On the face of it, Rasheed Sanook's announcement that school students will study mathematics until 18 is not a bad one. Although the UK performs above the international average in mathematics in global comparisons, increasing the mathematical competency of pupils further would seem a sensible policy.
It will remedy some of the over-early specialising of many students (choosing all humanities A-Levels, for example) in order to get out of a subject they perceive as too hard. Given that teenagers rarely comprehend the faulty logic of their decision making, forcing them to grind out a couple of years of sums would stand them in good stead further down the road. They'll thank us for it later. However, it seems doubtful that the policy will churn out maths prodigies a la the Orient.
More concerning is what Sanook is not doing, or what he fails to even perceive. He is a technocrat providing a technocrat's solution. Yet he is the leader of the notionally conservative Conservative Party. As such, one would hope he shares the concerns of many that the problem facing British education is not that our pupils think that two plus two is five but instead that they know so shockingly little about their country.
Our nation's story is not taught properly. There is no effort to impart a sense of continuity or of cohesiveness: students that bother to study history (it not being compulsory at GCSE) will learn a strange patchwork of topics but nothing amounting to cohesive picture. I, for one, studied the First World War, the Tudors and slavery. For A-level it was the Chartists, followed by Italian and German unification. Never did I learn about the Glorious Revolution, nor of Magna Carta, nor of the development of Parliament and the Civil War.
Those not studying history at school will pick up the dross they hear around them, bleated out by the usual suspects. That Churchill was a devilish racist, that we are forever stained by slavery's guilt, that our empire was uniquely malign. Repetitive soundbites stripped of context, but which have the cumulative intended effect of undermining impressionable minds' loyalty to the country.
It can hardly be expected of young people to feel an affection for a country which they are not taught about, or which is only ever described as wicked.
As the post-war generation gave up on transmitting cultural knowledge, so did the schools. That was, no doubt, all part of the plan: by leaving people ignorant of the past you can more easily manipulate their future, ignorant as they are of the centuries of progress that brought us to our incomparably fortunate modern state.
Still, remedying our society's dearth of understanding of who, precisely, we are would require something today considered utterly revolutionary: a conservative government.
One doesn't need an extra two years of maths tuition to realise that the days of this woeful party are numbered.
This is atrocious - but sadly symptomatic for 'history education': "Never did I learn about the Glorious Revolution, nor of Magna Carta, nor of the development of Parliament and the Civil War.".
Of course, lacking that knowledge, neither Brexit nor the Monarchy make sense, and of course the Left can happily plow on in their sly work to destroy this country, right down to the roots.
As for 'moar maths' - sigh. Just teaching plain old arithmetic to the primary school kiddies would be a very good start. But both proper reading (who needs books when there's 'Alexa'!) and reckoning (who needs that when there's an app doing all the legwork!) are now deemed unnecessary and a useless waste of time, just like map-reading.
The 'Higher Educated Intelligentsia' can learn copy & paste. Nobody needs anything else. For that we have the new-colonial 'employees' who get a better education in their countries, for us to exploit.
Mmm, what do I remember from 11 yrs of history lessons? The Romans came and built some straight roads then left again. We plunged into the dark ages until someone invented an agricultural machine. We had the industrial revolution, built horrible tenement slums and wove Paisley shawls. Some corn laws, problems with the Irish and voting rights for more men. Fantastic! that really set me up for life.
As always I just hate it when gov't decides to give its two penneth worth; more top down micromanaging that will have no positive outcomes. If in one decade you insist every young child have access to a computer you can't then decry that the little darlings used them and now as a consequence can't do maths.