This is why we need to start teaching humanism on the national curriculum

My children have been taken to every place of worship by their school. So thorough is their religious education that I half expect my son to come home and say: 'Mum, we're visiting a Satanist church tomorrow so I'll need a packed lunch, an LED crucifix and a goat'

The couple who took their child out of school over a fellow pupil wearing a dress have triggered a debate about schooling and religion (AFP/Getty)

A Christian couple have removed their son from school. Why? Because there’s another child in their six-year-old’s class who is “sometimes a boy and sometimes a girl” – which means he sometimes wears frocks.

So “confused” is Sally and Nigel Rowe’s son that they are now homeschooling him. The school has been accused of acting with a political agenda in allowing the other child to wear a dress.

When I was a kid, there was a Jehovah’s Witness boy at my primary school. His parents made him sit outside when we had assembly. They did not approve of hymn singing and didn’t want him exposed to a hall full of children warbling We plough the fields and scatter, lest a plague of locusts flew out of his bottom.

Presumably, an off-key, communal singalong by those who have not witnessed Jehovah might shake his faith and make him demand a birthday party and a blood transfusion.

However, I grew up in an atheist household. My parents were too hungover to worry about religious assemblies at school. They allowed me to hear all about Jesus and his mum and they let me go to Brownies to “promise that I will do my best to do my duty to God”. Not once did they worry I’d become a nun, take a job as a governess to a rich widower and dress his children up in curtains. They were even sympathetic to my agony at not being cast as Joseph in my school’s nativity play.

The children of atheists and humanists are frequently confronted with ideas and beliefs at school that are totally at odds with what their parents believe and what they are taught at home. People coming back from the dead, that sort of thing. As a humanist, I wouldn’t exclude my children from this learning – I’m all for it. Tolerance is liberating, acceptance is divine. No one should want their kids to get cross and panic when people do things differently to them or, say, get a cross.

My children have been taken to every place of worship by their school. They learn about every religion. So thorough is the school that I half expect my son to come home and say “Mum! We’re visiting a Satanist church tomorrow so I’ll need a packed lunch, an LED crucifix and a goat”.

What tend to be overlooked are the values and belief systems of non-believers. We have them and like to discuss them. My children are in danger of feeling, as I did, that because they do not have a religion, they are exempt from moral or philosophical discussion.

As for the Rowes, of course their son is confused: he’s six. He hasn’t been around all that long. Some would say that’s why he has parents, so they can explain stuff to him. But children can handle “out of the ordinary”. Tell them an old man dressed as a coke can will climb down the chimney, creep in their room, and leave them a present, as long as they see you are fine with it, they will not be traumatised.

They will not fear the bearded stranger in the house because you, as a parent, have presented him as a friend.

Not so hard, then, to reassure a child that wearing a dress is just that. If you can’t understand why sometimes another kid is a boy, sometimes a girl, then that’s OK. You don’t have to understand everything – it’s OK to be a bit baffled. It’s okay to ask polite questions. Teaching your child that their classmate is inherently wrong? Then you’re causing harm.

The school in question is a Church of England school. When Catholicism didn’t allow Henry VIII to divorce Catherine of Aragon in order to many Anne Boleyn, he got his stockings in a twist and separated the English church from Rome and so the Church of England was created. I bet Anne wished he hadn’t have bothered, considering that he had her head chopped off once the honeymoon period was over.

Henry murdered two of his wives, was riddled with syphilis because he couldn’t keep it in his pants and was a big fat baby who killed to get his own way – yet the Rowes claim adherence to the religion he set up means they’ve got to protect their son from a six year old in a dress.

I’m no religious scholar, but I don’t think Jesus would approve. He may even pick up the hem of his dress, do a twirl and tell you not to be so judgy.

If you have faith, then surely you trust that faith, you trust that the values you are teaching your child will not be eradicated by the expressions and beliefs of others.

That’s why I did not throw rotten tomatoes at my four-year-old daughter when she was cast as Mary in the school nativity. I bawled my eyes out at the cuteness of it all and cast an apologetic look at “Joseph’s” mother as my daughter dragged her son around the boutique hotels of Bethlehem.