Battle for the heart and soul of education

Where does the following statement appear: "The time has come for a radical shake-up in our education system to take account …

Where does the following statement appear: "The time has come for a radical shake-up in our education system to take account of the fact that many people no longer want their children to be taught in schools with a religious ethos. The State must reflect this wish and make provision for it"?

Just a few years ago, it would have been easy to guess the answer. The usual suspects would be found among the hard core of liberal, secularist Ireland. The quote might have come from Conor Cruise O'Brien, or from among the scruffy ranks of the godless pinko trendies at The Irish Times. And the response would have been equally predictable: a deluge of letters from good Irish Catholics, containing, in various combinations, the words "godless", "alien", "heathen", "burn" and "hell".

A mark of the profound change that is working its way through the culture of the Republic is that the quote at the top is, in fact, from the editorial in the August 15th edition of the Irish Catholic, a paper that broadly represents the views of the official church. That the church itself is now calling for radical shifts in the education system is a symptom of a wider transformation whose implications for public policy are enormous.

For most of the history of the State it was assumed, without much debate, that education should be controlled by the churches. The vast Catholic majority would attend Catholic schools. The Protestant and Jewish minorities could run their own schools. Everybody else could like it or lump it. There were, within this system, obvious contradictions. Parents who did not want to send their children to religious schools were treated with ill-disguised contempt. Teachers who were trained and paid by the State were obliged to proselytise for a religion to which they themselves might or might not belong.

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As society changed, awesome heights of hypocrisy were reached. On the one hand, teachers could be fired for having, in the notorious formulation which emerged from the Eileen Flynn case, a lifestyle not in keeping with the Catholic ethos. On the other, the entire system depended on women teachers using artificial contraception, since endless maternity leave would have made it unworkable.

Hypocrisy, though, is something we are very good at, and for the most part the system remained tenable. The State got a lot of free work from the religious orders. The authority of the church was strengthened by the implicit assumption that, in educational matters, the church was the State.

In the last decade the landscape has been altered, probably for ever. Ireland is no longer a Catholic society with a few Protestants and Jews and a tiny fringe of agnostics and atheists. Faiths like Islam, Pentecostal Christianity and Buddhism have grown rapidly. There has been a huge, albeit largely undocumented, rise in the number of baptised but non-practising Catholics who are, moreover, perfectly accepted in their communities. In last Sunday's Business Post, for example, the new Fine Gael TD for Waterford, John Deasy, describes himself as "living proof that you don't have to go to Mass . . . to get elected in rural Ireland".

This change is rapidly making one of the basic institutional components of Irish society - the provision of education - unworkable. If we do what we normally do, and wait for a crisis to develop, this collapse has the potential to tear communities apart. The appallingly badly-handled controversy at Dunboyne Gaelscoil, where Tomás Ó Dúlaing was punished in a brutal exercise of naked power for attempting to deal constructively with religion, is but a foretaste of what is to come.

Intriguingly, the most militant approach to the issue is coming from the church itself. Two Meath parish priests, Father Michael Daly of Stamullen and Father Andrew Farrell of Trim, have effectively suggested that Catholic schools should stop accepting the children of "non-practising, non-believing and non-contributing families". The Catholic Secondary Parents' Association has issued a rallying cry to its members to "make a stand and defend the Catholic ethos of their schools".

In a sense, this is fair enough. Churches have a perfect right in principle to demand that the institutions they own and control reflect their ethos. In practice, though, there are many hard questions to be answered. Who defines "non-practising" (in a context where, according to Father Martin Tierney, in the same issue of the Irish Catholic, "very few" of the couples getting married in Catholic churches are practising Catholics)? Can the State really afford to establish multiple schools in every small community to cater for every variety of belief and non-belief?

Should the church, as the priests seem to imply, be allowed to keep all the assets which result from State investment over the decades, even when its schools begin to operate a rigidly exclusive admissions policy? What rights do teachers in Catholic schools who are not themselves practising Catholics have in this new situation? Does the Catholic ethos itself not include ideas like tolerance and respect for difference? Without answers to those questions, we are heading for a disastrously divisive series of intimate local conflicts.

On this page yesterday John Carr, of the INTO, called for Education Minister Noel Dempsey to establish a forum on interdenominational education. What's needed, in fact, is a much wider forum to address the whole question of education in a pluralist democracy. It may sound like an abstract problem, but if things are allowed to drift, it will be coming soon to a local hall near you.