It is commended by the publishers as “the book every parent should read”, but there is nothing here they have not already heard Woodhead say in the columns of the Tory-favouring press so briefly hospitable to him.Woodhead boasted to a colleague, at the change of government in 1997, “They daren’t sack me. If they did, it would show they were soft on standards.” But his opening chapter on “Standards” disgraces the standards we should expect from such a voice: those of careful argument, due authority, detailed evidence, deliberative judgement and decent prose.He calls for standards, but provides no index. He quotes (and misnames) the respected American commentator E D Hirsch on cultural literacy, but is himself unlettered. His notes (there is no bibliography) contain 44 mostly unpaginated references, almost all newspaper articles Mine is not a crabbed, scholastic objection.

There is absolutely no sense, in this boring yet outrageous book, of any interest in the life of the mind that Woodhead was paid £115,000 a year to uphold.When he quotes a serious intelligence in order to defend his idea of a university, he turns, as one should, to John Henry Newman The result is a sheer embarrassment. One’s eye moves from Newman’s grave and stately manner to Woodhead’s awful clich?and dead cadences: “whistling in the dark” (three times); “education cloud-cuckoo-land”; “Sorry, David” (four “sorry”s altogether); “the $64,000 question”; “a tad [three times] underwhelming”… After a few short pages of this short book, only the reviewer with his duties can go on.One has to conclude either that he can’t think and doesn’t know it, or that he has lost interest in the whole business but realises he had to publish some kind of self-vindication. There is nothing here of that disinterested grapple with political expedience that would give his writing edge and vitality; his abstractions are contrived from ready-made triteness and stock responses. They even lack the raw slavering of the demagogue-journalist.Thus we are again asked to condemn the robotic leftists and sentimental egalitarians of what Woodhead (borrowing from the not-very-intellectual lips of President Reagan’s Education Secretary) calls “the Blob”– meaning “the educational Establishment”. But he nowhere addresses in detail the arguments of this creature.

Instead, we meet unnamed slack-jawed professors, incompetent local authorities, daffy primary-school teachers encouraging children to misspell and write rubbish, and “the great and the good with whose names I could fill the page”. It is an agreeable irony that, after his resignation, he has accepted a post as part-time research professor at the University of Buckingham – not itself noted for the distinction of its research record.When Woodhead is right, he has given us no standards for judging his rightness. The unspeakable gibberish of “learning initiatives”, “higher order learning skills” and the repellent neologism “learnacy” are all as mind-putrefying and heart-desiccating as he says. But when he progresses to his “way forward”, he returns to the mad-eyed jargonists of American managerialism who devised this grisly stuff in the first place.It is in this last section that we really see how Chris Woodhead’s zealous self-advancement and sudden recklessness twirled rapidly together to spin him into inaudible outer space. With casual contempt, he waves away the state as the vehicle of oppression and unfreedom, disregarding its long, painful history as a moral agent in defence of citizens against the arbitrary cruelty of power. And, with only the most cursory review of a few examples, he wants to commit all education to a universal voucher system.He doesn’t understand the economics, or even justify them He cites a few figures and saunters on. When in trouble with difficult sums (“Numbers,” he once said to a colleague, “I don’t do”), he turns to the last resort of the lazy populist and blames “the politicians”.No one can doubt that some large hiatus – as wide, perhaps, as the Reformation or Enlightenment – has opened up in the cultural and educational continuities of our somnambulist society.