Schools – even the Catholic ones – have a right to ethos

AS teachers at the INTO conference railed against the Catholic Church’s patronage of schools while rebelling against having to teach children the Catholic religion, or ‘faith formation’ as it is called, the union promised to survey members on whether faith formation should take place at all in Catholic schools as opposed to more general religious education like that taught in Educate Together schools.

What a bizarre idea. Surely not teaching Catholicism in Catholic schools is as nonsensical as not teaching diversity or inclusion in multidenominational schools?

It can hardly be news to INTO members that schools have a right to an ethos and to insist on its values being reflected within.

The benefits of a strong ethos are obvious. Whether Catholic or secular or Islamic, a school’s ethos lends it a distinct identity; it shapes its traditions and creates a continuity and frequently a sense of community so strong that generation after generation of the one family often loyally attend the same school. Indeed it is often schools with the strongest ethos that have the longest waiting lists.

THE problem with Catholic schools is not their ethos but their massive overrepresentation in education. Almost 90% of the country’s national schools are Catholic which is totally out of kilter with the population’s religious affiliations or lack of same. Parental choice is denied, children must attend schools whose values don’t dovetail with home, while resentment festers among teachers who are obliged to parrot views they don’t believe and may discriminate against them.

History is to blame for the State’s failure to develop a modern secular education system by entrusting education to religious orders with the wealth to roll out schools in their own image.

But what is to blame for the endurance of the status quo? Both the Catholic Church and the Department of Education claim to be eager for more schools to shed their religious ethos and become multidenominational, but progress is at a snail’s pace.

The 2022 Programme for Government committed to at least 400 multi-denominational schools by 2030 yet since 2016 just eight schools have been transferred away from religious patronage. In 2022 the department and Catholic bishops agreed a pilot arrangement involving the transfer of eight Catholic schools to multidenominational patrons but parents in the north Dublin suburb of Raheny said that the process was so badly managed and divisive, with so little information available about what precisely would replace the Catholic ethos that they voted overwhelmingly against divestment. There were also concerns about how divestment would affect secondary school choices.

OUR national schools are far from perfect, but they are popular, with only a minority of children attending private primary schools. Is the proverbial ‘devil you know’ the reason for our reluctance to interfere with a system that has an excellent record at drumming in the three Rs? Are schools a victim of their own success or is it a lack of commitment from the Church and organisation from the department that’s to blame?

Perhaps instead of thundering like rebel leaders about faith formation being anathema, teachers could lend their voices to a campaign for urgent school divestment so that more children can attend a local taxpayer-funded school without any religious teachings and they in turn can work in them. That might be a better strategy for finding freedom from the inimical demands of the Catholic ethos than just blaming religion.