Saints preserve us

Teaching is, and always has been, challenging. As society changes, so do the demands on educators. Every new generation at the chalkface likes to grumble that they have it worse than their predecessors and that their working lives are tougher than those of people in other professions. In response to this, friends working in, say, the City tend to mention the school holidays. The long summer break is a source of smugness for teachers, but the truth is that most of us love our jobs, and not just because of the glorious ‘six weeks’.

One thing that I keep coming back to, though, is the very real difficulty of teaching religious education. Teachers of RE are expected by their colleagues to be paragons of piety and virtue — and I am not being facetious here. They often have to cajole whole year groups of teenagers through a compulsory subject that carries none of the perceived weight or importance of English and maths in many schools. They are required to leave their own, often deeply held beliefs at the classroom door and then, in some schools, present a myriad of views — some of which they find intolerable or even dangerous — as being of equal merit. They are sometimes asked to present ideas that most rational people (and I’m including religious rationalists here) abandoned many decades ago due to their being totally unreasonable.

In the course of an average week, many RE teachers will have discussed abortion, the meaning of prayer, euthanasia, whether there is a purpose to human existence, homosexuality, the role of women in religion and whether there is life after death. They will have faced impossibly difficult and profound questions about these issues. They will have listened as students make comments that are, variously, bizarre, laudable, intolerant, ignorant and moving.