Wun, to, free, for...

The Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons has published a report into literacy levels in the UK and on the 'action' the 'government' is taking to improve a dire state of affairs.

The Committee interviewed the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills and the Learning and Skills Council. Not the Department of Balls, I note, which has a big job on its hands (no, please, don't - the images are too horrible...) given that the root of the problem falls bang in the middle of its remit.

Chappie on the radio this morning explained that he had been illiterate into adulthood but had rectified the situation himself and now, in his twenties, felt confident end enjoyed proper books and newspapers. He is looking for work and might even start his own business one day.

Wonderful! Good stuff, my old fruit. One more saved by his own efforts from the hopeless, tragic mire that is the the curse of the gangrenous 'teaching' classes. You know, those bastards of the left-establishment who have successfully Gramsci-ed our education establishment in order to control the stunted minds of the young and the recently-young and have consigned more than half the working age population of Britain to slavery under the Brown State system. Victory to the marxoids.

Chappie squarely blamed his school teachers. He said they had nothing to say to his class if they had forgotten to bring their teacher's textbook into the classroom. Nothing.

Now, you may call me old fashioned which of course I am and proud of it, but I remember ...

When We Were Very Young... sitting in the babies' class at the age of five and being taught to read by an elderly nun who, strangely, did not use a textbook. We, sitting at our tiny tables on our tiny blue, yellow and pink chairs, were the ones with the books - Janet and John. All Sister had was her knowledge of how to teach children to read using a lot of Big Letters on cards which we ran around the room sticking on the walls, a few coloured paper stars and (this is quite important) her experience of turning out a class of 30, EVERY year, who could ALL read and loved reading 'cos now we could have stories any time we liked.

And then...

Now We Are Six... in this class, we all (yes, all) became very sophisticated. We advanced to 'I before E except after C' and such highfalutin notions. It was written on the blackboard. I can see it now.

And that was the end of our learning to read. Oh - no tests. None.

From that point on, reading was something we just took for granted. In our third year (aged seven) we all read a proper book. It was Heidi. The following year, we all read Black Beauty. In the year we sat our Eleven Plus (we all passed) we read A Tale of Two Cities. No, I am not kidding. It was our Set Book that year. Terrific stuff.

We had a 'Library' - in fact, a large-ish book shelf - in every classroom, and you could take any book you wanted, any time. And take them home to read in bed.

This was a tiny, insignificant school (now disappeared entirely) in a poor North London suburb. It was not a hothouse. Just a school. All the parents were working class or lower middle class. We had a couple of small grandees, one whose father was a GP and another whose father was a scientist in a local factory. (They had cars!) Not a toff in sight.

But back to Chappie. He left school unable to read... you know, words... afraid of newspapers and magazines... and yet he left with seven GCSEs.

In 2003, an estimated 75% of the adult population of working age had numeracy skills below the level of a good pass at GCSE and 56% had literacy skills below this level. At that time, based on data collected in 1996, OECD assessed the United Kingdom as 14th in the literacy and numeracy international league tables, with relative levels of illiteracy and innumeracy some three times that of the Scandinavian countries. More recent figures are not available [Why? No-one capable of doing it? Something to hide?] but, despite improvements in the number of pupils leaving school with literacy and numeracy skills, many still complete their formal education without GCSEs in English and maths.

Eh? So, we have improvements in 'literacy skills' levels but children can get seven GCSEs without being able to read well enough to pass an English exam at the level at which they do pass in other subjects... my head hurts...

Such 'qualifications' are worthless. The entire eduction system is a vast fraud against the children, their parents and society at large.

One of the [...] biggest challenges is reaching people in the workplace who lack skills. One part of the challenge lies in getting employers to recognise the benefits to the business of raising the skills of their workforce.

Oh, they recognise it, yeronner, as I know only too well having been one of them, and the truth of it cripples many a business - but why should they, and why should our universities (or institutions calling themselves such when in fact they are nothing of the kind) have to train people to read?

Our schools are no more than essential holding-pens for the restraint of children below 'working' age lest they become destructive en masse. They are prisons offering nothing to inspire or nurture the minds and hearts of the unfortunate young inmates, so many of whom can be found swanning around shopping centres instead of at their lessons, and frankly who can blame them?

What is the point of making children attend an institution which bores, depresses and shouts at them when it is not earning their contempt by patronising them?

Our 'school system', the poisonous, cynically political replacement for education because real education is dangerous, represses children's innate talents and offers them nothing that will equip them for life as a free and independent person, but instead indoctrinates them into believing that personal responsibility is a relic of a shameful past, independence is antisocial and prosperity the preserve of the class enemy, excellence is permitted only in areas like sport where intellectual attainment is irrelevant, high culture is abolished in favour of 'street culture' and work is unnecessary now that everything is provided by the State in a world delineated by fantasists like Will Hutton and liars like Al Gore, and proudly trains them to report their parents to Controllers at the local council for non-compliance with Orders.

Shakespeare said 'hang all the lawyers'. No, teachers will be much higher on the list when I finally emerge from this cave to lead you all out to the barricades on The Day.

Well, maybe not me personally. But the Day will come and there will be A List and I nominate this bloke as our leader. He has the necessary level of anger and writes better than I do so we'll get better pamphlets.

Hang all the fucking teachers and educational theorists, along with the useful idiot clip-board wielders of the Department of Balls and the class war academics who control the training colleges. They think they have convinced us that they can fatten a pig by weighing it at age five, seven, eleven and sixteen whereas we know that their true aim is to enslave us to themselves by controlling our children's minds so that future generations will never know what it is to be free.

Bastards.

No, I don't blame this Labour Government. I blame the entire fucking Labour Movement. They're all on the list, from Polly Toynbee and the Scott Trust to every taxsucking Labour peer. Especially them. They are rewarding themselves - richly, mendaciously, and out of my pocket - for having done the seminal damage to generations of school children. Their heads will be the first on the spikes.