"You wait 'til I'm dictator. The public school system will burn. It serves no useful purpose and gives its victims grief for the rest of their lives ... Anyone who has ever sent an adolescent to a single sex boarding school will be forcibly confined in a room with members of whichever gender they would least like to shag, and pumped full of hormones until they feel they'll burst if they don't have it off with someone. Let them see how they like it."

I don't see an empire now. At an appeal meeting I went to at my old school recently, the headmaster talked about the qualities that the school continued to instill in its boys: independence, preparation for hard work, the knowledge that the world doesn't owe them a living. Good qualities — but surely that's the parents' job?

Don't take this as an attack on private education, because it's not. If parents have earned their money and paid due taxes on it then they can do what they want with it, and it's natural they want what they perceive as the best possible education for their young ones. If the local comprehensive can't oblige, naturally they'll want to pay extra for a better education. For this reason I got severely annoyed before the 1997 General Election at outcries when leading members of the Labour party choose private education for their children. Labour weren't then the government of this country, so its members were powerless to do anything about the schools in it. Supporting the state education system might be very noble and united, but taking that to the point where you send your children to what you perceive as an inferior school when you perceive that a better alternative exists — in other words, not giving your children the best you can in the name of party politics — is criminal. The answer in such a case is to build from the bottom up: a Labour government can undo the damage the last lot of clowns have done and repair the state system so that it offers opportunities just as good as the private system.

But even then, abolish the private system altogether? No. Like I said, if parents want to pay the extra, let them. Private schools will always strive to be better than state — take their existence as a challenge for the state to do better.

Also, this isn't an attack on boarding school education. I concede that it is occasionally the lesser of two evils for your children to board — for example, like my own (military) family, when the parents are moving house every couple of years and the children will never get a settled education otherwise.

No, this is specifically an attack on the public school system. I enjoyed my time at Sherborne, but then, when you're short changed you don't realise it until later — when you count up what you should have. That's when the resentment sets in.

Before I list my specific gripes, it would be churlish not to say what I appreciate. I appreciate the financial sacrifices my parents made in sending me there. I appreciate the extra efforts made by my housemasters and many of the staff to open my mind up to new concepts. I appreciate the missionary work of the chaplain and others, which led to me having the faith I have now. I appreciate the progressive nature of the place: we could wear civvies out of lessons, the uniforms were comfortable and we only had to wear ties with suits.

In short, my education made me me, and me is someone I'm very happy with.

But:

• I resent spending my adolescence in a single sex environment.
• I resent not having a clue how to look after myself in the real world at the age of 18.
• I resent wasting a year learning Latin.
• I resent the compulsory four-times-a-week worship, which I suspect made more atheists than Christians.
• I resent being raised in an artificial, unreal world.

And that's why I don't like the public school system.