How to put the nation’s pupils off great art for ever

‘Bathers at Asnières’ is a dreamily double-edged impressionist painting: an idyll as tricksy as the tiny dots, instead of brushstrokes, that Seurat used to paint. Young Parisian workers are stretched out like cats in the sun, or swimming in water so cool that you can almost feel it, and yet in the background the chimneys puff away, calling them back to work. At the National Gallery the other day, I overheard an official gallery guide addressing a heap of near-comatose teenagers: ‘This is a very large painting,’ she said, ‘and it was painted about 100 years ago.’

In an escape from the shackles of the classroom, as opposed to the factory floor, 80,000 schoolchildren pass through the doors of the National Gallery every year — that’s one potentially excitable child every 15 minutes. But if it is made this much fun, how many of them will return? Why would they? A few rooms away from Seurat, at a cost of £50 million, come September, will be ‘Diana and Actaeon’, the proverbial ‘saved for the nation’ Titian. Perhaps this will be presented as a medium-sized painting, done by an Italian.

Everywhere I looked younger school parties were trussed up like luminous lemmings in small yellow cycling jackets to make them visible (glowing in fact) even inside the gallery. When wonks send out Health and Safety officers to pull down snowmen, it’s no surprise that more rigorous investigations (A Good Childhood, published last month, the Kids in Museums campaign fronted by Mariella Frostrup, and the damning Cambridge Review of Primary Education) have concluded that it’s not much fun growing up these days.