The Minister’s approach to primary school patronage is inimical to the idea of a republic, and will be disastrous.
DON’T
LAUGH, but suppose for a moment we were actually in the business of
building a new republic from scratch. What’s the first thing you’d put
down on the “to do” list?
Is it not this rather obvious idea:
educate all your children together.
A republic starts with the basic
idea that citizens of all faiths and none share a common public life and
civic values.
It’s hardly radical to think that these things
should be learned from the moment children enter into a formal
relationship with the public world – in the primary school system.
Or
that the most powerful way in which they learn them is by actually being
together.
This is why Ruairí Quinn’s approach to the question of
the patronage of primary schools is so disastrous. At one level, he
deserves credit for at least acknowledging a problem that has been
ignored by pusillanimous politicians for decades.
The cowardice of
his predecessors has left us with a huge mismatch between, on the one
hand, a population whose religious and spiritual beliefs are
increasingly diverse and, on the other, a primary school system that has
remained remarkably static, with 90 per cent of schools still under the
patronage of the Catholic Church.
We now have nearly 15,000
primary school-age children who are atheists, agnostics or have no
religion; 8,300 Muslim children in the same age group and thousands more
who belong to religions that had a minimal presence in Ireland even a
decade ago – Orthodox, Lutheran, Pentecostal and Apostolic Christians,
Hindus, Buddhists, pantheists and Baha’i.
Because many of these
faith groups are younger than the general population, the likelihood is
that we will, over the next decade, have about 30,000 primary school
children who are not members of the traditionally recognised churches.
And this does not include those who are members of the latter but whose
parents would prefer them to be educated in schools outside of church
control.
It is depressing to live in a country where the mere
recognition of such an obvious reality constitutes political courage,
but at least Ruairí Quinn has not continued the disgraceful tradition of
denial.
If we had an infinite amount of money, we could, in
theory, build and staff more and more schools to cater for this
diversity in a largely unchanged system.
But we already have a very high
number of primary schools per head of population and, of course, we
don’t have money to throw at the problem.
Instead, we have an
opportunity to ask ourselves a basic question: what kind of primary
education system is best for a diverse 21st-century republic?
But this
isn’t just a question about education – schools are at the heart of
their communities and the way we think about them is part of the way we
think about democracy.
Ruairí Quinn, though, seems not to be
thinking about democracy at all. His strategy has two parts. The first
consists of doing nothing much for 1,700 schools that are the only ones
in their area.
If you live in a rural area with just one primary
school – tough. There will be nice talk about respect and diversity but
the bottom line is that children from non-Catholic families will still
have to attend schools where the Catholic ethos is pervasive and where
all teachers must at least pretend to be practising Catholics.
All
members of the boards of management will still be required by the deeds
of trust to “manage the school in accordance with the doctrines,
practices and traditions of the Roman Catholic Church” and to “make and
keep themselves familiar with the ethos of the Roman Catholic Church” –
active and explicit discrimination against non-Catholic parents who will
still be in effect debarred from serving on boards of management.
Ruairí Quinn has made it plain that for these schools “transfer of
patronage is not an option”.
The assumption, apparently, is that
rural parents are all happy with the existing regime. But a survey by
the conservative Iona Institute found “very little difference” between
rural and urban parents in this regard, with a slight majority favouring
schools that teach either all religions or none over “a Catholic
school”.
The second part of Ruairí Quinn’s strategy is for town
folk, who are deemed fit to make a choice: surveys of parents of
school-age children to determine whether they would like their schools
to be denominational, interdenominational or multi-denominational.
This
is very timid: as the advisory group on patronage put it, if the
process “resulted in one school being transferred [from church control]
in each of the areas selected, this would amount to less than 50
schools, out of a total of 3,169 primary schools”.
But the
long-term result of the strategy would, in any case, be a formalised
apartheid, with children roughly sorted into different faith groups.
Everything
about this strategy is inimical to the idea of a republic.
It
discriminates openly between people in rural and urban areas and
envisages a future in which children are segregated from the age of
four.
Are these really the lessons we have learned from conflict and
collapse?