Sitting there desperately waiting for the BBC to stop chuntering on endlessly about the latest GCSE and 'A' Level results, I heard as if in a dream someone complaining that there had been a serious decline in the number of kids sitting 'difficult' subjects like History and Geography.
What's difficult about History and Geography for Christ's sake? When I was at school they were the two subjects you took if you wanted to be absolutely certain of being able to get a pass even if you were as thick as two short planks, because all they required was the ability to memorise and regurgitate a few facts.
So what are the 'easier non-academic' subjects we are told kids are now taking instead of them? They must be subjects where you don't even have to remember anything and regurgitate it. Are they subjects in which all the questions come with multiple-choice answers in which every answer but one is so screamingly obviously wrong that even a chimpanzee would pick the right one?
Or is the problem that with History and Geography you have to be able to understand and write grammatical English - a skill which our heroic teaching unions seem to have managed to strip away from many of our most underprivileged kids.
I tell you, when History and Geography are considered too difficult for a high proportion of our kids, our country is in even deeper deep shit than I had realised.
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