I have asked criminals with virtually no education why their parents did not attempt to push them through school. Now we have one possible explanation – the quiescence of parents itself may be part of an anti-education culture. Do they protest outside the gates of these sink schools? They do not. Do they heckle the grumpy wreckers of the teachers’ unions? Never.

One in five seven- year-olds in London schools scores zero in reading tests.Worse still, our system has produced appalling social divisions. School league tables may be an imperfect guide, but the grossness of the disparity they reveal between the worst and the best is overwhelming evidence that we are busily dumping huge numbers of children into defective schools.Yet the parents have done almost nothing. No one within the spectrum of serious politics now doubts that, during the past 30 years, British education has failed. Particularly among the poorest and most disadvantaged, our standards are horribly low compared with those of other developed countries. More good news.But Woodhead’s second phrase – “anti-educational cultures” – is not good news and it is made less good by the fact that he is plainly right.One of the great mysteries of education in Britain has been the quiescence of parents. In short: nothing is reducible to the more mindless slogans of either the right or the left.

That is good news, not because it undermines the serious study of racial differences but because it helps to undermine the stupid, politically corrupted study of racial differences. Obviously we may one day find something to say about mass human variation on the basis of race or genetics, but it will certainly not be a glibly mechanistic linkage of colour and intelligence.Against the dumb left it should also be added that identifying a problem among whites tends also to discredit the belief among blindly ideological race warriors that racism is at the root of all disadvantage. And fourth, no such study can be convincingly scientific because of the impossibility of isolating environmental from inherited factors in human populations.So Woodhead’s observation that whites are doing badly is strong evidence against the depressingly numerous, supposedly scientific and usually dumbly right-wing studies which suggest that blacks are intrinsically intellectually inferior. Third, many studies suggest that changes in environment – say, moving a child from a poor area to a rich one – can produce changes in IQ far greater than any differences arising from purely inherited factors.

First, genetics has tended to show that racial differences are superficial; variations within a population are far greater than variations between populations. Second, intelligence is still not sufficiently well defined to make it convincingly measurable. The existence of such clear-cut differences appears, at first sight, to be unsurprising. After all, obvious racial variations do exist, so it seems reasonable to assume that less obvious ones, such as academic ability, are as real as slanting eyes or curly hair.However, most of the studies are compromised by fundamental conceptual flaws.

Most studies that have attempted to link race and IQ have tended to show that Orientals are the smartest, whites come second and blacks third. If white boys are underachieving, is it because they are white or is their whiteness simply one aspect of their cultural predicament?In fact, his identification of a specifically white problem in education works to discredit many of the assumptions previously made about racial differences. So Woodhead is safe; his remarks will not be called “racist”. But his phrase about “white boys” raises precisely the same issue as the specification of a racial category in any context.