If it ain't broke, don't fix it, so the saying goes. There are many who argue that our current education system gets more children into university than ever before, who point to the never-ending "improvement" at GCSE and A-level as proof of their claim that our school system is better than it has ever been.
These people get very angry when anyone suggests otherwise, and rather than engage with well-meaning attempts to show them what is wrong with our school system, they pull the shutters down. Somehow these very powerful people are convinced that the only way to support our state education system is to give it a gold star, no matter whether it is good or bad.
And yet our state sector is in desperate need of reform. The 2000 Pisa report ranked British children as 4th in the world for science, 7th for reading and 8th for maths. Yet the 2009 Pisa report showed that British children are now rated 16th in the world for science, 25th for reading and 28th for maths. Seventeen per cent of our 15-year-olds are functionally illiterate. This means that nearly one fifth of our children are unable to look a word up in a dictionary, or write their own CV. People say the reason the recent riots happened is because there are no jobs, but if someone isn't even equipped with basic skills that would allow them to apply for a job, how are they meant to get one?
"Progressives" will claim that I am focusing on the negative. It is only 17% after all. They point to the rest of our children who are all doing so well. But how well are these children doing? Nearly half of them do not get five grade Cs at GCSE including English and maths.
State schools ought to promote social mobility. They should not simply perpetuate a class system that ensures that only those who go to private schools are taught well, or that only those taught in leafy, suburban, middle-class state schools stand a chance of a half-decent education. Unfortunately, a number of people believe that the way to improve education for our children is to ban tradition from our classrooms – stop being so "fuddy duddy" and appeal to children by making things more "fun" in school.
The tradition of competition which we celebrate in sport has become unfashionable in the classroom. Now innovation requires that children never be given grades, and never be allowed to know where they stand in comparison to their peers.
The truth is that allowing children to win and lose naturally stimulates their desire to succeed and motivates them to try harder. Killing motivation and aspiration encourages bad behaviour in children, and this is why we have constant chaos in some of our classrooms.
The irony is that the rejection of all that is traditional comes from people who were themselves beneficiaries of a very traditional education. Some of them are very well meaning. Richard Branson, who dropped out of school at 15, thinks schools overeducate children and stunt the early sparks of entrepreneurship.
What Branson forgets is that he had the most traditional of educations at one of Britain's top private schools. Branson underestimates just how much his education has contributed to his success. What he took away from school at age 15 far outstrips the standard of education that some of our youngsters are currently accessing even at university level.
The idea of school being boring makes it possible for us to have reached a stage where teachers are no longer expected to teach. It is unfashionable to have desks in rows, and some schools actually ban traditional rows in favour of having desks in groups. Teachers are not meant to stand in front of the class, but instead move among children who are all busy doing something.
The idea here is that "doing" is more interesting than "listening". That might very well be true. But the problem comes when we think that "doing" needs to happen most of the time. This means that the teacher, traditionally a source of knowledge, becomes something of a referee.
The problem is that we underestimate the knowledge that we have and use every day. Recently, I read an article about Carla Bruni. To understand just the headline and standfirst, one needed to know who she was: that she's married to Nicolas Sarkozy, that he is the president of France, and what being a president means. Indeed, you had to know what France is – is it a city? Is it a country? Is it in Europe?
You may laugh, but I have, as a teacher, had conversations with 14-year-olds who didn't understand the difference between France and Paris. I can't tell you the number of times I've had conversations with kids who thought Winston Churchill was "that dog in the insurance advert".
If we want to equip our children with the power to change the world, they must first have knowledge of it and understand it. Unfortunately, the progressives think that somehow knowledge is rightwing and boring. This is simply not true. Traditional teaching has given us our most successful revolutionaries. Stokely Carmichael, who led the Black Panthers and was a major player in the civil rights movement in America, dropped gang life, so inspired was he at his science specialist school and so busy was he reading Darwin and Marx.
Nelson Mandela went to an elite Methodist mission school. Revolutions are created with traditional thinking. That doesn't mean you can't ever do any type of group work, or use a computer. But it should not be a fight to have a school system where our poorest children have access to an education that includes knowledge-acquisition, competition, a non-prizes-for-all culture, and high standards of behaviour in an environment where everyone reaches for the very best.
This is where I believe there could be a real role for free schools in our inner cities in Britain. As free schools are free to do what is best for their children without having their hands tied behind their backs, they are able to reject the cultural pressure that is felt in some of our ordinary state schools, and do something different.
They are free to provide children with the tradition that is found in our better private schools. The tradition of benchmarking children can be upheld, and standing at assembly and holding high standards for uniform and behaviour can simply become part of the norm. Paradoxically, bringing traditional thinking of this kind is to trailblaze and innovate.
If we keep burying our heads in the sand, the 50% of parliament that is privately educated will edge ever higher. It's the same trend that has seen the decline of state-educated Oxbridge graduates: 75% were state-schooled in the 1970s, now the figure is a measly 55%. At this rate it will not be too long before Etonians and others like them are the only ones skilled enough to run our country.
If we admit the system is broken, then, and only then, can we begin to fix it.
This is an edited extract from this year's Sir John Cass's Foundation lecture