The playground of the vanities

Since children don’t vote in the UK, they’re at the mercy of government whim and widely vilified as obese, inarticulate, feckless and violent.

This is because in British Lite Culture, spin and targets, rather than substance, are the reality, since it’s easier to manage numbers than people. So children must not be educated – they must hit education targets, and government spin demands that most of them do.

Thus the charms of the quadratic equation, the Petrarchan sonnet, the gerund and Boyle’s Law are, insultingly, considered beyond today’s young people, so it’s goodbye to interesting stuff and hello to media studies, raffia work and PR.

Young people get straight A grades in this rubbish and go to university since the target says that 50% of them must.

Simultaneously, statistics show that children are overweight, although they look OK to me, and this is apparently due to their diet, rather than the almost total lack of facilities for, or incentives to, exercise.

When we were sending kids up chimneys and down coal mines, their rights were zero but, in addressing this, our politicians went too far. Today, children’s rights are these:

• To remain silent, sullen, morose

• To bring in a note from your mum saying you’re too ill to play rugby

• To behave as badly as you like without sanction

• To be unconstrained by rules of logic, grammar or spelling

• To dress like an oik

• To own a dog which lives on a diet consisting exclusively of homework

• To eat nothing but gloop.

Perhaps these problems are linked. While people sentimentalise their schooldays, there has never been a Golden Era for school lunch, which remains the only meal for which you would automatically adopt the brace position. In their classic book Down With Skool, Willans and Searle summed it up with a section entitled: “Skool food – or the piece of cod which passeth understanding”.

Proper food is to school meals as Chanel No 5 is to a nerve-gas attack, and our children have had the common decency and will to live beaten out of them by a relentless diet of random meat products, chips and algal swill.

So the obvious solution is a dramatic upgrade. Jamie Oliver’s campaign was right but didn’t go far enough. Schoolchildren fed on devilled langoustines, filet mignon and fine claret will not risk expulsion or failure. They will hang around for a glass of Remy, perhaps a decent cigar and a chat about the Outward Bound syllabus and the Latin Poetry Competition.