8 - Conclusion

Summary

Things fall apart

The centre cannot hold

The best lack all conviction

The worst are full of passionate intensity

W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

UK achieves herd immunity of tolerating bullshit.

Nish Kumar

So, what would my four-year-old self think about the state of ignorance in education in 2021, almost 80 years after the Beveridge Report and Rab Butler's Education Act? What would be my future if I was four years old now? For starters, I would no longer be an “infant”. I would be a pre-schooler in an early years foundation stage, with teachers who know all about cognitive development and social learning skills, as well as crayoning and singing songs. They would be following government guidance on whether I had achieved my early learning goals. Ofsted would soon be checking up on whether my reception class was good or outstanding, especially in preparing us for the literacy and maths skills we would need in Year 1 and the first Key Stage tests. But my present and future achievements and levels of ignorance would still depend heavily on my social class and ethnicity, my family or care background, whether I had been told I had SEND and especially the schools I would attend. Would they be expensive or cheaper private, part private academies, local authority maintained, selective grammar or comprehensive, faith-oriented or agnostic, urban or rural, well-resourced or starved of funds and much else? I would also have started my schooling not with actual wartime bombs falling, but with the bombs of a pandemic still falling all around and a government that had not responded well to the Covid-19 pandemic and its mutations. I would not have had a full year's schooling in 2020 and 2021 as the pandemic took hold, and 2022 and beyond was looking shaky. Although early ignorance of the implications of a pandemic were understandable, the public has been subjected to much deceit, evasion, fabrication and lies affecting all public institutions and the well-being of the whole population. A YouGov poll in December 2021 “revealed huge public cynicism” over trust in politicians to act in the national interest (Helm & Savage 2021), but the view presented by Nish Kumar in his Daily Mash programme was that “the British public are now so used to lies and stupidity that the entire country has become immune” (Kumar 2021).