All Must Have Prizes (Paperback)

This is lucid, intelligent writing of a kind so sorely needed in Britain. It is a well-structured and cohesive rebuttal to the canards of increasing standards in education and shows the emptiness of the Blairite stress on 'Education! Education! Education!' to be the mindless squawking that it really is. The scope of this rebuttal is wide ranging but thorough and Phillips charts the history of the British decline in a way that it easy to follow and draw conclusions from.

I had expected more hysterical denunciations of everything that is wrong about Britian - I didn't get them. Instead, Phillips writes with clarity and good sense to reveal the often-hidden motives of those sections of the left-liberal establishment that control the long term future of us all. From the academics who theorise and formulate, to the media who transmit and finally to the policy makers (fellow-travelllers all) who implement, Phillips shows how the damage has been done over the last 50 years to the educational system in order that we are all dumbed down without realising it. Worse still, we have been taught to laughingly dismiss any conerns about this process as conservative paranoia. For those who think this might be a British phenomenon, please read Linda Schrock-Taylor or John Taylor-Gatto in the US...they chart the American cultural decline through education to the place where Britain is heading.

However, there are no solutions offered. How can one reverse such a cultural decline that is so wideranging? The decline in education is one aspect of a much bigger picture that we have allowed to be painted by our own indifference. Perhaps this is where the battle standard needs to be picked up by others and the decline reversed.

Melanie Phillips, in "All must have prizes", has sought to analyze the education system, to find out exactly what is going on. The starting point sounds predictable - a black councillor's outburst at the denial of access of deprived children to quality education. But the charge is levelled not at the conservative establishment, but a left-wing education authority. From this point, you know that the book is going to draw startling conclusions.

Phillips looks firstly at different areas in the education system, examining the collapse in areas such as literacy, numeracy, language teaching and science. In the second half of the book, she looks more widely at society, to trace the changes that have occurred that led to this breakdown. The heart of the problem, she believes, lies in the collapse of external authority. She advocates a restoration of such authority as a step to reversing the decline in education.

It is interesting to read this challenge to the post-modern, relativistic consensus coming from a humanistic rather than a theistic source. As a Christian, I would have no problem with the idea of an external, absolute authority. I suspect that without care, Phillips' model of such an authority bound to society would be a step towards totalitarianism.

The book is written in a fluid, journalistic style, and is easy to read on the whole, although it does wrestle with quite complicated political and philosophical issues. Perhaps the polemic of Phillips' argument is excessive at times. However, if a quarter of what she says has substance, her analysis requires serious consideration.