Get well soon, Nicholas Parsons. The 94-year-old Just a Minute presenter caused something of a stir this week when he missed his first programme for more than 50 years. “Just taking a couple of days off,” explained the BBC, which is fair enough.

For more than 900 programmes Parsons has been refereeing the popular Radio 4 show in which guests are invited to speak for a minute “without hesitation, repetition or deviation”. He deserves a bit of a break.

Elsewhere, the challenge is not about filling up a whole minute with non-repetitious twaddle – which some people find surprisingly easy – but enduring it without any content whatsoever. According to a report in the Times, the regular use of a minute’s silence in school is apparently “traumatising” the children. Or it is being done so much that it is desensitising them, leaving them “unmoved”.

Apparently, in one school they have had up to “five or six” periods of silence over the past year. Poor dears, that must have been so unspeakably horrid for them. Imagine the aching loneliness, the black pool of terrifying existential angst, that might be encountered in a whole six minutes’ absence from all our yabber, yabber, yabber over 365 days.

This is the reductio ad absurdum of a generation who thought that being spiritual but not religious was sustainable

As you can see, my first reaction was entirely unsympathetic, in that what-is-the-world-coming-to kind of way. I confess, I could even feel myself reaching for the word “snowflake”. Were these schoolchildren really so mollycoddled that they couldn’t cope for just a minute without distraction, without the consolation of continuous chatter? For centuries, silence has been understood as a place where many of the world’s mysteries unfurl themselves. Silence creates the conditions for wisdom and self-understanding … and so on.

But the more I thought about it, the more sympathetic I became to those complaining about the over-use of silence in schools. Because the sort of silence that is often being used in school assemblies is the lazy silence of not having anything to say. Too often, perhaps, silence is being rolled out as some good-for-all-occasions spiritual Esperanto, as something that has all the supposed gravitas of prayer but without any of the troubling religious content. And silence doesn’t take much preparation for a harassed teacher having to make up yet another dreary assembly.

Should schools stop observing one-minute silences – for the sake of the children? Read more

Silence can be profound but it can also be cheap. As Diarmaid MacCulloch explained in his fascinating study of the history of silence in Christian thought, silence isn’t just the profound silence of the desert ascetic at one with his God. There is also the silence of those who are not allowed to speak, and those who have been silenced by the authorities. Silence is an extremely various phenomenon – it can be an invitation to wonder as well as a gagging order on those who would speak up for the truth. There is the industrious silence of your children doing their homework. And the lonely silence of the house when the rest of your family go away on holiday without you. And the embarrassed silence when your granny farts in the lift. Nothing absorbs its context quite like silence. And too often, the quality that school-assembly silence takes on is the defensive silence of not wanting to say anything that might offend anyone, and the silence of not having anything to say turned into a routine. No wonder the children find it tough to sit through.

In our post-religious age, contentlessness has become a cheap stand-in for something a bit religion-like. Like the ghastly airport chapel, for example, that has had its religious content stripped out, and now exhibits all the spiritual charisma of an interrogation cell. And it pleases no one. This is the reductio ad absurdum of a generation who thought that being spiritual but not religious was a sustainable thing. And in objecting to the overuse of silence, perhaps our young people are calling time on those who cannot tell the difference between deep and empty.

• Giles Fraser was the author of the Guardian’s Loose Canon column, and is priest-in-charge at St Mary, Newington, south London