At school, I was a bad flute player, and for some stupid reason I found myself entered into a school music competition, playing a piece that was technically beyond me. Come the competition, I sloped despondently onto the platform, noted with relief that the large hall in which all this was happening was almost empty, and in a state of resignation began to play. To my amazement, I got it all right. Note perfect. That hideous passage that I had never once got right when practising went perfectly. Twice. Amazing.

Then the bad news. The bastards decided that I should repeat my performance in the school concert. For the school concert they cherry picked the music competitions, getting the best of the prize winners to reprise their various triumphs. A reasonable procedure. Trouble was, they decided to include my unrepeatable fluke in this showcase event.

I wish that I had point blank refused to play in that concert. Instead I buckled, and played, and duly messed the piece up, this time in front of five hundred schoolboys.

It actually wasn't really compulsion, because I could have refused. It was very heavy influence, emotional blackmail, dishonest argument and a blatant obsession with their interests (filling the slots in their damned concert) and a blatant disregard for my interests. But it wasn't compulsion, pure and simple. I could, as I say, have just said no. What they might then have said to me, I don't know, but I do not think they would have tortured me, in the way that for other acts of misbehaviour or defiance they did torture us. It was, you might say, impure compulsion.

Because it was compulsion, but because it was impure, I learned two things from this episode rather than just the one. I learned that I thought that compulsion of children is wrong. But I also learned that, had I really been thinking clearly, I could have resisted the compulsion.

I learned that children should be free, and also that, if they really choose to be, they are free.

Whenever I expound my views on the wrongness of compelling children to do things that they really, really don't want to do, someone in the compulsion team says: I remember being made to do … physics, basketball, sculpture, flute playing, whatever. At first I thought it was stupid, but I'm glad I was made to do it. Allowed to make my own decisions, I would have been a less well educated and well prepared adult. I would have done nothing. Hurrah for compulsion.

I can offer no simple and smart put-down of this kind of argument. But I am about to start pursuing a career as some sort of teacher, and if I can (probably a foolish fantasy but there you go), I will resist compulsion as a teaching method.

I will persuade. I will advise, urge, try to convince, try to sell the culture in general and the relevant bit (such as reading or sums) in particular, with all the eloquence and charm that I can muster. But the final decision about what my pupils do will be theirs, not mine.

Easy to say. But I wanted to record this ambition before reality starts to pollute it. As so often, my most important reader is myself, later.