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Retired teacher Liz Beattie of England will be attending the Professional Association of Teachers's annual gathering in the coming days (July 25-28 in Buxton, Derbyshire) to present yet another putrid exacerbation of the already particularly fetid meme of political correctness. Hers comes in the form of an idea that the word "failure" should be replaced in educational vocabulary with the concept of "deferred success." What a load of rubbish that is. Even the bag of bricks Education Secretary Ruth Kelly thinks it's trash.

From a logical point of view, it's clear that failure is precisely that; it has absolutely nothing to do with success. If a student has earned a low score on an exam, what has he done? He has failed to grasp the concepts. He has failed to perform at an acceptable level. He has failed at his attempt to apply his knowledge. This is not success, and it's foolish to try to convince anyone that, in every case, this is really deferred success. Just get real.

The phrase "deferred X" implies that everybody is confident that X will happen at some point down the road. Is the pothead teenager that sits at the back of his English class, consistently performing poorly because he just doesn't care, going to be successful at some point? Likely not. A likely career path for this gentleman is to drop out of school, get arrested for selling drugs, and spend some time behind bars, before eventually cleaning up and mopping floors at the grocery store until his retirement, at which point my tax dollars will be subsidizing his new muscle relaxer habit. Maybe this is Liz Beattie's idea of success, but it's certainly not mine.