O THE delights of Wacko Jacko! Did you see the pictures of him talking to the students at the Oxford Union? The idea that Oxford university gives ear to a pathetic clown like Michael Jackson encapsulates just what's wrong with higher education today.

No wonder they call Oxford the home of lost causes: it's the cause of intelligence that has been lost here. But what did he say? "I need a tissue, I'm so sorry. You will have to excuse me. My father had great difficulty showing affection. He never really told me he loved me." Grow up Jacko!

Was it also your father's neglect that made you want to disown your natural colour and turn white - and then try to get yourself up as if you're the new Elizabeth Taylor?

He had come to talk about something called "Heal the Kids". He wants a universal bill of rights that will provide for young people to be "listened to without having to be interesting". Well, what does he want a bill for? The brainless students listened to him being colossally uninteresting without the need of such a bill.

It strikes me that Jacko's intended bill does not go nearly far enough. I want a bill of rights that guarantees that I shall not have to live out my days as a humble columnist. I want the Nobel Prize for Literature, and if I don't get it...well, I'll stamp my foot.

I want the right to be adored by everybody even though I am stupid and ugly. Moreover, I claim my right to become a millionaire without having first to go on that quiz programme and phone a friend.

The coverage Jacko got for talking sentimental nonsense about children is just a further illustration of how far we have descended into the baby talk of an infantile society. There is a degenerative movement throughout our national institutions which is progressively removing intelligence from all aspects of public life.

The result is an enfeebled national character, as if the object of our culture were to produce a race of cry babies. Nothing must be "demanding" for that would be "elitist".

But where nothing is demanded, nothing is striven for and so human beings are falling short of their potential and becoming in fact less than human. Strength of character, stoicism and courage under fire are everywhere undermined.

The idea of progress towards an ever-ripening maturity has been abandoned and instead we are constantly exhorted to indulge and display our most childish impulses. It is as if human evolution has been set in reverse: we no longer strive or aspire; we are urged to be happy with decayed standards of what makes a person admirable, no matter how infantile these may be.

The result is tragic, for we are producing a new generation which is alienated from the best aspects of its own culture for the simple reason that people are becoming too feeble and babyish to cope with it.

It is ordinary people themselves who are the chief casualties of this degeneration, for they are losing the capacity to engage with those parts of our public life which are intellectually, emotionally and spiritually sustaining. We are being deliberately cut off from the things that can help us.

Jacko's message is that we all need more nannying. Nothing could be further from the truth: we need less nannying and more of being told to grow up and get a life.

Of course I'm not recommending cruelty to children but if youngsters are to mature into rounded adults, they need to be challenged not mollycoddled.

Michael Jackson's message is a prescription for the creation of a race of spoilt brats. The sentimental, sickening namby-pambyfication of childhood does children no good precisely because it prepares them for a world that does not exist.

The grown up world is full of problems to tax human ingenuity and strength of character. Jacko's notions of how to bring up our young are a recipe for the sort of emotional impotence which ensured those Oxford students listened to him respectfully instead of laughing him off the rostrum

Published: Tuesday, March 13, 2001