The start of the new school year has produced more hot air about the role of the Catholic Church in education, and the Minister for Education appearing on the news suggesting that the only problem was accommodating immigrants in the system – this is wrong. The major issue is that the government allows the Catholic Church to control the bulk of primary education, and has ducked out of providing genuinely state run, secular, primary education. This is going to be the next big fight in Irish society, it is going to be painful but it is one which is vital if we are to progress as a liberal state.
At one level, it is quite simple – the State pays for the school system – it builds the schools, pays the teachers and meets the costs. Therefore the State should control the schools. Minister Mary Hanafin feels that schools have a right to protect their ethos, which in most schools is Catholic. I would be interested to see how Mary would swallow it if the most convenient primary school for her children to attend was run by fundamentalist Muslims who felt girls didn’t need education, and that boys should learn that women shouldn’t work, drive or go out without their husband. I wonder if she would be quite so keen on allowing primary schools to preserve their religious ethos then? Yes, it is a hypothetical case, and extreme cases make bad law, but those values are fundamentally opposed to western liberal values, and are flat wrong. (You could, to be fair, point out that the Catholic Church refuses to allow women to be priests, and even if the extent of the discrimination is different, the logic is the same.) The problem is very easy to avoid it – make primary education genuinely multicultural by removing religious control over the schools.
You do not go down the road the French and some American ‘liberals’ have mistakenly gone down and tried to ban all religious symbols in schools. Insofar as it compatible with good teaching, students should be free to wear religious symbols or dress, although the building itself should be a neutral, civic space. Religion in schools as a subject and as a part of life, should teach kids to accept and be tolerant of a variety of religious paths. Religion as a subject would look at how different religions grapple with the problems of existence and morals rather than rote preparation for catholic sacraments which might be more aptly named First Holy Playstation. If a church wants to prepare kids for it’s specific rites, move it out to the Church, Chapel, synagogue or mosque out of school time – and stop allowing the clergy to let teachers do most of the work of preparing kids for rites. This would require people to think about big questions, rather than sub-contracting thinking out to some old book.
Lest I sound too harsh, I should saw that I have plenty of toleration for people who think things through and decide that they want to follow a particular religious path – I might disagree with their choice, but as long as they don’t use it as an excuse to blow up or oppress people, they are welcome to it. Most of them are clear on the ‘love thy neighbour’ part which is what makes it possible for us all to live on this small rock. However, a great many people in Ireland are simply sliding along, and as our society becomes more diverse and multicultural, and we have to shape our foreign policy in a world tossed by fundamentalism, we need to be clear about our values. You cannot, as Minister Hanafin did on the news, try to blame the problems of religion in primary education on immigrants; they are not responsible for our intellectual laziness.
Leave a Reply