What are they really teaching in our schools?

Pupils selling sweets at St Anselm's College could be excluded – Telegraph.

It seems the headmaster of St Anselm's College, Birkenhead (deep in the Peoples' Republic of Scouseland) is teaching that a business-person selling sweets and sugary drinks is responsible for the obesity of the person consuming them. He is also teaching that constant interference by authority in the minutiae of an individual's life is the way to that individual's salvation. The individual's own choices, of course, having nothing at all to do with it.

It's particularly delightful that the pompous ass Mr Duggan is the headmaster of a Catholic school. Is he suggesting that the Almighty will one day forgive his pupils the sin of gluttony, if they can prove that they were tempted by wicked businessmen?

If he really wants his pupils to avoid obesity, he might do better to ensure that they are constantly exposed to sugary temptation and then mocked mercilessly when they fail to resist. Unless he's expecting them to grow up in a land where foodstuffs are strictly rationed, it would be a better preparation for life than such coddling.

On the positive side, deep behind Red lines, it's good to see that entrepreneurship still thrives as it did in my day. I used to offer the service of bringing food from the local chip shop to fellow-pupils in return for a modest tip big enough (if I brought all I could carry) to pay for my own meal. I became a big enough customer of the "chippie" to ensure I got a free meal thrown in, thus allowing me to keep the cash tips. Yes I ate a lot of chips, but I also got a lot of exercise rounding up the cash, walking to the shop and running back to ensure the food was delivered piping hot so I would get repeat business. There was more meat on a butcher's pencil in those days and weight problems came later, with the sedentary but exhausting life of a lawyer.

Learning to operate a business (as Duggan puts it) so as to make "ill-gotten gains" on "the margins of legality" may be the best preparation for their future life in a business-hostile, over-regulated state that any of his pupils ever gets. It should equip them to make a greater contribution to society than their headmaster ever will. After all, if Britain's bloated mammoth of a public sector is to be fed, someone must run businesses; even on Merseyside. Rather amusingly, clicking on the school website's link to "business studies" today produces a 404 error. QED, I think.