Scrap targets

There is no task more difficult than that of educating British children. To the natural indiscipline of youth has now been added the indiscipline of parents, many of whom interpret any reports of wrongdoing in school on the part of their offspring as a personal affront, or as the manifestation of the malice of teachers. The teachers themselves have changed out of all recognition in the past few decades, thanks to the long march through the institutions by indoctrinating, and indoctrinated, intellectuals bearing pernicious gimcrack radical ideas. While many are respectable and learned men and women, who view it as their vocation to induct their charges into a civilisation, a tradition and a way of behaving, others sometimes give the appearance, especially when congregated at the conference of the National Union of Teachers, of being a rebellious rabble.

Unfortunately, successive governments have given teachers plenty to rebel against, and justifiably so. Rightly perceiving that there was a problem with British state education, the government under Mrs Thatcher chose precisely the wrong solution: more central control. This is the solution that all subsequent governments have also favoured, because it increases their power and flatters them into believing that they are the Great Helmsmen of British society.

When the teachers threaten, therefore, to boycott the government’s latest attempts to dragoon both them and the children – namely, the Key Stage Tests – they are responding to a genuine problem, for all that some of them at least may be acting from the worst of left-wing motives. Not only are head teachers faced with a wretched financial settlement, causing budget deficits in schools across the country, and the consequent loss of staff. The teachers are rebelling against a tendency that threatens to undermine Britain’s very foundation as a free society: namely, the ability of professions and institutions to retain their independence from government control.