When more means worse

Bernard Levin once wrote a piece in The Times about the expansion of university education and how more students would lead to lower standards. 

It seemed obvious enough at the time, but even Levin probably didn’t foresee what form a lowering of standards could take. He assumed quite reasonably, that a university degree would have to become easier, with less to learn, fewer complexities to absorb and so on.

Perhaps this is what has happened, yet we have seen another mechanism for lowering standards - frame everything within what we now call woke ideology. Make the right answer into the morally, socially, egalitarian, non-racist right answer. Frame everything within this easily learned political context.

A familiar consequence is that we have ended up with subjects from science to history to English to art encased in a varying but apparently widespread woke framework of climate change, sustainability, equality, decolonisation and identity politics. Everything linked by single, simple egalitarian framework.

This seems to be one of the ways by which Levin’s lower standards are now being achieved, a simplifying narrative framework suited to all subjects in and beyond formal education. It seems to be why an obvious fool such as Ed Miliband feels competent enough to pontificate about climate change. His version is easy to learn, easy to apply, and useful for life beyond the restrictions of veracity.