Tests for Europe's schoolchildren

After England slid from 3rd to 15th in the PIRLS study, the education secretary Ed Balls blamed Playstation for the student's poor score. Columnist Martin Samuel disagrees. "It seems rather strange that naughty old computers are getting the blame from the Education Secretary because our children now trail Latvia and America in a global assessment of reading performance. What happened to education, education, education? ... The future is bleak. Bulgaria, a country in which a person was recently torn apart by a roaming pack of wild dogs, still manages to get basic literacy skills across in a more satisfactory manner than England. Even America - a country in which many children spend at least two lessons each day cowering beneath tables from loner gunmen wrongly empowered by nihilist websites, drag-act musicians and Charlton Heston - does it better than us. ... still Mr Balls speculates, identifying the root of the problem as the free time, not the school time."

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