All I want for Christmas is a a little more global literacy

A WHILE back, before a huge and hideous abscess morphed my already challenged face into the pumpkin-like apparition it is now, I was listening to the BBC World Service and heard a British education official say the country's so-called National Curriculum was a load of rubbish.

Many teachers had been saying the same thing since this twaddle was introduced several years ago. Now the word was it had to be dumped because it was loading up a whole generation with useless knowledge compressions.

The National Curriculum underpinned Margaret Thatcher's ambition of creating a peppy generation of capitalist readers - for a high-tech, look-smart, be-smart 21st-century Britain.

Under this bold plan, everyone would be computer-literature and be smart enough to be in smart company and go to smart places. People would say 'Super!' and 'Excellent' a lot.

The intellectual elite of the future would not be Oxbridge dons - who do not know Warp from iambic pentameter anyway - but mesmerising fund managers who could whiz about in real-time.

By the time the National Curriculum arrived in Hong Kong, it seemed to dissolve books. Textbooks were replaced by worksheets arranged around topics that had beginnings and ends. They were distributed in digestible portions and, as the next portion was being digested, the last portion was being jettisoned.