One of many plausible ways of understanding the niceness movement is thus that it is a feminisation of the classroom, though clearly many women would regard it with the same derision as I do. Women are commonly regarded as nicer than men. Maybe they are. They are certainly much more given to feelings of compassion. Being more co-operative, they need less discipline. Further evidence of feminisation might be found in the fact that many white working-class pupils appear to have turned their backs on school understood in this way, and thus become an underclass. Girls have thrived in this new order and correspondingly many boys have opted out. Education with teachers as inspirational leaders is clearly a long way from the austere traditions in which Sir paraded round the class with a stick in his hand and often did a nice line in sarcastic rejoinders. But Sir played by the rules; you might not like it, but you knew what the rules of the game were. That is less easy with inspirational leadership and positive reinforcement.

We might therefore interpret the niceness movement as a feminisation of education, but in fact its range is wider. Its project is to banish pain (including the pains of duty) from our lives. It seeks to replace fear as the basis for good conduct in favour of rational understanding. It is above all hostile to punishment. We need not doubt, of course, that punishment is a rough and brutish idea. It seldom does full justice to the human complexities involved in delinquency. The great legal historian Frederick William Maitland wrote that the Greeks never developed a satisfactory system of law because they were always seeking the most philosophically satisfactory judgment in a case. Punishment is a curious structure confected from justice on the one hand and social order on the other. It is partly a retributive restoring of balance in a notional moral universe, partly a device for deterring bad conduct and partly an attempt to reform the character of the delinquent. Making law correspond to justice is the endless business of legislators, and rules can never catch up with changing circumstances. Lawyers and judges sometimes think that their business is to mete out justice rather than enforce the law, a mistake that muddles their wits and leads to judicial activism. To judge current law by the test of abstract justice can look like an admirable piece of idealism, but it generally leads to an endless merry-go-round of improving expedients that only move problems elsewhere.

To lose one's grip on the centrality of punishment in our civilisation is to destroy the crucial balance between punishment and reward. Without the balancing severities of punishment and criticism, praise and reward take on the aspect of bribes, which demeans both those that give and those that receive. But the managers of our world increasingly resort to inducements. Teenagers aged 17-18 from poor families in Britain have been given Educational Maintenance Allowances to induce them to stay on at schools after the age of 16. Schools reported that most of the beneficiaries exploited the system, turning up to the classroom only to qualify for the grant. The idea that people should be paid to perform their duties is a pure case of the corruption that has doomed underdeveloped countries to poverty. The destruction of the punishment/reward balance is importing the same moral collapse here.

The niceness movement, then, is a central part of the answer to the question: how have we moved from the disciplined and largely successful schools we had before 1960 to the disorderly educational failure common, though obviously not universal, today? Much that happens in schools depends, of course, on family life, and some of the most radical changes clearly have little to do with politicised compassion. From TV to the mobile phone, the enclosed character of family life has been opened up to outside influences, of which the most powerful is probably the peer group. The peer group locks individuals into the much narrower experiences of contemporaries rather than the intergenerational wisdom of the family.