Parenting & Family Quote by Polly Toynbee

Toynbee’s line turns on a deceptively small pivot: “about” versus “by.” That preposition swap is the whole argument. Teaching children about religion frames belief as a cultural literacy project - history, art, ethics, power, conflict - something you can examine without surrendering to it. Handing them over “to be taught by the religious” implies something else entirely: not education but custody, not inquiry but formation.

The intent is pointedly political, aimed at the long British argument over faith schools, state funding, and who gets to set the moral weather in classrooms. Toynbee, a journalist with a secular-liberal sensibility, is warning against outsourcing a public function to private conviction. The phrase “handing them over” is doing heavy lifting; it evokes a transfer of authority, almost a parental or governmental abdication. Children become the object passed along, not citizens in training.

The subtext is that religious instruction, when controlled by believers, tends to smuggle in certainty as a learning outcome. It can present doctrine as fact, normalize one tradition as default, and quietly narrow the space for dissenting kids: the nonreligious, the minority faith child, the questioning teenager. Toynbee’s cynicism is restrained but clear: institutions that exist to reproduce belief should not be surprised when they prioritize reproduction over education.

It works because it doesn’t attack religion itself; it attacks a category error. In a plural society, the public school’s job isn’t to raise adherents. It’s to raise thinkers who can recognize how belief shapes the world - including, crucially, how it tries to shape them.