When I wrote 'all Must Have Prizes', my book about Britain's education meldown, in the late 1990s, I was told by the great and the good in the education world that what I was describing bore no relation to reality. The trendy, child-centred theories I was describing as the education orthodoxy, which rested on the premise that teachers should no longer transmit knowledge but take a back seat while pupils 'took control of their own learning' and found things out for themselves -- thus being abandoned to ignorance and worse -- had been, I was told, superseded years before. All old hat. All untrue.

Today, John Clare in the Telegraph tells us that Dr Patrick Hazlewood, the head teacher of St John's in Marlborough, Wiltshire, has alrady scrapped subject teaching and is now to abolish homework:

'He will tell them that, to make their schooling more "relevant to life in the 21st century", they are to be given responsibility for "managing their own learning".'

if any naif should imagine that Dr Hazlewood is the educational equivalent of someone who was found deep in the jungle years after the war and had no idea it had ended, they should think again. For he is part of a project organised by the Royal Society of Arts,

'which rejects the notion that a teacher's job is to transmit a body of knowledge to pupils. The project aims instead to encourage pupils to "love learning for its own sake" and the project is intended to replace the "information-led, subject-driven" national curriculum with one based on "competences for learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information". The point of schooling, the RSA says, is to acquire competence not subject knowledge. It believes that exams only impede pupils' progress.'

If I were the Education Secretary, I would promptly impede the progress of Dr Hazlewood and any other school inclined to participate in the RSA's anti-education project. 'Project' my foot. The result will be actual children abandoned and betrayed by their school which is simply repudiating the essence of education and leaving them stranded in ignorance.

Now listen to the voice of a real teacher, one who understands the point of education and has realised how completely this country has turned its back on it. She wrote to me:

'I used to teach English Literature and Language at a further education college until about eight years ago. I resigned because I could not bear to have to give acceptable grades to A-level students whose standard of work would have ensured that they would have failed at O-level. In my last weeks at the college I gave old O-level papers to my class, really for my own benefit: I needed to prove to myself that I wasn't deluded. All of them found the papers too hard to attempt. How much weight lies in that little word, ' all '. I knew already that I had been giving B grades at A-level to students whose work would have been unacceptable at O-level only fifteen years before. So I left, because I could not bear to lie any more. Most teachers and lecturers simply can't afford to leave their profession and many of my old colleagues are sad, disillusioned and utterly resigned to dissimulation.'

The nihilistic ideas that took over British education are still firmly entrenched. Good teachers got out long ago. If you want to understand what has happened to Britain, you don't need to look much further than this.