Just when one thought it could not get any worse, the government has announced that it is considering re-introducing a form of grammar school: not, we must all understand, grammar schools like they were before. No. These grammar schools will have all the good bits of the old ones. What they did not say in the initial announcement is what will happen to those students who do not get into grammar schools.
What a contentious choice of subject to have opened with, Mrs May. The reaction was inevitable with instant condemnation from the Chief Inspector of Schools to the Tories' own former Education Minister, Nicky Morgan (who has at last said something useful).
The most pithy reaction was from Nick Clegg who described it on the Today programme as 'A new government foisting their evidence-free prejudices on the rest of the country. There is no evidence at all that that is the answer to many of the problems in our education system.'
In the aftermath of Brexit, I suppose evidence-free is the new orthodoxy, even if it was famously articulated by the derided has-been Michael Gove.
But where does one start in discussing the idea?
Selection in education is fine. We are familiar with selection at the age of 16 when some students go on to do A levels, others to follow more vocational course. These are familiar and sensible for maturing teenagers plotting their future lives. Many schools and colleges are more than comfortable with providing both types of course in one campus.
But how? This is a government that has singularly failed to produce an effective new SAT test. The English grammar test was recently described as 'being more suitable for a 14 year old than an 11 year old'. No doubt they will suggest the mindlessly dull IQ tests of the past. I am sure someone has copies from the 1950s. We could re-use those. Oh yes, plus all kinds of social-engineering indicators 'Do you vote for the Tory party?' 'Are you newly poor because of the EU?' ... and so on.
It is a government that been in power for just over a year and is already re-organising its half-finished mess of a re-organisation of education. Have we voted on it? Is there a mandate for it?
Has anyone actually joined up the dots between the perceived problem and the proposed solution? I doubt it. It is all prejudice stuff. Provided I say it loud enough the principal sounds sensible. Logic can go hang.
And then there is the manner of the thing. Grammar schools were originally replaced after a series of detailed studies and very careful thought. Passing the Bill through Parliament involved hours of careful deliberation with Three Readings and Committee Stages. Amendments were made and details refined. It was signed off by the Commons and the Lords.
In comes a new PM (with no new mandate) who stamps her foot like the Red Queen and says 'Off with their Head': no studies, no evidence and in the teeth of advice from the experts.
She is supported, of course, by her cabinet, many of whom went to grammar or selective schools. If it worked for me - and look where I have got - it will work for others. Mummy used to read me a bedtime story and that inspired me with a love of reading. Why don't we make that compulsory too?
What a way to run a country.
An after-thought. I am not normally one for conspiracy theories but quite happy to believe anything of spin-doctors. What were the chances that the 'leak' of the policy was not quite accidental as it seemed.
On Monday David Davis gave an appalling performance in the House of Commons, reporting no discernible progress on his Brexit brief over the summer. The following day - surprise, surprise - a photographer 'happened' to catch sight of a briefing paper about grammar schools, three days before the PM made a major speech about it.
They would not have engineered the leak of a potentially controversial policy to draw attention away from Brexit would they? No, it cannot be true. Surely.
