Recently I sat watching my two grandchildren, Elsa and Morva, play in the garden. Who are they, these strange creatures, I thought, so familiar and transparent, yet so remote and self-contained, growing up in a world so different from the one that I knew as a child?

I was seven before my parents bought a television to watch the coronation – yet Elsa, 5, cannot imagine what life would be like without TVs and DVDs. She already knows more about computers than I ever will; in restaurants she studies the menu as a matter of course, even if she can’t decipher all the words. I half expect her to advise me on the choice of wine. At her age I had never even stepped inside a restaurant – and when we were taken to one some years later by friends, I was too intimidated to enjoy the luxury because it was all so unfamiliar. The past, I thought, as I reflected what it was like to grow up as a child in the 1950s, is not so much another country. It is another planet.

And yet. The world in which our children and grandchildren are growing up may be remote from that which I knew as a child, but the nature of childhood itself has not changed; nor are our responsibilities as adults different from those of our parents and grandparents.

You may be thinking: why labour the obvious? The answer is that the politicians who determine our children’s education believe the opposite. No point in education needs labouring more, and the knowledge that, having motor neurone disease, I will not be there to see my grandchildren carry on through their schooling has strengthened my determination to state truths that have been forgotten in the rush to modernise state education.

When I was at school in the 1950s and 1960s, we were expected to listen to the teacher. This did not mean that we spent our days listlessly taking notes. We were expected to answer and to ask questions; to contribute actively to the lesson.

How different from the news last week that two-thirds of pupils do not study history for GCSE. And if they do, they probably spend more time reflecting on how they might have felt if they had been, say, Anne Boleyn with her head on the block than learning much about our nation’s story. Is that the right way to teach his-tory? Here are two memories I have from my own school days.

The first was a lesson on the battle of Hastings, when I was in the top form at primary school. Our teacher explained the nature of the forces that were marshalled on both sides. He described the lie of the land and asked us how we would have deployed our men if we had been King Harold. He then told us what had actually happened, asking us to comment on the good sense or otherwise of Harold’s decisions. I could not wait to go to the public library to find out more.

Six years later we studied the causes of the English civil war. We were given a clear account of how economic, religious and constitutional factors combined, and we spent the week debating their relative importance. Our teachers were expected to tell us things worth hearing. They were the authorities who knew more than we did – and we were there to learn things we would not otherwise know.

I knew as a child and know now from my former role as the chief inspector of schools that the better the teacher teaches, the more the child will learn. This may seem no more than common sense, but today it is not the accepted wisdom. The aim now, to quote one government-funded body, is to help children become “articulate, autonomous but collaborative learners, with high metacognitive control and the generic skills of learning”.

In other words, helping children to “learn how to learn” is more important than teaching them knowledge about the world in which they live. A teacher is no longer expected to be an authority in his or her subjects; his job now is to be “a skilled mentor and coach, committed to the co-construction of all aspects of schooling”.

I accept that as Elsa and her two-year-old sister Morva move through school, they will, as the jargon goes, “take more responsibility for their own learning”. What I do not accept is that there is no longer any point in teaching children interesting things. When Elsa and Morva’s mother recently took them round the garden, naming some of the plants and talking about the bird and animal life, they listened, rapt. That is how children of any age “learn how to learn”: they listen to people who know more than they do, and are inspired to find out more.

If you have a child of primary-school age, you may well have heard of Seal: social and emotional aspects of learning. In a typical Seal lesson for 10-year-olds, the children are expected to fill in a circle of multiple rings with the names of the people they love, the names of people they like a lot, those of people they know quite well and, in the outer ring, people they know as acquaintances.

The idea, according to the new national curriculum, is that schools must offer “clear, planned opportunities for students to understand and explore feelings using appropriate learning and teaching styles”. This is not an approach that would have appealed to my teachers when I was at school; nor would they have wanted, for example, to waste valuable teaching time on the Seal topic of “revisiting anger”. The “intended teaching outcomes” for this session are that children should come to understand “what my triggers are for anger; what happens when I get angry; what happens when I am overwhelmed by my feelings; some ways to calm down”.

Most children do not need quasi-therapeutic interventions of this kind, and most teachers are not qualified to help those who do. Teachers should, simply, teach. Seal and other similar initiatives led me to write in my new book, A Desolation of Learning, that I want my granddaughters to benefit from the educational opportunities I am lucky enough to have had.

As I progressed through school, I did not always understand my good fortune. What child does? And, to be honest, had I been inspecting a number of the teachers I had at both primary and secondary school, I would probably have failed them. No school, after all, is perfect. What is certain, though, is that all my teachers would have collapsed in mirth at the idea of “revisiting anger”. I would do, too, if my granddaughters’ future were not at stake.

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