Whenever a government minister cites the advent of artificial intelligence as the justification for a policy, you can be certain that there has been an absence of actual intelligence in the reasoning behind it. Nowhere is that clearer than in the Education Secretary’s embrace of ‘oracy’ as the new priority for our schools. ‘With AI on the rise,’ Lucy Powell asserted, ‘we need to go harder on the skills that make us human, like oracy.’

Ms Powell refrained from explaining what it is about large language models that requires a different approach to language teaching in our schools. But that is because the vaunting of oracy is neither a carefully thought-through response to the rise of computer power in the hands of the Altmans or Amodeis, nor is it yet a quest to rediscover the art of oratory as practised by Cicero or Demosthenes. Would that it were so. It is yet another modish 1960s concept beloved of educational progressives who oppose rigour in the classroom – and which, like all such approaches, has already been tried and found wanting.

Sitting at the back and chatting to your friends was no longer a diversion; it was educational practice

Sitting at the back and chatting to your friends was no longer a diversion; it was educational practice

Oracy has nothing to do with oratory, per se. In truth, the neologism was dreamed up by an educationist in Birmingham in 1965. Andrew Wilkinson was a guru of the progressive education movement. He believed that traditional English teaching placed too much emphasis on literature and grammar. A great critic of direct instruction (or teaching as it used to be known), Wilkinson invented the word........

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