Tuesday, 24 July 2012

It All Adds Up

Can you name the Prime Minister who replaced O-levels with GCSEs? She also sat unprotesting in the Cabinet that decimalised the currency while metricating the weights and measures, the root causes of mass innumeracy. People who had left school at 14 or younger used to add up old money and imperial measures in their heads on a daily basis.

That situation could perfectly easily have been restored in law as well as in fact in 1974, and it is greatly to Labour's shame that, having voted against decimalisation and metrication, it failed to repeal them when it returned to office so very soon thereafter. Likewise, that it failed to restore O-levels after having voted against Thatcher's GCSEs. But the shame for having made those changes in the first place belongs elsewhere.

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