Schools should be under deregulated private control and so be disciplined by the only impartial master - the market. The owners of the schools should be thought of not as Principals or Proprietors but as Punters. Their teaching staff would be Presenters and the pupils would best be termed Puntees. Parents would still be Parents. The P's would be the structure within which the whole enterprise would operate. The Punters would be safe hands in which to entrust the Four R's - the usual three, plus Religion.

The school week would be devoted to training for the weekly tests - to be held on Saturday afternons from August to May and also on certain public holidys as part of associated religious observances.

The tests would be competitive between schools according to rules laid down by the Promoters; referees would be appointed by, and answerable to, the Promoters. Test competition would be in leagues according to a Promoters' Fixtures List for the educational season and there would also be knock-out competitions sponsored by education-related enterprises of various sorts - textbook publishers, computer firms, educational counselling consultants etc etc.

Competiton would take care of standards but enterprise should be encouraged in other ways. Training sessions during the week could be fragmented, to suit concentration span, by the insertion of video commercials and cartoons (and Thoughts for the Week for the Predestined High Fliers - the Pick of the Puntees as they might be called). Also, the carrot of selling Promising Puntees to other Punters and the stick of firing sluggish Presenters after a run of poor results . . . these well-tried practices should be brought into education. Parents of Puntees, and other people too, could have their interest in Enterprise Education stimulated by Pools Promoters. An element of gambling would liven up the whole business; performance, as reflected in the current state of the League Tables, would kill parental apathy or scepticism stone dead. The international dimension should not be overlooked. On the contrary, the competitve achievement ethos could be fostered on the continental scale by SELLIT - the Single European League for Learning, Indoctrination and Testing.

Of course all this competition might raise problems of violence on and off the test sites - but nothing that could not be solved by closed-circuit TV, wire fences, tracker dogs, water cannon and computerised identity cards. These support services and facilities would not be a great charge upon the Punters because the items mentioned will be a part of life generally, in all its many and varied aspects, in the Brash New World.

Finally it is not only education that would be changed by the above ideas being implemented. Sport, as we know it, would die out. We could achieve the withering away of sport - and all its attendant evil effects on health, character and international relations.