Many people (perhaps most) find it hard to grasp this rather boring truth.The most militant anti-smokers are nearly always people who used to puff through 60 a day. During the Cold War, the fiercest anti-Soviet campaigners were those who had once hailed Stalin as the people’s champion. And, most notoriously for readers of this paper, Chris Woodhead, the hammer of the trendies, was himself once so trendy that he thought a good English lesson involved handing out apples.

This question of balance is at the heart of arguments over the literacy hour. Last week, the TES reported on new research claiming the literacy hour damages children’s speaking and reasoning skills.

Only 10 per cent of children’s contributions were longer than three words and only 5 per cent longer than five words. Teachers limited class discussions because they were anxious to “cover the ground”. Uninterrupted “interactions” of more than 25 seconds between teachers and individual children (or small groups) had declined.

I have to admit to scepticism about claims that things were much better in the past. Twenty years ago, the late Brian Simon, professor of education at Leicester University, found that the average primary school pupil spent lonely days of drudgery poring over worksheets or trying to think of something creative to write (possibly about apples). He or she spent only a few minutes each week directly addressing or being addressed by the teacher. British education has never been good at developing oral skills. I have always found young people in America more articulate, an assessment that surprises Americans who protest that “yours is the land of Shakespeare” and don’t want to be disturbed in their belief that England is a country where people go around quoting passages from Hamlet all the time.

I suspect, nevertheless, that the literacy hour, with its rigid framework, has got the balance wrong. I was never convinced that trendiness was as much of a disaster for our schools as everybody thought. Why can we boast of Britart and Britpop? Is it just possible that these successes owe something to the creativity developed in the primary schools of 20 years ago? My impression is that creative writing and drama have all but disappeared from many primary schools and art isn’t doing too well either. I fear we shall regret this in about 15 years.

One reason why trendiness never did much damage was that the vast majority of teachers never accepted the full package as it emerged from local authority advisers and education professors.

Indeed, the study in 1976 which started the whole backlash against “progressive” methods actually found that most teachers used mixed methods - and these were found to be most effective.

The whole argument between teaching through phonics and teaching through look-and-say was conducted (with extraordinary ferocity) almost entirely outside the classroom. Most teachers did a bit of both, depending on individual children and on their own preferences.

That is the sort of judgment you pay professionals to make. The objections came only from people like Chris Woodhead who are, well, unbalanced.

The trouble now is that teachers have been stripped of the kind of professional discretion that allowed them to resist the extremes of past fashions. If central government doesn’t get the balance right, it won’t easily be corrected in the classroom. The only way to stop the imbalances created by the literary hour, therefore, is to create new hours. Expect Estelle Morris to announce, before long, a creativity hour, a reasoning hour and a chattering hour.

Peter Wilby is editor of the New Statesman