WHEN ROYAL Marine Commando Matthew Croucher realised he had accidentally triggered a Taliban grenade booby trap, his first thought was for his colleagues. So he flung himself on the device - as you don't - and waited for the inevitable.

Modest Matt miraculously lived to tell his tale. "I figured that if I could keep my torso and my head intact I'd probably survive any other injuries - although I fully expected to lose a limb," he says, cheerfully.

For this selfless act it's said he's in line for the Victoria Cross and I sincerely hope he receives it.

Yet people like Matt Croucher are the sort that the ranting, spite-filled National Union of Teachers apparently wants to see barred from our schools in case they give a false impression of Army life to our children. Or at least that's what they voted for at their conference last week.

Teacher Paul McGarr told his colleagues he would only welcome the Army into "his" school when recruiting materials gave a true picture of war.

"These would have to say, Join the Army and we will send you to bomb, shoot and possibly torture fellow human beings in other countries'," he said.

"Join the Army and we will send you probably poorly equipped into situations where people will try and shoot or kill you because you are occupying other people's countries."

I've got two boys and I know I'd prefer they heard from a man displaying the qualities of duty, sacrifice and humanity of Matt Croucher, than the Paul McGarrs of this world any day. And I know I'm not alone.

Whatever he says, thanks in part to indifferent teaching and lack of discipline both inside and outside failing schools, far too many kids are now living in a society where they'd be safer in a tank in Basra than they would be on their own street in Hackney or Moss Side.

Too many kids are being raised in a neighbourhood where drugs, gangs, violence and living on benefits is the norm. Too many kids have no prospects and no hope. Too many are ending up like Daniel Dokubo, knifed to death in Croydon on Tuesday by yet more teenage thugs.

Eleven young lads have been stabbed to death in London this year. For comparison in Iraq, at time of writing, four young British soldiers have died. That's still four too many. But it puts things into perspective.

Yes, the Army is dangerous and yes, you can end up hurt and only a moron thinks otherwise. But how is that any different to what can happen to you on certain streets in Britain?

Yet rather than give their pupils a fighting chance to break away from all this and make something of themselves with a job in the Military, some teachers would apparently rather they were welded to the conveyor-belt of misery, merely to satisfy their own political prejudices.

Instead of banning the Army from schools I'd ban people like Paul McGarr.

PS: And talking of being knifed in London, could Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harpy please explain just why, with three coppers accompanying her on a visit to her constituency, that she had to wear a stab vest?

A T-shirt bearing the words "Failed on crime, failed on the causes of crime" would have sufficed.