There's no point blaming youngsters for the curriculum. It just doesn't add up.

SO when did you last use Pythagoras' Theorem? Or need to know about the life cycle of the earthworm, or the principal exports of Canada?

Or how many men it takes to build how many ditches? And what is a quadratic equation anyway? And as for the ablative absolute...

Let's face it, once we've laid down that pen in the exam hall, much of what we learnt at school never troubles our feeble brains again. We have long forgotten it - even if we ever knew it in the first place.

Oxbow lakes? The Treaty of Utrecht? Macbeth's ambition?

They're stored somewhere in the dim recesses of the brain, as in some cobweb-strewn attic where no one ever ventures. And the days we spent learning it all might have been better spent in more frivolous occupations for all the good it's done us.

Meanwhile, today's youngsters are getting criticised again. Despite soaring exam results, employers are complaining that they are being forced to give teenagers remedial lessons in English and maths because youngsters cannot add up in their heads, or follow written instructions.

Not like that in our day, we say, tut tutting.

But was it? Was there ever a golden age when everyone could read and write and do hard sums in their heads? 44 children in my class of 45 passed the 11 Plus. We were a bright lot, taught well and drilled to within an inch of our lives. Very golden age.

But there was another class in the same year at my school, another class of 40 of whom not one passed the 11 Plus. Forty children who couldn't write an exciting essay or work out compound interest. They all went to secondary moderns. One or two joined us later at the grammar schools, a few had one or two O levels, but most never passed any sort of exam.

When my brother-in-law was doing his basic army training in the 1950s, a high proportion of the lads in his barracks were functionally illiterate. He spent his Sunday evenings writing their letters home for them - and reading them the replies.

Today's youngsters aren't any dimmer than any others. Even the CBI admits that their computer skills are fantastic. But the world has changed. It's a world of spin and bias, a world of a trillion pound's worth of debt, of credit agreements and interest rates, and APRs, a far more sophisticated world than our parents ever knew and needing more sophisticated skills to deal with it, not just the basic 3 Rs, but something far more advanced.

And teaching hasn't kept up.

And who devised the curriculum that has let down our youngsters?

Yep, that's right, our lot, our generation. If we're so clever, then you'd think we'd have made a better job of it, wouldn't you? And not try to put all the blame on the kids.

MEANWHILE, Janet and John are back. Or rather...

Look Janet, John is back.

Look, look, said John, Janet is back.

Look, said mother, Janet and John are back.

Look at Janet and John play.

Gosh, it's gripping. But I can actually remember them from the 1950s, the books that taught a whole generation to read. Though how we managed to learn before succumbing to terminal boredom and letting our little heads droop in the sand tray, I cannot fathom. The plots weren't exactly cliff-hangers.

Still, it was in the days when the most exciting thing on television was Muffin the Mule so you could see we were desperate for entertainment.

The Janet and John books (reprinted by Summersdale, £5.99) conjure up a long lost world of 1950s innocence - of Father working in the garden, of seaside holidays, of swings and slides. These days the Janet and John books are categorised under "Humour".

If the 1950s were that funny, I must have missed the joke.