Fabulous news from Holyrood. The best wee country in the world, with the best chip butties in the world and the most expensive parliament in the world, is to get the “the best education system in the world”. Who says Scots are guilty of talking down their achievements?

This happy state of affairs is augured for 2020, when this year’s primary one intake will be nearing the end of their tertiary education and the current batch of secondary pupils will be having children of their own. It is Jack McConnell’s most ambitious target for Scotland’s schools since his last most ambitious target for Scotland’s schools. Nobody can accuse our first minister of lacking foresight. He’s had more visions in seven years than Saint Bernadette of Lourdes.

When it comes to Scottish education policy I happily own up to being the class dunce, but I thought an education system second to none was what we were promised with the McCrone deal six years ago. You remember McCrone — £800m for teacher’s pay rises, the recruitment of 3,500 additional support staff and a 22Å-hour week at the chalk face.

Or maybe I am confusing it with the Discipline Task Force, whose 36 recommendations for improving standards in Scottish schools were meant to have been implemented in June 2001. Chief among them were: a return to school uniforms, the establishment of so-called sin-bins for disruptive pupils, a mentoring system and a scheme to teach parents how to raise their offspring.

The latest promise, for what it’s worth, involves: completing the school building programme, training more teachers, creating more vocational courses, establishing more schools of ambition, providing more support to university and colleges and reducing the number of Scots not in education, employment and training. These are laudable, if vague and uncosted, aims.

It’s such a shame the pesky CBI (Confederation of British Industry) dented its impact by unveiling a withering verdict on the state of Scotland’s education system on the same day. A third of Scottish employers send school leavers for remedial courses in maths and English, so dismal is their grasp of the rudiments.

Perhaps somebody could send Allan Wilson, the deputy minister for enterprise and lifelong learning, on such a course. A government leaflet promoting “a month of education and learning” has just landed on my doorstep. Wilson’s one-paragraph quote contained more solecisms than the average 12-year-old’s essay.

Rather than launch another education plan, McConnell should stop and ask why his repeated initiatives have ended in failure. The first minister’s commitment to education is not in doubt. A former maths teacher, his desire to improve our schools is sincere. Nor is it due to lack of money. The most ambitious school rebuilding programme in a generation is under way. Teachers are better rewarded than ever. And it’s certainly not due to neglect. The education system has been tinkered with more often than a second-hand Lada.

The truth is that there is no longer a culture of learning in this country. As the humorists WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman observed: “For every person wanting to teach there are approximately thirty who don’t want to learn — much.” To put it bluntly, school’s not cool.

This is not entirely the fault of government. McConnell cannot be held wholly responsible for the fact that eight times as many girls want to be lap dancers as teachers. But it is true that successive Labour governments have played the leading role in devaluing education and undermining a culture of learning for learning’s sake.

They have colluded in eroding teachers’ authority to such an extent that some are barely able to do their jobs at all. They have encouraged our leading universities to engage in blatant social engineering by depriving some of the best-educated children places on the basis of where they went to school.

They have fought a war of attrition against the independent sector, dismantled the grammar schools that were the best ladder many working-class children had out of poverty, discouraged competition, outlawed prize- giving and fixed the exam system to such an extent that, of the 300,000 pupils who sat Standard Grade English in the five years to 2004, only one failed. Yet basic standards of literacy in school leavers, according to the CBI, are appalling.

Almost every policy of new Labour — from Asbos to identifying potential criminals in kindergarten — suggests that the government sees children as a problem, not an asset. And at the same time children have been encouraged to think of themselves as victims. Pupils who struggle to recite their tables can reel off the number for Childline.

Instead of concentrating on the fact that they come from homes where they are loved, well fed, cared for and generally indulged 99% of the time, children are encouraged to focus on the odd parental lapse — a tired mother’s anger, a harassed father’s smack. Instead of showing gratitude for their education, they are expected to report any teacher whose behaviour is less than saintly.

Before more doomed policies are implemented, something much more fundamental has to be addressed. If not, McConnell’s 2020 vision will prove to be short-sighted and short-lived.

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