A pious social experiment that betrayed our children

Sorry? Did I hear someone say sorry? Sorry so many of you out there don't know anything about your own country's history and, when you travel abroad, know nothing about where you're going and have no chance of speaking the language of the people who speak yours to you. Sorry about that. Sorry your reading and writing isn't quite what it might be. Sorry that, when your own kids ask you to help with maths homework, you come out in a prickly sweat. Sorry your idea of science is 50 fruit flies in a jam jar. Sorry we wrecked your education system for 40 years. For that, we are truly sorry.

Is Estelle Morris saying sorry to us? If so, I'm very glad to hear it: an apology from the governing classes for the state of British schools is long overdue. I don't agree with capital punishment, but I'd probably make an exception for all those ideologues who sentenced children to ignorance and illiteracy in the name of - may God forgive them - equality.

All those Tory ministers who sent their own youngsters to private schools and for 18 long years left the state system to rot. All those members of the liberal intelligentsia who enjoyed a rigorous classical education themselves - an education full of facts and figures and lovely, useful knowledge - but decided that the way forward for other people's kids was through the exact opposite.

The children of the British working and lower-middle-class were shafted at one end by lofty indifference and by pious social engineering at the other. No wonder we learned bugger-all.

Many of us who were enlisted, without our knowledge or consent, into the great comprehensive experiment in the Seventies now look back in anger at afternoons spent tracing vases (Classical Studies) or colouring in crop-rotation schemes (Humanities). All those precious learning hours squandered on pandering to the lowest common denominator (in our case, her name was Carol) in a mixedability class, while the likes of Tony Blair were being put through their paces in a place where education meant rather more than Pritt Stick and raffia mats.

Now Estelle Morris, the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, has announced that comprehensives-will have to modernise and offer a specialist education. Well, hallelujah, sister!

As a former teacher, Morris said this week that she wouldn't touch certain comprehensives with a barge pole. This was immediately called a "gaffe". Gaffe being an English expression of the early 21st century meaning: "Politician caught telling the truth in an unguarded moment."

Only I'm not sure Ms Morris let it slip out by accident. Beneath that shy, diffident exterior, there may just lurk a steely resolve, and she's going to need it as she tries to challenge a doctrine whose popularity on the Left has never been dented by the awkward evidence that it simply doesn't work.

According to Morris, "the comprehensive ideal has not solved the problems it was hoped it would solve". She can say that again. After 40 years, where has it got us?

a) In big cities, the middle classes are too scared to use their local schools - they flee to the suburbs or go private if they can afford it, leaving the less fortunate to fester in low-achieving ghettoes policed by plucky, but knackered, teachers.

b) Social mobility has fallen, not risen. Last week, a study by the London School of Economics revealed that a child from a disadvantaged background had more chance of getting on in the world if they were born in 1958 than in 1970. (A bitter irony: when grammar schools were in place, far more kids from poor homes made it to Oxford or Cambridge.)

c) Our public schools now officially offer the best education in the world, yet our illiteracy and innumeracy rates are among the worst in developed countries; 29 per cent of adults think that their reading, writing or mathematics need improving. In other words, seven million grown-ups can barely order a takeaway pizza because they don't know where P comes in the phone book.

d) Australia, New Zealand and South Africa - countries which adopted a traditional British system of education, and which kept it when we threw ours away, now provide a huge proportion of staff in our beleaguered schools. My Australian nieces receive for free a primary education for which any London parent would have to pay through the nose.

It makes you want to weep, doesn't it? In this city, I already know two families who have falsified their addresses to prevent their 11-yearolds being sent to the local Lord of the Flies High. The parents live in fear that the kids will pipe up in class about where they really live. In one local comprehensive a pregnant teacher was kicked in the stomach and miscarried.

By now, it should be clear to any sane person that some form of selection is necessary to deliver a decent education to our children. As with the German system, bookish kids should be allowed to grow bum-fluff beards and stick to their swotty studies till they're 27, pupils who are good with their hands should be given a terrific apprenticeship to build or design things, while the noisy and uncontrollable can be encouraged to join the Army or become celebrity chefs.

Forty years on, the comprehensive experiment should have taught us a lesson. If Estelle Morris shows no sign of having learned it, then yet another generation of children will be laid low by the very people who set out to raise them up. Sorry seems to be the hardest word.