Kitty Holland: The religious bias of our national schools is beyond belief

A colleague, driving his unbaptised six-year-old daughter to school recently, was informed from the back seat: “God made this car, Daddy. My teacher told me God made everything in the world.”

In an effort not to bruise her emerging thought processes while remaining true to his non-religious beliefs, he brushed it off gently. “Well, he didn’t do a great job of it, sweetheart.”

“I’ll pray for a nicer one, Daddy,” she reassured him.

A sweet story, perhaps, but it raises fundamental questions about freedom of thought in our national schools.

These pages have seen many stories charting the difficulties of parents of unbaptised children getting a school place for them when the vast majority of schools in their area are denominational and oversubscribed.

In December 2013 I wrote about my experience of trying to get a place for my unbaptised son in a school – any school – near our Dublin 6 home and of being rejected by all four despite having had his name down from the time he was an infant. In the case of the nearest, a little Church of Ireland school, my son (5) was described as “other”, destined to be at the end of an admissions queue in which children’s places were determined by 10 religion-based criteria.

In the end, an Educate Together school opened in the neighbouring postcode, and he is happily there.

More recently, Hindu couple Roopesh Panicker and his wife, Najamol, told how they were unable to get a place for their four-year-old daughter Eva in the local Catholic school in Cabinteely, Co Dublin.

When told they could not be assured of a place in 2016 either, because of the school’s Catholic-first policy, they considered leaving Ireland. They are now campaigning for an end to the situation in which schools can prefer children of a particular faith when they are oversubscribed.

Eva did get a school place in the end, in a Catholic school, but a half-hour drive away, which upsets her and her parents, who would prefer her to go to the same local school as the other children on her road.

Minister for Education Jan O’Sullivan appears to share the Panickers’ sentiments. In response to a query from my colleague Carl O’Brien on Monday, November 9th, she said that where schools were oversubscribed, they should be obliged to prefer children from their locality rather than preferring on religious grounds.

In an Irish Times poll last week, readers agreed; 85 per cent responded No to the question, "Should religion play a part in school admissions?"

The more this issue won’t go away, the more bodies such as the Iona Institute say it is not an issue of religious discrimination directed at four-year-olds by tax-funded schools but is in fact about insufficient school places. It is, they point out, only an issue in 20 per cent of the 3,305 primary schools – that’s about 660 – where demand exceeds supply.

This argument misses the point that, because the Catholic Church manages 90 per cent of our schools, and so exercises overwhelming power over admission to them whether the schools are oversubscribed or not, the potential to exclude amounts to religious majority rule.

Faith formation

In such a context it is perhaps little wonder we in the minority – atheists, Hindus, Muslims, lapsed Catholics, “other” – focus our energies on simply getting our children into the national school system, leaving to another day the battle over what happens to our four- and five-year-olds’ minds once in.

It’s worth looking at what is being taught to children in Catholic primary schools. The Catholic religious education programme Grow in Love is taught for 30 minutes a day in junior and senior infants. The programme’s teacher manual reads: “The faith formation goals are longer-term goals that have to do with the children’s developing relationship with God and with one another.”

For those parents who believe assurances that their non-Catholic children can opt out of this instruction, the manual states: “It is assumed that prayer is part of the life of the classroom in a Catholic school, so children will pray every day.” Catholic teaching is interwoven into the school day.

Dissenting voices

The voices of non-Catholic parents, who have no choice but to send their children to Catholic schools, will grow louder against this state-sanctioned indoctrination of their children.

The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment is perhaps pre-empting this by proposing a new type of religious instruction for primary schools – on religion, ethics and belief. This process is at consultation stage, and the council will make recommendations in due course.

However, the reaction of some reveals just how jealously many would protect the special role of schools in the nation’s “faith formation”. Prof Eamonn Conway, of Mary Immaculate primary teacher training college in Limerick, described the proposed new subject as “bizarre”, saying it would “undoubtedly adversely affect religious instruction and a faith-based school’s characteristic ethos”.

Many will argue that “faith formation” in schools is necessary to provide children with a moral and ethical compass. This atheist parent of two children wishes to reassure them that she provides a home where the ethos is one of respect for the beliefs of others, where the wonder, beauty and equality of every human being is rejoiced, where prejudice is not tolerated and where it is taught that behind every first impression or lazy stereotype is a person whose hopes, dreams and frailties are the same as our own.

You might almost call us Christian.