Sir, – John Waters (Opinion, July 1st) describes the set of civic skills I advocate as appropriate for young Irish citizens (Opinion, June 24th) as “outrightly sinister”. He suggests I argue for “a process of indoctrinating each child in an ideological version of reality in which she is to be regarded as just another atom” and for a scheme of civic education that would result in the young citizen being “closed off from most of the vast possibilities of existence, his hopes deflated, her desire stunted, a citizen of a dictatorship of . . . nothingness.”
It is difficult to reconcile this analysis with the set of civic skills I propose in the article: that young citizens develop understandings of the role of the democratic institutions of the State and of the importance of civic participation; that they be educated towards an awareness of economic, social, environmental and political interdependencies; that they have regard for the “common good”; that they understand the fact that they share a political community with other citizens many of whom hold different religious or non-religious beliefs etc.
Mr Waters expresses reservations about my suggestion that young citizens develop the capacity to critically assess their own inherited religious or non-religious commitments. My argument, I would suggest, is rather modest.
It requires, for instance, that children be exposed to different belief-systems. Contrary to what Mr Waters imputes to the argument, it does not require the prohibition of religious education in schools, nor does it require the abolition of religious denominational schools. That most children are likely to end up holding similar beliefs to those their parents hold should be attributable to love, familiarity, or a sense of security or belonging; it should not be caused by indoctrination, or by the inculcation in young citizens of a permanent antipathy towards alternative belief-systems.
The neo-republicanism that informs my argument emphasises that citizens enjoy liberty when they are resiliently protected from domination by others.
In this way, it is as attractive to the devoutly religious as it is to doctrinaire secularists. Moreover, it objects to domination of citizens by the State just as it objects to domination from other sources. The reference by Mr Waters to Orwell's 1984is therefore deeply misrepresentative of a compelling public philosophy that we, as citizens of an ailing republic, would do well to embrace with more verve. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – It is not just John Waters’s hoary visage that earns him the reputation of Ireland’s prophet in the wilderness: it is his penchant for uttering literate and thought-provoking analyses from his almost solitary position in the broadsheets and other middle class media. The fact that he can’t be pinned down as merely “conservative”, “Catholic”, “libertarian” or “republican”, and yet neither would he run shrieking from these tags of intended contempt, is a credit to his integrity and courage, while most of his fellow commentators hide behind the shield of being “progressive”, a term which is quickly acquiring an Orwellian dimension of Goodspeak. His recent column’s dissection of the religion-in-schools issue, and, more importantly, the received media interpretation of them (Opinion, July 1st), serves as a worthy riposte to that of the soft Left. I am not sure if he is correct in his suspicion of the secularist education brigade but it does seem at times to be a scary mix of “up-with-people” and Mao, and it is certainly healthy to have that doubt vocalised, despite the likelihood of being declared a heretic and being told, nay encouraged, to stand in the corner to consider what an unhelpful adult-citizen he has been. – Yours, etc,