When I was little, I wanted to be a boy scout. Can you guess the problem? Technically, I wanted to be a cub rather than a scout (I was only small), but it was still boys-only. It isn't any more, but girls were barred in my day.

The brownies didn't interest me. I suspected them of sewing. These days, I'm sure, they do all the same things boys do, but I didn't want to wear a drab brown dress anyway. I wanted to wear green shorts, scramble up trees and salute an akela.

My parents, who were sanguine about my short hair and swimming trunks, drew the line at a huge legal battle to get me into the cubs. So I didn't join anything. I stayed in my room and wrote weird stories about haunted cats. (When I think about what I was like as a child, I assume I am now a murderer. I just haven't begun yet. One day, I'll open fire in a Homebase and it will all make sense.)

I blame my failure to join the cubs for my general inability to do anything practical today. I can't pitch a tent or tie a knot, never mind fix a car or rod a drain. My mechanical skills never got started.

In years to come, it won't just be strange little girls whose cubbing aspirations are doomed. Under the great, grey umbrella of recession, local councils have announced a whacking-up of ground rent for the buildings used by scout groups. And I mean whacking. One scout group in West Yorkshire, which was using local school premises for free, has been told it must now pay £5,000 a year. A group in Surrey is being charged £10,000.

This just doesn't make sense. The scouts don't cost local councils or central government anything. There is no funding to cut. They have simply been identified as a new money-spinner. But if the groups close down, as many surely will, the councils will never get the money anyway.

We know which ones will stay open: those in affluent areas, subsidised by parents whose children already go to play groups, music groups, summer camps and smartly chosen schools with big playing fields.

No disrespect to those aspirant families – it'll be great if the scouts survive at all – but the movement is most valuable to those who couldn't afford to subsidise it. And it is the poorer areas that would really feel the loss of that little green army, whose tasks include picking up litter, planting trees and doing odd jobs for old folk. The council has never paid a penny for this service; how dare they tax it?

The most illogical part of all is: the deeper the recession and the more troubled the country, the more urgently children should learn discipline, time-keeping and practical skills. It's tough enough to find employment when you've mastered those things, never mind without them. And if you can't get a job at all, you'd better know how to plant, cultivate, fix and build, because it ain't going to come free otherwise.

The nation is watching Jamie's Dream School, the latest hopeful project from heroic Jamie Oliver, in shock at the ill discipline of the kids attending this glamorous televised academy. Those unfortunate teenagers have no attention span, no peace and no manners. They can't sit quietly and listen. They drum their feet and fiddle with their phones.

This was, surely, a statistical inevitability as soon as grammar schools and streaming were abolished? It is only a certain percentage of children who will ever have their imaginations captured by Shakespeare, algebra and foreign languages. The mistake, in a previous generation, was to privilege these disciplines above metalwork, carpentry and cookery. Our elders decided that it was insulting to the "less bright" kids to teach them "trades" instead of Hamlet.

But it isn't at all. Some children's brains come alive for practical or visual skills, some for flights of mental fancy; you don't need to define them as more or less "clever". Learning anything, whether speaking French or making a table, is beautiful for its own sake. We once had a system that identified whether children excelled at physical or verbal creativity, respected both and weighted their education accordingly. Abandoning that system was both patronising and short-sighted. It was a decision taken by those who had shone in written exams themselves, but couldn't hammer a nail to save their lives. Like, duh.

I had a plumber round here the other day, talking about his disappointing son.

"He's a bit slow," the plumber revealed. "He could never make it in plumbing. I once left him to drill six holes in a wall. Came back an hour later, he hadn't even managed one of them. Poor lad, he isn't the smartest."

"What does he do now?" I asked.

"He works for the civil service," said the plumber, sadly.

It was a salutary lesson in perspective.

Of those kids who sit texting and nattering at the back of Jamie's school, I bet not one was in the scouts or guides. A bit of early discipline in building fires, chopping wood and reading maps might not have led them to a love of Shakespeare, but it would have taught them how to concentrate on something – anything – for more than five minutes. It would also have taught them altruism; they might have been a bit kinder to poor old David Starkey.

What could be more important to a local council than shaping the skills, visions and values of its children? What do they want the money for? More roads, so a generation of fat, vacuous, impractical people can roll all the faster towards KFC? I'll tell you one thing: that's no way out of a recession.

If you want to help protest against punitive charging for scout groups, go to www.dontraiseourrents.org.

www.victoriacoren.com

• This article was amended on 28 April 2011 to make it clear that today the Cubs and Scouts are open to girls.