I'm watching Newsnight report on today's big education story, which is the government's relaxing of the ferocity of testing for primary school children. We are now, the government is saying, going to let teachers themselves make more of the assessments themselves. Schools will set more of the targets themselves.

Chris Woodhead, the former Chief Inspector of Schools, says that the big reason why things have got better in recent years, where they have, is because "we" have had objective information about which schools are doing well and which are doing badly. The new system will blur that information, and make improvement harder. The government, he says, is caving in to the teachers, or to what in the USA they call (and Woodhead likes this phrase also) "The Blob", although he didn't use that phrase on TV this evening.

Now Jeremy Paxman is grilling Stephen Twigg, Education Secretary Charles Clarke's number two, about just how definite the government's educational targets are. Will anyone resign if they aren't met? asks Paxman. Blab blah blah blah no blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blahblahblahblab – says Twigg.

Politics as usual, in other words. Will the nationalised education industry be run badly in an atmosphere of neurotic norm-fulfilment, or in an atmosphere of old fashioned, who-the-hell-knows-what-the-hell chaos.

If you're literate enough and interested enough in education to be reading this, teach your kids yourself at home, I say.