FRESH from their success in the Higher Still programme, the captains of industry are behind moves to give “enterprise” lessons to school pupils. Some of their prototype ideas have come to my notice.
At management level we will be led by an Incompetence and Inefficiency Department (sponsored by Railtrack). Self-awarded bonuses will be payable to those who best fulfil the remit suggested by the departmental title.
Creative accountancy will teach useful “skills” such as tax dodging, and the global player module which will train future serial investment grant collectors to have one eye on the main chance and the other blind to economic cause and social effect.
Social inclusion will be a “partnership” combining outdoor education, which will provide access courses in the art of sleeping in the streets (the blanket presence of the homeless seeming to be a necessary factor in the “global economy”), with personal and social education whose Intermediate courses will inculcate a wholesome appetite for staying in more profitably to play electronic games.
Modern studies will be “flexible” in its analysis of worldwide famine and poverty, provoking not too much in the way of outrage, a charity event or two perhaps, but nothing that might disrupt the flow of raw materials or the productivity of sweat shops.
The Ambience Department will be busy inventing jingles which can be tried out in the Mechanically Recovered Meat Co canteen - all tunes written in the key of CJD. Religious education will be devoted to “modernising” old saws for the moral edification of the future lieges as in, say, finding alternative endings to the one which begins “What does it profit a man . . .”
Meanwhile, that ancient British rogue, Pelagius, who said “the few rich are the cause of the many poor”, will be excommunicated for the fourth time.
At the core of all these schools will be the Ethics Department: absolutely essential, but cheap as it will have no staff and no syllabus.
The new schools are to be inspected by an HMI Enterprise with pointy ears, vacant eyes and a total ignorance of human emotion - not much change there then.
Meanwhile, I’ll be busy in the Communication and Presentation Department keeping literature afloat by reinterpreting Brave New World and 1984 as modern Utopias. So, despite suggestions to the contrary, it won’t be me that’s applying for the key post of AHT Cynicism - that one will be filled from the business community.
Perhaps a wee post-incarceration job for Jeffrey Archer?
