Lucy Powell is taking a wrecking ball to England’s schools. Labour’s newly appointed education secretary is determined to erode academic standards and diminish the status of traditional subjects, in order to turn schools into employability factories where children are made workplace-ready. She must be stopped.

Writing in The Times on Monday, Powell takes aim at one of her Conservative predecessors, Michael Gove. Pushing children into learning maths, English, history and science has turned education into a ‘straitjacket’, she moans. Rather than what she derides as a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, Powell wants teachers to lower their expectations, free up more room for ‘creativity’ on the curriculum, and allow pupils as young as 14 to focus on vocational skills training. Given that so many of her assumptions about the current state of schooling are plain wrong (14-year-olds can already study for technical qualifications and GCSE passes require shockingly little knowledge), it is hard not to conclude that Powell is determined to ensure every child leaves school as dumb as she is.

Signs of the Philistinism about to be unleashed were there last week when Andy Burnham set out his ambition for a society that values ‘the hard hat as much as the graduation cap’. It’s a worthy aspiration: too many in the graduate class treat manual workers and skilled craftsmen with contempt. But Burnham seems unable to conceive of education as being about anything other than preparation for the world of work. His plan is for teachers to act as intermediaries in negotiating local jobs for local people, beginning with work experience for teenagers. This means sorting children into academic and vocational streams aged just 14, with subject knowledge the preserve of some and the rest consigned to – let’s be honest – low-level, basic skills. This is hardly likely to be a great leap towards levelling up.

Lucy Powell shares the same conviction that the shamefully high proportion of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) is all down to failings in our education system. Putting the number of NEETs at one million, she finds it far easier to point the finger of blame at a former Tory education secretary than to unpick a decades-long, cross-party consensus on deindustrialisation, mass migration and overly generous and easily obtained sickness benefits. Burnham and Powell prefer tearing up the national curriculum to admitting that increasing both the minimum wage and employers’ national-insurance contributions has cut the number of jobs for young people. They would rather gear school around work experience than question the debilitating impact of the countless mental-health initiatives children routinely experience.

Powell’s Times column exposes her inability to conceive of education as being important in its own right. ‘Education should be a passport’, she writes, ‘A passport into work, into life, on to the next stage.’ In other words, there is no point in knowing stuff just for the sake of it. There is no literature so inspiring, no art so beautiful, no science so fascinating that knowledge alone is worth revelling in. Rather than introducing children to the best that has been thought and said, Powell wants schools to prepare children for ‘the modern economy, or societal demands’.

Powell may think she’s socking it to the Conservatives and coming up with a radically new agenda, but her aim of gearing schooling around ‘societal demands’ harks back to the origins of the so-called progressive education movement. Since the 1920s, educationalists such as John Dewey have been associated with the idea that teaching should be guided by children’s own curiosity. But this was always disingenuous. Behind the child-centred rhetoric lay Dewey’s view that the role of teachers was to ‘shape the experiences of the young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits shall be formed, and thus the future adult society be an improvement on their own’. In other words, the role of the teacher is not to pass on to children their intellectual birthright, but to mould them into politically desirable and economically useful future citizens.

This approach to education has been tried and tested for a century. The idea that schools should sort children into future ‘brains’ and ‘hands’ workers, and give them academic or vocational qualifications as appropriate, has meant that working-class children in particular have been patronised with low expectations and denied access to knowledge, whether through secondary modern schools in the 1960s or GNVQs in the 1990s (General National Vocational Qualifications, or, as they came to be known, Generally Not Very Qualified). This reinforced social inequality at every turn. By contrast, Michael Gove’s determination that every child should have the opportunity to engage with a knowledge-rich and intellectually demanding curriculum meant social class no longer needed to limit educational success.

Powell’s derision for the ‘straitjacket’ of academic study and her sneering at the backwardness of ‘pen and paper exams’ reveal her contempt for education itself. Rather than striving for a nation where all children know about the richness and beauty of the world they have been born into, she wants local employers to dictate the curriculum, and a generation of school-leavers who can hit play on a PowerPoint presentation but know nothing about their country’s past.

Joanna Williams is a spiked columnist and author of How Woke Won. Follow her on Substack: cieo.substack.com