, the more compound interest will accrue on your initial deposit.
By handicapping kids with trendy irrelevances at an early age, their future all-round educational prowess is inevitably weakened.
However. And it is a big however. Those parents who may be well-off or highly-educated themselves have the wherewithal to escape the state schooling trap by offering top-up teaching, either as an extra after-school resource (paid or free) or as a stand-alone home education. Richer kids, by the simple rules of life, will always manage better when equality is the prime concern in schools.
Yet again, the left's best efforts at egalitarianism only serve to disadvantage the less well-off.
Teaching kids to be the very best they can be, even if little Andrew turns out to be the type of genius that little Wayne will never be able to aspire to, should be the only consideration for teachers. Some kids will always be more clever than others, or better resourced. But by focussing on pushing them all to their limits, rather than making them all equal, we stand a better chance of raising standards across the board - and improving our country's future prospects - than some slavish adherence to a big pile of theoretical steaming horseshit.
Just let the teachers teach, how hard can that be? Or, as someone once said ... "education, education, education", not equality, equality, equality.
