Madam, – It seems to me desirable that the State school system should be focused on education and not indoctrination, with an emphasis on producing citizens rather than simply turning out Catholics, Protestants, Jews or Muslims.
A republic whose citizens understood and embraced the notion that they had duties and responsibilities towards their country as well as holding expectations and deriving rights from it would be a fine place to live. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Louis O’Flaherty (January 30th) quite rightly reminds us of Lord Stanley’s famous letter of 1831 setting out the parameters for the new national school system. While a success in so many other ways, as a mechanism for creating a non-denominational system – in a country where over 90 per cent of the population were Catholic! – it was a comprehensive failure.
Surely in modern, pluralist, democratic, tolerant states, parents have the right to choose to send their children to a school that reflects their moral values – this after all, is the right that those whose children attend Educate Together schools, for example, exercise daily. Despite the breezy and errorenous presumption of Educate Together that somehow there was a time when schools did not, as a rule, accept and cater for children of other faiths, the organisation points the way, surely, to how we should treat institutions with precisely the same agenda – in other words the right to educate children in a particular and articulated moral setting – by allowing religious schools of any persuasion the same rights to management, ethos and so forth. This, after all, is surely the mark of the enlightened, pluralist, tolerant state? – Yours, etc,
Madam, – I am drawn to disagree with my fellow alumnus Heidi Good (January 30th). Surely the aim of religious ethos education is not to simply recruit members to witness and organised prayer, but to instill in them overtly or otherwise Christian, Jewish, Muslim or other religious values that correlate with a healthy, progressive and functioning society.
Churches and religious orders can play a very powerful and positive role in many young people’s lives through this manner and I believe withdrawing from education will see the church lose much of this positive influence over a much larger audience then can be attracted to Saturday night youth clubs, weekends away or summer camps. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Two correspondents (James Scully-Lane and Nick Hilliard, February 1st) might be surprised to know that even in France, that bastion of secularism, the state gives aid to private, mainly Catholic, schools. Such aid is mainly in the form of payment of teachers’ salaries and is conditional on teachers having state-approved pedagogical qualifications and on schools following the national curriculum.
It looks very like what is done in Ireland.
State financial aid to non-state schools is widespread internationally, even in quite secularised societies. The United States is rather exceptional in the way in which the constitution is interpreted by the Supreme Court.
I don’t condone any abuses, whether of children or of power, but much of the correspondence on this subject reeks of anti-Catholic and anti-religious bigotry rather than any adherence to genuine liberal principles. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – In England we have the prospect of parents competing to get their children into church primary schools. Even a secular minister, David Miliband has elected to send his child to a church school two miles distant in preference to a state school 80 yards away. The church schools are seen as having a better, more civil ethos, both in regards to staff and pupils. Also they tend to have better academic success.
So perhaps some caution would be advisable on this question in Ireland lest the baby be thrown out with the bathwater. – Yours, etc,