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Let’s face it, the young are getting cleverer and cleverer. The “A” level results in UK have improved for the 29^th year running. This is an achievement we can all be proud of. Education is clearly improving. If what I say sounds cynical I don’t mean it to. Like you, I want a well-educated world. It is the best chance we have for survival.

When will we see the benefits of this better educated population? Recent riots and the looting that accompanied them do not endorse modern education but of course the rioters were not the people who had achieved the increasingly successful “A” levels, I assume. When can we anticipate better behaviour, more attention to the urgent needs of the planet, higher ethical standards to flow from the high level of exam passing?

Or is our education system merely creating another divided world, one in which some are and some are not? Just as the financially divided world has created a split that may have become irreparable could educating some and not others do the same thing in a different context? A class structure, however inevitable, is undesirable and all progress implies its dismantling over time.

I have searched for the education systems for those less academically inclined. There are courses for digital techies but very few for other craft and art students. Where are our apprentice schemes with their strong personal standards and their excellent mentoring of the young? I learnt more from my carpentry master than how to be a carpenter; more from a ploughman than how to plough a field; more from a thatcher than how to make a thatched roof.

Looking back, much of my education, including the hard subjects, was reflective rather then regurgitative. How are the young today being encouraged to reflect? And about what?

While not for a moment doubting the accuracy of the enhanced “A” level results, might we not think about the value of exams in anything like their present form in a Google world? Is Denmark to remain forever the only country that allows Google into the exam room? Are we never again to see qualitative assessments of students for fear that they will be corrupted by biased invigilators?

In America parents are taking the matter into their own hands. The number of home schools has burgeoned. Curriculum-free education is on the rise. It is time we reexamined the whole basis of educating people, young, middle aged and old. What we have now is a charade of memory parading as an educated population.

And that includes “A” levels, too.