A generation of well-trained but empty minds

Education. Say it loud and there's music playing. Say it soft and it's almost like praying. Say it three times – education, education, education – and somebody might just be lulled into believing you know what you're talking about. Abracadabra, hocus pocus, bim shallabim. Mist clears. Enter, centre stage, Blair, Brown and Morris – three imperfect speakers prognosticating on a blasted heath: "I'll do, and I'll do, and I'll do." Strange, the incantatory power of threes. Education, education, education. "Weave a circle round us thrice/And close our eyes with holy dread/For we on honey dew have fed/And drunk the milk of Paradise."

So how paradisal was the triple trance for you? Convinced were you/are you that all will be honey now that we have the cash, a fresh terminology – "new comprehensives", to mirror New Labour – and the promise of a hitherto unimagined pyramid of hierarchy comprising elite schools (though don't expect them to be promoting elitism), beacon schools, city academies, specialist schools, training schools, schools for Big-Endians, schools for Little-Endians, and schools that need to do better?

She has a caring Citizens' Advice Bureau face, our Education Secretary, a confidential if somewhat funereal northern manner, and a way of supporting her chin on her hands and looking into the middle distance – as though across the Pennines – which is meant to suggest she half sees the new Jerusalem. So what sort of school taught her that? A specialist sincerity school? A beacon middle-distance academy? Not a school specialising in any high idea of education, I think we can be certain of that, nothing that had Plato or Aristotle on the curriculum, or Matthew Arnold or John Henry Newman, or much in the way of thought in general, or in the way of language, come to that.

"Pure Estelle" is how her colleagues have been describing her conception of educational ascendancy, "putting every single school on a ladder of improvement". "Pure" meaning not so much chaste as quintessential. Think of that: a ladder of improvement. And what was your contribution to the educational thinking of the country, Estelle Morris; how far did you plumb the reason why of learning, or contribute to the cultivation of young minds, or help disseminate through the community the virtues of literature and science? Aha. You came up with a ladder of improvement. And would that have been a Jacob's-ladder, Minister, whereby men might mount to heaven? Of course – forgive me – you are New Labour and, though churchy, don't believe in heaven.

Well, if plain words and metaphors drawn from a do-it-yourselfer's shed were her only sins we might mind less, but something more sinister lurks in Estelle Morris's Investment for Reform document, published last week to coincide with the provision of the spondulacks. Writing of the effects of Sixties comprehensivisation, she notes its tendency to "treat pupils equally" and to fight shy of "excellence and diversity", and hence its failure "to meet individual needs and to recognise individual talent". This is meant to reassure us in the matter of the bright being held back by the not so bright, but in the process leaves us exactly where we started in the Sixties when we argued there was no reason why everyone shouldn't be given the chance to read Middlemarch. Come up with the wheeze of speciality schools, catering to speciality talents, and we're back with cultural deprivation. You're not a Middlemarch kind of guy, Craig, so it's computer banking and a job in the cyber city for you. Result – we all get a little stupider.

And, of course, a little more criminal. This is perhaps not the place to reiterate our belief in the decriminalising effect of great novels, even those about criminality. But if you still don't believe that Middlemarch keeps you out of prison, try asking around in Wormwood Scrubs how many inmates were reading George Eliot on the outside. None? One? Point proved. How could it be otherwise. Start reading Middlemarch and there isn't time to commit crime.

I have seen at first hand how the apparent egalitarianism of the individual-need-and-talent argument is in fact just intellectual dog-in-the-mangerism, dispossessing the ox of hay which you will not touch yourself. Teaching literature at Wolverhampton Polytechnic in the Seventies, which to me meant offering Mansfield Park and Sir Charles Grandison to all takers, I was frequently challenged by those who thought such works of no use or interest or relevance to students who had not been brought up on country estates. As an alternative to my imperious, not to say colonial high-mindedness, a course called Cultural Studies was initiated, which included visits to local football matches, midnight raids on ordinary people's rubbish bins (to ascertain popular taste), and condescendingly ill-written novels (but who was I to judge?) of the kind which today would have the word Boy in the title. Thus was the individual need of the already undernourished student understood and met, thus was the opportunity to enlarge his imagination and vocabulary (in the best sense, to become somebody else) denied him, thus was he kept in ignorance of the history and resources of his native culture, thus was he estranged.

That estrangement of this sort is to be numbered among our current woes, and is as much the cause as the effect of many of them, no one with eyes to see or ears to hear can doubt. But who, in a government which likes to associate itself with footballers and pop stars and whatever other icons of mass ignorance it can crowd into 10 Downing Street, would dare propose any programme of repossession? Here's the advantage of your "ladder of improvement" – it can imply amelioration without having to address questions of worth and value, of what is humane, of what is civilised, of what is worth passing on. And of what isn't.

Of education in this sense – and I know no other – New Labour wishes to hear nothing, see nothing, speak nothing. Training is its real concern. Training, training, training. But soon all we'll be training are wordless zombies.