Just back from manoeuvres in Liverpool, addressing this years’s Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (the gathering of leading public schools, primarily for boys) most ably led this year by Andrew Grant from my old school.

My zany theme was Why Stupidity Should Be Taught In Schools, a subject on which I felt more than competent to pronounce.

The central idea was to point up the startling decline in foreign language learning in the British education system which has followed a calamitous decision a few years back by this Labour Government that every child should no longer be taught at least one foreign language to GCSE level. It seems that because so many children were vanishing from these lessons, government Targets were being spoiled. So they dropped the requirement.

Hence now a steep decline in GCSE qualifications in languages, particularly in state schools. To the point where the Guardian no less has warned that learning a language at all could soon be a privilege open only to public school pupils.

How to ensure that we stay at the Heart of Europe. Not.

This, I said, was a wonderful example of positive feedback. Not the silly, syrupy process pap sent in on a form after some modestly positive bureaucratic or other experience to say how wonderful it all has been.

But real positive feedback. The unstable situation where X causes more of X, which causes more of X, and so on …

Thus dumbing down standards in languages and indeed English creates less able pupils, which creates less able teachers, which creates less able pupils, and so on.

Warming to the theme I used lots of examples of crass sloppiness on official FCO and other BBC/government websites with which avid readers of this site are familiar.

And I concluded that the best available metaphor for modern government was this gentleman.

A malignant, sprawling, cynical blob which exists only to be so sprawlingly malignant and cynical and blobbish that it ignores hard criticism or even sharp blows 

I suggested that if you give a painter only one big brush there is a limit to the delicacy of work which can be done with it, even with skill and ingenuity. Denying pupils the discipline needed to use English punctuation and grammar accurately was, said I, was taking away from them many of the best paintbrushes they needed to do beautiful written work.

The assembled educationalists were given a real treat this year. Post-prandial poets including John Mole and the incomparable Roger McGough, both on top form and showing what can be done with English words by those with a large array of magical paintbrushes.