Employment of teachers today has much to do with fashion. Pressure to keep up with the times means, in practical terms, a respect for what is thriving in the market. An art school rarely manages to employ the real "fashionable darling of the day", though such a personage might come in as a visiting tutor; instead the schools make do with those who may have touched the hem of a darling's garments. Within a few years of the commercial explosion of the YBA generation, most of whom were taught together at Goldsmiths, many of our top art schools had employed as their heads former members of the Goldsmiths staff to restructure and administer their courses. Hence the remarkable similarity of our art schools.

Fashionable teachers will naturally select fashionable students for their schools. Despite the proclaimed diversity, and despite all the testing of boundaries through laboratory research, the consequence must be the contraction, those "narrow habits" of which Reynolds warned. But this contraction is now intentional. Typical of our times, there is an emphasis on "your chosen career" and what the schools try to avoid calling self-promotion. One school advertises that it will "prepare you for professional life after graduation". Another, that it will "help you learn vital professional skills as you develop a better understanding for the context of your work". This may be conveniently vague, but surely it means an education in how to be fashionable. This is what the teachers have to offer; it is after all what they were employed for, for they had witnessed the ways of the market and were now wise.

It is all very confused. It is hard to be both instinctive and scientific, primitive and market-savvy, to aspire at once to the therapeutic and the academic. It is hard to extol the virtues of rebellion and deplore all history when you benefit by occupying a position in a historically established institution. It must be hardest of all to call yourself a teacher of art when your contempt for so much of art is what got you the job. To defend so contradictory a position, you have to be ruthless before the sceptics. This is another reason why the teachers are so keen to admit only younger versions of themselves, and why I had to lie at interview. The result is that art schools, behind their closed doors, resemble social clubs more than places of learning. It is "us against them": this is the mentality that that introductory welcome meeting and the talk about specialness were contrived to develop. Within these clubs teachers have their pets; all students know that to move up the ranks to a position of favourite, they need only try to make something more similar to what a chosen teacher might deem "really sort of interesting". "Accomplished", "precise", "complex", "subtle", "astute", "apt", even "beautiful" — all these are denied as qualities of art, the only positive comment left to the teachers is "interesting"; this is pretty well the only word ever heard.

The students generally admire the institutions and their masters; there is comfort in belonging. But at the same time they are aware of the suspect agendas present. Once I overheard a revealing conversation between two students of the oldest and most venerable institution of all. Both were the recipients of an annual award given privately to young figurative painters to allow for their study of the Old Masters in the Museo del Prado at Madrid. One asked the other: "Have you told our teachers that you went to copy old paintings? Would you?" To them, it was a natural assumption that such an admission would not go down well. I suspect they even felt guilty for having betrayed the dominant ethos at their academy. Despite having sat through hours of so-called art history lectures, they knew that it was naughty for them to be looking at art. But this did not really irk them; I am sure they never raised an objection, and their greater concern was to remain part of the club.