The notion of segregating children by religion is offensive to many sound ideals. But it’s just not that simple
THE PATRONAGE system under which our primary schools are run is in the firing line again. The anti-clerical feelings provoked and intensified by the Ryan report on child abuse were bound to result in a resurfacing of calls to put primary schools under the sole jurisdiction of the State.
Just when that was fading, the row over the failures in the Muslim school in Cabra has drawn the spotlight back on to the system.
The notion of segregating small children by religion is offensive to many sound ideals. In principle all children should be educated together, as the excellent organisation of that name promotes and implements. But like everything else in life, it’s just not that simple.
Pragmatism can often be an excuse for low expectations and dirty compromises, but in some cases there are battles one shouldn’t waste time fighting.
The State cannot afford, and never could, to buy all the schools from the churches. The churches could hand over the schools for free, but even if they did it still imposes a huge running cost on the Department of Education. That’s an expense the State has no interest in bearing even in the best of times. When I say “State” I mean of course the Department of Finance, which approaches all matters encapsulated under the term “rights” with a rather parsimonious attitude.
Rights can only be vindicated if they don’t cost too much. The “right” to be educated free of God is just too expensive so it’s not going to happen.
City folk have some flexibility, as there are non-denominational or multi-denominational schools in areas of high population. In rural areas there is little or no choice, and I confess I have some misgivings when I hear my five-year-old singing sweetly to himself about the Holy Spirit while building a church with his Lego or drawing pictures of Jesus dying on the cross.
But these are easily dismissed. I can’t quite contrive liberal moral outrage on the matter of feeding small children stories of lately benevolent creators while simultaneously propagating secular tales of tooth fairies and Santa, angels of the cult of consumerism.
Neither can I muster up resentment towards clerics whose daily pastoral work bears no relation to the evils of institutionalised abuse.
In our parish, the priests are our friends who are not simply respected but incredibly popular.
There are good men throughout the whole country, who have been just as upset and bewildered by the Ryan report as everyone else and yet have to get up every day, put on the collar and keep going. They do the christenings, weddings and funerals for every kind of reprobate, for those of fickle faith and none, because we like our rituals.
Roman Catholicism is what we’ve inherited, so for those of us not fully committed in faith, we might as well just get with the programme.
Those are arguments that could be summarised under inevitability: It’s the system and I can’t change it, so why bother?
There is another, more positive set of arguments: it’s the system and it works incredibly well, so why would I want to change it?
You know all that corporate language that people hate so much? One often hears talk of “stakeholders” who must be “empowered”. Before Charlie McCreevy, “decentralisation” did not mean that people did the same job in another location.
It meant that power of decision-making was moved down the chain of command so that decisions could be made by those closest to the point of implementation.
Governments and businesses recognise that for any project to work it requires people to have a genuine stake in the success of the programme and to be empowered to make decisions most suited to their own situations. Centralised systems lead to alienation and dysfunctionality – like the Health Service Executive.
When you have a primary school that is run by a team composed of a principal, a priest and a board of management of locals, you have a system of which civil servants in other developed countries can only dream. It’s the reason faith schools in otherwise secular systems like the UK and the US are always oversubscribed. They work better.
Some secular systems try desperately to emulate the patronage system by recruiting and empowering high-performing principals or establishing “charter” schools such as those in England. They are trying to develop, through force of political will and top-down bureaucracy, what our patronage system already has. A motivated and dedicated team with internal checks and balances that pulls a divided community together through forces other than mere education.
As anti-monarchists and early parliamentarians discussed intensely, this does leave the problem of the Bad King. The system is great so long as the local priest is a Good King.
If he has administrative weaknesses these can be compensated by a Good Principal and active Board of Management. But if the Bad King appoints Bad Advisers then the people are badly off.
In this case, we need the department, through its inspectorate, to intervene. The most worrying aspect in the case of the North Dublin Muslim school is not that religion was the rock on which the education of the children perished, but that the only time when the department had to be relied upon – it failed.
The moral of the tale is not that religious patronage is a bad system, but that one more heavily dependent on an incompetent department would be considerably worse.