But my mind is wantonly contrarian, and I think of the kids of my own year. The boy who fell off a horse, the man who jumped off a building, the brilliant minds that wandered aimlessly ever after, the perfect teeth that turned to stumps watching Oprah. Which of these girls will match which of those unhappy lives? They can't all be fated for happiness and attainment. But no. Not now. This is a sacrilege. Reality is for another time. This is a celebration of what has been done and what might be.

Deanna fronts the pulpit to speak. Her blazer is bristling with medals and her speech is funny, brave and heartfelt. Most adults lose the ability to speak with this rude mix of hilarity and gravity. We're laughing even as sad tears warp our vision. She mentions that when this cohort of girls came together, one of them thought Adolf Hitler was a kid at a local boys' school. As a measure of how far they've come, it's perfect.

They've graduated from crayons to calculus as Adolf graduated from prep to infamy. Their uniforms are bedraggled, torn and frayed at the end of this long campaign; T-bars gape and hems unfurl. They have the louche elegance of veterans.

When the school hymn starts I stare up into the chapel's ceiling. Its many cross-stays and braces give it the complex wooden geometry of a galleon capsized. The hymn is a standard piece of holy extortion assuring us life is worthless without The Lord and exhorting us to ''Eat the bread of carefulness''. The what? In the end, I figure it might be a coded reminder to the girls to take the pill.

While it's sung I look around at the mums and dads, shell-shocked, twitching veterans of an arms race to give our girls the best opportunities, best life, most happiness. This cohort of parents spent something like 45 million bucks to get its daughters educated. And for that you get results.

Girls were once made of sugar and spice and all things nice. But that was yesterday and part of a ruse to keep them down. In this post-patriarchal age, they are made chiefly of opinion and pout. And brains. This cohort of girls is frighteningly and feistily gifted. They've won medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad and scholarships to Princeton. They are capable of declining Latin nouns while applying double-sided tape; like Bond villains in jumpsuits, they spit metaphysics while they take you out at the knees. A middle-age man can't help but be frightened by girls like this.

What have we done here? We have not, I think, eaten the bread of carefulness.

We have made a supersex of perspicacious Cleopatras bent on reaching the apex of all life's pyramids.

I worry for the boys. What boy could even hold a conversation with them? What boy without a PhD, an MG and a VC in his CV could make himself seem cool to them? Girls in my day were dumber than this. Easy to outwit and easy to lie to. But how are boys today, gormless and wordless as they are, going to cope with this swaggering cohort? Looking at them singing this hymn, I have the uneasy feeling we are releasing something on society it isn't ready to handle. I hope so.

A prayer is said in the chapel. After 12 years of politics, literature, biology, revolutions, physics, chemistry … a prayer is offered to assist the girls into their future. I look around, hoping to meet a gaze so we can cock an eyebrow together at the irony.

After the service outside the chapel, photo-ops form and re-form frenziedly in a crescendo of farewell. A moment can be sad and happy simultaneously, if it plays equally to the past and the future. And this one does.

The death of the child being the birth of the woman. And if children have to die, then it's as well it's to become women like these.

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