More and more frequently, money is seen as the only indicator of value. A butler is offered enormous sums to abandon his integrity and spill the beans about goings-on behind closed doors. Newspapers exploit the suffering and failings of individuals simply in order to sell more copies. Food companies spend millions of pounds on TV commercials flogging nutritionally empty snacks and flavoured water to small children - in the full knowledge that they may be damaging their health. Universities threaten to charge undergraduates pound;15,000 a year, on the grounds that such students will be the high earners of the future. Higher education is already a commodity, bought and sold on the international market.

What’s more, the whole culture seems to be getting sucked into a frame of mind where financial success and material consumption are the only things that matter. Here are a few examples. The Sunday Times works itself into a fever of excitement over the 500 top earners in the country. So - David Beckham earns more than the Queen? Who, in the unforgettable words of former chief schools inspector Mike Tomlinson, gives a monkey’s toss? But it all feeds a climate of opinion where high earners are seen as the only heroes.

Drama, art, music and sport are forced out of the school timetable, because they can’t be shown to be sufficiently productive. Nicholas Hyntner, director of the National Theatre, has been deploring the fact that school theatre visits have fallen dramatically over the past decade. But it’s hard to justify such spending to the hard-nosed men of the Treasury, wedded to targets as they are.

Fifteen years ago, proper cooking was squeezed out of the national curriculum by being reclassified, bizarrely, as “food technology” - the outcome of a long-ago battle between the technocrats (mostly men) and the home economists (mostly women). Pretty obvious who was going to win that one. And the result? In spite of watching endless cookery shows on television, we have fewer and fewer real culinary skills, and are forced to spend money on highly-priced ready meals. Worse, mothers think it is normal to feed their children from babyhood on a diet consisting entirely of processed food. Obesity is a national problem, and the supermarkets are cashing in. Why should they worry? Such goods represent a huge mark-up on the cost of the original ingredients.

Meanwhile,“retail therapy” is jokily described as a remedy for the blues - yet we all know that material goods will never solve emotional problems.

Big business does well, though, out of pretending that they will. And the Government stands by and watches, knowing that all this frenzied meaningless activity will be good for the national bottom line.

Yet when I go into a school, as I did last week, I am struck by the fact that a completely different value-system pertains there. The same was shiningly obvious at the Teaching Awards ceremony televised last Sunday.

Teachers are overwhelmingly committed to individual growth, to human relationships, and to real achievement.

Back in the 1970s, a popular Penguin book amongst PGCE students was entitled Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

Among other things, it recommended equipping pupils with a built in “crap-detector”. The extremes of that era are behind us now, but schools still stand as a constant, unspoken critique of the empty culture of materialism - which is why Governments will always view them with suspicion. Teachers know that young people still need effective crap-detectors.