A word from the Editor: Education is the key to solving differences

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Education is the key for a better tomorrow

Twenty one! I cannot be the first parent to see their child reach that landmark and ask themselves: where did all that time go? One of his birthday cards, sent by an artistic cousin, featured a beautifully rendered photograph of him, aged three, dressed up as a policeman and chattering into a toy walkie-talkie.

Eighteen years later he is studying, at the wonderful York University, to be a lawyer, so I suppose that playsuit was roughly prescient.

That card certainly gave the two girls he shares a house in York with a laugh. "Oh, look at you: SOOO cute!" He was a lovely baby, of course, as I suppose all babies are but why does that seem like only yesterday? Perhaps I should read Stephen Hawking's A Brief History Of Time for the answer.

We took him to Bettys Tea Rooms in York to celebrate and he was in nostalgic mood. What, he wondered, was the first holiday he had with us? Broadstairs. What sort of toddler was he? Always in charge of the household.

As for the future, he joked that it was good to be 21 in his graduation year because 2:1 was the degree he'd end up with. Of course my wife and I want him to get a First - with honours.

What sort of a future can a 21-year-old expect to have these days? Everyone keeps telling me that it is hard for young people to get a job. I don't know about that but the world is definitely a more dangerous place than when I left college in the late 1970s.

If I have one hope above all others for my son's immediate future it is that no sensible person even considers voting Labour in the next election.

We should not forget that the grave terrorist threat facing us all in the next few decades was brought about by the actions of one Tony Blair.

My son, in going to university, is enjoying an advantage that I never had, and I think it's important that as many young people as possible are able to have that experience.

If they can never be trusted again on the economy, and if the enormous social upheavals of mass immigration can also be placed at their door, it is the fact that they dealt a terrible blow to the safety and security of this country that is Labour's most unforgivable act.

Having said all that, I have enormous faith that my son's generation will not make the same mistakes whether they are directly involved in politics or holding future governments to account at the ballot box. They will be a generation that will have to learn to think for themselves and who, largely, must think of working for themselves too: this is something we have hammered into all three of our children.

The age of relying on big companies for employment is well and truly over. In future our children are going to have to hone their own sets of personal and professional skills so that they can be flexible in the jobs market.

This is going to add up to a very strong and self-reliant generation that will reject many of the prejudices and attitudes of the past. The old notions of Left and Right, for instance, are dying away.

When my son talks about the sort of world he wants - fair, tolerant and civilised with plenty of opportunities for all - class divisions play no part in his thinking.

His, refreshingly, is the language of calmness and common-sense, completely free of the rabid politics of envy fomented by Labour. His friends at university, drawn from all over the country, seem to have the same level-headedness. They are refreshingly classless young people who are, above all, non-cynical.

There is a school of thought that young people never really change, that each generation is destined to repeat the mistakes of the last, but I think things have changed for ever with the advent of a war on terror that may have no end.

Our children are going to have to try, somehow, to find a solution to the religious and ideological differences that threaten to tear our world apart.

They are going to have to be sharper, smarter and more open-minded than we ever were.

Are they up to that challenge? Education is the key.

My son, in going to university, is enjoying an advantage that I never had, and I think it's important that as many young people as possible are able to have that experience.

Personally I couldn't care less whether they take a degree in history or hairdressing. University takes them away from the narrow confines of home and opens them up, at the age of 18, to the challenges of a world which needs, more than ever, the power of intelligent, tolerant, openminded people.

It is not guns and bombs that will eventually beat the terrorists it is the power of good, well-rounded education and the collective strength of moral disapproval.

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