It was Hermann Goering who famously declared, ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my pistol.’ (Actually, sheer pedantry demands I point out that he was misquoting a cleverer line from a 1933 play that said, ‘When I hear the word Culture, I reach for my Browning.’ But it spoils the joke to have to explain the double entendre about the poet and the gun-maker both called Browning). From a fat militarist given to wearing outrageously silly uniforms such a profession of philistinism might appear just that: but Hitler's comical yet murderous military chief had a shrewd eye for fine art, gained by plundering great works from all over occupied Europe. So I'm alarmed to find myself agreeing with him about culture - or Culture. As for Creativity and Cadet Forces (all recent daft government ideas start with C, apparently), don't get me started.

I'll explain. Since the start of the year we have witnessed a flurry of government proposals to enrich the education of the nation's children. They sound plausible when worthily (if dully) expanded by government spokesmen but are likely to be about as successful as a dodo doing aerobatics. Talking of non-starters, I barely know where to begin.

Culture. Ministers want our kids to have five hours of it every week. Why five? Why not four, or six? It’s even more arbitrary than the sport/physical activity targets: there at least one can presumably work out some kind of physio-medical rationale. Quite where those five hours will come from is not specified; but they’re unlikely to be able to be squeezed into the teaching week, given the undiminished pressure on schools to hit literacy, numeracy, SAT and GCSE targets.

What is Culture, anyhow? Is literature no longer taught in English? Or has the literacy imperative reduced it to the lowly function of being a text that children have to prove they can decipher and to hell with the aesthetics?

Is art Culture? Or music? Drama? Does history never deal with it? Our policymakers appear so eager to prove themselves right-on and in touch with ‘yoof kulcher’, that they forget that a lot of culture is actually covered in existing subjects. Nah: don’t be stoopid! That’s all just old school stuff. This politicians’ Bright Idea is something else. It’s new, it’s real, it’s (spare us) relevant!

Television images announcing the Grand Plan for Culture showed visiting drama specialists working with children in a school. Importing arts groups for a day, or a week, can spark an interest, get ideas going; but it cannot engender real, sustainable development. This kind of tokenistic input is like sticking a cherry on top of a diner’s burger in case he doesn't have time for pudding. Real culture is organic: it needs to be developed over time (over years), where children are led, trained and above all inspired by teachers who work with them on a long-term basis. At WGS we still rely on those inspirational teachers who teach a full week and still do all that wonderful drama, music, sport, outdoor pursuits and all the rest outside school: that’s what we call real education, led by example.

Not long ago our lords and masters complained schools weren’t teaching children to be entrepreneurial. Maintained schools have Enterprise Weeks now, so that problem’s solved. Hurrah! But it’s not enough: now we’re told we need to make schools more creative.

How this government expects schools to encourage children to go for creative, open-ended solutions when they are the most tested pupils in the world is beyond me. The people complaining about lack of creativity are the very ones who won’t let up on the testing-and-accountability business for a second. Teachers daren’t encourage risk-taking in exams. There's no room for clever-clever, creative responses that don't match the marker’s template. Keep it simple and get it right: that’s the only safe way. And results are so important - for the school, if not for the kids - that we have to play safe. It’s a brave teacher or school that doesn’t.

Our elected guardians never rest. Most recently we’re told that Gordon thinks Combined Cadet Forces (CCFs) would be good for kids in maintained schools: they would teach them discipline and self-respect. No, they wouldn’t. You don’t change children or their schools by rubbing camouflage paint on their faces and getting them to march up and down the playground. CCFs run successfully (and more imaginatively than I’ve described) in schools where discipline and self-respect are already endemic in the school: the good CCF is a symptom of those qualities, not the cause.

So is this Cadet Force wheeze just more motherhood-and-apple-pie? Possibly, though a conspiracy theorist (or just someone mildly paranoid – like me) might reckon that taking Ministry of Defence funding away from independent school CCFs and moving them into maintained schools would smash what left-wingers see as the perpetuation of the Officer Class.

As always, politicians refuse to see the contradictions in adding bright ideas on top of their unremitting drive for results: in thinking up new ways to compensate for the disastrous side-effects of that pressure. As a result these add-ons they dream up are mere window-dressing. Ministers (Prime and other) are just fiddling with the problems they identify. They're fiddling (ha ha!) while Rome burns - a truly Cultured and Classical metaphor.

So, yes, hand me my pistol. On second thoughts, if there’s a cadet handy, I’ll get him to lend me lend me his antiquated Lee Enfield 0.303 rifle. At least when that was made the army’s equipment actually worked.

And I’ll reach for my Browning too and read a spot of poetry, quietly giving thanks for the fact that, WGS being independent, we don’t have to do all that tosh if we don’t want to. We’ll carry on doing real education with (I hope) minimal interference. Salute!

This is an edited version of a piece due to appear soon in SecEd, THE Voice of Secondary Education