For years my daughter called it “colouring in”. And I assumed it was some sort of free lesson in the timetable. Much later I discovered this was the period that her school knew as religious studies – a subject, I am proud to say, that my children have all been spectacularly bad at.

Like them, I glazed over at the sheer inanity of the subject matter: a tepid version of cultural studies where religion is transformed into a calendar of funny festivals, lighting candles and distinctive headgear. And when the curriculum had the temerity to venture into territory with even the vaguest potential for moral or spiritual gravitas, it was obvious that a sort of moral and intellectual panic gripped many of the teaching staff.

Terrified by the potential for offence, terrified also of giving the impression that any one line of thought was preferable to any other, the default position on every subject became a mushy relativism where every conceivable matter of opinion was deemed to be as valuable as any other. Apparently, if you call something a religion, you can say anything you like about life, the universe and everything and it has to be respected. Which is another way of saying that religious studies became a hollow subject entirely devoid of intellectual debate or moral challenge. And, as a consequence, schools became a production line for children all programmed with the dull-eyed shoulder-shrugging atheism of indifference (in my experience, the stickiest form of atheism ever discovered).

Which is why I am delighted to support the British Humanist Association, which is complaining that its own position is not being represented on the curriculum for GCSE and A-levels. Back in 2013, the Department for Education issued advice to schools that a range of material could be used in RS lessons, including “atheism and humanism”. In updated advice, this phrase has been removed.

Like them, I am dismayed. Why should the world’s major faiths be so unfairly held back by first being presented to impressionable minds by a pallid watch-glancing geography teacher at 3pm on a Friday? Why should humanism have the privilege of looking like dangerous free-thinking, the sort of exciting thing one reads under the bedclothes at night with a torch? No, I say bring it into the curriculum and see it suffer the same fate as all the other world-views: death by textbook. Or better still, lets get rid of the subject altogether.

Am I being unfair on religious studies teaching? Perhaps a little. Some will argue more than a little. But part of the problem is that not enough of those who actually take RS classes are specialists in the subject. And this is just as true in many faith schools as it is in secular ones. Most are teachers from other disciplines just helping out for the afternoon. In schools, RS is a compulsory subject – but no one really wants to teach it.

Not that it was any better back in my day: colouring in a card for Diwali or Hanukah is no worse than tracking the journeys of St Paul around a map of the Mediterranean with tracing paper. Arguably, modern colouring-in has the marginal advantage of increasing sensitivity to other cultures – though feelgood multiculturalism courtesy of Caran D’ache has a flattening out effect that treats all religious traditions as basically alike, and thus fails properly to honour the distinctiveness and specificity of any particular religious practice. How this leads to greater community cohesion is anyone’s guess. In contrast, the traditional Christian-dominated Bible stories approach did at least have the not inconsiderable benefit of introducing children to the foundational texts of the western canon. But this could be just as much a justification for compulsory classics as for compulsory RS.

The fear that most right-thinking liberals have about RS lessons is that they are a means of indoctrination, a Trojan horse that inducts vulnerable children into some dangerous cultic religious practice long before they have had a chance to think for themselves. The thing is, properly done, RS lessons could be a tool for helping children to do precisely that: to think, to question, to argue. It could be a place where the adolescent philosophy of “that’s just my personal opinion” is challenged and moved on. It could be a place where children begin to discover why it is that some will live and die for their belief. But all this is rare. Instead, the secret contained in belly of the RS Trojan horse is not religious fundamentalism evangelised by stealth, but the steady suffocation of curiosity and intellectual enthusiasm. And it looks like the BHA has fallen for the trap.