Continued … Sherlock Holmes would turn in his grave at the Holcombization of intellectual enquiry today and the reduction to mediocrity of intellectual life. For example, the hijacking of political and philosophical thinking:

We, all of us, have reached our currently entrenched positions on tax, education, society et al via various circuitous paths - we differ on many little points - and yet the tendency has always been for like-minded individuals on certain issues, e.g. freedom:

1] to band together;
2] to produce manifestos which become binding on each member;
3] to produce catch-cries, labels and logos to officially represent the official viewpoint;
4] to exert pressure on members to conform to a policy of collective responsibility;
5] to produce catch-cries, labels and logos to dismiss and mock opposing points of view.

I understand the human tendency to form coalitions but I've never understood the human tendency to force members into conformity on all points of an articicial manifesto. My Right Links banner has above it ‘Eurosceptic’. Does that mean that all aspects of Europe are wrong?

I don’t believe that.

I believe that a united Europe does prevent a European theatre of war but at a cost of huge wastage of money and a bringing of the political agenda more closely in line with the ancient Bavarian cross-border usury that has always existed since the times of the Templars. In other words, peace is artificially perpetuated, for now, in the interests of a ‘higher’ agenda.

This is the true agenda – the reduction of society to an economically controlled, money-driven, financial-elite-tweaked dependence on a humanistic substitute for real values. It requires the bringing into society of alien elements under the guise of social responsibility - the great task being to make them palatable to the populace, e.g. ID cards and semi-military presence on the streets.

One aspect of this agenda is the restructuring of education, beginning with ‘inclusive’ class composition, irrespective of the level of ability and achievement, so that the lesson focus is forever tuned to the centre-ability-level and dedicated to the middle and lower thirds. The curriculum materials are such that they can only be completed in 110% of the available face-to-face time and this, in turn, pressurizes teachers, who themselves are subject to results-oriented accountability procedures which require a statistical quota of marks.

This reduces education to a numbers game where the teacher must demonstrate measurable improvement, which is a violent swing away from the opposite polar extreme – the elimination of exams and grammar and rote learning in favour of values teaching, coursework and hazy assessment measures.

All of this militates against scholarship and intellectualism. Say what you like about woolly-headed intellectuals but the natural habitat for them is surely in educational institutions and yet these institutions are now demonstrably anti-intellectual and over a period of two generations, the intellectual process has been press-ganged into an imposed set of guiding principles and predicated on research-grant oriented educational theory.

Later today I’ll post [education 2] explanation for the dumbing down.