Hand-shake-gate.

Occasionally we have resorted to open criticism of contemporary education policy. In our view secondary education is a processing plant. A sausage machine designed to achieve the lowest common denominator of human efficiency, whilst processing individuals for a lifetime of dull, rigid, conformist compliance. Those who get the highest marks are destined to be doctors, bureaucrats or any other tier of publicly funded sinecure. For those who get higher marks still, they’ll be processed by the twin pillars of the establishment and may emerge from Oxford or Cambridge as the pinnacle of human achievement… bankers. And for those who are uneducated, who fail the test, who are academically speaking, ‘discards’, they’ll just have to fend for themselves. They might even become entrepreneurs, but more likely will become the serfs of the machine age, either wiping bums in old age homes or working in a call centre.

Neville massaging bruised hand after demonstration of ” Blood and Iron” Tarzan-Grip.

And, universities, once geared as the national consciousness, vibrant and dynamic articulators of the ascent of civilised thought and creativity are now no more than processing plants. Technical institutes devoted to processing “units” and propitiating an income stream from visas and overseas students. And for good measure the promise of dull and predictable degrees for those who think within the boundaries.

Dr Goebells. Absence of Left hand suggests criminality.

Our education system is systematically flawed, and at the heart of it, in our learned opinion it doesn’t seem to be capable of adjustment. The politics aside, it’s lacking in its own sense of history. This has something to do with the very very short attention span of contemporary society and if you’d like to see were it all leads take a look at Trump and Merkel.

I was asked by my daughter, to provide a synopsis on whatever Hitler did to start the Second World War, and the question was , “Was he responsible for the entire fracas”?. “Well, he invaded Poland”, but before I could expound on the treaty of Versailles, the hyper inflation, the Depression, the racial theory, my daughter reproached me, “ Dad it has to be in dot point, and no more than three paragraphs’. ‘Oh’ I said, suitably chastened and was made aware that contemporary education is all about rote learning, and succinct dot points. I suppose it makes it easier to arrive at the “correct’ answer.

I thought hard, and put the real rise of fascism, and Soviet totalitarianism to the demise of the free press. Goebell’s put the shine on fascism, by peddling utter rubbish as fact. It was he and his cronies, most notably Julius Stretcher who made the filth that dehumanised ordinary people. They established the orthodoxy, the blind unquestioning orthodoxy that made very ordinary people mass murderers and passively complicit in the systematic extermination of “untermensch”. And crucially after Munich in 38 it was the bad manners displayed by the Nazi’s that shocked the world. And ‘we’ , (the democracies) allowed such poor behaviour to happen out of a policy of appeasement. Bad manners should not be tolerated. That’s where it all begins. So there you have it. Donald should’ve shaken Angela’s hand. WE understand she’s a sheila, and is open minded and liberal in outlook, but manners show respect. Cleary Donald doesn’t. There’s an irony in this. He doesn’t get history. But neither does Rupert. Scarcely seventy years ago the roles were reversed.

But then, ‘WE’ won the war.