I run the graduate trainee scheme at my newspaper. The people who vet the applications are under instructions to reject those with grammatical errors or spelling mistakes on the grounds that someone who would be a professional writer in the high-pressure atmosphere of a newspaper should not be prone to making mistakes: and, indeed, those filling in application forms or writing covering letters for them should have all the time in the world to check their work before submitting it. In this way those who cannot spell or write English grammatically have their life chances harmed as a result. I wonder whether this ever occurs to the teachers who feel no need to correct spellings or solecisms?

We ought also to make a judgment about the quality of someone's writing and how it reveals the quality of his thought process. Someone who writes in a stream of clichés is not really thinking at all. Someone who fails to see the logic of the rules of grammar may well fail to see the logic of a lot of other things, too. Someone with these failings is unlikely to be able to comprehend, or have an accurate appreciation of, much of English literature, thereby being denied one of the greatest intellectual pleasures of our culture. Such people are unlikely ever to be persuasive in their communications with others, at who knows what cost to them. The Marxist educationalists have done the products of their system no favours in this respect.

To promote my book, I went a few weeks ago to a very good comprehensive school in Suffolk to talk to the pupils about how they regarded correctness in English usage. They accepted there was a standard. They all recognised that their chances of getting a place at a good university, or of getting a good job, could still be handicapped by a poor grasp of English. They said their spelling was corrected at school but not their grammar. That, they agreed, was something their parents did. Will the next generation of parents be able to do this? Or are we about to have a two-tier language: one that is spoken and written in accordance with the rules by a tiny percentage of highly-educated people, and one that is a free-for-all, and in complete decay, by everybody else? The result of having a culture dominated by the second is that it will fragment further. It would be bad enough for us to be like Tsarist Russia, where a small elite spoke French and the masses what was considered to be the crude and coarse mother tongue. It would be worse if we ended up with no mother tongue at all, but a series of argots based on geographical or social location, so that an American or Australian might be infinitely more comprehensible to an educated user of English than someone from a housing estate in Doncaster or Portsmouth.

The media are the guardians of the language, in default of the schools. Yet while I was writing my book I heard a reporter on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, normally a bastion of correct English, talk of someone "flaunting" the rules. He meant flouting. However, when I looked up the verb "flaunt" in the online edition of the OED, I found it explained that it was sometimes used instead of "flout". Radicals would not mind this: it is, in their view, a justified change in the living language. Yet it is a pointless change. "Flout" is a perfectly good word. It does not need a synonym in "flaunt", especially such an illogical one. "Flaunt" has not been adopted as a synonym for reasons of necessity. It has come to be one (and please forgive me for not mincing my words) because of the pig ignorance of some people who choose to use it as such. And, no doubt, those users were never told by their teachers not to do so.

The determination not to teach English properly in schools is all part of the determination not to enforce rigid standards, and to force children to make the intellectual effort to comply with them. It is why the standard of the grades of public examinations has had to be systematically lowered since the 1970s in order to ensure that a respectable number of children pass them. Socialism loves such a doctrine, because the more stupid people are the easier they are to control. This is especially true if they leave school ostensibly with a GCSE or even an A level in English, but are still largely inarticulate and in some measure illiterate. A solid and accurate grounding in English should be the basis of all other study. It should be the basis of a successful career and of continuing education, usually autodidactically, after formal education is over. To allow it to be otherwise is to create a people in whom intellectual curiosity has been killed and for whom effective communication is an unknown land. We should be ashamed that our education system has brought people down to this level. It is time we resolved to force our children, and in the first instance their teachers, to make that effort.