Whenever there was a chance to related it to the news, I liked to talk about education. As you can see from the rest of the website, it is a subject that I have devoted a lot of time to, as I consider it to be a crucial factor in the identity formation of muslim kids - well, any kids for that matter. Unfortunately, it's been a while now, and I don't think I've managed to change much yet.

Easter time, and it's not just a time for Ulster walks, but teacher talks, their main unions having been meeting at their conferences in Glasgow and Cardiff - those of them that could make it, that is. Teacher retirements due to ill health quadrupled last year. They're beginning to feel the strain.

We are told that the different unions are fighting each other for members, that the right wingers, the left wingers and even the moderates are at war over voting mechanisms and the like. Yet they all seem to agree that it's not just teachers but the education system itself that is ailing.

Discussion rages over the problem of classroom discipline, and the politicians offer a range of cost-free punitive solutions, but solutions often do more harm than good if you don't follow that old teacher's maxim and look at the question very carefully. It may be that indiscipline should be looked at not as a problem but a symptom.

The paternalism of adults deciding what a child should know, and then trying to impose it, clearly doesn't work without more attention being given to the maternalism of attending to a child's emotional and spiritual needs. Teachers have always relied upon the home environment for that (such unquantifiable things being seen as peripheral to the curriculum in our secular education system), but nowadays, along with society, what home provides has changed.

In muslim education, values and morality are not seen as extras, but as essentials. Children should be taught by example as well as instruction, taught to be "good", as well as knowledgeable. In a disconcertingly rapidly changing world, the eternal nature of moral values serves as an anchor, a base from which children can safely explore a future for which their teachers are otherwise ill-equipped to prepare them.

For children to feel fulfilled as individuals it is their emotional and spiritual yearnings that must be satisfied. That way we may yet come up with a system of education in which children don't feel bored and imprisoned, tempted to vandalise and burn down their surroundings, or abuse teachers they see only as jailers.

It's not just our teachers who deserve better.