Gove's back-to-basics drive is just what is needed Our seven-year-old asked me the other day for help with her maths homework. No problem, I thought, recalling my against-the-odds triumph in scraping through maths "O" Level 35 years ago. But after a few moments scribbling away in her exercise book, I found I simply couldn't do it. This was not because the sums were especially difficult, rather that I did not understand the methodology. Children are no longer required to put figures in simple columns, and carry across, when adding, deducting, or multiplying. No, they are invited to "conceptualise" numbers, with the consequence that a simple sum requires the drawing of great loops across the page showing number connections between different powers of digits. Maths is no longer a discipline or a series of rules, but supposedly a means to greater, more imaginative things. In many primary schools, the learning of multiplication tables by rote is deeply frowned upon, though they must surely be the starting point for any young mathematician. If a Google internet search took 25 minutes rather than 0.17 seconds, none of us would bother with it. By the same token, it is painful to observe children answering a maths problem before they know their times tables. Without that ingrained knowledge, sums are mind-numbingly tedious, requiring so many fingers and thumbs, that the child simply loses interest. Michael Gove is surely on to something with his announcement this week of a long overdue shake-up of the curriculum. As successive secretaries of state have, year after year, hailed ever more implausible "improvements" in exam grades, Britain over the past decade has plummeted in the international rankings: from 4th to 16th in science; 7th to 25th in literacy; and 8th to 28th in maths. These are catastrophic measures of Britain's current and inevitable future decline. For all the bias within the education establishment against learning by rote - which children actually rather enjoy -- Chinese 15-year-olds are now more than two years ahead in maths than British 15 year-olds. This tells you all you need to know about why the globe seems to be tilting eastwards. But Mr Gove, who has the splendidly earnest manner of an obsessive Edinburgh maths teacher whom the mothers might find rather odd, has much wider ambitions. Nine-year-olds will be expected to know their 12 times tables, and to learn how to multiply fractions (when exactly did that stop?). He is demanding that proper content be put back into the curriculum. Few of us would want to go back to some idealised neo-Kipling version of our "glorious island story," but it is staggering that the only men specifically mentioned in the history curriculum are the great slavery abolitionists William Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano. There are no rivers, or countries apart from the UK, in the geography curriculum. In this fast globalising world, British children know that Lionel Messi plays for Barcelona and hails from Argentina, but will learn nothing at school of either country. And they will certainly not be required to learn Spanish or German, or any other modern language. No foreign languages are on offer in our son's class, apart from sign language. Truly, it is of course a delight to watch five year olds "signing" "rain" and "night-time," but with the best will in the world, what is this achieving apart from ticking a politically correct box at our local education authority? The majority of teachers are sufficiently motivated to ensure proper content is introduced to this weirdly barren educational landscape. But how can proper tests of achievement be measured against such a vacuous vessel that is the current national curriculum? Languages are to make a come-back as Mr Gove reverses the last government's disgraceful decision to remove the requirement that GCSE students take at least one foreign language. The problem is where these teachers will come from, now that modern languages are dying out in this country. A friend, a talented Oxford linguist who speaks five languages including Japanese, recently wearied of his office life and pondered a career change. He decided he wanted to "make a difference" by putting the teaching of difficult foreign languages back in their proper place in state schools. This friend went to a an old-fashioned rigorous grammar school in the 1970s. But even with the modest re-training inducements on offer from the education department, he calculated it would cost him £50,000 pounds to attain the Qualified Teacher Status that would allow him to achieve a decent salary. Reluctantly, he decided he could not gamble the financial wellbeing of his children on his wish to bring back the joys of modern language teaching to the next generation. Particularly depressing was that this friend felt, when he went on observational excursions to state schools in the Home Counties, that he was not made welcome by the "lifers" in the staff rooms, who appeared to resent his intrusion. The vexing point here, as he says, is that the teaching of difficult languages is no longer an argument in private schools, where Mandarin, along with the usual modern languages, plus Latin and Ancient Greek, are taken for granted. Go to a London private school and you will find they are loaded to the gunwales with refugees from the post-Lehman Brothers City meltdown. Private schools can scoop up these educated people and deploy their skills to the very great benefit of their fee-paying children, because their head teachers enjoy autonomy, and can appoint on impulse new staff, in violation of the teachers" unions "best practice" controls. And if these new teachers turn out to be no good, they can be sent on their way. Not so in the state sector, where it is only possible to fire incompetent teachers if they drag their school so low that it goes into special measures when radical pruning is finally allowed. As a consumer of state education, I pray Mr Gove gets his way, and I have to say I like that flinty, Presbyterian look in his eye. He is the only member of the cabinet who seems really serious about what he is up to. If I were the headmaster of a third-rate private school, charging parents £20,000 a year for a second-rate education, I'd be worried he might just pull it off. The writer is an author and political commentator