Liberals will no doubt be horrified by the connection, but I can't help recalling something from a long-ago history lecture concerning the pre-war years of the Third Reich, when Nazi propaganda focussed heavily on children.

I have before me an image from a German child's coloring book, printed in the 1930s, showing a young girl telling Hitler (in German, of course): "My Fuehrer, I know you well and love you, like father and mother. I shall always obey you, like father and mother. And when I grow up, I shall help you..."

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the President has hit a new low with this one.

Liberals will no doubt be horrified by the connection, but I can't help recalling something from a long-ago history lecture concerning the pre-war years of the Third Reich, when Nazi propaganda focussed heavily on children.

I have before me an image from a German child's coloring book, printed in the 1930s, showing a young girl telling Hitler (in German, of course): "My Fuehrer, I know you well and love you, like father and mother. I shall always obey you, like father and mother. And when I grow up, I shall help you..."

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the President has hit a new low with this one.

The primary school I attended oh-so-many years ago had 700 students, 22 teachers (including a teacher-librarian and music teacher), a principal, deputy principal, one janitor (part-time), and a solitary secretary who worked on a typewriter. Teaching aids consisted of a blackboard and chalk, occasionally supplemented by reeking pages duplicated on a Roneo machine.

Despite - or perhaps because of - the tiny number of administration staff, by age 12, students were literate and numerate to a degree that would shame today's average college freshman.

How many modern educational institutions run so lean?

Dare I suggest the way forward is to sack rafts of bureaucrats and make teachers teach?

Doubtlessly, the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion will result in a range of irksome tasks for teaching staff, which shall further erode quality education. I foresee committees, sub-committees, and focus groups, all leading to that bane of modern working life: the Pointless Meeting.

Like a pandemic, Pointless Meetings spread from government to infect the corporate sector. Even in these straightened times, bureaucrats (public and private) remain enamored with them. An ersatz and possibly carcinogenic substitute for productivity, the Pointless Meeting consumes large slabs of time and money, but it is very good at satisfying the aims of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, which are, of course, equally inane and...