The Maltese Patriots were out in force, demonstrating outside the Archbishop's Curia a few days ago, because he had had the temerity to say that he thinks Islam should be taught in Maltese schools.

Unfortunately, compulsory education or no compulsory education, there appears to be no cure for backwater ignorance wherever it occurs, so many people became hysterical and panicked at the thought that their children would be taught Islam.

It is quite clear what the Archbishop meant: that Islam should be taught to Muslim children in Maltese schools just as Roman Catholicism is taught to Roman Catholic children. Non-Muslim children will no more be taught Islam than Muslim children will be taught Roman Catholicism.

He is completely right, of course: the state cannot claim it respects freedom of worship and then refuse to teach any religion other than Roman Catholicism in its schools. If the state does not wish to go down that route of teaching multiple religions, then it should not teach Roman Catholicism at all, leave that up to the responsible church, and teach ethics instead.

Mandatory Roman Catholic doctrine and 'MUSEUM' classes haven't done anything whatsoever to make Maltese people decent, moral and civilised. On the contrary, they seem to have made a disproportionate number of Maltese opportunistic and self-serving nihilists who act only in their personal best interest and do really bad things either because they don't think they are bad or on the grounds that they will be forgiven. Perhaps ethics classes would get better results.

But that's a side issue. If Muslim parents want their children to be taught Islam, those lessons should be provided - especially in private schools, where the fees are horrendous. If they can teach classes in Chinese, they can teach classes in Islam.

The situation is more difficult for state schools to organise, because of the myriad complications, but at least there should be some kind of commitment towards it. Church schools are more flexible.

The hysteria is ridiculous, and no children need more to be exposed to non-Catholic children and the fact of freedom of worship than the children of bigoted parents. They are seriously disadvantaged at home in that regard, and one of the major purposes of compulsory schooling is to make up for such serious parental shortcomings.

I went to a school - a Catholic convent, as it happens - with the daughters of Muslim, Protestant, Orthodox and Buddhist parents, and nobody bothered anybody else on matters of religion, let alone the nuns. Children and teenagers absolutely do not give a damn about religion. Their main concern is how to get out of those classes.

This situation arose because the Islamic school in Corradino will close down soon because it no longer has the money to survive. It was only a matter of time. The school was funded by the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and all that ended six years ago. The children who went there will have to move into state schools. Those whose parents can afford the fees will go to independent schools, where there are very many sons and daughters of affluent Muslim parents already.

The way I look at it, it is far more beneficial, to the children themselves and to society as a whole, if they are pupils integrated in the mainstream education system rather than pupils at religious schools. Church-run schools in Malta can no longer be described as religious schools. The only discernible presence of religion is the RE classes which children are not even obliged to take as long as they have parental approval, and perhaps the occasional holy mass.

It was never a good idea to have an Islamic school in Malta funded by the Libyan dictator who paid the piper and called the tune. That this situation has ended, and that the children will have to move into mainstream education, is a good thing and not a bad one. Children don't like being at religious schools anyway, whatever the religion is. It's not good for them. I, for one, consider it a form of child abuse. Many older people today, who had to contend with the Roman Catholic schools of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, will agree. Thankfully, today's church schools are largely indistinguishable from independent schools.

The mistake made by the Maltese Patriots and others who think as they do probably stems from the default reasoning that Maltese = Roman Catholic and that Roman Catholicism classes are compulsory in schools, therefore classes in Islam will be compulsory too.

But RE classes are not compulsory in schools, not even in state schools. It is an optional subject and children are not obliged to take it. This is precisely because Malta is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights (nothing to do with the European Union) and it can't impose religious teaching of any kind on children without their parents' consent.

In Malta, because of the predominance of Roman Catholicism, parental consent is taken as the default position, but if the parents object (or if the older child objects and gets parental consent), the school is not permitted to teach that child RE against the parents' instructions.

It follows naturally that people like the Maltese Patriots who don't understand the right of others to freedom of worship are unable to understand the implications of their own rights in that regard. Even if, for argument's sake, schools were to introduce classes in Islam across the board, their children would only be able to take those classes with parental consent.

Religion is not a subject like any other - like maths or physics. It is governed, ultimately, by human rights provisions on freedom of worship.