If any reader of my blog ever needed proof of my essential message - that school is a waste of time, energy and most of all potential - I recommend that you watch Educating the East End, a Channel 4 series currently showing.

At the suggestion of a friend, I watched last Thursday's episode and felt, at varying times, angry, amused, and bewildered.

We never saw any classroom interaction but merely a set of 'cat and mouse' games between the staff and the pupils over the breaking of petty rules, all made by the adults, the very people who would claim that they are producing self-confident graduates with a good sense of what democracy means.  Yet schools are the most undemocratic, authoritarian regimes in society.

Teachers kept challenging one boy to be 'like a man'.  But boys are not men and their behaviour needs to be looked upon as such.  That's not to say that we should make excuses for anti-social behaviour in the young, but we should look into why such behaviour exists and how best to deal with it, rather than the usual I make the rules - you break them - punishment must ensue.

So long as we view children as a different species from adults, the present attitudes towards school will never really change.  I am not optimistic.