[TELEGRAPH.CO.UK] Malala doesn't just shame Taliban fundamentalists and men who can't believe daughters are the equal of sons. She shames this country, where the craven creed of multiculturalism allows girls to disappear into forced marriages at the age of 14, and a free Mohammedan school in Derby is just one of many that should face closure over "practices which discriminate against girls and women". Above all, Malala shames the "Am I bovvered?" young and their parents who take education for granted. "I want to tell students [in the UK] to think that it's very precious, it's very prestigious," Malala told interviewer Mishal Husain. "Go to school. Reading a book, having a pen in our hands, studying sitting together, in a classroom, is very special to us."

How relevant her words seem, in the week when a major international study revealed that England and Northern Ireland have among the worst levels of numeracy and literacy in the developed world. Not only do our 16- to 24-year-olds rank 22nd for literacy and 21st for numeracy, they are likely to be less skilled than their grandparents. Instead of having a highly educated upcoming generation, we are relying on the over-fifties to keep the show on the road. Those of us who dared to challenge pious New Labour education ministers when they reeled off inexorably improving exam results were told to stop knocking the achievement of hard-working teachers and pupils. It is now clear that those exam results were a cruel mirage. Dumbing down is a real and present danger to this country's prosperity.

How would you explain British educational decline to Malala? In her homeland, pupils may be so poor they use chalk and slates, but education is considered prestigious and special, which means many of the brightest students are attracted into teaching. Because teachers have high status, pupils are respectful and they work hard, because education is the difference between a decent life and dire poverty. While Pak girls like Malala are dying for the right to go to school, truants in Britannia miss 3.7 million school days in a single term.

In Britannia, the rights of the child have eclipsed the rights of the teacher to teach and to discipline. (Malala was astonished that the staff at her new Birmingham school didn't use a cane on unruly pupils, as they do back home.) Children's growing sense of untouchability has led to a situation where a fifth of teachers say they have been physically assaulted by pupils. So, in Pakistain, the teachers hit the kids and here the kids hit the teachers. And we call this progress.