Rote learning is at the heart of education

When future generations come to study the causes of Britain's global decline, Exhibit A will be a letter published this week in the Daily Telegraph, signed by 100 academics from across the UK. In it, the various professors attacked Michael Gove's proposed national curriculum for consisting of "endless lists of spellings, facts and rules". My God, the madness! Sometimes the Education Secretary must wake up in the morning and wonder whether it's all worth the struggle. His opponents are of such a deep strain of perverse idiocy that it is impossible to argue with them - ideology has defeated reason.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes - an expression few schoolboys will now know, thanks to the sort of educational philosophy on display in that terrifying letter. If the people at the top of the educational tree are anti-knowledge, what chance is there for the children starting out at the bottom?

The "spellings, facts and rules" that these clever fools are attacking have another name - an education. Without spellings, facts and rules, you aren't educated. Instead, you're left floundering in a knowledge-free vacuum, barely comforted by the progressive lie that ignorance somehow magically generates thought.

At one point in their letter, the academics say that a "mountain of data will not develop children's ability to think". I'm afraid that is exactly what a mountain of data leads to - proper, considered thought, rooted in knowledge and the logical jumps and inferences that naturally develop from the simple gift of knowing stuff.

Those academics think knowledge and thought are at war with each other in a zero-sum game; that you can't have one without destroying the other. They say that rote learning is less important than "cognitive development, critical understanding and creativity". How wrong they are - and how depressingly keen on the dreary, Latinate jargon of academese. You can't be critical or creative, or develop, without knowing anything. Knowledge and thought aren't chickens and eggs: knowledge always comes before a decent thought. Brilliant thinkers invariably know lots of things; and people who don't know anything are usually stupid, unless they have had the cruel misfortune to have their natural intelligence stunted by an education system that prizes ignorance.

How can you have a worthwhile thought about governments and constitutions if you don't know your kings, queens and prime ministers? How can you think up a new mathematics theorem if you've never learnt your 12-times table? If you don't know anything, you end up like the poor fool in Philip Larkin's poem "Ignorance": "Strange to know nothing, never to be sure/Of what is true or right or real,/But forced to qualify 'or so I feel',/Or 'Well, it does seem so:/Someone must know.'?

All this is common sense to most of us, particularly to parents desperate for their children to learn - in the words of the Victorian schools inspector, Matthew Arnold - "the best which has been thought and said in the world". It is only in the groves of academe that brainiacs, warped by their doctorates and professorships, contrive to argue the opposite. To prove their wilfully contrary arguments, they leap beyond common sense, to borrow from obscure theories concocted by their knowledge-hating contemporaries.

They were at it in the letter, twisting common sense to claim that schools in high-achieving Finland and Massachusetts emphasise our old friends cognitive development, critical understanding and creativity, rather than rote learning. I bet those bright little Finns and Americans know a few facts, too.

Yes, a fantasy curriculum that only taught facts rather than encouraging thought would have its disadvantages. This week, my old maths teacher told me about a teacher in Japan who said his cautious pupils - crammed with facts, and limited thought - dream of becoming civil servants above all else. Hardly thrilling. But still, Michael Gove isn't offering a facts-only model; what he's saying is knowledge is better than ignorance, and who could argue with that?

Needless to say, none of this wicked, anti-learning philosophy makes its way into private schools, where learning spellings, facts and rules - often by rote - remains sacrosanct. Surprise, surprise, British private schools are rated the best in the world, while our state schools don't even limp into the top 20 for reading. You do the maths - if you've been lucky enough to have been taught any.

Private schools impose the rigorous learning of facts, from which pupils extrapolate to produce thought. Most state schools don't, because they've been riddled with the ignorance-is-good philosophy cooked up by muddle-headed educationalists for the past 50 years.

Last year, I gave a talk on Latin and the Romans in Britain to a state primary school in north London. Few of the seven-year-olds, although bright and eager to learn, had heard of Latin. A week later, I gave a similar talk to seven-year-olds in an upmarket prep school in Notting Hill.

"Now, when do you think the Romans came to Britain?" I asked, in a super-slow, easy-to-understand way. "It depends," said one girl, sitting in the front row with her hand in the air, "Do you mean Julius Caesar's invasions in 55 and 54 BC? Or Claudius's in 43 AD?"

Which class do you think had been forced to learn by rote? Which class will end up providing the doctors, lawyers - and thinkers - of the next generation?

Harry Mount is the author of 'How England Made the English' (Viking)