LET us sing a hymn of praise for the fact that (almost) everyone has finally seen through the sham and fraud of our state “education” system. Frankly, the system that has been operating in our schools for 30 years amounts to child abuse – which is to say that children’s minds, when they are at their youngest and most receptive, are being systematically deprived of the substance that can sustain them.

I am not speaking out of abstract theory. I have been talking to some youngsters – reallive youngsters, and not conjectured examples on what I have heard described as “an analytical and rising learning curve”. Bad language – even if it emanates from the Government’s education department – does not come more offensively that that.

This is what the youngsters – I will not call them “kids”, which are nanny goats – told me: “We learn about Hitler, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the evils of capitalism.

We learn about suffragettes. We learn about the slave trade…”

“Ah,” I interrupted, “did they tell you that it was English Christian gentlemen in the 19th Century who abolished the slave trade and that this abolition was secured and guaranteed by the Royal Navy?”

“What?” Such astonishment – you could have knocked me down with a GCSE paper.

Had they heard anything about the medieval trade guilds which set high standards in a hundred industries and promoted charity – which they still do through City Livery Companies today?

Of course they hadn’t. Do you think for a moment that the mindless Trotskyists who comprise the self-interested teaching unions would even know about these things? And, if by some miracle, they did know, their ideological prejudice would not allow them to mention it. Or the building of the medieval cathedrals? Or the hospitals and the hospices?

A European system of universities devoted to the pursuit of truth – something a few notches higher than GCSE?

How about the Elizabethan Settlement which set up a system of political toleration of which their teachers are walking examples of denial? Had they heard about the Civil War of the 17th Century, the beheading of our monarch in 1649 and the setting up of a politically-correct tyranny under Oliver Cromwell? Nope.

Had their wonderful masters taught them that the industrial revolution was not, on the whole, a bad thing and that it greatly increased the wealth and prosperity of most English people – many of whom had been suffering near starvation in the countryside?

Did they know, for example, that contrary to the obscene caricatures of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games – of recent memory – that when William Blake referred to “dark satanic mills,” he was not talking about chimneys in Lancashire, but the secularising prejudice of new universities?

So what’s the relevance of all this old stuff?

I came back to that beloved topic of the modern comprehensive: Adolf Hitler. Did they know that almost all the politicians of the 1930s believed they could trust him and work with him? And so it was their policy of appeasement which led to the Second World War? “No, Sir,” replied my young friends.

“But we did learn that John F Kennedy was a great guy. And so is Obama.”

“Oh yeah?” I said – so we went for a coffee.