Howard Jacobson: So how many of my teachers should have been put on a sex offenders list?

How can I best put this? Schools need the sexually peculiar in the same way that politics need the ideologically deranged. It is pathological to believe you can change society for the better on the basis of a preference for one socio-economic system over another, and it is a dysfunction in an adult to want to spend his working hours with children. Both institutions - government and education - exist only so long as there are crazies to staff them.

You could say the same of the army, the police, ophthalmology, television, dentistry, religion, accountancy, surgery. Who, by any definition of normality, would choose to cut open people's stomachs for a living? How can a person of flesh and blood take satisfaction in a ledger? What man, not desperate to reveal something untoward about his gender orientation, would believe in the Virgin Birth, smother himself in incense and dress in women's clothing?

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It is only through this wonderful provision of nature - throwing up from her store of plenty a weirdness to meet every social exigency - that human civilisation proceeds. If we were all sensitive to pain and blood, easily distracted, sceptical of belief systems, as bored by children as we ought to be and as uncaring of the old as the old deserve, squeamish, intelligent, fair-minded and well-balanced, our species would have died out millions of years ago, assuming we would ever have evolved at all. The biological supremacy we enjoy is to be explained only by the rich variety of our aberrations.

Thus, when it's an Education Secretary in his own image the Prime Minister requires, nature delivers a Ruth Kelly. And thus, when Ruth Kelly has to find someone to teach in one of her schools - no easy task when you consider the paltriness of the pay, the low esteem in which teachers are held, the violence of the environment in which they are required to work, and the monotony of the childish company they must keep - bountiful nature provides her with a person on a sex offenders list. Not a proven paedophile who, in these touchy times, might test the limits of the allowably loony; simply someone who has accessed dodgy photographs of children probably the same age as those he is hired to instruct.

I myself - squeamish and well-balanced - have trouble imagining where the pleasure lies in looking at children, actual or photographed. I happen never to have liked very much how children look. I also happen never to have been able to teach them. Many years ago, when I could find no other honest work, I was employed as a supply teacher in a comprehensive school in Bethnal Green - a place so fearful that the headmaster was never seen, though rumour had it he was in the building somewhere, cowering from the armed pimps and strumpets who were his pupils.

He had my sympathy, though it was their conversation I dreaded more than their weaponry or allure. So much did I not want to hear them speak or watch their mouths move that I never asked them a single question; so much did I not want to read a word they wrote or otherwise familiarise myself with the black holes and cesspits that were their minds, I never set them any work. "You have books, read them," I wrote on the blackboard. That I was the worst schoolteacher there has ever been I do not doubt. That the nothing they learned from me was in direct proportion to the nothing they had to fear from me - sexually or affinitively or however you want to describe unnatural relations between old and young - I also do not doubt.

Conversely, when I recall my own excellent grammar school teachers I cannot think of one that was not peculiar. By this I do not necessarily mean identifiably sexually peculiar, though I am not sure we would have known how to recognise what is today called paedophilia or indeed any of the crimes for which men now get put on lists. Some were too emotional in our presence. Cried easily, grew who can say whether too warm or too close, expressed hopes or disappointments in us which we found embarrassingly personal. Others would hit us as soon as look at us, with a ruler, a duster, or just with the back of their hand. One or two would bend us over the desk and beat us with a slipper in front of the whole class. Our French teacher even named his slipper - Percy. An alter ego which I now see gave the beating a personalised homo-erotic flavour.

And then, of course there was our PE teacher, Mr X, who spent a lot of time in the showers with us, testing the temperature of the water or redirecting the shower head, and once got us to drop our shorts and do gym stark naked. A pervert? The question would have struck us as absurd. Of course he was a pervert, he was a PE teacher! Why else would he have taken the job? In our own way we were imaginative and humane about it; we understood that if you wanted to be with us, when you weren't our age or size and didn't share our interests, there had to be something a bit wrong with you.

And did this do us any harm? No doubt it left us all as mad as hatters. What doesn't? But if you discount the PE, which should never have been taught anyway - bodies, unlike minds, being a private matter - I don't see how we could have had a better education. We were taught to think, we were taught to value learning, and we were taught to respect men who possessed it. The personal oddities of our teachers did not detract from our interest in their subjects. By virtue of the passion which they brought to teaching, and through the wisdom they imparted, we learnt to judge them magnanimously and forgive whatever it was in their natures that made them teachers in the first place. This is what it means to have a liberal education.

Impossible to say how many of them, were they alive today, would be placed on some list of nebulous offence and prevented from teaching. But the loss to education of even one such teacher is greater than we can bear. Every day we learn of another way in which schools educationally and morally fail our children. Little brute bastards roam the streets, illiterate, innumerate, inebriated. And we worry lest a person on a sex register gets to stamp their library books!

Take a look at your child when you can next locate him and give a little prayer of thanks that someone, out of whatever motive, wishes to pass an educative hour in his company.

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