For as long as anyone's been using their brain, the more considered observers of society have noted how quick the ruling class is to produce new clothes for the Emperor when things aren't going so well.
Recently, the beleaguered Anglesey education department, taken under special measures by the Welsh Government in 2012 for being "unsatisfactory", has been handed a large, multi-million pound grant to consolidate its school buildings and overall services. The council is match-funding the grant.
But, given that clever people of old were educated with little more than floors to sit on and sand to draw lines in, is spending money we haven't got on razzamatazz new buildings the answer Wales is looking for?
To me, this looks very much like trying to plaster over the criminally poor performance of the welsh education system. No doubt buildings with better facilities will improve matters somewhat. But they won't, of themselves, bring about the dramatic and urgent improvements needed to get our kids on a level that isn't, as it currently is, bottom of the PISA pile.
No, we're so far behind the rest of the world that doing anything other than paying architects, lawyers and LEA chiefs huge wads to build new 'ta-da' constructs is simply too tall an order. Ergo, revert to the usual answer: bamboozle!
Up and down the country, hundreds of millions are being spent on new school buildings. Yet, if a fraction of that money were spent on the salaries of the best teachers, and schools given much more independence from the bureaucratic and interfering nightmare of LEA control, then we might find the cost-benefit analysis looks a lot more attractive.
Sadly, we are simply seeing more of the same old crap: throw money at tangible things politicians can say "Look! See what we have given you! We are already addressing the problems. Be grateful and vote for us!"
With a population almost entirely switched off from the self-importance and, more locally, basket-case activities of politicians, far too many tick their ballot boxes without a second thought. On Anglesey, the electoral results clearly show people, when it comes to the quiet anonymity of their polling booth, vote predominantly for those they know and speak welsh, irrespective of how rubbish they actually are as their representative.
So, the next time you find yourself slightly awed by the glitzy new multimedia, green-powered, sedum-roofed local school, spare a moment to consider that the kids educated in there - and their kids after them - will be the ones paying for it when the current politicians have taken their credit. It really is 'buy kudos today, pay later'. Or, as the same politicians always wag a finger at, exactly what we shouldn't do.
Spare a thought also for those countless ones before us who have moved humanity on in leaps, not by relaxing in plush new schools, but by being blessed with naturally superb teachers and an application of talent.
