When I was a child I could float like a walrus, sting like a manatee ...

As a nipper, almost anything physical was one long string of failures. “Can’t skip. Can’t jump. Can’t run. Tickell shows limited ability and less enthusiasm for physical activities. Until Andrew applies himself properly, he will never make the most of his very limited sporting talent.”

I paraphrase. I don’t have the heart to leaf through the critical notes on my childhood inadequacy. But needless to say, I had my doubts about the advantages of applying myself. I went unapplied. The pleasures of sport, essentially, died for me in primary school. Nothing subsequently revived them. It’s a discouraging essay on the power of education.

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Reading the newspapers yesterday put me in mind of this period of personal history. The EIS, the country’s largest teaching union, has submitted a 172-page dossier to the Scottish Government on Scottish national standardised assessments. These assessments were introduced across four age groups to help measure the attainment gap in schools. The youngest cohort? Primary ones. The purpose? To generate data on attainment.

But the notices on how this assessment is going aren’t great. “It is awful to look at the faces of anxious wee people who are wondering why this stress has been imposed on them,” one teacher reflected. Another mother reportedly said she was “absolutely disgusted by the way in which these tests have been dressed up in the guise of the ‘child’s best interest’” and suggesting the Scottish Government is “robbing this generation of their childhood.”

Without wishing to be flippant about weeping infants, a few tears at the age of five is hardly a childhood stolen or a soul snuffed out. I remember a childhood of semi-regular tears, from skint knees and kicked shins to My Little Pony kidnappings.

One of my contemporaries seemed to have developed acute hydrophobia and would foam up into a thunderhead of dismay every time we went swimming. More tears. I wonder how he feels about it now.

But that’s the problem when we talk about schools and debate schools policy. The school furniture of your own childhood clutters up your head. You remember the good teachers and the bad. The joys and the miseries. What worked for you, and what didn’t. How it shaped you.

When Michael Gove was Secretary of State for Education, you couldn’t slip the suspicion that his main ambition was that every school should be Robert Gordon’s College, and every child was Michael Gove. He seemed to universalise from his own perspective. Most of us are inclined to do so too.

So here’s mine. During the years which followed, compulsory physical activity was to be endured by expending as little effort and generating as little personal embarrassment as possible. Unfortunately, a beamer isn’t so easily avoided when you find yourself sailing under the bar of the high jump and your long jump is a contradiction in terms. Your blushes aren’t spared when you’re reduced to dashing around the row of hurdles and rattling across the marathon line – wheezing like an emphysematic concertina – last in a cast of hundreds.

Eventually, the teaching staff treated my creative compliance with the rules of gymnastics and athletics with indulgence and a roll of the eyes. Except for the occasional sadist who relished the opportunity to torment the terminally inept with their ineptitude, most of my teachers only seemed interested in the brightest and the best. They regarded the infantry as sport’s cannon fodder. Devil take the hindmost isn’t an educational philosophy I admire, but as a teenager – as one of the unknown soldiers – it seemed like a mercy, in its own indifferent way.

But there’s a serious point squirming loose here. Because what destroys your confidence as a kid has a dark knack of staying with you. Although its shape mutates as you grow older, you’re lumped with it. Your ego quickly goes to work mapping escape routes. Even as a kid, you learn to take evasive manoeuvres. Even unconsciously, you strategise.

In my case, I cultivated high-minded indifference. Pretentiously. Or tried to, as I stumbled and hirpled, and lobbed and lolloped along. Football was a treat. When you are tall and a bit adipose – with no interest in charging up the field – you’re ideal casting for blocking off a bit of goal. Target practice for your kindly confreres.

“Son, you might have more success keeping the ball out of the net if you uncrossed your arms,” he noted, dryly.

“That’s your hypothesis, is it?” I asked the not unkindly – but not particularly bright – PE teacher. He was clearly unfamiliar with the word. He stalked off, lip petted. I basked in a fizz of triumph only a teenaged wanker could be warmed by. Point to me, I thought, smugly. I didn’t uncross my arms. I didn’t intentionally deflect any goals – though occasionally a mis-targeted strike would fly off the dome of my forehead. Another brasser I couldn’t avoid. A red lesson in the limited effectiveness of psychological avoidance strategies.

But you do learn. You learn to taking charge of the self-satire before someone else volunteers. Look: I’m doing it now. Observe: all the tell-tale signs. The minimising. The exaggerated sarcasm. Getting your comic retaliation in first, assisted by a glass menagerie of sea creatures. You may well find yourself thinking – this apathy isn’t entirely convincing, Tickell. And you’d be right.

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Looking back, I regret the lifelong antipathy to sport my education generated. I blame my own lack of fortitude in the teeth of all the discouragements.

Other kids with modest abilities kept going for the pleasure of the thing. I didn’t. Despite my exaggerated opening gambit, I wasn’t entirely without talent. I swam reasonably. I could clatter a tennis ball across a net. But I made nothing of these talents.

By this point, I was stuck with the jumped-up indifference routine. I blame some of my teachers, certainly, who regarded the inability to affect a brisk jog or turn an easy hand to the game as an inexcusable failure of character.

At universities, at colleges, in schools, it’s a sobering caution to all teachers. The evil such educators do – whatever the topic – lives after them.