Jennifer Horgan: Faith segregation in schools keeps children out of their communities
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My friend didn’t notice that the kids in our local playground were calling out her daughter’s name as we approached it. I imagine it has happened dozens of times before.
So, she also didn’t notice that nobody was calling out my daughter’s name.
Or, that they weren’t calling out my daughter’s name because they don’t know my daughter — nobody knows her where we live, apart from the few children she plays football with in the local team.
Nobody knows her because she is excluded from our local schools, all of them Catholic.
Sure, she could attend the local school. And she could be invited along by well-meaning, smiling parents to the ‘big day’ in her own ‘special’ outfit.
Yes, she could attend the local school. And she could sit in a classroom colouring in, while everyone else prepared for a sacrament that has more to do with bouncy castles and fake tan than with God or faith.
Yes, she could attend her local school and lose her basic human right to avoid faith formation, alongside her constitutionally protected right to some kind of moral guidance.
But her big brother had a bad experience in our local Catholic school for all those reasons, because, actually, being segregated can be pretty harmful to a small child.
People in Ireland like to talk about parent choice in education. They say Catholic schools are just fine, because parents have other choices.
However, most of our schools are still Catholic, and if we run and divide schools on ‘parent choice’ grounds it means that some parents, and some children, have no choice whatsoever but to leave their local communities in order to be educated.
The other, even more concerning consequence of a parent choice approach is that you end up with a very fragmented system.
Parents in Catholic schools are made to fear Educate Together schools, as if something different goes on behind those school walls.
The truth is that all schools are fundamentally the same, defined by the children in them, by their characters, their interactions, their troubles, their joys.
All schools have far more in common with one another than not. This fact is lost in the ‘parent choice’ model, a model shot through with fear of the ‘other’, fear of other children.
Conversations about reconfiguring schools, turning Catholic schools into multi-denominational schools, misses this fact completely — the bare fact that reconfiguration will result in children believing they are different to other children, when they are not so different at all.
I had the honour of contributing to a book about integrated education in the North recently. It is called and is edited by author and journalist David Rice.
It is fascinating to me that just as we look set to carve up, reconfigure, our education system in the Republic, the North is looking to provide more integrated education for children, who 93% of the time, attend either a Catholic or a Protestant school.
The book is a must-read for anyone interested in equality of education.
My entry is a brief one detailing how, when teaching in a Catholic school in London, boys from the local Muslim school hurled bricks over our playground walls. My entry considers the damage caused by separating children.
The most affecting entries are those written by adults who were divided from the ‘other’ as children, namely children who grew up in Belfast, or in one particularly chilling chapter, in a Germany divided after the war.
Its author, Dr Beatrice Neufeldt, a Lutheran, recalls walking through a Catholic area to attend her school in Düsseldorf in the summer of 1970.
She relied on a Catholic friend called Wölfi to get her through safely.
The journey as she described it “normally took 20 minutes if we weren’t stopped by some of the gangs — groups of three to four Catholic children, circling us, hissing, or making comments. Sometimes Wölfi would run into them from a distance with a roar and his stout tall body and the noisily bouncing knapsack on his back made them scatter.
"Whenever we reached the square across from the school, we had to wait at the zebra crossing and, if the Catholic and Lutheran children stood together, a wild ruffling and pushing into the back of the stiff leather school knapsacks would start.”
Is this what we’re aiming for now in reconfiguring our schools? Fear and distrust between children through segregation?
Should we start to carve up our workplaces in the same way?
Surely, if a Catholic child or an atheist child is a danger to our children, Catholic adults or atheist adults must also pose a threat to us adults?
It’s difficult not to end up feeling pretty despairing of the lot of us.
We must stop obsessing about patronage and come up with practical solutions to allow children of all backgrounds and faiths to sit together, play together, and learn together — in an atmosphere of mutual respect.
We do not need to reconfigure schools; we need to reconfigure how we think about education, and how we think about children.
Because I’d really like local children in my area to know my children’s names.
It’s very simple — embarrassingly simple really. We might still run lessons in faith formation during school in line with the patronage.
We must work to ensure that faith formation does not colour any other subject, and we must protect all children’s rights within all state schools.
Patronage doesn’t need to change. The limits of patronage need to shift.
This is not my opinion alone; it is a growing opinion among teachers of all faiths and none.
Teacher Paddy Monaghan questioned the time given to faith formation during school hours at the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) conference last week.
Delegates subsequently voted for the establishment of a union taskforce on the issue.
“I’m a supply teacher and again and again I am asked to take the other kids who aren’t going to make their confirmation, and the guilt that I feel standing in that room with those kids, many of them from a refugee background …
"I feel like I’m babysitting because they are segregated and othered. Think about how that must feel.
"Think about your own children. Because they are set aside, not just on the day but in the preparation.”
“Imagine it was blond-haired kids and we were having a celebration for blond-haired kids. How would your children feel not taking part in that.
"And don’t tell me it’s inclusive to bring these kids along, telling them they won’t be singing the songs and it’s not about them, but they can come along.
“Divestment is not the answer,” he continued. “Firstly, it is not happening. And secondly, who wants a segregated system? What is wrong with kids just going to school together?”
Indeed. What is wrong with children being educated together?
Incidentally, I also heard Norma Foley, the education minister, speak at the INTO congress and when asked how she wants to improve the system for children she said she wanted “every child to be able to go to their local school”.
It should be that simple.