Twice within the space of 24 hours, friends, one from New Zealand and one from the United States, have remarked on the lack of acknowledgement in British schools of the September 11 disaster. US schools have sung patriotic songs and brought in grief counsellors. In Britain, stiff upper lip reticence and business as usual have been the order of the day.

Yet it was not always like this. Victor Davis was headmaster of Latymer school in Edmonton, north London, between 1929 and 1957. When he took over, the school had little more than 300 pupils. A decade later the roll had grown to 940, making it the largest school in Middlesex and the largest co-educational school in Britain. For the next six years Victor Davis bore the burden of steering the Latymer through three evacuations and running it on four sites.

The real measure of the man was not so much that he carried the school through the Second World War but that he cared for each pupil and family. He maintained a detailed correspondence with most of the 760 former pupils who served in the armed forces in units as diverse as the Gordon Highlanders and the Indian Army. And he wrote to the bereaved parents of the 92 former students who died in the conflict.

More than 50 years later, on September 11, I finished an A-level politics lesson with the trite but prescient remark that unless a jumbo jet crashed into Buckingham Palace, Tony Blair’s speech to the TUC would be the headline story that night. Ten minutes later the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Within 20 minutes, a small gaggle of staff had gathered round the television in the reprographics room. The next day it was back to normal, following schemes of work, discussing bullying, PSHE time - but all the while under the cosh of public exam courses. We observed the nationwide three-minute silence and opened a book of condolence, but beyond that there has been a reluctance to engage with the issues.

This is understandable. The world is a complex place. How many teachers have a sufficient grasp of Middle Eastern politics and history to be confident of handling such a discussion? Yet the hunger is there. Members of my Year 10 form bring newspapers into registration and gather round to read the latest details of the bombing campaign rather than turning straight to the football pages.

Schools no longer believe they have the flexibility or the confidence to tackle such issues. Despite the advent of citizenship, such spontaneity has been bludgeoned out of teachers by the dead hand of Ofsted. The terror of being criticised, in this context at least, outweighs the desire to inform young minds and expand horizons.

Contrast this with the solemn services of remembrance that took place in thousands of schools this week, acknowledging remote and distant events that for some young people have little relevance. We feel comfortable with the lexicon of remembrance. The passage of time has rendered the two world wars neutral in the sense that none can take offence at the general sentiment that war and suffering are terrible, and that we should remember the sacrifice of others.

But each individual loss, each piece of news that some local household had received the dreaded telegram, bore deeply into Victor Davis. To the mother of a boy swept off the deck of a submarine in the North Atlantic, he wrote that he was “a fine boy and the pride of his school”. In turn, the parents replied that the school had been the focus of all their hopes for a better future that the war had so cruelly taken from them.

The correspondence reveals a tightly knit community focused on a latticework of respectable working-class streets within a mile radius of the school. Pilot officer Ronald Church’s co-pilot wrote: “When our motors failed and I told him we were ditching, his voice over the inter-communication was as cool and fearless as if he had no care in the world. No other hero of flying left this world more bravely than did your son and I only hope that when my turn comes I can go to meet him as bravely.”

Remember Eric Berry, shot down over Romania in 1943; Arthur Edmonds, killed on a night raid over Berlin; Frank Files, taken prisoner by the Japanese and drowned when his transit ship from Java was torpedoed; Betty Leech, a sister in the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Nursing Service, killed when her hospital ship was torpedoed in the Indian Ocean; Thomas Snelling, who died of malnutrition while working as a Japanese prisoner of war on the Thailand railway; and Edgar Lamble, who suffered a severe shrapnel injury to the spine and died in 1953.

Victor Davis’s correspondence is a reminder of the enormity of the old British Empire. Bernard Collop writes of his “visions of boyhood past”. He remembers the long summer evenings on the cricket pitch, saying his heart cries out for the “old place”. Parents write proudly to Mr Davis informing him of their son’s whereabouts and progress. Mrs Clark writes bursting with pride that her youngest son has been awarded the DSM for his role in the Norwegian campaign, while giving thanks that her older son has survived the gruelling and bloody evacuation at Dunkirk.

Not all parents rejoice. The mother of Alan and Geoffrey Evenett twice received the black-edged telegram telling her a son was dead. Alan died from bacterial dysentery in Osaka camp while Geoffrey was killed when his aircraft was shot down over Algeria.

Ronald Clark writes from Egypt thanking Victor Davis “for the fags”. It is not difficult to imagine him opening his packet of untipped Woodbine while yearning in the Egyptian heat for an English winter. Derek Johns maintains a copious correspondence from Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia - “God’s Own Country”. Johns tells his old headmaster in hushed, almost conspiratorial tones, that he is to be married to “a level-headed farm girl” and that Mr Davis is the first outside the family to know.

Others look forward to what Britain will be like after the war. Fred Embleton is full of enthusiasm for Battle Together for Britain, a right-wing Christian moral rearmament movement with its programme of “sound homes”, “teamwork in industry” and a “united nation”.

Perhaps, most remarkably, Victor Davis wrote to eight prisoners of war in German prison camps. Ronald McLaren writes from Stalag 18: “This stalag is a punishment camp as reprisal against alleged similar treatment to German POWs in Egypt.” He complains of the starvation rations, mentions the 20,000 Russians who died in the camp in the winter of 1943-44 of starvation, typhus and exposure. Not surprisingly, he blames the “foul Huns”, but hopes that Latymer’s football and cricket teams “are still making it hot for their opponents and that Lamb House is still cock of the roostI” Victor Davis’s rather forbidding portrait now looks over the two bound vellum volumes in Latymer’s War Memorial Library that contain the names and portraits of all of those from the school who went to war and did not return. In the most meaningful of ways he befriended them in their darkest hours.

It is difficult to imagine any modern teacher or head showing such concern or involvement, or a willingness to engage with the issues. Despite Labour’s discovery of the virtues of citizenship, the Gradgrindian, utilitarian philosophy of modern teaching discourages risk-taking in the classroom and means we have effectively abdicated responsibility for confronting the great problems of our age. And for that we shall all be poorer.

Andrew Granath is head of history at the Latymer school, Edmonton, north London. He wrote this piece after the letters of Victor Davis, who died in 1971, were found in a school cupboard this year. Each year, Year 11 Latymer pupils travel to the cemeteries of the Western Front to mark Remembrance Day