MY friends, please let me confide in you.

After reading one of my columns in The Northern Echo in which I had criticised some of the dumbed-down aspects of modern life, someone took me on one side in a bar the other week, and said: "It's all right for you, born and brought up in the nice middle class with a silver spoon in your mouth." It's just not true. I was brought up in Armley, Leeds, opposite the jail, by the railway goodsyard.

Among all the magic of growing up in Armley in the 1950s, I remember first of all the children's library. It was in the basement under the main building on Armley Town Street, not far from Alan Bennett's dad's butcher's shop. There was the smell of damp and of something that was being used to dry out the damp. But there were wonders: Hans Anderson's fairy tales and the infinitely more unsettling - and therefore instructive - Tales of the Brothers Grimm which agreed with the Bible's view that there is evil in the world as well as good. When we began our teens, we were allowed up into the main library where some of us used to make a beeline for the art section, not so much to fasten ourselves upon the Golden Section but to peruse the pictures of the naked ladies there. If we giggled, we were shushed.

Nowadays public libraries are like bedlam: they are enough to put you off reading forever. Only this week, Tessa Blackstone, the Arts Minister, set out the Government's ten-year blueprint for the ideal library which, she says, must contain "...talking books, videos and CDs". Because the very word "library" revives distasteful echoes of elitism, Ms Blackstone recommends that it be renamed "idea store" which, she says, "should have the feel of a record store or Internet caf." But really a library exists to free you from the cultural slagheap of the consumer pop culture.

I went to a good school as well. I don't mean what people today mean by a good school. It's not a matter of having a computer for every child, or of how many pupils to a teacher. My first school was Castleton County Primary, next to the main railway line, now and then bombed by Hitler. There were 40 in our class - most of them unspeakably deprived far beyond modern notions of poverty under which today's "poor" own wide-screen TVs, and trainers that cost as much as a second mortgage. At Castleton, many children had no shoes and they came to school in rags. Many others were hungry and some would even beg for their pal's apple core at morning playtime. Exercise books were in short supply and we used chalk and slates. But by the time we were eleven we had learnt the parts of speech, how to parse an English sentence, and we were beginning clause analysis.

But what now goes on in schools? Never mind eleven-year-old pupils, you would be hard-pressed today to find a teacher who could parse an English sentence. And instead of the outline of the Christian faith, children are indoctrinated into the contemporary lie that any opinion is as good as any other. I never had that silver spoon, but something infinitely preferable: training in the basics.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.