After the launch of the preliminary results of the national primary school survey, a phrase of a song that I couldn’t identify kept repeating itself in my head. Eventually, I realised it was a line from Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell: “Don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”
If the results of the survey are accurate, a surprising number of parents and guardians seem to like what they have got just fine and have no desire to see it gone. Sixty per cent of parents are happy with denominational education.
About 40 per cent of households with children under 12 completed the survey – a perfectly respectable response. However, we cannot extrapolate much from the figures regarding patronage because we don’t know how the other 60 per cent would have voted.
Reports on individual schools are due to be published in May. Only a foolhardy person would predict how many schools will be divested as a result.
READ MORE
Although the 2022 Census reported some 14 per cent of the population as having no religion and a further 3,823 people identifying as agnostic or atheist, this does not necessarily translate to momentum for divestment. People tend to be fond of their local school and more concerned about systemic underfunding than they are about ethos.
This is not necessarily good news for committed Catholics, many of whom would love fewer but more authentic Catholic schools rather than many schools that are Catholic in name only. Divestment would be helpful for everyone if all schools were given equal respect for their characteristic spirit. Until that is guaranteed, divestment will continue to be slow.
There is no completely secular primary school in the Republic. Educate Together, the best-known patron of multidenominational schools, teaches about all faiths and none but does not expect anyone to believe in any particular religion or philosophy. This is often presented as an ideal, value-free way to teach religion. However, there is no such thing as value-free education. Multidenominational education presents religion as primarily private, something to learn about rather than participate in, which is not how religious people themselves understand faith at all.
There is a strange double standard about religion in schools as opposed to other areas of learning. Religious schools are presented as inherently divisive, as though being deeply rooted in a particular tradition excludes respectful hospitality towards other world views.
Yet, sadly, only a minority in Ireland are passionate about the Irish language. Exemptions are increasing. But no one seriously suggests that someone with an exemption from Irish is being discriminated against or excluded by having to be around those who are studying it, or that the subject should be dropped entirely or taught after school.
[ Large number of parents seek shift to multidenominational ethos in schoolsOpens in new window ]
The kind of pejorative language used about Catholic schools, like the alliterative but inaccurate phrase “the Baptism barrier”, does not exist in other jurisdictions.
Take New Zealand, where the Catholic school system has strong ties to Ireland. Mother Cecilia Maher set out for Auckland in 1850 from St Leo’s Convent of Mercy in Carlow with a small, intrepid band of women. In 1870, 10 Dominican women, led by Mother Clare Elliott, left Sion Hill for Dunedin.
From 1877, Catholic schools, which primarily served the poor, received no State funding. By the 1960s, Catholic schools were in terrible repair with intolerably large class sizes. Salvation came from an unexpected quarter – the Labour Party, in particular the party leader, Norman Kirk, and education spokesman Phil Amos. Although bitterly opposed by secularists, the 1975 Private Schools Conditional Integration Bill provided State funding to Catholic schools while fully protecting their special character.
Catholic schools in New Zealand have a legal obligation to uphold their ethos, including giving preference to Catholic students. No more than 5 per cent of their intake can be non-Catholic. Contrast this with Ireland, where since the 2018 Admissions Act, Catholic schools are the only religious denomination that cannot give preference to students of their own faith. This is one of the blocks to divestment. If a Catholic school divests, parents wanting a Catholic ethos are not guaranteed a place in another Catholic school.
It is true that in New Zealand, parents have options other than Catholic schools, but the dominance of Catholic schools here grew from real faith and from our history as a colonised country desperate to maintain our identity.
The upcoming debate about divestment in local communities is an opportunity to set out the unique character of Catholic schools. Schools could do worse than start with Pope Leo’s apostolic letter on education, Drawing New Maps of Hope, describing a milieu where “questions are not silenced, and doubt is not banned but accompanied”.
Pope Leo sets out three educational priorities: nurturing students’ interior and spiritual lives; promoting wise, humane use of technology and AI, which places “the person before the algorithm” and educating for peace “in nonviolent language, reconciliation and bridge-building rather than wall-building”. That kind of education was never more needed.
