I should have said to myself: “Let that be a warning to all us recent over-fifties! Just let your guard slip for one moment, and you turn into a cantankerous old geezer grumbling about the modern world!” I should have taken out a subscription to Curmudgeons Anonymous, so that whenever I am tempted to rant on about the revolting mores of the age, I could phone a counsellor and be reminded of the many advances clocked up by the wicked western world since the good old days when single mothers were locked up in loonybins as immoral imbeciles and children currently afflicted only by key stage 2 were forced up chimneys by having fires lit under them.

I should have sworn an oath, as the Prince never does, to button my lip and refrain from mad, ranting generalisations about the sleazier aspects of national life. But alas, I haven’t. Help! I feel it coming on, the potion is taking effect, I am turning into Prince Charles, quick, strap me down.

The fault lies entirely with the National Association of Head Teachers for assisting the education media with a story about a situation so horrific, so dumb, so demoralised that the only correct response is to hurl adjectives around and call down fire and brimstone.

It is not even a story of physical abuse of children, but merely the almost casual revelation that schools are finding an increasing problem over the re-naming of pupils. The kids have their surnames changed every time their mother shacks up with a new man. Sue Sayles of NAHT reports with admirable calm that it is “quite a common issue” and that it is not unusual for a child’s surname to be changed two or three times in as many years. One primary teacher, with that endearing primary-teacher focus on tidiness, laments that “there’s no more room in the name box on their file because there have been so many crossings-out”.

The children, they report, get “weepy” and confused and occasionally aggressive, and sometimes can’t quite remember their own current name when asked. Boys in particular may get deeply upset at having their father’s identity forcibly removed from them. And so forth.

The schools, having neither the time nor the powers, can do very little when informed by some self-righteous hag that Johnny is no longer called after that treacherous bastard whose name she gave him to expunge the original one bestowed by his natural father, and that he must from henceforth be called Smith, after the guy she met at salsa night. So they just sigh and scratch out the last surname and worry a bit, and Johnny Smith, ne Jones, formerly Wilkinson, just has to get used to it.

It is not fashionable to condemn the lifestyles of others, but in this case - knowing how much names mean to children, and how deep identity goes when you are small - I think I must make an exception and say that women who impose multiple surname-changes on their children to suit their current romantic status are stupid, selfish cows with less imagination and empathy than the average puddle of slurry. But before I am tempted to ramble off into hellfire denunciations, just note the other little moral of this story.

Who told us about this? Teachers. Who is at the sharp end, facing up to the daily effects of social disintegration, self-indulgence and the uncoolness of fidelity, self-sacrifice and family responsibility?

Teachers are. Who has to bandage the wounds of a decadent, thoughtless, stupid society at its most vulnerable edges? Teachers. Who is the last best hope of these lost children whose fathers drift away to the next shag, and whose mothers have been pap-fed on dreams of Brad Pitt and rubbish about self-reinvention, and never told or shown how to be decent parents?

Teachers, teachers, teachers are those children’s hope. They are supposed to provide not only learning but the stability, the courtesy, the attention, the encouragement and the confidence without which nobody can function. Especially when they are only seven.

Sometimes, teachers do precisely that. They save souls.

Sometimes, however, they try and fail, and are depressed and defeated, and run for it. But it was not teachers who caused the problem in the first place, and to blame them for it is more than any curmudgeon should do. School is not a magic pill for every social ill. At the very best, it is a Band-Aid. Sometimes, the emotional landscape out there must feel like the worst end of the casualty-tent in the Crimea.