Give teachers authority or betray our children

What is going on here? These children grasped that their teachers were self-consciously obscuring the truth.

This is not because teachers are fibbers. Most are hard-working, honest, committed and do an excellent job.

But the self-evident nervousness of teachers - which those boys picked up on - about defining and asserting objective academic standards in the classroom goes to the heart of the educational crisis we face today.

As a society, we are obsessed with education. But as a society we seem to have given up on adult authority and the idea that the person who knows best in the classroom is the teacher.

The crisis of education is intimately linked to that of authority.

What is happening in our classrooms today reflects a far more fundamental problem about the confusion adults have with exercising authority inside and outside of schools.

Teachers are not immune to this confusion. Education requires the conscious and regular imposition of adult authority.

Yet teachers often attempt to avoid acting authoritatively because they feel uncomfortable with this hierarchical role.

Consequently, teachers often adopt the affectation of a friend or a mate in their dealings with children. It is now common for teachers to call themselves "learners" - some heads even refer to themselves as lead-learners.

Although this tendency to redefine the relationship between adult and child appears progressive and enlightened, it represents an evasion of the responsibility grown-ups have to the younger generation.

Disastrously, with the reluctance of teachers to be the grown-up at the head of the class comes a mood of casual disrespect for what our children are taught. The assumption that adults have little to teach children is rarely made explicit.

But there is a growing tendency to flatter children through suggesting that their values are more enlightened than that of their elders because they are more tuned in to the current moment.

The result is a throwaway "relevant" pedagogy coupled with a deep-seated hostility to the teaching of traditional academic subjects to young people.

As we head into the 2010 election we have been warned of "Curriculum Wars", with the Conservatives hinting at curricular reforms. But tinkering with the curriculum will not fix the problem of adult authority at the heart of our education system.

Wherever we are on the political compass, we need not only to back teachers' authority in the classroom but to recognise that authority is gained through a firm commitment to transmitting knowledge - a task that new "learner" teachers shy away from.

Any education system worth its salt is underpinned by the assumption that children are the rightful heirs to the achievement of the past.

Society needs teachers with the authority and confidence to, as Alan Bennett's Hector in The History Boys would say, "pass it on".

Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury.

He will launch his new book, Wasted: Why Education is not Educating, at the Battle of Ideas 2009 opening lecture on Saturday at the Royal College of Art, SW7.

www.battleofideas.org.uk.