Teaching religion in schools - We are at an important crossroads

Two predictable events suggested this week that by choosing not to acknowledge that this society has changed utterly, we seem set on ensuring that an avoidable and destructive conflict becomes an inevitable one. Both events focussed on the place of religion in education and highlighted deeply-held but conflicting beliefs around this issue. Both events highlighted the complexity involved and suggested that as society becomes more diverse, this problem will become even more fraught.

One was the admission by Jan O’Sullivan, the education minister, that only two schools — and one was a Church of Ireland school — have had a change of patronage despite the fact that this evolution has been a Government policy objective for more than three years.

In the face of this snail’s pace change, it does not seem unreasonable to assume that, just like unbending civil servants prepared to out-wait a demanding but transient minister, some of those who hope to protect Catholic Church’s dominance in our primary schools’ system have been less than co-operative. Catholic patrons control around 90% of our primary schools and a teacher is very unlikely to be employed at one unless they have completed a course in religious education sanctioned by the Catholic Church. This dominance may have reflected society once, though even that is open to question, but it certainly does not now and it needs to be changed. Trying to oppose that change will, ironically, make it more inevitable. It seems it is time for the Government to be more forceful on this issue.

The second event was a call from Dr Ali Selim from the Islamic Cultural Centre in Dublin for a radical change in our education system to facilitate the teaching of Islamic beliefs. Dr Selim also suggested that school activities like music, drama, and physical education involving Muslim children should be remodelled so as not to offend religious beliefs around how boys and girls mix, how girls dress for sports, and how sex education is delivered.

Dr Selim’s suggestions, when considered from a European, much less a European pluralist perspective, seem at least anachronistic if not medieval. They seem, at their core, to condemn women to a place they escaped from in European societies centuries ago. They seem, by the usual standards and behaviours of this society, unacceptable. Not to say so would be dishonest and an affront to the generations who struggled to modernise Ireland.

These two events suggest that we may have reached the point where we need to discuss, and come to a conclusion reasonably soon, about whether we should continue to have any religious teaching in our State schools. We should try to decide if it is time for families to pass on their own belief systems outside of school hours and how our school systems need to change to support any new arrangements.

Religious freedom is a bedrock principle in our democracy but so too is the idea of, if that is what you choose, freedom from religion. At the moment our schools do not support those ideas equally. Maybe it’s time they did.