A conference like no other.Cuts, cuts, cuts. Everywhere one looks in British politics at the moment the talk is of hacking great chunks out of public expenditure. The cheek of some of those involved is quite breathtaking, considering how wedded they have been to ever higher state spending. But the truth is that the members of the British political class - with a few honourable exceptions - have spent so long advocating more spending that they have no frame of reference for talking sensibly about cuts. Getting value for money for taxpayers is a concept beyond their ken. And so what should be a hard-headed, well-informed discussion about restructuring the public finances is becoming, instead, quite ridiculous and hysterical.So says Iain Martin in the Wall Street Journal. How ironic to read this in a newspaper, albeit in the European section, from the very streets from which this crisis began.Yet at a time when the world is undergoing massive transformations; culturally, financially, environmentally and technologically, couldn't there be a better time to transform learning by pressing the reset switch on a Victorian past to look at things in ways more suited to learners in the 21st century?