Speaking at a conference in Oxford this week Lilian Katz, Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, argued against the “hothouse” approach to education, which teaches children to read aged 4. Children who are pushed towards reading and writing at too early an age, she argued, do less well in later years than those who have been eased into formal education through play. What young children need, and what benefits them most in the long run, is not cut-and-paste learning but “mind-absorbing activities and experiences that support their natural nosiness”.

Well, we've heard this before. Ever since the American philosopher John Dewey first advocated “child-centred” learning, educationists have been telling us to stimulate natural curiosity and social skills, and to forget about rote learning and the academic curriculum — in short to make the classroom “relevant”. The damage done by “relevance” is familiar to all university teachers, who have watched the steady decline over recent decades in the intellectual equipment of school-leavers. The decline began in the Sixties, when the educationists (who on the whole know nothing except how to teach it) took over the schools.

Professor Katz is of course right that we should not start to teach children to read before they are ready for it, and that we should allow them to explore the world through play. But it is reading and writing, not playing, that children should learn, and they should do this as soon as is compatible with their later development. It is not oppressive to insist on this. Children may be naturally curious about hamsters, dolls and bouncy castles; but they are just as curious about books — provided an adult reads to them. And it is books, not images on a screen, that contain the store of human knowledge.

Of course we don't have to turn up the heat as high as did Leopold Mozart. But when the roots are firm and the soil is fertile, heat may be just what is needed. And here lies the real cause of the antagonism that educationists feel towards the hothouse. Their hostility to rote learning and academic study comes from a deep-seated fear of excellence. For if Wolfgang Amadeus is allowed to fulfil his potential, the rest of the class will fall behind. That is unfair.

Now if you distrust the theories of educationists as much as I do, then you must be prepared to offer an alternative. My own view is that we should return to first principles and ask ourselves what education is for. The experts tell us that education exists to provide children with the benefit of knowledge. I would say rather that education exists to provide knowledge with the benefit of children. Knowledge is more easily lost than acquired and without children it will die. And we are losing knowledge at an alarming rate: knowledge of everything that matters, from manners and morals to music and maths.

Teachers who take knowledge seriously are therefore on the lookout for the children in whom it might be planted, and are ready to turn up the heat whenever the seeds have begun to germinate. This natural response to knowledge is familiar to all loving parents, who will exhale their knowledge in hot gushes at their children whenever they show the slightest inclination to respond to its appeal. It is when teaching my two small children what I know, whether about horses or music, chickens or carpentry, that I take most pleasure in their company.

Of course, not every household contains the same amount or kind of knowledge. Nevertheless, almost every household contains the knowledge of manners, morals and conversation and, once the roots of these things are firmly planted, the heat should be turned full on. For that is the knowledge on which the future of society depends.

Unfortunately we have to reckon with an insidious enemy, which is television. I don't possess a TV; but I have observed its effects, including a chronic need for distraction and an addiction to visual stimuli, which together result in a drastic lowering of the educational temperature. A few germs of interest may struggle towards the pockets of warmth, and here and there parents will rebel against the screen long enough to communicate their hobbies. But knowledge is increasingly frozen out of the bookless households of Middle England. Hence we should be grateful if here and there a teacher, recognising that little Mary or John is wanting to read, should pick up the call and run with it.

The culture does not provide such teachers with much support. They have to contend with short attention spans, image addiction, disruptive behaviour, and also with a society in denial, refusing to recognise television as the cause of these things. Teachers are therefore naturally tempted to join in the great lie, to produce a Teletubby classroom where reading is optional and rote learning banned.

Those who remain loyal to the written word, who know that their goal is less the comfort of children than the survival of knowledge, are the unsung heroes of the modern world. They have many enemies; but none so determined as the educationists, who will always be looking for new ways to turn down the temperature of the classroom, lest real knowledge take root in it.

And with knowledge comes the distinction between those who acquire it and those who don't. Such distinctions, the educationists have told us, are unfair.

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