It began with a simple tweet.

Gemma Worrall, a 20-year-old receptionist from Blackpool, picked the wrong day to start following the news. She became confused while watching a television report on the geopolitical chess game underway between Russia, Ukraine and the West, and by sharing her own two cents on Twitter she did more to tarnish the image of British education in a mere second than a whole years worth of falling national examination results could ever do on their own.

Misunderstanding President Barack Obama’s job specification (and grotesquely, if comically, mangling his name), she posed the rhetorical question:

If barraco barner is our president why is he getting involved with Russia, scary

We can all count the ways that this is embarrassing, cringeworthy, depressing. Failing to grasp that Barack Obama is not “our” president. Getting Obama’s name so terribly wrong (a Damn You Autocorrect fail for the ages, if her excuse is to be believed). Not understanding that in carrying out their duties as heads of state or government, leaders “get involved” with other countries as a matter of course. Et cetera.

The ridicule was predictable, and it came. Seven thousand retweets, numerous mean-spirited comments and the usual smattering of death threats from the trolls. This was unfortunate and unseemly, particularly because the author of the offending tweet seems to have no malice about her at all, unlike many of her detractors.

There was no need for the more hateful reactions to the beautician’s blunder, nor even for the snide and scornful ones, because in truth, there is a little bit of Gemma Worrall in us all.

Take the Daily Mail for instance, one of many national newspapers to jump on their story. They and their readers may look down at Worrall for her geopolitical ignorance, but in the same article they feel it necessary to gently explain to their geriatric readership what it is to ‘hashtag’ or ‘retweet’ a statement on Twitter:

Within just 12 hours, her comment had been retweeted (where people send on your tweet for others to read again) almost 7,000 times and screenshots of her words were appearing on television news programmes as far afield as Australia, Canada and America.

A solid argument could probably be made (though not proposed by this blog) that it is actually far more useful to know the intricacies of social media and the workings of smartphones than it is to be up to speed on world leaders and foreign policy, especially given the degree to which technical and IT savvy have become such important prerequisites for employment and the equal degree to which foreign policy is conducted on behalf of us all by those who presume to know best but never deign to ask our opinions.

Rather more concerning is the low esteem in which the supposedly patriotic Daily Mail clearly holds our country in relation to the United States:

It’s a corker of a gaffe by anyone’s standards. Making the most powerful man in the world sound more like the fizzy vitamin supplement Berocca is one thing. Demoting him to leader of the UK is quite another.

Maybe Paul Dacre can order the Daily Mail to publish its definitive ranking of countries so that we can see just how much of a ‘demotion’ it is to go from President of the United States to Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. It is rather astonishing that a major British daily newspaper should hold such an inferiority complex, previously hidden and apparently deeply suppressed, with regard to another country. But this revealing morsel of information and potential area for debate will also no doubt be lost amid the swell of outrage at Gemma Worrall’s personal ignorance – an ignorance from which none of us are entirely free.

Grace Dent, writing in The Independent, hammers home this fact and points out (albeit somewhat condescendingly) that while it is extremely hard to monetise a good layman’s knowledge of geopolitics, Worrall quite probably has other more practical skills that will stand her in much better stead throughout life:

Gemma has a skill. Gemma will most probably have a thorough understanding of Shellac nail procedures and skin exfoliation. She’ll probably know how to remove excess upper-lip hair, push back cuticles and spray a Fantasy tan without missing elbows or staining knees. So, yes, Gemma seemingly can’t spell Barack Obama. But she will always be in employment.

Meanwhile, the clever person with an arts BA Hons 2.2 who can spell Angela Merkel first time without googling it will be sat at home writing petulant blogs to David Cameron about why the Government hasn’t furnished them with a job as a medieval art curator. We deride the differently skilled and slap down the not quite as sharp, but the country’s cogs turn via the energies of people not quite as bookish as you.

While Dent probably cuts Worrall a little too much slack (inferring in their article that her principle error was the misspelling of ‘Barack Obama’ and not her ignorance of the leadership of her own country), there is surely some degree of truth to her conclusion:

As access to the internet makes many of us feel cleverer, more connected, more omniscient, more infallible, it’s tempting to write off all the people “left behind”.

All those little unthinking people without university degrees who shape our nails, or clean our houses, or mend our toilets, or rewire our kitchens, and can’t even spell a president’s name without messing it up.

But the fact is, they might not know where Ukraine is, and they might not know why Germany doesn’t favour sanctions against Russia, but when the lights go out in your house, they know where the fuse box is and which wires to fiddle with to mend it. And right at that moment that’s a damn sight less stupid than you.

Dent labours the point, but it is an important one. Knowledge and skill come in many forms, and it is quite unreasonable to expect everyone’s spheres of knowledge to coincide with our own – though a basic level of fundamental civics awareness really should not be reaching for the stars.

Fraser Nelson, writing in The Spectator, makes a similar point, but while his critique of the Westminster set is dead-on, his excusing of fundamental ignorance is not:

The Spectator’s great coalition of readers include those who think poetry is more important than politics.  Those who buy us just for Jeremy Clarke and cartoons  are certainly getting their money’s worth (just £1 a week, by the way, sign up here).

If you decide that life’s too short to follow the Westminster tragicomedy, it emphatically does not make you stupid. The societies which tend to make a fuss about the bloke in power tend to be the societies in which you don’t want like to live. The freer the country, the less the need to know who is running the government. That’s why Ms Worrall’s tweet can be seen a sign of something going right, rather than wrong, in Britain today.

But what should be of infinitely more concern to everyone than how many minutes of national and international news Gemma Worrall consumes every evening after she finishes work is the fact that a young woman with a seemingly solid and respectable school education has seemingly emerged from twelve years of compulsory education with next to no knowledge of how her own country operates and is governed.

The Daily Mail informs us that Worrall is not stupid on paper, and has the qualifications to back it up:

While Gemma might not be signing up for Mensa any day soon, she’s certainly no Jade Goody. Softly spoken and articulate, she was educated at a local Catholic school and insists that she has 17 GCSEs — an extraordinary number, as most people obtain 11 at most — in subjects including English, Business Studies, Religious Education, Textiles, Technology and Media Studies, all with passes of grade C and above. She also says she has two A-levels, in Travel and Tourism.

Worrall is educated to A-level standard, and yet she is sorely in need of the type of introductory civics lesson that an American child might reasonably expect to receive by the age of eight. And this blogger has extensive personal anecdotal evidence that Worrall is far from alone in her want for basic knowledge.

How is it possible to gain numerous GCSEs (even if the reported figure of seventeen turns out to be inaccurate) and A-Levels and not pick up some civics knowledge along the way?

More pressingly, perhaps especially today with the need to assimilate immigrants and their children, why is civics – the nuts and bolts of British society, citizenship, law and government – not one of the very few mandatory and inescapable classes for all British children?

Michael Gove, Ed Balls, Alan Johnson, Ruth Kelly, Charles Clarke, Estelle Morris, David Blunkett, Gillian Shephard, John Patten and Kenneth Clarke: please stand up. Would you care to explain yourselves?