FOR reasons that many of my more discerning readers will understand (thanks again, Mrs C) we have not seen hide nor hair of Teachers Tess and her husband Tim this past month or so: they are off in their converted barn in the Dordogne.

And this has been a great loss for the regulars in the Beggars' Arms and also, for that matter, in the post office and the WI. Because schooling, or rather the lack of it, has been a topic of consversation even hotter than the weather these summer holidays.

In fact, the educational establishment as a whole must be truly grateful that the best summer offering show on TV in years has been screened when everyone involved, from ministers via civil servants to head teachers and their staffs, have been in absentia (that's Latin, kiddiewinks, like what the Romans used to talk).

This was the brilliant That'll Teach 'Em series on Channel Four, which set the generations at each other's throats with more relish than Leeds fans celebrating Man U's sale of Becks to Spain.

It involved taking some of the land's brightest 16-year-old GCSE students out of their glass and concrete high tech comps and putting them into a 1950s boarding grammar school - and watching them squirm like worms on a hook.

Now in this, I have to admit my own total lack of impartiality. This is exactly the type of school I was lucky enough to attend with one vital exception: no one was allowed to take a ruler, slipper or cane to these modern kids.

That's illegal now, you see, so discipline had to be enforced with strength of character from the teachers and/or lines and detention. In my day, classrooms were filled with flying chalk or wooden blackboard dusters (from the teachers, that is), the slipper on the hand was an everyday occurrence, and I managed to get myself caned every November for three years on the trot for letting off fireworks.

Watching these modern kids undergo real discipline, and face work that was actually hard, gave me a strange sense of joy. Not from watching them suffer but from my own reaction: I longed to be with them.

For school days really were the best days of my life. More importantly, I knew it at the time - at least from the Lower Fifth onwards.

It was very, very hard in the beginning. You had to fight, literally, to find your place in the pecking order. Lessons were hard and school sports were even harder.

However, by the time my pals and I were, say, 14, we had found our place and because we were getting a superb education - probably the best in the world - had learned to take on the masters at their own game.

We had become bright enough to question their teaching. I once asked a maths master what algebra was for and he could not explain. Such questions led to full-scale debates in which we and teacher were virtual equals.

In other words, we learned to deal with adults on an intellectual level, without hurling abuse at them and running way. We didn't need violence because we had expended our aggression on the playing fields. We had, put simply, gained confidence.

Then politicians threw it all away and set up an educational system inhabited by these young people on television who failed what they thought were GSCE exams when, in fact, the questions had been taken from a 1950s 11-plus paper.

It is not the kids' fault. That accolade belongs to the people who call themselves "educationists" - only people of barren mind could invent such an ugly word. They were lucky to be away on holiday. Shame they can't stay there.

* The Curmudgeon is a satirical column based on a fictitious character in a mythical village.