The person with the most power in the school is not the principal or his assistant. Neither is it the daily organiser, who otherwise holds your life in his hands when it comes to doling out extra classes, nor the office manager, who could choose to tie you up in lovely red tape were she ever to take a set against you.

And while both the chief cleaner and the woman who runs the canteen are genuinely fearsome, it is not too difficult to avoid their basilisk stare. No, the person who claims the title of Imperator Maximus is none other than the ICT manager.

Those of us who are not entirely certain what the letters ICT stand for in the first place are being made to conform to the department’s diktats through a program of re-education. For it is not enough, it seems, that most of us have a four-year degree and years of experience in classroom management (never mind the tricky politics of sharing confined spaces like so many caged chickens with dozens of other teachers).

You might be the full bottle in the intricacies of the Terror, for instance, but would still fall short of the department’s expectations.

For the modern teacher is now required to insert himself like a human USB stick into the port of information technology. While some of us older folk were feeling pretty chuffed that we knew the difference between download and upload and could use terms like ‘burn’ and ‘cut and paste’ (the anathema of history teachers) without feeling completely fraudulent, it has now been made plain to us that this is not enough. No way. No how.

So there we sit after the final bell, a mirror image of the detention class next door, suffering the contempt that ICT experts have for all those incapable of following a ‘crumb trail’ or constructing lessons to be delivered via an interactive white board. It takes you back to those ghastly diagnostic tests you were made to sit at school where you were required to calculate the speed of a moving train from the relative velocity of a car.

Or the cost of items from a convoluted shopping list. Skills, it should be stated, which have not once assisted in the business of living subsequently. In the same way, you seriously wonder what the ability to move items around on a data projector screen has to do with real learning. Or the elevation of wikis and blogs et al to the status of literature and analysis.

It is all about engagement, you are told. Get the students involved and their interest in learning will follow. It sounds very like the strategy of advertisers who can sell any old sh-t by linking it to entertainment. But that is what the department seems to want as the end product of education: good little consumers who are duped into thinking that an X on a ballot paper every four years amounts to democracy.

Model citizens who are persuaded that progress is measured in freeway kilometres and apartment towers. No wonder education is vaunted by Big Sister as a Number 1 Priority.

But there, we’ve spoken out of turn. Teachers are not permitted political opinions. Instead we are made to sit before the telescreen shouting IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Read the full Lowbottom High diaries here.