One of the most baffling features of modern Western civilisation – more accurately the UK/US version of it – is the way honesty has been downgraded to something contingent and ‘relative’.

This applies particularly in education, where generations of pupils are being insulated against the unbending honesty of the reality that in most spheres of endeavour only disciplined hard work gets results.

Take languages. There is no way to learn a foreign language other than to learn it.

OK, if you are moved to a foreign country and have no choice but to communicate, you’ll slowly absorb things. But otherwise you need to spend hours poring over long lists of words and phrases – and simply learning them. Some shortcuts exist, and oddly enough the more languages you learn the easier it becomes to learn new ones. Patterns emerge. One just gets good at learning languages.

Here in the UK the state system under Labour has failed to deliver disciplined language learning, and so is opting out of it. The number of children learning even one foreign language is falling fast, despite far more money than ever before being spent on education. Our collective national intelligence and insight and our very ability to learn are declining accordingly, with the private school sector increasingly the focus of any language learning of harder languages. Disaster.

The problem? Neurotic state micromanagement:

In fact, in the seven years till 2007 we shamefully fell in the list of OECD countries from 4th to 14th in science, from 7th to 17th in literacy and from 8th to 24th in mathematics. Almost every day newspapers carry a litany of complaints about 11-year-olds with zero reading skills, truancy, exam grade inflation, the dearth of good school places and other calamities.

What went wrong for Labour? In a nutshell: they saw the answer as micromanagement from Whitehall. The education department published, among other risible hortatory posters, one that showed a series of car jacks, the lever of the bottom one worked by the Secretary of State, whose impact reached every corner of every classroom…

Or try the USA, where maths teaching has been dumbed down for progressive ideological reasons:

High-math-achievement countries teach arithmetic in the elementary grades in a coherent curriculum leading, step by step, to formal algebra and geometry in middle school. The progressive educators, by contrast, support “integrated” approaches to teaching math—that is, teaching topics from all areas of mathematics every year, regardless of logical sequence and student mastery of each step—and they downplay basic arithmetic skills and practice, encouraging kids to use calculators from kindergarten on…

A form of mathematics stripped of much of its intellectual content has obvious repercussions for higher education and the American economy. Hung-Hsi Wu, a Berkeley mathematician, expressed the view of many of his peers when he wrote in 1997 that the brand of mathematics purveyed by the NCTM’s 1989 report “has the potential to change completely the undergraduate mathematics curriculum and to throttle the normal process of producing a competent corps of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.”

And then there’s sheer cheating, scientists just making things up to win acclaim and official funding (although there is of course an unfine tradition of this behaviour going back centuries).

As the years tick by, overall standards and achievements edge down. Intellectual and ultimately physical capital inherited from the labours of other people down the centuries is frittered away, just as other countries which adopt a stricter approach to learning are now busy accumulating their own.

Ebb? Meet Flow.