Firstly, the book appears to be dealing with only the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and it appears to have neglected the entire subconscious, which I should have thought was by far the largest and most important bit. If I understand correctly, that bit fights itself, breaks apart, tumbles around and finally crystallises in new and more permanent mode each time you e.g. lose your temper or fall asleep. So it would seem that the left and right hemispheres must only control the conscious mind, which constitutes a small portion of the whole psyche, and that they cannot control or even influence the subconscious mind which is the greater part of the psyche.

To put it more crudely – the older I get, the more I believe and rely on my own instinct, and I think that probably relates to the increasing development or recognition of the subconscious mind, which in a civilised culture is of necessity denied for much of our lives.

Most learning depends ultimately on the subconscious mind. It is a little easier to play your Grade I piano scales on the second day of practising than it was on your first, because you have slept on it. That is, a little of the comprehension of task (left brain) and a little of the motor skill (right brain) has worked its way into your subconscious. You can’t manage without that process any more than you can turn left on your push-bike while relying on conscious thought only, to make your decisions as to how far to turn the wheel or shift your balance.

So it’s not us and them, or right or left. It’s all one. Teaching is (or should be) pragmatic. There will never be a way of examining the most able and the least able students fairly, anyway, as we all know. There will never be a fair way of league-tabling state schools which are all so very different.

Erm, that’s it.

That said, it is heartening to read any challenge to the dominant ideology of targets, top-down directives and coercive accountability which has so poisoned the culture of the public sector. The idea of public service, and all which that entails of professional responsibility, trust, expertise and collaborative endeavour for the public good, had no grip among post ERA policy-makers whether Tory or New Labour. In the shadow of Thatcherism and its Blairite offspring It remains a foreign language.

Sir Michael Barber’s career might stand as one exemplar of what can go wrong. As a negotiator for the NUT during the first anti-SATs boycott in the early 1990s, he opposed his own union’s policy of backing the boycott-action, and wanted to lift the boycott almost at once as a “gesture of goodwill” to the government. In his 1996 book about the National Curriculum he disparages NUT activists and records that union officials such as himself were skilled in evading the demands coming from the very people in school-branches they were supposed to represent. He essentially supported the SATs, and the government’s policy of imposing them, and attacked the NUT in print for its opposition to the narrow tests almost as soon as he could upon quitting his union post (in the Times, 7 January 1994). His support for ‘hyper-accountability’ and the kind of system-building outlined in your article, has been unswerving. As well as backing SATs he also supported setting and OFSTED, helped devise the now-scrapped National Literacy Strategy and other parts of New Labour’s education-policy before 1997, headed the Standards and Effectiveness Unit and later the Number 10 Delivery Uniit in Downing Street, (organisations charged with applying these systems-building policies across the public sector) and went to his reward in 2005 at McKinsey and Co., a private firm. The full details are (or used to be) available online (at ) in an interview he gave on 13 January 2006.

It is a commonplace to observe that the attitudes and policies which Sir Michael Barber embodies draw their energy from the orthodoxy of the profit-making sector, where the pursuit of greater and greater profit is the essential driver. Pointless to look for broader human values where the watchword is ‘efficiency’. This remains a crucial front in the struggle between different world-views, which itself derives, I believe, not from divisions in human brain-structure but from the inevitable struggle between classes within our current economic mode of production.