Here we go again. One day we’re told by ministers and the teaching unions that educational standards have never been higher. The next, out come figures showing just how dreadful those standards really are. The latest, published today by Professor David Jesson, show that in last year’s GCSEs only 39 per cent of 16-year-olds managed even a grade C pass in maths, English and a science subject.

But the twist comes in the tail. Three fifths of 16-year-olds may be unable to pass exams in English, maths and a science, but more than half nonetheless still manage an A-C pass in five other subjects. So much for the gold standard of the GCSE. Pupils can sail through peripheral subjects, but test them in the only ones which matter and they fall apart.

These figures confirm the fundamental disease which still rots our education system, and which no amount of literacy or numeracy hours can overcome. Failed “child-centred” theories which took hold of education in the 1960s still retain their iron grip on educationalists and still infect teacher training colleges.

Take a recent DfES initiative published by Estelle Morris when she was Education Secretary. It proposes that “thinking skills” should be taught independently of subjects. This, it says, will help pupils to “form rich images of problem situations in multiple modalities”. But of course. Children should “find out” for themselves, and teachers will be “liberated from their traditional role as the fount of all knowledge”. If children don’t understand something, they should ask other children in “virtual communities”. Under the “child-centred” orthodoxy, children should “take ownership of their learning”. As if anyone should expect a teacher to pass on knowledge!

This is the mindset which leads to such educational vandalism as the abandonment of compulsory modern language and geography lessons for children over 14 in favour of tourism, manufacturing and leisure; and the scrapping of physics, chemistry and biology, to be replaced with “relevant” topics such as cloning, genetically modified food and diet (as is due to be announced later this month).

At the root of this drivel are the training colleges, which have ensured that generations of teachers cannot do the one thing they should be doing: teaching. Educational orthodoxy holds that what children themselves bring to the education process is far more valuable than anything a teacher can tell them. As Alex Moore, an education lecturer at Goldsmith’s College, London, puts it in his book Teaching Multicultured Students: teaching English to children for whom it is not their first language is “patronising do-gooding in the tradition of the Victorian missionary”. Education is no more about imparting knowledge; it is about refining what pupils already know.

Thus in 1996 the London University Institute of Education — the most influential such body in the country — published a guide for trainee teachers asserting that schools are guilty of “legitimising one popular view of mathematics” (arithmetic, algebra and geometry) and so devaluing “the students’ informal mathematical experience and skills”. Maths should be replaced by “ethnomathematics” because “the view that ‘official’ mathematics dominates ‘ethnomathematics’ is consistent with that of Western cultural-educational imperialism in mathematics education”.

It’s easy to laugh at such rot, or to dismiss it as lunacy. Easy, but wrong. “Ethnomathematics” is merely a more obvious expression of the madness which has steadily wrecked any chance of schools doing the one job we should at least expect of them: teaching children to read, write and add up.

Stephen Pollard is a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, a Brussels-based think-tank.