What if only 4% of Primary Schools had a Catholic Ethos?
If I had a Euro for every time someone told me there needs to be more choice in primary education in Ireland, I’d probably have enough money to retire now. The concept of parental choice is seen as a fundamental truth by most of the population. I was watching the INTO’s excellent primary education debate online and was struck by Minister Patrick O’Donovan’s problem with Labour’s and the Social Democrat’s manifesto to remove faith formation from the school.
According to him, he wants to send his children to a Catholic school so they can make their sacraments. At no point did he consider the vast numbers of teachers and principals that do not want to prepare his child for sacraments. Firstly, they aren’t paid to prepare children for sacramental rites. Secondly, they may not believe in the same god that he does.
However, I don’t want to keep harping on about the same thing as I always do because I imagine you’ve read the above paragraph hundreds of times and have not been moved by it because, the truth, as it is presented is that teachers have a choice like parents have a choice to work in Catholic schools. That choice, as it is always offered is to work in a multidenominational school.
I decided to do a little thought experiment with one of the people that spends most of his time interacting with me telling me that he is in favour of parental choice and that I am not. He calls himself the Scientific Christian and we’ve interacted on this issue for a couple of years.
The thought-experiment was to do a little bit of a flip — we would have an education system where multidenominational schools had the vast majority of patronage and Catholic schools had the same percentage of patronage as multidenominational schools do now, i.e. 4% of primary schools.
Essentially, everything else remains the same. We have 4% Catholic schools, 5% Protestant schools, 2 Muslim schools and 1 Jewish school. Every other school is multidenominational.
The scientist accepted the offer and I asked him my first question:
Where should we put these 150 Catholic schools and ensure that every area has reasonable access to a Catholic school.
His answer: Locate them as strategically as possible.
I pressed him and he replied: to ensure as many people as possible get a place in their preferred school. Perfection impossible.
I liked that reply. “Perfection impossible.” However, I needed to find out how this was going to work and how we would decide who would get access to a Catholic school and who wouldn’t to which he replied: An optimisation algorithm.
When I pushed him to tell me more about this, he didn’t reply. A few weeks later he was back telling me about parental choice so I reminded him of our thought-experiment and how his optimisation algorithm would ensure that all Catholics who wanted a Catholic school would get one if 4% of schools had a Catholic ethos. You won’t be surprised I didn’t get much further. His reply:
A competent mathematician or statistician could easily design one. The sort of algorithms that work out optimal bus routes etc.
To be fair to him, he conceded that it was impossible to provide most rural people with a Catholic school before throwing a few swipes, as is the ethos of X these days.
As we can see, very quickly, parental choice falls very quickly if there are not enough schools to ensure that everyone goes to a school of the religious leaning of their choice.
While the scientific Christian didn’t continue the discussion yet, I imagine, if I were him, I’d counter with the same thing most people hear when they listen to debates on the topic — we need more choice! That is, we need more schools to ensure that everyone has a choice to go to whatever religious-run school they wish for.
I looked up the 2022 CSO figures for the religions that we have in Ireland and there were 25 main belief systems. My understanding is that there are well over 100 belief systems in the State at present but let’s accommodate all 25 that we know of.
The trouble with this is that we run into another problem. While big cities might be able to accomodate twenty-five different types of schools, and even then they would struggle, if we think of a rural area, how would we manage this? Rural areas struggle to fill one school, never mind twenty-five different types of schools.
Ultimately, the obvious thing we need to do is have a default type of school that treats everyone equally. Currently the default in Ireland is Catholic, and we know that this can’t treat anyone that isn’t Catholic equally, as at some parts of the day and at some parts of the year, children that aren’t Catholic have to be excluded from what’s going on.
Schools that don’t offer faith formation during the school day don’t have this problem. There isn’t a single part of the day where a child must opt out on the basis of their belief system.
I’d be interested in hearing people’s thoughts on this. While I know all schools do their best to accommodate everyone, is it time we faced the fact that this is as impossible as giving everyone the choice of school they want?
