Should we despair at the kids of today?

More from Mark Kiwis on drugs: A blueprint for the future? 'Bedroom tax' reprieve for disabled? Why have the white British left London? House building scheme in 'unfairness' claims I hadn't been back to my old school for 35 years. But the new BBC One series The Editors invited me to consider a question I posed on this blog. And the answer, I thought, might be found in the place I spent my teenage years.

You may recall the post - it asked whether the teen rebel is now a dying breed. I rattled off a string of statistics suggesting that youth behaviour (despite all the headlines) is far better than in my day. Sex, drugs, booze, fags, crime - teenage problems with these have all fallen hugely in the past few years.

Problems persist, of course, but the current crop of young people may be the most compliant since youth culture was born last century. And I think we need to consider why.

So, I am retracing a journey I took countless times as a teenager. The walk up the hill to Peter Symonds College in Winchester is familiar and strange in equal measure. Neglected synapses fire in warm recognition with each stride, but stepping back into my past is also disconcerting.

“Start QuoteThe persecuted swot of the past is often now celebrated as a model of geek chic”

End Quote

The landscape doesn't match my mental picture. New buildings alter and obscure views; there are unsettling alterations to once habitual trails; doorways to classrooms have been bricked up and reconfigured. (An elephant might feel like this when discovering a hotel has been built across his ancient migration route.)

The cavernous school hall, where I had quivered at the sight of dyspeptic masters in mortar boards and gowns, has become a welcoming pastel-carpeted management hub for a college that now teaches 3,600 sixth formers.

I spot the old headmaster's chair, once the seat of school authority, tucked in a corner. In a meaningless act of subversion, I pull it out and sit on it.

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