BEAR WITH ME, for this is a fairly circuitous journey. I am going to try and take you from a cancelled train through the education and housing systems, touching on Farepak, immigration and an explosion in jail numbers, to a crisis in masculinity and an explanation of why the Government is telling mothers to sing nursery rhymes to their children.

It started yesterday with a cancelled train in West Sussex: “07.50 cancelled. No stock”, as the whiteboard baldly explained. Nobody complained, most resigned themselves to waiting 40 minutes for the next train, some rushed back to their cars to try and catch a train elsewhere. Four men in suits had a brief conference then strolled to the car park together and laughingly climbed into a car. I was struck by how relaxed they were, how distinctively happy they looked, jackets slung over their shoulders, despite the fact that they were obviously all going to be late for work. Men usually look so miserable and whiny these days. But these were commuters, they were successful, they live in a nice part of the country and they were tackling a challenge together. They had a purpose.

Somewhere along the line we have stripped men of their primary functions and made them miserable. First went supporting the family. In making it so easy for them to deny responsibility for children, from making access to children difficult to simply not expecting them to be there, we rid them of fatherhood and the responsibilities, pleasures and self-esteem it brings. Rid them? Yes. I don’t believe men are worse or less loving parents than women. I think the State fails to expect much of them, helping women to push them out of the picture when they become inconvenient.

Remember, for instance, when you hear in the Queen’s Speech debate that ministers are going to change the rules and “force single mums to name their kids’ dads on birth certificates”, that the claim is rubbish: mothers not married to their child’s father are currently not allowed to register him at birth. He has to do it and if he doesn’t, there is little she can do. Not many people know that. The myth that it’s the other way around is a telling example of the way we have carelessly relieved men of their responsibilities, by conveniently choosing to believe the wrong things.

If we don’t get rid of the poppycock, we will never understand what is going on: that the male role has been dangerously undermined. It is true in education too, where the zeal to push everyone towards academic studies that they may not be suited to has contributed to the crisis of worthlessness among young men who may be better off learning a trade. This is not class prejudice, suggesting poor people are not clever enough for maths GCSE. But those who struggle with maths have to see a point to achieving the grade, and if there is no decent trade or job waiting for them, then there is no point. What do you think the less academic public schools and Cirencester agricultural college were doing for years? They were educating the scions of the gentry to manage the farm or family estate. They were being taught a trade. We never said that was shameful. Now we force bored and disruptive children through ever more tortuous examination systems.

The entire educational establishment, from nursery upwards, is contorted in this tick-box madness from “early learning goal” (“parents & carers receive support in helping their children to enjoy and achieve”) to Key Stage 2, and 4, and five GCSEs, in order to avoid stating the obvious: that some people are not as academically able as others. It doesn’t make them any worse, but forcing them through the same education system will.

No job; no role in fatherhood; no chance of ever buying a house and a very slim chance of being given one (she’s got it, with the kids); and no one expecting anything more of them. And people wonder why the crime rate has soared and the jails are full. There are second and third generations of unemployed coming through; it is a family business. And they are being undercut further by skilled and unskilled labour from Eastern Europe; not much point in bothering, really.

This is not a problem that affects the majority of the country. A child likely to end up in jail can, sadly, be identified before birth and ministers are rightly trying to intervene at the earliest possible stage, in a move dubbed FASBOs, or Fetal ASBOs. Beverley Hughes, the Children’s Minister, upset the Daily Mail (again) this week by announcing the creation of a parenting academy to train a “parenting workforce” to teach parents how to sing nursery rhymes with their children. In case you think the Mail exaggerates, this is what the minister said on Monday: “Some parents already know that reading and singing nursery rhymes with their young children will get them off to a flying start — often because this is how they themselves were brought up. For other parents without this inheritance these simple techniques are a mystery and are likely to remain so — unless we act and draw them to their attention.”

Well, really, Minister, of course the Mail was going to fly off the handle at that. But what neither she nor the paper admits is that this isn’t about Daily Mail or Times readers; it’s about the FASBO kids. Or rather, it’s about their parents, and in 10 or 20 years’ time it’ll be about the kids, and then about their children after them.

And it’s about a society that simply lets men walk away from all this. Look at the tales on the sad collapse of Farepak, the deposit scheme for low-income families: they are mostly from grandparents and single mothers (www.unfairpak.co.uk/forum). Women have financial responsibility now. The overwhelming majority of books for toddlers no longer even have dads in them, which may explain the popularity of Postman Pats and Bob the Builders, the only male authority figures left. We have even edged fathers out of the literature.

A man needs to be challenged and to be useful; to do and to achieve something — and I bet they won’t be the ones taught how to sing nursery rhymes with their kids. Anyway, that’s what I was thinking as I watched those four men getting happily into the car yesterday morning.

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