Picture the scene.

My teacher is finding the behaviour of a class member particularly distracting.

In an effort to prevent my education and that of my peers from being disrupted, he or she decides to send the agitator to another classroom. But no other teachers will accept for fear of their own students suffering.

Another day, my teacher finds learning materials advantageous to the whole department. However, they ensure it benefits only their own class to gain a competitive advantage over other staff.

At the end of the year, the teachers who have worked flat out to get pass grades for their students are docked pay based on exam performance.

These are just some of the results that the government's "performance-related pay" plans will cause.

Plans which are glaringly antithetical to everything a school should stand for. They are not communal but reward selfishness.

They certainly don't motivate good teaching - only rote learning.

Indeed, these reforms symbolise Education Secretary Michael Gove's relentless drive for a Gradgrindian education system - a mission ordained by none other than the bastion of experience that is the man himself.

No use listening to those pesky unions and professional teachers. It would only confuse things.

Gove pronounced loftily from his lectern at the Conservative Party conference that "there is nothing 'child-friendly' about industrial action." But the strikes teachers are mounting tomorrow are exactly about protecting kids' best interests and ensuring that they don't receive an education based solely on targets and pay.

The industrial action by Britain's biggest teaching unions the NUT and NASUWT will hit over 100 councils across England and Wales.

The cause of protest is not only about the dismantling of a national pay system for teachers but the proposals for making teachers work more hours for longer through raising the retirement age.

Perhaps teachers would find striking unnecessary if Gove actually acknowledged them. Instead, as the NASUWT general secretary Chris Keats has remarked, "Such action would have been unnecessary had the Secretary of State been prepared to engage in genuine discussions.

"Teachers are asking nothing more of the Secretary of State than to recognise that their pay and conditions of service are directly linked to the provision of high-quality education and that their concerns cannot simply be ignored."

If, even bearing in mind his ignorance, public opinion was with the Education Secretary then perhaps his positions would be less untenable. But recent YouGov poll results show that only 8 per cent of parents think the government has made a positive impact on education in this country.

Clearly, the future of Britain's schoolchildren is not only in disrespected but also unpopular hands.

These strikes signify a wider issue about the direction of education policy in our country. The government and teaching professionals are at odds in their attitudes to improving standards.

Since the coalition first made its nascent steps into privatising our national institutions such as the NHS and now more recently the Royal Mail, those places and services we deemed to be communal and "symbiotic" - institutions interacting in a mutually beneficial way - have been pillaged of both properties.

Instead, as can now be seen in the invasion of our school values, a pernicious individualism has been promoted.

The Tory wish is a soulless wish. To use an economic term, it is a wish to limit people's capacity to generate any positive externality - that is any result not reflected in market values - from their actions.

Schools are not the only educational institutions threatened. Libraries have been closed up and down the country and community centres abandoned.

The decision to strike tomorrow is not one taken lightly by teachers. It certainly does not deserve to be ridiculed as "militant" by the Education Secretary as at the Conservative conference.

Tomorrow's industrial action deserves to be recognised as the last resort of dedicated professionals who see their concerns repeatedly trivialised.

To allow these pay and pension changes to go through is to allow the government to chip away yet again at the few meaningful and communal elements of the public institutions we have managed to cling on to.

There is certainly nothing "child-friendly" about Michael Gove.