Alan Bennett’s “The History Boys” has taken Broadway by storm, walking off with half a dozen Tony awards. The Hollywood version can only be a matter of time. So it may seem churlish now to criticize a play that has undoubtedly been among the most successful productions of the London stage in recent years.

When the play was first staged at London’s National Theatre, however, I gave it a less than enthusiastic review in The Daily Telegraph. In an era when Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values has actually come to pass, comedians are the new high priests. It is forbidden to be impious about impiety, to satirize the sacerdotal satirist. Yet I plead guilty to a crime that dare not speak its name: treating the great Alan Bennett with less than due respect.

Americans who have seen “The History Boys” may be unaware of its author’s reputation in his home country. Here Alan Bennett is treated as a national treasure. He made his name in 1961 along with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller in “Beyond the Fringe,” a pioneering satire that mocked the British establishment mercilessly, at a time when the Lord Chamberlain still had the right to censor plays. More recently, he has specialized in one-man shows, in which he assumes the persona of an “ordinary” Brit, usually gossipy and female, delivering his one-liners in a high-camp, dead-pan Yorkshire accent.

As you may have gathered, I do not share the widespread view that Mr. Bennett is the funniest Englishman alive. I cannot endure his drollery without hearing echoes of his interminable left-wing diatribes in the London Review of Books. For readers unfamiliar with the politics of this magazine, it is like the New York Review of Books, only more so. The LRB may not, like the NYRB, have published a guide to making a Molotov cocktail for the benefit of Black Panthers, but it did run the no less incendiary Mearsheimer and Walt article on “The Israel Lobby” earlier this year. The LRB’s star writer was the late Edward Said. I judge Mr. Bennett by the company he keeps.

Still, it is an indubitable fact that a play that wins six Tonys must have some merit. And it does. The trouble with “The History Boys” is that its author is more interested in boys than in history. Alan Bennett appears to suggest that if the price of a teenager’s educational experience is being groped at high speed by an obese middle-aged man with a motorbike and leather fetish, then that price is well worth paying.

Even the actor who created the part with such genius, Richard Griffiths, admits that he found this view somewhat odd. He apparently asked the playwright why the hero had to be a child molester and received the cryptic reply that the boys were 18 anyway. So that’s all right, then, is it?

But predatory sex is not the main point. The real flaw in Mr. Bennett’s idyll of postwar state education is that his hero, Hector, should really be the villain of the piece – not because he is a pederast but because he is a progressive.

How do I know? Well, I went to a grammar school very like the one depicted by Mr. Bennett, shortly before the period – the 1980s – he purports to depict. By the early 1970s, schools like mine, which were reserved for the top 20% of the I.Q. range, were fighting a desperate rearguard action against the effects of progressive educational ideology. In fact, they were losing the battle for their very existence. By the 1980s, the “bog-standard” all-ability comprehensive school had taken over almost everywhere.

Since then, the autonomy of public schools has been eroded further, to the point where they have lost control over their admissions, their curriculum, their staff, their finances and their ethos. Only “faith schools” – which, though subsidized by the state, are owned by the churches – preserve a minimal degree of independence. This, too, is threatened by those who use the academic success and popularity of faith schools as an excuse to demand their abolition.

When Mr. Bennett was a pupil at a grammar school in Leeds during the 1950s, an eccentric like Hector might well have seemed excitingly subversive – but then he was harmless. The lunatics had not yet taken over the asylum.

In those days there was still a large corpus of knowledge, in the humanities as well as the sciences, which good public schools made sure to teach. A bright, ambitious son of a butcher, like Alan Bennett, could still gain a place at Oxford. The post-war socialist and liberal establishment included many Bennetts, but not all beneficiaries of state education gravitated to the left. It is a telling datum of political sociology that all six leaders of the Conservative Party since 1965 were publicly educated – until David Cameron (Eton) restored the “natural” order.

Mr. Bennett’s inspirationally antinomian teacher, Hector, is depicted as a tragic rebel, a martyr in the losing struggle against Gradgrind and Dryasdust, those two hoary old caricatures created by Dickens and Carlyle respectively to satirize the worship of facts. Hector rebels against the values of the institution where he teaches because it is the kind of school where knowledge is revered, not reviled.

In the play, Hector is made to resign by a demonic headmaster, who represents the rising tide of Thatcherite capitalism and conservative, Judeo-Christian morality. The Hectors are supposed to have been drummed out of the profession, their creativity replaced by uniformity.

But the truth is just the opposite: Hector’s disciples, who deny the need for teenagers to memorize facts – lots of them – and insist instead that what they need are “thinking skills,” have long since won their battle. The Hectors have been running the education system for two generations now. In that time they have hollowed out the curriculum, the examination system, and the teaching profession to the point where the place of objective truth has been usurped by relativism, that of high culture by an anarchy of values and the authority of scholarship by an equality of ignorance.

A while ago, at a dinner for Jewish teachers given by Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, I listened to the then education secretary, Ruth Kelly, admitting that the attempt to make state education less “elitist” had actually accomplished the opposite. Social mobility has gone into reverse. Progressive education has been socially regressive.

This means that a child of uneducated parents is now less likely to go to university than a generation ago – even though many more people now go to university. A young Alan Bennett today would have little chance of getting into Oxford, not because the academic or social barriers are higher, but because his school would be less likely to give him the breadth and depth of knowledge, the intellectual confidence and ambition he would need to compete with the best products of prohibitively expensive private schools. The first generation to climb the educational ladder promptly pulled it up behind them.