Tarquin O’Flaherty 

Education, like youth, is wasted on the young.

Oh, dear me, no, not at all.  In the golden olden days, when the Empire stretched ‘from sea to shining sea’ it became more and more apparent, and more and more urgent that the business of business be recorded. In the vast stretch and sway of commerce within the British Empire, every jot and tittle was required to be noted down, set out in sensible fashion in properly ordered books, tomes and ledgers.  This could not be done, could not be achieved by any slap-dash or lackadaisical approach.  Things had to be done properly.  This need for uniformity demanded ledgers in Louisiana which could be read in a trice by a pox doctor’s clerk in the Punjab.  Clerks, appropriately educated, were de rigueur, so that in any profession  essentials might be anticipated and kept in good supply.  It is after all, impossible to beat beri-beri in Bangalore or keep the louse rate low in Louisiana without good lines of communication.  Every step, every branch of the bureaucracy demanded education.  Life and death could hang on a chap’s capacity to read and interpret messages so the quality of a chap’s schooling mattered greatly.  Without proper medical supply, without up-to-date records, without reliable information on train and troop movements, trials and tests to cut down the possibility of us all being murdered in our beds, any Empire would undoubtedly collapse.  This is why a competent, efficient bureaucracy was vital.

As can be seen from the foregoing, the Empire’s bureaucracy demanded its people be educated.  To provide for this need, schools sprang up all over Britain whose whole function was to provide cogs for the bureaucratic machinery of Empire.  On leaving school or university, people entered the Civil Service and were ‘posted’ to Hong Kong, Burma, New Delhi, or wherever there was a hole to fill, and from whence, with a little diligence, a young man could make his way in the world.

There was an inexhaustible need for educated foot-soldiers.  There were no calculators, no computers and no cars.  The Biro hadn’t been invented.  Message storage was on paper and in filing cabinets.  Everything depended on people, and a good memory could make you a fortune.

This, as we all know, is no longer the case.  The Civil Service has been revolutionised by technology, the Empire has withered away and as a consequence, a once mighty bureaucracy has folded it’s shrunk and shrivelled tents and slipped off into the night,but yet…

But yet, and I consider it a very good thing, we continue to educate people to within an inch of their lives.  What worries me about this is that one day, in the featureless expanse of the Conservative mind, someone of that stripe is going to notice.  It’ll take a while.  After all it’s been only been about sixty years since the decisions of the above and departing bureaucracy killed a million people in India.

One day they’ll ask what all this education is for, and why we spend so much money on it, why we bother… We’d better have answers…