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‘A generation of unruly toddlers’. Thus screams the headline in the Daily Mail. Imagine! Unruly toddlers? Whoever heard of such a thing? Mine, of course, sat when they were told, waited patiently, said “please” and “thank you”, never ran or shouted or fought or jumped or kicked or repeated any of the bad words they heard from some adult other than me. I must admit that at a few points in their young lives they may have been children, but naturally we stamped that nonsense out pretty damn quick.

Fortunately, Michael Gove’s department (I keep expecting a Beadle-costumed Harry Secombe to loom into view on the Ten O’Clock News whenever Gove’s on) is on hand to lecture us and demand higher standards from nurseries. Minister Elizabeth Truss, a Tory so Tory that she at times makes Gove look almost sane, tells us some nurseries are so terrible that “toddlers are running around with no sense of purpose”. Shocking!

(Actually, if these shrivel-souled human-shaped things had any idea about children other than what nanny reports at the nightly conference, they’d know that toddlers are brimful of purpose – it’s just that the purpose changes on a very regular basis…).

Anyway, I would like, this week, to place on record my appreciation of Michael Gove. As bereaved people with kind hearts who care for the good in life search around for a figure to hate nearly as much as Margaret Thatcher – nobody could ever be hated as much as her – Mr Gove has selflessly stepped forward.

He’s always been a candidate, of course, barking, loony mad, but now he’s declared his mission to make our poor children as miserable as possible, as early as possible. Chuntering and hectoring like the bastard lovechild of Ebenezer Scrooge and Lady Bracknell, he spews clichés so true-blue Tory they’d send true blue-rinses into orgasms of delight, were orgasms not far too vulgar and unruly.

Gove doesn’t think children should have long holidays. He thinks they need to work. He thinks long holidays are a throwback to Victorian days when children had to have time off to help on the farm. Which shows that Mr Gove, the throwback’s throwback, should have had less holidays himself and more history lessons.

I suppose he does represent a party that depends on myth and cliché (Scroungers! Foreigners! Scroungers foreigners take money! Money mine! Want more! Scroungers foreigners rape car and steal granny!) for its survival, so we shouldn’t be surprised at the vacuity of the argument. And we must acknowledge that ‘Victorian’ is a very apt cliché to use in connection with Gove’s personality and policies.

Children can be absolute bastards, of course, and most parents have many days when they would happily consign the little sods to school – or prison or the salt mines – seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

But children are full of fun, full of zest for life, joyfully unbroken by the cares and prejudices  of Gove’s world and desperate, desperate, for freedom to explore, to play, to run and jump and climb and shout.

Lots of children love school, but all children hate being cooped up for too long. Watch them run from their schools at pick-up time – like jacks-in-the-box or wild animals freed.

What do you remember from your childhood? Mr Miggins’s double geography sessions on Friday afternoons, or playing with your mates in the holidays? Presumably, Gove’s chief pleasures came from geometry, algebra and helping mummy and daddy count their lovely money.

Gove thinks children should work harder, study more – suitably enough for a member of a party that believes in infinity (for example, “we must cut benefits so all those scroungers will pull up their socks and get a job because there are infinity jobs out there”).

And his latest banality may even be applauded by all those families where both people have to work just to make ends meet – the children will then fit in better with their parents’ work commitments, and isn’t that important? Who’d want to make something as crucial as work fit in with something as unimportant as children, eh?

(After all, Tory policy in recent months has specifically been designed to punish parents like me, who choose to put providing a home and caring for the kids above having enough money for a holiday or a flash car or pretty much anything really. Thousands of pounds in tax breaks will encourage parents to abandon their kids in those unruly nurseries and look for one of those infinity of jobs the Tories think are out there).

Look, I think Michael Gove is a joyless little tick who needs to leave children alone to have fun. They have a long life ahead of them, spitting with fury at the incongruity of being told what to do by a drooling cretin like Michael Gove, so they should be able to enjoy themselves for as long as they can.

I think he wants to crush the joy out of our lives to make us super-efficient entrepreneurial earning machines competing in the modern market economy from about as soon as we’re out of nappies. I think he doesn’t like children because they have independence of thought, endless energy, questing minds, unquenchable spirit and a belief that goodies always beat baddies – just the sorts of nonsense no dogma-driven Tory can stand.

To be scrupulously fair, much of the blame for the shambles of the system over which Gove fusses can be fairly and squarely laid at the doors of his Labour predecessors.  

Some schools are local authority controlled, some stand alone; there are free schools, academy schools, co-operative schools, faith schools; many schools now choose to work together to be more efficient but there is no policy or guidance to protect them, the children or the taxpayer from the whims of whoever happens to want to set up linkages, which can be anything from executive headships to hard federations to academy chains to co-operative trusts.

Still with me?

The national curriculum still exists, but not all schools now have to teach it. Private schools, academies, free schools, faith schools can opt out.

Gove is intent on driving schools to become ‘academies’. This means the governors of such schools assume control of their own budget. That budget is removed from the local authority that used to administer it, which reduces the pot available to local authorities to help children in schools that choose to remain part of a state system.

Schools are bribed to become academies with offers of extra short-term cash. People who choose to take Gove’s 30 pieces of silver are too stupid to understand the money will run out; too selfish to care that that money, too, is being stolen from other children; and too dull to work out that one day there will be a terrible reckoning for them as they have to bear the costs of their staff’s pensions, or redundancies, or law suits…. Or dozens of other difficult areas from which local authorities were able to cushion schools, thereby allowing them to get on with teaching, learning and, hopefully, teaching children to smile.

Already, such academies are entering into sponsorship deals with all sorts of corporations. The McDonald’s Cookery Academy must be a cholestorel-deadened heartbeat away.

If schools are not thusly bribed, they are threatened. Gove’s Ofsted inspectors deliver a damning verdict at an inspection, which Gove has decreed means a school must become an academy even if it does not wish to do so.

In the north, where people, thank God, still have the sense they were born with, increasing numbers of schools are appealing against this inept bullying and succeeding. Other schools are forming co-operative trusts to protect themselves and the values that enshrine the delivery of education as a means of delivering social justice.

All this means the role of the local authority is shrinking, of course. I know somebody who’s been trying to source support for a child in need since November with not even a response to an initial query yet. This is not me politicking; this is what is happening in Gove’s education system.

Some local authorities have picked up the challenges and met them head on, driving their own policy and setting up models that protect children from the ‘freedoms’ enjoyed by academies (to be sold burgers and chips, to ignore the national curriculum, to not take part in education for all).

Other local authorities have abjectly surrendered the rights and benefits so bravely fought for and won in times gone by – they have lost staff, let schools stand or fall alone, and are now presiding over a crumbling, fragmenting system.

Some have rallied to the proud cry of “every man for himself”, even church schools that should believe in ideals rather better than that.

More and more power is being left in the hands of individual governing bodies, hard-working and well-meaning volunteers trying to do their absolute best but not expert, trained, qualified educationalists basing their decisions on academic research and factual evidence.

It’s a mess. The only certainty is the frantic speed with which the goalposts shuffle back and forth across what corners of the playing fields haven’t been sold off to builders. The idea of a system based on research, evidence, carefulness, consistency – forget it. Every week there is a fresh idea, a new initiative. Every week there is a new standard to be met.  Unruly toddlers! Shorter holidays! Performance pay for teachers! Change Ofsted grades for nurseries! Change criteria for Ofsted observations! Test seven-year-olds! Don’t test seven-year-olds! As for sharing, working together, social justice – none of these interest Michael Gove, naturally.

And my boys? The children? They want to catch the newts in our pond. They want to play football. They can’t wait for playtime. They want to ride their bikes and watch TV and play with their friends and that lesson on Egyptian mummies was cool and the visit to the museum was great and Dad, I’m hungry and Dad, can we have Horrid Henry for stories tonight and Dad, look at this and Dad, look at that and Dad….

Thank God there are places in the world where the joyful madness of life rules. The American humourist PJ O’Rourke, a right-winger if you please but great fun with it, once commented on Italy. “Italy has the seventh largest economy in the world,” he said. “Imagine how powerful Italy would be if anybody or anything actually worked.”

He touched on a truth long understood by our Mediterranean friends: life is for living, not just for working. I breathed that lesson in from all the people I loved and admired and who loved me – not from a classroom, though my best and favourite teachers understood that truth too.

Look, it is central to the core of a decent human being that we, as a society, pool our skills to do the best we possibly can for the highest number we can possibly achieve.

It is central to the core of human-type beings like Gove that “if we do that, I – me, myself, I, me, me, ME – might miss out. My children might miss out. It might be better over there. It might be better if we didn’t have to mix with all the other people, the bad people who want a share of what’s going too and are getting in our way because of it”.

Human-type beings like Gove believe it is right to teach children that money can buy them separation from difficulty, from obstacles – that money can get them into a nice private school with the very best facilities, where children learn, and learn fast, that they get the best because of mummy’s and daddy’s money and everybody else is, well, everybody else, and doesn’t get the same standards.  

Never mind that no child has chosen its parents. Never mind that a decent society would provide equality of opportunity for every child, no matter the wealth of his or her parents. Better to preserve Gove’s eternal, thrown-back verities and protect the system that has delivered us this Cabinet of rich white men jealously protecting their own.

What is needed is a minister with the policy vision to call in educationalists and say “sort this bloody mess out, and pronto.” What is not needed is trite rubbish about making kids work harder, bully-boy threats to teachers, bribery to schools to fit into the Tory agenda. What is needed is fairness and vision. What we have is Michael Gove.