Independent schools have a duty to lead society away from its obsession with greed and its “X Factor culture”, a leading head teacher said yesterday.

In a blistering attack on the nanny state and the financial crisis, the Rev Tim Hastie-Smith, chairman of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference (HMC), told its annual gathering that members needed to hold a mirror up to society's faults.

He expressed dismay at the British electorate's fixation with consumer consumption in his address to the conference in Kensington, West London.

Mr Hastie-Smith, an Anglican clergyman and head of Dean Close School in Cheltenham, implied that the 250 HMC schools, whose members include Eton, Harrow and Winchester, had to shoulder responsibility for the future of society.

He said: “This is not a society currently noted for overwhelming personal responsibility. No wonder mature thought has been crushed out of many. A generation nurtured on nannying government, legislation that shifts personal responsibility and finger-wagging admonitions on public notices and labels is highly unlikely to take the blame for anything.”

Mr Hastie-Smith told head teachers that they had a responsibility “to be a prophetic voice and not simply reflect those aspects of society which we know to be dangerous and destructive to our young charges.

“Challenging greed and challenging selfishness should be axiomatic to schools which inevitably live in a community, and thereby at their best have to engender selflessness for communities to survive.

“A life dedicated to the acquisition of more things is not only doomed to disappointment, but is bound to cause destruction to others as well. Regardless of the colour of the party and the purity of its ideological stance, the British electorate has tended to cry with one accord, ‘Give us more stuff.'

“It may be that, even now, we are starting to see the price that is having to be paid. But we, as educators, have the opportunity and indeed the prophetic duty to challenge the deafness of the status quo.”

Mr Hastie-Smith said that if children were nurtured in the belief that someone or something else was always to blame, they never learnt to take responsibility.

He will leave the independent sector next September to become head of a new academy in Kettering run by United Learning Trust, a Christian body. Despite the recent expansion of faith schools, he criticised the “retreat of God from education”. This, he said had “left a moral and spiritual vacuum and the breakdown of any shared value system”.

Mr Hastie-Smith said: “In our schools we have the freedom, if we choose, to fight that malaise, not by retreating from society but engaging with the big questions in a mature and reasoned way, offering possible answers and challenge rather than the passing fads of an X-Factor culture.”

Mr Hastie-Smith told The Times that more schools needed to be freed from the “dead hand of Government”.

In another speech last night, Frank Field, the Labour MP, told the HMC that independent heads should help failing state schools if only to prop up the economy and secure their own pension pots. Mr Field said the heads were a “slightly self-satisfied” group that did little to raise standards in the state sector. The former welfare minister told the heads: “You have dined out for far too long [saying] that you're a poor, persecuted minority when in fact you possess gifts.”

One HMC member stood up to say that he had “insulted a lot of people”.

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