Sometimes I envy the old-fashioned authoritarians. I really do. They are so certain, so sure, so confident. And at their best, they write so well:

Forcing every child to re-invent the wheel turned out to involve a heavy price in illiteracy, innumeracy and the inevitable frustration that went with these disadvantages. But what mattered was the principle of anti-authoritarianism.

For a teacher to enforce standards of social behaviour, not to mention grammar and spelling, was a form of cultural imperialism: an imposition of "middle-class" values on pupils whose own communities lived by very different rules. (And those communities - however delinquent or feckless - were never to be judged or condemned, just as their dialects - however sub-literate or socially incapacitating - were never to be corrected.)

Now the teachers' leaders, who defended this pernicious ideology with relentless fervour against Thatcherite ministers, have the jaw-dropping effrontery to blame its consequences on the very government that tried to curb it.

The president of the NAS/UWT, Pat Lerew, is absolutely right to say that the bullying, anti-social behaviour of today's children is a result of their parents having grown up with "little respect for teachers and others in authority". But they did not learn that disrespect at Thatcher's knee. They learnt it from their teachers - in the classrooms of the 1980s, which were self-consciously dedicated to the idea that no authority figure was worthy of automatic deference, that no rule should go unquestioned and that no goal was worth pursuing except the narcissistic one of "personal self-fulfilment".

This is Janet Daley, commenting on the NUT Conference I have already referred to.

… Now the current generation of teachers - who are far less ideologically driven than their predecessors - are paying the price for that regime of anti-discipline, anti-authority and anti-structure. There is a generation of parents who well and truly learnt the lessons they were taught in school.

Daley says the prisons should be run by the warders, and that Lerew and her cohorts have merely allowed the prisons to be run by the prisoners, and so far as that critique goes, I agree. If I have to choose only between Daley-ism and Lerew-ism, I choose Daley-ism. But in common with the progressives of an earlier time, whom Lerew still goes through the motions of echoing, I want to believe that there are better ways to do things.