Children, and I speak as one who considers himself to be one, or at least to have only recently stopped being one, are wicked.

Having the memories of going to schools with good reputations still fresh in my mind, I can safely say that Amanda Palmer (A singer to whom I pay far too much heed) was quite right when she sang that "Nothing is crueller than children who come from good homes."

I'm talking about the children whose parents never swear at them, give them lots of pocket money and normally end up giving them just about everything they want. Children who never read the (relatively) unadultered versions of the Brothers Grimm. Children whose parents had nothing but their own mental stability at mind, and so made sure they they were never, ever in a position to be teased.

I'm referring, of course, to socialites. People who peak in high school, then leave to become either politicians, or failures. People who simply cannot cope with the real world.

I don't completely blame the parents. I blame something much older, and much worse. I blame Mother Goose, and all other attempts to censor the hell out of everything a child reads.

That is simple. Because the old fairy tales have stories where bad things happen, and mistakes people make have negative impacts on them.

In contrast, I recently perused a promisingly named book called "The Bad Baby", and found that, although the baby caused all manner of mayhem and upset for a number of elephants and ice-cream makers, its mother found it, told off the elephant that was its long suffering partner in crime, and took the baby home. But were there any consequences for the baby? No. It didn't suffer at all. It was mentioned - but not to it - that it was a bad baby.

What sort of message does that give to small children reading the book? If you're bad, people will say so? Why should any child be put off the fun of wanton destruction by words alone?

That does, in my opinion, depend on the words in question. The Brothers Grimm, for example, paint horrifying pictures with words that terrified my mind into avoiding doing wrong. Roald Dahl promised me that even things that aren't done with ill intent, if simply done foolishly, can have terrible consequences. The thought of being turned into a rat and living out the rest of my life in nine years or less terrified my nine year old brain, and yet I desperately craved more.

Although I do not claim, by any stretch of the imagination, to be the perfect child, I do consider myself to have been a much better child than a lot of the more coddled ones I encountered over the years. Perhaps slightly less socially able, yes, but endowed with a far healthier respect for the world, and I like to think somewhat more intent, not to do good specifically, but to avoid foolishness and wickedness.

Of course, there are those that point out that a child's fragile mind would be warped if they were allowed to see and read everything that an adult reads. At this point I must agree that children should not be exposed to much of the media avalable today - namely some over-the-top horror films and a number of the more graphic romances - but I would argue that children, being possessed with a fairly powerful sense of curiosity, do require at least some understanding of "Bad" and "Consequences" if they are to be prepared to enter society and make a positive contribution. In England, we are currently flooded with "chavs" and related miscreants, who are well aware that even the most dire consequences the system can impose on them are not really that bad, and are blissfully unaware that, should the system ever change, the world has a few much worse consequences of its own. I await with burning curiosity the children of the "chav" generation to grow up, curious to see whether they mimic their wayward parents, or learn from their parents' mistakes. I sincerely hope that it's the latter.

I think that my real reason for disliking censorship is far less social, and somewhat more selfish. Elizabeth George summed it up neatly in her book "Write Away", by pointing out that a tale without conflict is dull to the mind.

And it seems to me that this applies equally to children. My own mother, fortunately, recognised that the "Peter and Jane" books with which she taught us to read were trite, and quickly purchased a number of older tales, each of with was possessed with at least one actual plot. My sister and I both developed a passion for reading very quickly, and, without the mind-rot of television in our early youth, I hate to think how we would have passed rainy or cold days without Rudyard Kipling, Roald Dahl and other authors with a wicked streak to their writing.

There is a very good reason, you see, that children learn more from "Horrible Histories" and related texts than from any more official text. We are not damaged by less savoury tales, we are drawn to them like metaphorical moths to flames. Not only are they more interesting, but Terry Deary and similar authors also have a knack of explaining that we don't actually want to get burnt, so we don't actually want to encounter the real life horrors that are within the pages.

Meanwhile, countless children are bored to death by Oesop's fables which have had their morals dropped, nursery rhymes where the cats play with mice but have no practical application, and fairy tales where the little mermaid finds that the grass really IS greener on the other side, and (no doubt) tales where the witch in the gingerbread cottage feeds the children and takes them home to their doting parents who simply lost them in the woods.

Happy stories are not only harmful to children, by leaving the learning to situations with real rather than fictional risk, but they are also, and this is considerably worse, downright dull.

That's all, really.