Despite their falling numbers, religious congregations can make a major contribution to tackling the failure of the education system to meet the needs of the poor, according to Sister Teresa McCormack, director of the Education Office of the Conference of Religious of Ireland. She was speaking on "Religious Involvement in Education in the New Millennium" at the final day of the Mercy Education Conference at the University of Limerick yesterday.
Sister McCormack, who is a founder member of the Mercy Education Development Group, said that almost all of the approximately 3,500 young people who left full-time education each year with no formal qualifications came from poor backgrounds. "A total of 75 per cent of families in poverty are `headed' by an adult who has no educational qualifications, and an adult in this position is nearly nine times as likely to be poor as someone with third-level education."
The cost to the State of educating a third-level graduate was more than twice that spent on an early school-leaver, she said. In order to change this situation, religious would need to work with others to develop new structures to take over the trusteeship of schools currently held by congregations. "They need to find ways of responding to the unmet education needs of poor people, both adults and children, and of influencing the system as a whole," she said.
The first challenge of handing over Catholic schools to lay people arose "not from a shortage of religious personnel but from the need to recognise that there is no solid basis for believing that the continuation of Catholic education depends on the direct involvement of religious". The provision of Catholic schools was, in fact, a responsibility of the whole Catholic community.
Sister Teresa said that less than 3 per cent of educational spending was targeted on tackling disadvantage. There was a need for a fully integrated approach to disadvantage and the excessively academic nature of the curriculum.
"The exam system which recognises and rewards a very narrow range of talents needs to be changed, and the fact that a small minority of people are totally alienated by their experience of school and drop out early."
Religious needed to redirect the resources which they currently used to subsidise schools to support trail-blazing ways of responding to the most obvious failures of the school system, which was early school-leaving and adult literacy.
There was a need to expand involvement in adult and community education. Finally, there was a need to become much more active in forging alliances with other groups with whom they shared basic values and who worked from the perspective of poor and marginalised people.