We have better numeracy and literacy skills than 18-year-olds? No surprise there then.

Apparently the current crop of 16-to-24 years olds are, on average, less literate and less comfortable in dealing with numbers than their grandparents. The revelations sparked a number of headlines, all of which treated the findings as if they were indeed news. They may be news to some but I suspect, had they asked most grandparents, they would have found the senior end of the age-bands would not have been the slightest bit surprised.

It has been obvious for years that there has been a dumbing down in education standards and the only surprise is that the likes of Estonia are ahead of the UK when it comes to literacy and that Ireland are a shade ahead of us too.

Then again, two of my favourite authors are or were Irish so, despite the jokes about Paddy and Co, the fact is they could always turn a fine phrase.

When the news was released I happened across The Guardian who somewhat artfully took a swipe at the resident Minister and “his occasional badminton partner” for trying to remedy the situation, clearly missing the point in desperate attempts to shift the blame. There is no escaping the fact, the sample group on which the findings are based, are Blair’s Children.

Remember the former Prime Minister bidding farewell to Parliament and saying that his keynote was “education, education, education” and that we now had a “world class education system” – whatever that means. Of course it was all spin and to discover the evidence that we are somewhat down the rankings in world-class education, only underlines the hollowness of the claim.

Yet I think the whole issue goes back beyond the days of Blair and Brown, back to the times of Wilson and Heath. Recently, there was a television series in which modern children were set the lessons experienced by 1950s pupils and found themselves largely out of their depth.

I remember after leaving school in 1958, somewhere along the line I stumbled across a child’s homework in which they were set a question and were provided with a number of choices from which to select their answer.

I remember thinking at the time how sad it was that such an approach had not been introduced in my time because, with a few hints of multiple choices, I would have gained far higher marks.

That of course was the crux of the matter. You were encouraged and helped to obtain the right answer, rather than risk being depressed by the fact they had not learnt the facts properly in the first place. Knowledge was not something soundly gained but prompted.

For my money, the use of calculators in classroom, the inclusion of course-work as contributing a large percentage of the final exam grade (which in itself was open to abuse) and the banning of “the old fashioned” learning by rote have all contributed to the decline in standards.

I did not thank my father for setting me long division sums during my school holidays, dividing such as 47,986 into 798,463,219, but after working on a half dozen of those each morning for a month, I found myself at home with numeracy. Today’s youngster can reach the answer in a few seconds on a calculator without knowing or necessarily understanding what is actually involved.

The 20th Century produced some of the finest and creative brains in history, and they did not seem to suffer from the handicap of learning things by rote. The subsequent thinking was that rote had to give way to the new approach: pupils should be taught to think rather than be programmed by repetition. All of which forgot that the comfort of knowledge provides the basis for thought.

Not long ago I saw a GCSE History exam paper and it seemed to ask questions based on a surface, shallow requirement, light years away from the paper I sat in 1958.

The 1960s had a lot to answer for – good and bad - but I do not think the trendy moves in education served us well, for the recent study reveals there are 8.5 million adults in England and Northern Ireland with the numeracy levels of a 10-year-old.

Children today, 20 and 30 years ago, were poor at mental arithmetic by 1950s standards.

I also happen to think while they can outstrip us with their knowledge of apps and technology; they are well adrift in general knowledge. How could educationalist, as was the case in the 1990s, draw up a syllabus on recent history, include the Second World War but make no mention of the existence or the contribution of Winston Churchill?

Of course that was politically motivated which suggests facts should be subjugated in the cause of spin.

I helped an English schoolboy the other week. He was set a question on capitals of European countries. The knowledge would be useful and I helped him look the facts up on the internet.

A few days later I asked him to name the capital of Estonia. He replied to the effect he did not know but he had included the question in his homework and was 100 per cent right. I countered by saying that the object of the exercise was to learn these things.

“The teacher never said anything about that,” he replied.

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