All experts in any field who try to legislate for people whose lives and needs they do not understand are more or less bound to get it wrong, often to everybody's cost.
In education, for example, it is becoming more and more clear that more money, more resources and more personnel have not succeeded in ensuring that every child leaves school at 16 with at least an acceptable level of literacy and numeracy, so is it not time to tell the experts that they have got it wrong?
Forty years ago, they tried to find an answer to the vexed question of how to bring the 11-plus failures up to the same standard as their more fortunate grammar school peers.
But well-meaning though they were, they have not managed to do this mainly because, I suspect, they could not understand the first thing about the working classes and how they viewed the educational experience.
Coming, as most legislators and professionals do, from a class of society that has, historically, a great respect for the benefits of education and a laudable desire to offer these benefits to as many children as possible, they made one fundamental error in their planning. They took as their educational model the old grammar school tradition, (which they claimed they wanted to replace) which holds academic exams at 16 and 18, followed by further education and a degree, for as many children as possible.
They put all children in the same sort of schools, but they chose the wrong career pattern for the majority of children in these new schools, with dire consequences, both for individual children and for the system as a whole.
What the legislators and reformers failed to understand is that, historically, over many generations, education has been of no interest at all to the majority of work-ing class families.
The pattern consisted of reluctant attendance at secondary school from 11 to 15 (or 16), then going straight into a job with training on the job and money in their pockets, along with the kudos within the family and local area that being a "wage earner" brought them.
There were, of course, aspirant children from work-ing class families who saw education as a way out of poverty and work in a factory, but for the most part, protracted school attendance and "book learning" meant nothing to them.
They just didn't want what was offered.
To offset this pig-headed resistance, reformers had to find some way of keeping these children in school.
First they made the exam contents easier, the syllabuses less demanding. They allowed children to do pretty much as they liked.
They took away the authority of the teacher in the classroom. A by-product of this was to cut out all the traditional skills schools had once given to fit children for work: good timekeeping, regular attendance, ability to work to a deadline, to do concentrated work, be able to take criticism and instructions.
Yet, to the chagrin of the reformers, 50,000 children still skip school every day, encouraged by parents who don't give a fig for a system of education that doesn't fit their children for a job, seeing the school curriculum as unimportant and irrelevant to their lives.
Thus it is that, in the rush to "show the mobs we're as good as they are" we have created a system that works for nobody.
The clever, the hardworking and dedicated scholars have been marginalised, given dreary syllabuses and babyish exams and discouraged from reaching their potential.
The majority in whose name these reforms were undertaken - who want good, practical skill training not necessarily in a school setting - are allowed to waste their time and end up illiterate, enumerate and unemployable.
