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

We understood that if you wanted to be with us, there had to be something a bit wrong with you

Published: 14 January 2006

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?

Article Length: 1066 words (approx.)