Our attitudes to the role of education are profoundly affected by those of our parents, so by way of preface to the series of pieces I shall be doing about it over the next few months, I shall explain where I am coming from.

My mother Lydia (RIP) took a very dim view of conventional education. In her latter years she had to be scolded by my sisters for subverting their attempts to get their offspring to take it seriously. When a grandchild popped over for help with their GCSE project, it was all my mum could do not to explain in detail why it was a waste of time. She limited herself to saying: 'It's a complete waste of time.'

At Christmas-time, one of her pleasures was in pointing out that her toddler grandchildren often obtained far more pleasure from playing with the wrapping paper than the educationally improving presents contained therein. She would become quite animated on the subject of early education for preschoolers - 'absurd' - or if encountering a real atrocity such as hothousing: 'bloody absurd'.

Needless to say, her attitude in these matters derived from her own educational history. While some loathe pushiness because they endured it and are reacting against it, she was only briefly pressurised, at Roedean, where she spent a couple of years aged 12 to 14.

When we were children, she would entertain us with the story of how she put a rhubarb crumble in the bed of an unfortunate girl called Betty Smelly. Her parents rerouted her to Dartington Hall, a progressive school. There in the early Thirties, she did little work towards examinations. She helped to dig the swimming pool and never forgave Lucian Freud for putting barley in her horses' feed. But she graduated without any qualifications.

It was only after several years of psychoanalysis (bizarrely, in Nice in the south of France) that she decided to pass some exams, which she did very quickly, and went on to become a psychiatric social worker and then a psychoanalyst (and author of the first parents' problem page, in this paper in the early Sixties). The ease with which she passed the exams once she put her mind to it only served to confirm her derision for the system - one she had derived from her parents as well as Dartington.

Her father had been a successful Australian businessman who came here before she was born. He turned to scholarship, fascinated by social welfare and Jewish Liberalism, to which causes he gave most of his money. From him and her brothers, she developed a keen interest in reading (she read Mein Kampf while at school) but could see no point in education as a mere method for sticking people in boxes via exams.

While she accepted that children had to be taught basics, I learnt from her that what matters is to be interested in what you are studying. Encouraging this is about as far from Blair's educational policy as finishing school was for creating fulfilled women.