The government keeps telling us that teenagers are getting brighter and brighter. Their A level results - with many students achieving five at grade A, tell us so. And yet those who took A levels twenty or thirty years ago, know that it would have been impossible for anyone but the elite to get such a portfolio, or even be allowed to sit that number of exams. That hoards are going to university, is a mark of the government's investment in education. What the statistics don't show is that thousands of those students cannot construct a proper sentence; they cannot sit for an hour in a lecture, and some can't even tell you who fought, let alone won, the Second World War! Our education system used to be the envy of the world. Now, those who have been involved in education for more than a decade, and who haven't yet succumbed to the lure of a management pay cheque, and promotion to the ethereal world of massaging figures and generating paper, are embarrassed at the paucity of knowledge a large body of students arrive at University with. They wince at the illiteracy at college level. The fact that the government has insisted that no-one can fail has created a system where we propel students into higher education with sets of qualifications that would make an academic squirm. The result, of course, is a much larger failure, as a large minority fall at the first hurdle and drop out. We cannot molly coddle young people within education, rewarding them for the most pathetic amount of work, and accepting them on University courses, when they haven't even passed the preliminary courses intended to prepare them for them. The British education system is immoral, and a farce.