Tame by comparison with the American experience of PC, such proposals are seen by some as the thin end of the wedge. Here lies, I believe, the main reason for the emergence of PC from academic obscurity into the limelight of public awareness. With its grand design of collectivism, multiculturalism, and hostility to individual achievement, PC offers a custom-made palliative to the traumatized utopians who have watched the Potemkin villages of socialism collapse before their eyes. Nothing is better designed to expose the fault lines of British society than the debate over educational standards. A good education, argue traditionalists, is synonymous with self-discipline and the pursuit of specific levels of attainment.
Standards torment progressive educationalists.
They highlight disparities between individuals and groups, hence must be either reduced to the lowest common denominator, and as a result discredited in the public mind, or, preferably, abolished altogether. Nobody is permitted to lose, but nobody is permitted to win, either. Arguments about race, ethnicity, sex, the attack on the canon of literature, and the supposed evils of Eurocentrism are increasingly germane to Britain, whose cultural homogeneity is under threat from various single-issue groups. Amid this cultural fragmentation British English cannot remain unscathed. Words are harbingers of change, and much of today's rapid change reflects the stunning success of American-led technological innovation.