We live in an age when the separation of truth and illusion seems beyond the judgement of Solomon. What chance do the rest of us stand, asks Alistair Macnaughton?

The sky is falling down...

A couple of years ago I was trudging back from Tesco in my home city of Gloucester. It was a drizzly Sunday morning, there was no one about and all I was wondering, rather blearily, was whether Cholesterol Watch would allow me to go home and rustle up some sausage and eggs.

As I turned down a path by the cathedral, I saw a young girl in a hoodie standing under a tree facing a large, rather sinister-looking man who was shouting, although so unclearly I couldn’t really make out what he was saying.

While even my best friend wouldn’t claim I am the stuff heroes are made of, this wasn’t a situation anyone could ignore; almost before I knew it, I had dropped my shopping on the ground and jumped between the two of them, my first thought being to protect the poor girl from this monster who was clearly intent on assaulting her.

So there we were, suspended almost in time with the man and the girl glaring at each other and looking, perhaps, a little baffled at the sudden arrival of this stranger between them.

“He’s trying to rape me!” sobbed the girl, backing more and more into the tree.

“You b****!” shouted the man, threatening to move forward even as I put up a tremulous arm to prevent him.

Then, quite unexpectedly, the man looked at me, visibly upset.

“Look mate,” he said, breathing heavily. “This isn’t what it looks like! I was getting some cash... down the road… at the auto bank... when she snatched it and took off!”

“That’s a lie!” said the girl. “He’s been stalking me all day. He’s trying to scam you!”

If you were the judge in that situation, who would you believe and what would you do? On the one hand, there was the man – panting and cursing under his breath – and, on the other, the girl still pressed against the tree, her face wracked with defiance and fear.

Nobody, least of all me, could call this an everyday dilemma, but I still see it as a kind of contemporary parable. Has there ever been a world in which fraud and deception have been so rife? Whether you are talking about cricketers on the take for bowling no-balls, rugby players feigning injury with packets of fake blood or the UBS trader arrested for wasting $2 billion in secret, fraud seems to be ubiquitous to an unprecedented degree.

For young people, the problem is worse. If life today is intrinsically complicated, deceptive and unstable, they are also seeing it – and have always seen it – through the contemporary media prism. In the ongoing media fairytale where Rupert Murdoch is the pantomime villain, Jordan a comicstrip figure (with a heart of iron) and Posh and Becks sit on imaginary thrones in their LA mansion, there is certainly little room for the truth.

Returning to my personal parable, I certainly didn’t feel any confidence in the truth as I attempted to work out what to do, still standing between the man and the girl. After a few interminable moments, I decided to phone the police on my mobile.

When that was done and the man and the girl both agreed to wait, it was only then that I noticed how twitchy the girl was getting. Two minutes later, she pulled a crumpled wad of cash out of her pocket and ran off, leaving the man to fumble on the ground for his stolen money and leaving it to me alone to explain everything to the police.

We live in difficult times and with one certainty only: that the difficulties will become impossible to disentangle unless society – and educationalists, most of all – tries to get a grip. Arguments about the merits of particular reading schemes, about summative and formative assessment, about A levels v the Pre-U v the International Baccalaureate (IB) are missing the point.

Our biggest challenge is to find a way to teach our pupils to distinguish and discriminate from the information that is swirling around them in an endless media blizzard.

Or are we already too badly impaired by years of failed educational policy to rise to the task?

• Alistair Macnaughton is head of The King's School, Gloucester.

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