Liberal arts education has been under attack – we need to rediscover its profound wisdom

England did so deplorably in the Ashes in part because of an obsession with data, including minutely detailed plans on diet and exercise. Excessive bureaucracy can squeeze the lifeblood out of sport, the arts, and indeed education. Bureaucracy gone mad.

Michael Gove, aided by Michael Wilshaw, has massively improved the standards of schooling in Britain. Their insistence on top quality teaching for all, and a will to smash the mediocre, lies at the heart of all they have achieved. They will go down in history as great education secretaries and chief inspectors respectively.

But for all that, they do not sit comfortably in the same railway carriage as the principle of a liberal education. They are on a crusade, relentlessly driving our schools forward. Perhaps it has been inevitable that the subtler manifestations of schooling have been subordinated under their watch. So too has any clear vision of what an educated young person is.