Dujon wrote:
Sorry, Tudor, just getting used to the system. Hrmph.

You could well be right in your assessment. Not having been part of the
English education system for some 50-odd years hardly endows me with
some right to criticise it.

I suspect though that many education systems in many countries are, to
use your term, 'dumbing down' their curricula. As best as I can gather
it's a fear of singling out an individual by assigning them a mark
which would indicate that they are a failure.

As far as I am concerned the presentation of proper and correct
information in the media leads to the further education of the
reader/watcher/listener - whatever the subject.

It's a shame that this does not seem to happen as often as I would like.

I wonder what the ethos behind this ritual stupifying is. One can
understand the madness that irradiated the USA in the early fifties.

One can understand the criminal offering presented to the UK about the
Common Market in the seventies.

It's difficult to see how a Labour leader should become a pictogramme
of the marchionesse of madness and take us, unasked, into a couple of
colonial wars in lands foreign even to us.

It's impossible to see, in the day of broad band internet, that the
slime of government is still propelled in that sublimely "we know best"
way. Perhaps it is the sheer vitriol that besets users of environmental
and political newsgroups that turn moderate people away.

It's no secret that such techniques have been the mainstay of
democracies for centuries.

But why on earth are agencies such as the televison companies so busily
engaged in utter plonk?