I spent quite a lot of time on holiday cajoling my eldest son (he’s 13) to at least attempt to make inroads into his reading list for next year. He sat on the beach reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which was encouraging, and then decided he’d done plenty and needed to devote much more of his time to surfing and hanging out.

What about Waugh, I cried. Greene? Siegfried Sassoon? Oh look, Selections from the Aeneid — I’ll pay you to read it. But he was gone.

When I dropped this same son off to go on a school trip to France last year I was amazed to see one of his friends, who’d got there early, sitting on a wall doing the Telegraph’s cryptic crossword, if you please. I felt a stab of purest envy.

This paragon is no doubt spending his summer holiday reading Riddles in Mathematics, by Eugene P Northrop, also on our reading list and doomed, I fear, forever to gather dust in our innumerate house. I bet this child devours Virgil and can quote from Decline and Fall.

Whenever I order my son to be more like him, which I do at least twice a week, he smiles beadily and says: “But he’s a boffin.” So? So, being a boffin is a fate worse than death, apparently. The only thing that saves this child from gross unpopularity and ostracism is that he is also a) funny b) nice-looking and c) crucially, good at games.

I have explained patiently to my son that if he were to make a small effort academically, Stephen Hawking would probably still manage to sleep at night, but to no avail. Being seen as actively clever is now apparently socially unacceptable, and his friend is the lone and freakish exception to the overwhelming rule.

Last week delegates at the 35,000- strong Professional Association of Teachers’ annual conference were told they should stop telling their pupils they are “clever” because it is “uncool”. They should instead use the more thrusting, businessy term “successful”.

Simon Smith, a teacher from Essex, told the conference: “A culture has developed that mocks being clever . . . I have talked to various pupils. They said being clever meant you were boring, lacked personality, were a teacher’s pet and other things not polite to mention in company such as this. With a few exceptions, including sport, academic prowess is in many eyes not ‘cool’. We need to change this, perhaps by changing the language we use.”

Another teacher said pupils often failed to turn up to collect their awards at prize-giving “because it is not cool”, and a third pointed out that achievers and Nobel prize winners were not considered celebrities, unlike people who’d made a virtue out of undistinguished academic careers, such as Alan Sugar or David Beckham.

Other teachers spoke of clever pupils deliberately making their work second-rate “because of peer pressure not to appear bright, clever or hardworking”.

Now, we all had a class swot, hand permanently up, panting with their love of knowledge, keen on double maths and given to a little light dissection of mammals in their spare time.

Nobody’s suggesting we need more of those: being the class geek, or nerd, or boffin, is not necessarily a number one priority when you’re 13, and a trip to the cinema is always going to be more fun than impromptu revision. However, there used to be kudos attached to cleverness, especially for those who developed the trick of making it seem effortless.

That seems to be a thing of the past: at school, as increasingly throughout society, thickness, or the appearance of thickness, is where it’s at.

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