Tight security and a very patronising thanks to audience members for allowing Gove to speak kick off a rhetorically impressive, if entirely vapid, speech from he whom many in education fear most. Appropriately, the "unashamedly elitist" talk was chaired by Simon Heffer, author of many a Telegraph article and the book Strictly English. Framed by allusions to Gladstone and peppered with references to Dickens and stoic Victorian moral values, the speech was a proud moment for the politician. He reveled in the bliss of learning for learning's sake, intellectual curiosity and the inherent value of education, all values it's hard to challenge; yet, these ideas hardly tally with a system that is intrinsically competitive,
assesses, monitors and tests at every turn and is so laden with materialistic language that renders children and their parents "customers" and "consumers".

Gove's ideal is a superlative compilation of the "greatest that man's mind has to offer" (after prompting from an audience member, Gove clarified that he takes 'man' to include all people). The teaching of a pre-approved canon that spans pre-approved disciplines is one that takes the form not of a national curriculum, but of a much less explicit value judgment that is soon to have a yet firmer stranglehold on the classroom. Intellectual capital is here bought and sold; imagination has been tested and found wanting. I couldn't help hoping that he would take a walk to the other side of Sidgwick and see a space where students have reclaimed their learning environment, where they are engaging in arts and debate (and, in a cordoned off quiet space, working hard on that weekly essay).

It is spaces like those occupied that offer the best example of what a positive, democratic education might look like. The kind of freedom Gove advocates will be executed at the expense of those who most need, and in many cases most desire, a holistic and inspiring education system. At the same time it will alienate those who teachers who most want to provide one. Gove cloaked a
loathing for popular culture, pay regulations and development of the "whole child" with the assertion that he is a "hopeless romantic"; I worry that he is instead just dangerously hopeless.