There are one or two observations about WJ McIlroy's letter "Some sense out of such silliness" (The Argus, May 24) that I should like to make.

Firstly, it was not Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night's Dream which was regarded by the headmistress of St Mary's Roman Catholic School, Portslade, as unsuitable and inappropriate for her pupils but Tim Crouch's idiosyncratic version of it.

When I was at school, I played in the real thing and it was not full of smutty innuendo and 'sexy' bits.

The headmistress made her decision not under pressure from a priest but in the light of her experience and training as a teacher.

She is the best judge of what is appropriate for her pupils to see and hear.

She regards sex as a very serious subject and not a subject for jokes which many of the children would not understand anyway.

We have many problems today because children are brought up in a society where sex has become a subject for smutty jokes and frivolous banter instead of being regarded as the wonderful God-given gift it is to mankind.

I am sure the parents of the children would concur with her views.

Mr McIlroy is right in saying that Christianity cannot be instilled in the young without studying the Bible but this is done in schools and church Sunday schools in a way which is appropriate for their age group.

Thus we do not find religious instruction lessons filled with stories of the infanticide, slaves, animal sacrifices etc but emphasis on teaching the Ten Commandments (the basis of Western codes of law); the Psalms, the Book of Proverbs and the teaching on social issues of

the great eighth century prophets such as Isaiah, Amos and Micah

and the New Testament teachings of the Sermon on The Mount and the Lord's Prayer, including the revolutionary teachings of both Jesus and St Paul to 'love your enemies'.

Most of all, our children learn that God so loved the world that He gave Jesus Christ to be our Saviour, who died on the first Good Friday to take away our sin and guilt and rose again in the Resurrection to empower us to live good God-pleasing lives.

Are these truths, which have influenced our culture and history for good over many centuries, to be denied our children, while their minds are filled with sex and violence?

Wilfrid Road,

-Hove