Summer's over, and a new year's beginning: not the calendar year, or the tax year, or even the Christian year, but the academic year. We all notice it in little ways - the school run traffic jams are back again! - but some of us have it in our bones. During one of the graduations from Sheffield University I attended last year, I worked out that, from kindergarten to college, I've spent nearly half my life in formal education. So for me September feels both exciting and nerve-racking: new chances to learn, but on the downside, new opportunities to put my foot in my mouth.
Maybe many of us have ambivalent feelings about education. I went to an old-fashioned school where you sat down and shut up and listened to the teacher who knew things, so that you might eventually know things too. And some of my teachers had very effective ways of making us feel small if we gave the wrong answer to their question. Sometimes the safest way through was not to speak up at all unasked - that way we didn't put ourselves in the firing line! But such methods were counterproductive, as well as bullying. Such teachers never found out how much we knew - and often it was much more than they would have given us credit for.
I never went to Sunday school myself - my closest brushes with the church as a child were the annual Guide parade services. Sometimes I'm sorry not to have had that experience of growing up with God. On the other hand, I'm quite glad to have escaped the Sunday school experiences some people tell me about, in which you could be shamed in front of everyone for giving the wrong answer. A good Sunday school, of course, will teach the basic messages of Christian faith - Jesus shows us God; God is love; that love of God helps us to love our neighbour and ourselves - by how the teachers behave as well as what they say. And the influence of good Sunday school teachers on their charges may be far deeper and last far longer than they will ever know.
Nowadays the emphasis in education has changed a lot from when I was a child. Subject-centred learning has been replaced by student-centred learning, focussing on the student's interests and needs as well as the curriculum to be studied. And with ‘a job for life' a hollow promise, opportunities for constant retraining and lifelong learning are flourishing, from evening classes to the Open University to the U3A. Even my mother has been persuaded to take up computing classes, and is speaking excitedly of the possibilities of the Internet.
Oddly enough, the church has become one of the few places where it can be acceptable to stick at a childhood level of understanding rather than to explore faith at an adult level. Maybe that's partly because of the old fear that speaking up may expose us to shame and ridicule. Maybe it's also because our faith is so precious that we are afraid to expose it to close scrutiny, in case the rock we stand on may have cracks in it.
But, speaking as an addict of education, let me encourage you to explore the chances of learning more about our faith that will be on offer this autumn. The God we worship is not a bullying teacher who will zap us for giving wrong answers, but the Spirit of truth who will always lead us into further truth: about the Bible, about the church, about the world, about ourselves. And like all learning about an area in which we are committed, that's an exciting business!