Having just watched a disgraceful item on BBC TV Newsnight about the Prince Charles row, I am ever more astonished and aghast at the malevolence and bias of a culture in which remarks are wrenched out of context and gratuitously misrepresented. Prince Charles wrote a private note to a member of his household, in the context of a dispute with another member of staff about employment opportunities, in which he sounded off about an educational culture which encouraged everyone to think they could all achieve the dizzying heights of fame and fortune. This is most of what he wrote:

'What is wrong with people nowadays? Why do they all seem to think they are qualified to do things far above their capabilities? This is all to do with the learning culture in schools. It is a consequence of a child-centred education system which tells people they can become pop stars, high court judges or brilliant TV presenters or infinitely more competent heads of state without ever putting in the necessary work or having the natural ability.It is a result of social utopianism which believes humanity can be genetically engineered to contradict the lessons of history.'

This has been represented by various journalists, along with the Education Secretary Charles Clarke, no less, as the Prince telling people to know their place. Newsnight further put the boot in by sneering at his own privileged background and education. But this is a total misrepresentation of what he said. He was not decrying aspiration. How on earth could he, when so much of his public good works through the Prince's Trust is devoted to raising the aspirations of the disadvantaged?

He was making an entirely different point, one not grasped or investigated by Newsnight at all. This was that the current educational orthodoxy does not encourage aspiration or equality of opportunity so much as promulgate the disastrous fiction of equality of outcome. It tells pupils that everyone can get good A levels, that everyone can go to university, that everyone's qualification is of equal value to everyone else's. The notion of achievement has been all but destroyed in favour of an 'all must have prizes' philosophy that is all about the appearance of achievement rather than the reality. For the reality is that not all who aspire can make it. Not all can win prizes; some will fail to do so. Not everyone has the aptitude or ability to do everything. But to maintain the cruel and destructive lie that this is not so, our education system has dumbed down, reduced examination standards to meaninglessness and emptied education progressively of content (see the post below) on the basis that what children bring to the classroom is of greater value than any actual knowledge teachers might teach them. This so-called 'child-centred' approach thus confirms children in their own ignorance and traps them forever in disadvantage.

That is what Prince Charles was on about. It is nothing to do with genuine aspiration. It is instead its antithesis. It is a disaster that is simply destroying this country's future. But the malevolence of this culture means that this cannot ever be discussed properly. Instead we are treated to an ignorant, prejudiced, class-war, sub-Marxist jeering along with a quite staggering dishonesty in reporting.

I have been banging on about this accelerating education catastrophe for years. Indeed, I wrote a book about it called All Must Have Prizes. As a result, I gather from a reader that on Channel Four News this evening Tony Benn apparently described me - along with the former Chief Inspector of Schools, Chris Woodhead, who fought a lonely campaign against this madness and lost -- as 'very very right wing'. Only someone as closely associated as Benn with the destruction of the life chances of hundreds of thousands of children by the anti-meritocratic, anti- education, anti-west philosophy for which he has stood all his professional life could describe a deep concern to rescue from disaster British education -- and particularly those at the bottom of the heap who depend upon the schools to escape from disadvantage -- as 'very very right-wing'.

Such is the debased debate in this country now, an indication in itself of the collapse of education standards and a symptom of a society in advanced decay.