‘Truncated knowledge of faith revealed’
THE report from the Forum on Patronage and Pluralism is a serious threat to the right to denominational education in primary schools in Ireland.
If adopted by the Government, it will severely hinder a faith-based school from fulfilling its legal responsibility and right to uphold and foster a denominational school ethos.
The forum’s recommendation that the Catholic Church divest itself of some schools is welcome; this facilitates greater parental choice. What it recommends for schools that remain denominational, however, will effectively eradicate the rights of parents who want their children to have a faith-based education.
The threat takes a number of forms. It calls for an end to rule 68 for national schools, which recognises religious instruction as a fundamental part of the school course and permits a religious spirit to “inform and vivify the whole work of the school”.
The forum is effectively requesting, even for faith-based schools, that no such spirit should characterise a denominational school. It specifically requests that religion be singled out to be taught as a discrete subject apart from the rest of the curriculum although all other subjects are to be taught in an integrated manner.
Hymns and prayers are to be inclusive of the religious beliefs (and none) of all children. This recommendation would prohibit specific Christian prayer in a Christian school if there was even one atheist or, say, Muslim, enrolled. Similarly, the emblems of various religions are to be displayed and the feasts of different religions are to be celebrated without any allowance for a religious patron’s responsibility to uphold and foster its own specific ethos.
At first glance, this promotion of inclusion and diversity might seem appealing. In practice it often leads to bland indifference rather than an informed cherishing of real difference.
Interestingly, the report cites favourably that the “inter-faith and inter-cultural initiatives work best in schools where the Catholic students and parents are most committed to their own practice”. Yet the whole thrust of the forum’s recommendations is to inhibit a Catholic school’s ability to contribute to faith practice.
Oddly, there is scant recognition of the extraordinary work already done by school patrons, principals, and teachers in faith-based schools to accommodate and include pupils of different religions and none, and this because it is, in fact, the “Catholic” thing to do.
The forum insists on a new subject called “education in religions and beliefs” being offered in all schools. All future teachers, regardless of their personal beliefs, will be obliged to learn how to teach it, along with courses in ethics. It is presupposed that such courses can be taught from a “value free” or “neutral” perspective.
However, this presupposition is itself a fundamental tenet of one particular belief system: the secularist world view. In fact, the whole report implicitly professes the core belief of secularism: Religion has no place in the public sphere and therefore in a modern state’s educational system.
Religious people of whatever perspective know and agree that one cannot approach questions of ultimate meaning from a position of indifference. Most educators accept that teachers teach not just what they know but who they are.
The fact that some teachers with no religious beliefs rightly object to teaching religious education in school testifies to the fact that religion and ethics cannot be taught as though they were merely culturally interesting and personal views were immaterial.
In making these recommendations the forum reveals its own truncated understanding of religious faith and how it permeates every aspect of personal identity. More surprisingly, it also demonstrates a deeply impoverished understanding of education, denying its formative dimension and reducing it to the imparting of facts and figures.
In campaigning for greater diversity and plurality in education provision, the forum is also working on outdated data regarding religious beliefs and practice in Ireland, which in any case, it interprets superficially. The most reliable and up-to-date data is the 2011 census which shows that 84% describe themselves as Catholic, an increase of five percentage points since the previous census.
The increase is not explainable by immigration alone, and given what has happened with regard to the Catholic Church in Ireland over the past few years, the figure is astonishing, no matter what spin is put on it. This statistic, taken together with the fact that non-Catholics often choose Catholic schools because of their evident quality, should give the minister for education pause for thought when considering the implementation of the forum’s recommendations. Any radical steps which would undermine denominational education might be seen as undemocratic in a country where such an overwhelming majority still describe themselves as religious.
* Eamonn Conway and Rik Van Nieuwenhove lecture at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick.
