Something has gone wrong with education. Somehow, over the past quarter of a century we have seen confidence leaking away, and something else slowly seeping in to take its place. I think this something else is poisonous, and I think we ought to get rid of it at once.

Take the glowing, radioactive core at the heart of the whole thing: the national curriculum and the literacy strategy and the SATs. This is what the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority says about the reading part of the English tests at key stage 2 — that means, in human language, at age 11.

It thinks that reading consists of using a range of strategies to decode, selecting, retrieving, deducing, inferring, interpreting, identifying and commenting on the structure and organisation of texts, identifying and commenting on the writer’s purposes and viewpoints, relating texts to the social, cultural and historical contexts.

That’s it. Nothing else. That’s what it wants children of 11 to do when they read. It doesn’t seem to know that reading can also be enjoyed, because enjoyment doesn’t feature in the list of things you have to do. Instead, when you read a book, you have to: oList the words and phrases used to create an atmosphere. oWrite a 50-word summary of a whole plot. oPick a descriptive word from the text and, using a thesaurus, write down five synonyms and antonyms for that word.

Except that you don’t read a whole book. You read bits, which are extracted and photocopied.

And before you write a story, you have to make a class list of “the features of a good story opening”. The teacher is asked to model the writing of a first paragraph, and the instructions say: “Read through the finished writing together. Check this against the criteria for a good opening — does it fulfil all of these?” I can’t say it clearly enough: writing doesn’t happen like this. What does happen like this is those Hollywood story-structure courses, where there are seven rules for this, and five principles of that, and eight bullet-points to check when constructing the second-act climax. It is telling children a lie to say that this is the way you write stories.

But day in, day out, hour after hour, this wretched system nags and pesters and buzzes at them, like a great bluebottle laden with pestilence. And then all the children have to do a test; and that’s when things get worse.

The danger of tests and league tables is that they demand clear, unequivocal, one-dimensional results. In order to give the sort of result that can be tabulated and measured, multiple-choice questions force every kind of response to a piece of writing through a sort of coarse-grained mesh so that it comes out black or white, on or off, yes or no, this or that.

Here’s the truth about how children respond to literature: “A child very seldom gives out any account of a deep impression made upon him: it is too sacred and personal. But he very soon learns to know what is expected of him, and he keeps a set of stock sentences which he has found out are acceptable to the teacher. How can we possibly gauge the deep effects of a story this way?” That was written in 1915. Have we learnt nothing since then? The children who are supposed to be at the heart of the educational process are turned into little twitching cells of response, like the nerve in the leg of Galvani’s famous frog. That’s all they have to do: to twitch or kick appropriately. Nothing else matters. All we want is the little kicking twitching frog’s leg.

If enough of them kick this box, then the school will go up in the league tables, to universal applause — what a good school! What dedicated teachers! What a wise and far-seeing education system we have! If too many little twitching frogs’ legs kick that box, then the school will go down, to universal condemnation: useless teachers; feeble leadership; name them and shame them.

But this is the system we have. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

True writing and true reading don’t happen like that. Of all the things I did and failed to do when I was a teacher, the things I’m least ashamed of are the occasions when, for some reason, a child in my class discovered that he or she could take time and write something true and meaningful.

I remember a boy of 12 who was difficult and uncommunicative, but who responded when I encouraged him to write about the family’s greyhounds. I told him to take his time, not to fret about it, but to talk to the page as if he was talking to me; and over half a term the most wonderful piece of writing emerged, full of knowledge and love and a vivid ability to convey it.