All of us wrap up our children when it’s cold. We put them on booster seats in the car and make them wear helmets when they’re on a bicycle. We strive constantly to keep them out of harm’s way, and then we send them off to school so they can be tortured and killed.

I suppose we all think, rather naively, that school today is exactly the same as school back in the Sixties, apart from the fact that children are now allowed calculators. And get hit by the teachers rather less often.

’Fraid not. School today is completely different. There’s very little bullying, and no smoking behind the bike sheds because there’s no time; not when you need to be fluent in 17 languages by four and you’ve got those pesky quadratic cosines to finish off by break.

I’m not kidding. I do not understand any of my son’s maths homework. And what’s more I bet he knows more about advanced mathematics now, at the age of 10, than most of the Nasa scientists did when they put Armstrong on the moon.

People say Gordon Ramsay works very hard, what with his restaurants, his autobiography and his swearing empire to manage on television. But he’s a workshy benefits dodger compared with the average 12-year-old these days.

My daughter, who already speaks Latin better than Julius Caesar, comes home from school at 6pm every night, bleary eyed and drunk from the pressure. But before she can collapse into bed she has to do four half-hour homeworks. Supper? MSN? A bit of light texting? Forget it.

And on the basis that a parent can only be as happy as their least happy child, this makes me pretty damn miserable.

She’s not alone, either. I read the other day that a four-year-old child had been diagnosed with “stress” and I’m not surprised. Chances are she’d been made to miss her playtime and lunch so she could finish her paper on how the gross domestic product of Iceland was affected by EU fish quotas.

When I was at school I remember being told that if I spelt my name properly on my common entrance paper I’d be half way there. Exams were a hiccup in the day; not the be all and end all of absolutely everything.

What’s changed is simple. We now have bloody league tables, a handy cut out ’n’ keep guide to how well the school performs. Well, forgive the expletive, but that’s bollocks.

Printing a list of “best schools” purely on the grounds of academic achievement is as idiotic as printing a list of “best foods” purely on the grounds of calorie content. It tells you nothing.

A couple of years ago a sixth-form student I know wanted to study for a science A-level so she could pursue a noble career in engineering. The school campaigned vigorously for her to do something useless instead, like media studies or knitting. But she and her parents were adamant.

So she sat the science A-level and got a D. And because of that single failure the school fell 50 places in the league tables. One child. One exam result. And a 50-place fall. Still think league tables make sense?

There’s more. Another child I know was sent home recently from her school with a note saying that by the age of 10 she really should have a rudimentary grasp of quantum physics and that because she didn’t she must have some extra tuition.

Unfortunately, on the back of this hurriedly written note the teacher had been doing some sums. There was a list of every child who was having extra lessons, how much each parent was paying and at the end, under the total — which was £16,000 by the way — he’d written “yippee”.

Now I’m sorry, but people pay an eye-watering fortune to have their children educated privately, and to be honest we do not want to end up with an emaciated wreck simply so the school can maintain its place in some pointless national academic championship.

Recently I made a decision on which secondary school my children will attend. I won’t tell you what it is but I will tell you that I have no idea where it came in last year’s league tables. I have not looked. I absolutely couldn’t care less I chose it because I know several people who’ve been there, and they loved it. I chose it because I liked the cut of the housemaster’s jib. I chose it because the children I saw mooching from lesson to lesson were mostly smiling. I chose it because it “felt” right.

Of course, I want my children to leave there with a basic academic foundation; enough to get them to £32,000 on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, say. But more than that I want them to learn social skills so they can interact properly with other human beings. I want them to learn to play the guitar, and how to smoke without being caught.

I want them to enjoy it, to have fun. I can’t bear the thought of paying a small fortune every year so they can be put on a treadmill and emotionally flogged until they’re bulimic, suicidal and riddled with tics and angst. School is supposed to prepare a person for life, not wear them out.

This is what we all seem to have forgotten. Yes, we must do everything we can to keep our children safe. But we should also do everything we can to make them happy as well.

Times Recommends

• Strip away the figleaf and reveal naysayers
• Dave’n’George: there may be trouble ahead
• I do not accept that £64,000 a year for politicians is peanuts