Imperial Party forum

thomas davison

Our 'A-grade' children can't even manage a paper round
By Peter Hitchens
PUBLISHED: 22:00, 25 August 2012 | UPDATED: 22:20, 25 August 2012

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How we used to jeer at the Soviet Union for claiming record tractor production, record wheat production and record economic growth.
These fatuous lies were obvious falsehoods, in a country where the fields were full of weeds, the factories rusty museums of incompetence and waste, and life a series of queues for rare, wonky consumer goods and unfresh food.
But our own official figures are now just as laughably false. The worst of all are the annual claims that our schools are producing a new generation of brilliant wonder-children.

Tory MP: Graham Stuart said 'the standard of performance is better than it's ever been, the teaching's better and the children are cleverer than ever before'
A Tory MP called Graham Stuart, who as chairman of the House of Commons Education Committee ought to know better, actually said on the radio on Thursday: �The standard of performance is better than it�s ever been, the teaching�s better and the children are cleverer than ever before.�

Presumably that�s why my local newsagents now employ pensioners to deliver papers, and most of the hard-graft jobs for young people in this country are done by migrants from Eastern Europe. Our own children are just too clever to do paper rounds, or work on a building site.

If Mr Stuart is typical of our lawmakers, it strikes me that they too could all be profitably replaced by pensioners or Poles.
Does he really believe what he says?
For more than a decade, people like me have been abused and denounced because we dared to point out that British school standards were falling, and that our benchmark examinations were being watered down.
There was good evidence for this. The Engineering Council noted 12 years ago that maths standards at A-level had fallen by objective measures. They blamed a softer syllabus.
Durham University, by equally objective methods, found a similar rise in grades � unmatched by a rise in standards � in other subjects.
Now our case is absolutely proved, by the sudden halt in ever-improving grades. This was caused by a simple warning from the government, requiring the exam boards to show that any more �improvement� was justified by better-quality work.

And yet the lies continue.
The BBC, which in my view rightly doubts George Osborne�s pitiful economic policies, has never questioned the absurd Stalinist claims of our education industry, or our equally ridiculous crime figures, apparently compiled in Toytown by Noddy and Mr Plod.
That is because the causes of our wretched education standards, and of our ever-increasing disorder, lie in the failed Left-wing policies of the Sixties.

The BBC passionately supports these policies, and the Tory Party has adopted them just as their utter failure has become evident to anyone with a spark of intelligence.

Here�s the real reason why the BBC can�t host a statue of George Orwell (Orwell himself would have loathed the idea of such a graven image).

Orwell was neither of the Left nor of the Right, but dedicated to truth at any cost. The BBC, by contrast, can and does distort the truth to serve its Leftist ends.