LONDON -- More than 700 nude bicyclists pedaled from Hyde Park to Wellington Arch the other day to protest global warming and excessive emissions from automobiles. Their message was better "nude power" than "nuke power."

This was the fourth annual World Naked Bike Ride, with cyclers in 60 cities participating this year. The bikers want to flesh out the pleasures of fresh air cycling and persuade others to enjoy pedal pushing without pedal pushers.

"Bikes and naked bodies harm nobody," one biker told the BBC. That depends, of course, on your aesthetic sense. These were not necessarily the likes of the beautiful nudes on the Elgin Marbles in the British Museum. But we get the point.

Tony Blair has been giving vigorous farewell speeches in preparation for stepping down as prime minister, but anyone who knew London in an earlier day -- I lived here for several memorable years in the 1960s -- senses a country beset with doubts, fears and dark thoughts about what has happened to the culture. The world power is long gone. The royal family has become all too ordinary. Education once hailed for its discipline and rigor is as flabby as some of those exposed bums pedaling past Hyde Park.

A report by the General Teaching Council, an independent regulatory agency appointed by the government, describes children in British schools as unmotivated, intractable and bored. There's plenty of blame to go around, but the prescription ordered by the educationists sounds worse than the ailment: "Let's just stop testing." That's a little like saying to a sick patient that "you're fine as long as we don't take your temperature, your blood pressure and your pulse."

The council wants to abolish standardized tests now mandatory for students aged 7, 11 and 14. The tests are said to be so stressful that psychologists are more and more frequently called on to treat anxiety attacks. Surely these can't be descendants of the English sailors at Trafalgar, of Wellington's legions at Waterloo, or the blokes whose stiff upper lips could not be softened by the Blitz.

Today's teachers don't sound like Mr. Chips, either. They're feeling stress from the pressure to produce students who make high grades on the tests. One teacher under investigation for helping her students cheat on an exam hanged herself. Continued...