THE latest A-level and GCSE results show yet another improvement on previous years, so it's nice to know youngsters are getting cleverer and cleverer.

It's all thanks to 'education, education, education', I suppose. But the man who coined that slogan also said that the millennium dome is 'an educational experience'.

There is less encouraging news from another quarter: A-level examiners recently issued a report saying English candidates - and this is the flagship qualification remember - have little grasp of basic punctuation... too many used slangy, slipshod expressions... a majority spelt the word millennium wrongly... spelling, punctuation and grammar remain weak... pupils are allowed to take annotated texts into the exam and many candidates copy out their annotations with little sense of responding to a particular question.

Physics and maths departments at Oxford and Cambridge have been obliged to simplify courses, lengthen them or else provide cramming for first year students inadequately educated at secondary school. More pupils are entering secondary education without the basics in arithmetic and English and more are leaving school illiterate and innumerate.

Yet we are told that standards are ever-increasing towards the sunlit uplands. Soon everybody will get an A - even those who don't know where A comes in the alphabet. Standards of literacy and numeracy are rising all the time: it's just that pupils can't write and can't count. They all write poems of course when they can't even write a shopping list without mis spellings.

Classic texts in English have become optional and you can get English at GCSE without having read a single Shakespeare play. A classic nowadays may be defined as a best-selling pulp novel of the 1950s or 1960s. Anti-elitism again and the unwillingness to put children under what is called pressure which is alleged to cause what is now called stress, means that primary education is inadequate and in many schools consists of little more than getting them to cut up little pieces of sticky blue paper and affix them on to larger bits of sticky yellow paper and call the result creativity.

What used to be known warmly as learning by heart has been pejoratively renamed learning by rote and largely abandoned in favour of the alleged creativity. But you can't begin to be creative until you know something. Heads have to be filled with something. No French without tears.

Despite Government declarations that schools are returning to traditional teaching methods, education is still reckoned to be a matter of fun, self-discovery and self-expression - a doctrine which quite overlooks the fact that we have no self to express until some facts, knowledge and understanding have been ingested.

This is learning and it is a painful process. Our children are being denied a decent education by the misguided desire on the part of the educators to spare them the pain of effort which is essential to learning of all kinds.

Everyone understands and admits that you become a good footballer or snooker player only after hours and hours of arduous and initially unrewarding practice and that what goes for sportsmen goes also for pianists, chess players, gardeners and experts on the subject of English butterflies. But it is foolishly and wickedly pronounced that somehow a child can attain proficiency in reading, writing and counting without sustained effort of any kind.

This misguided orthodoxy deprives our children and sells them short. Never mind the issue of access to higher culture: this institutionalised deprivation of the basics means many cannot even get a decent job.

Teachers have to cope with piles of paperwork miles high and so are too busy being bureaucrats to be efficient teachers. Worse still, the evidence strongly suggests that many of these recent exam successes aren't worth the paper they're written on.