In Brazil there's a custom among the mothers , in the shanty towns. When the children are crying with hunger in the evening, the mothers put a pan of water on the fire, put some stones in it and boil these stones. Then the mothers say: 'wait, wait, supper will be ready soon,' in the hope that their starving children will go to sleep, and stop crying in the meantime. That happens every day, repeated a thousand times. (CiB link)
Schmeview
Science education and possibly baccalaureate: that's something folks like the Royal Society have been talking about. Cohen's being melodramatic with his 'permanent intellectual decline', but it's an issue. Note what they say about uni's requirements from A-levels, which most students aren't willing to submit to so early, it seems.
As for the first half of the review - really? All the stuff around libel laws was galvanising and pulled a lot of this new set of 'geeks' together in the UK. It's a campaign sense about science have been pushing too.