Once children were birched at school. Now they are taught maths | Simon Jenkins

Modern education’s obsession with rankings blights the lives of intelligent pupils – never more so than at exam time

I used to long to be a child again. Not any more. British children seem under perpetual assault from the three horsemen of the apocalypse: obesity, social media and the manic gods of examination. Of these the most needless, and clearly dangerous, is the exam. The signs of stress are blatant. One in 10 schoolchildren now has a “clinically diagnosable mental illness”. Rates of tee...