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Post by guillaume on Apr 4, 2011 7:55:26 GMT
Source : indepedant.ie
Religion 'a waste' of class time Education Minister wants pupils reading instead of preparing for sacraments
By Katherine Donnelly
Saturday April 02 2011
EDUCATION Minister Ruairi Quinn would prefer schools spent time improving reading and maths skills rather than preparing pupils for sacraments such as First Communion and Confirmation.
The minister said the faith formation carried out during the day took up time that could be used in other ways.
He referred to a severe decline in performance by Irish 15-year-olds in the international OECD/PISA league table on literacy published last year, dropping from 5th to 17th place. Maths also dipped.
Primary pupils spend 30 minutes a day on religion, which in Catholic schools includes preparation for the sacraments.
Other schools, such as the multi-denominational Educate Together sector, also spend 30 minutes daily on ethical issues, but it does not include formal religious instruction.
Mr Quinn said while no person should enter the world without clear knowledge and understanding of the history of religions, faith formation was a different thing.
"It takes up a lot of time, some people suggest it might be done by parents or parish, perhaps within the school building but outside school teaching hours.
"Quite frankly, we have overloaded the curriculum," Mr Quinn said while attending the annual conference of the Association of Community and Comprehensive Schools (ACCS).
But, he added, he wanted to maximise the potential for the system to educate children.
Mr Quinn was speaking in the context of the forum he has set up to decide on the transfer of some of the 92pc of Catholic primary schools to other patron bodies.
Rights
Schools may be handed over to existing patron bodies, such as Educate Together, or, in some cases, new arrangements could be put in place.
The Catholic bishops state that any new arrangements must respect the rights of parents, in particular in relation to the religious instruction of children, within the curriculum.
Mr Quinn said he respected the autonomy of the different school patron bodies, and their commitment to education.
"This is a dialogue, but Ireland has changed", he said.
Mr Quinn's stark message to the ACCS was that "we have to do more with less". ACCS general secretary Ciaran Flynn said while they did not like the minister's message, they applauded his honesty.
Meanwhile, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork Dr Paul Colton told the conference that their schools were facing a threat to their survival because of the raft of education cuts.
Dr Colton said there was a lot of apprehension about the impact of measures, such as the value-for-money review of small schools and changes in entitlement to school transport, on the Protestant sector.
Many Protestant schools, particularly at primary level, are small, rural-based and widely dispersed and, as a minority sector, it has enjoyed special protection from the State.
- Katherine Donnelly
Irish Independent
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 4, 2011 9:56:08 GMT
I notice the story says he is talking about "the transfer of 92% of Catholic primary schools to other patron bodies". I thought the transfer was supposed to be something more like 40% - or is that secondary schools? I also notice Quinn's view is that students should be taught about the history of religions but faith formation should be off the curriculum. As the British experience has shown (cf Peter Hitchens' writings) that sort of "teaching comparative religions" approach encourages unbelief because it takes it for granted that religions are best viewed from outside with condescension. The really worrying prospect is that Quinn will change the national curriculum so as to make this approach (comparative religion in school time, faith formation excluded from the curriculum) mandatory whether or not the school remains under church patronage. The other problem is that it assumes that religious teaching is an additional subject which can be taken or left. The whole point of a Catholic school is supposed to be that Catholicism permeates the whole curriculum and is the lens through which all of life is seen. Obviously this does not mean that there is a distinctively Catholic mathematics, let us say, or that Catholic historians should whitewash Churchmen and Catholic figures while demonising their non-Catholic rivals, and of course it should not mean that such falsehoods as young-earth creationism are passed off as truth - but neither should it mean that students are left with the impression that science definitively establishes the naturalist/materialist view of reality. The Church has to some extent let itself in for this by going along with the view that education is a neutral service which can (or indeed should) under normal circumstances be left tot he state, and that Church provision of schools was only a stop-gap when state provision was not available. Catholic education is intensely important, and assuming that it can be safely left to the state alone is a sure way to have it secularised.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 4, 2011 10:47:57 GMT
Gerard Murphy has a very good article related to this on p.4 of the current ALIVE! (April 2011 issue). He begins by noting how the GALWAY TRIBUNE recently published a photo of a group of girls from a well-known Galway convent school standing round a statue of St Thomas Aquinas "welcoming to the school Senator David Norris, who was to speak to them about 'homophobia'". He points out that the school authorities must be aware of Senator Norris's long record of promoting active homosexual behaviour. "Given how difficult it is to communicate Catholic sexual teaching in today's culture of despair, we may wonder about the approach taken by the Galway convent school. But this incident points to a much bigger problem - that many schools bearing the name "Catholic" no longer even know how to be Catholic. And it doesn't help matters when the focus is put on the school's "ethos", a vague notion that can mean virtually anything, instead of stressing the school's role in the mission of the Church. [This is a very important point - I remember seeing reviews of a couple of recent novels satirising well-known Irish Catholic secondary schools in which the reviewers noted the author saying that the Catholic ethos in practice boiled down to middle-class manners and worldly ambition with a superifical Catholic veneer. - HIB] The schools "go with the flow" of society instead of adopting the radically counter-cultural stance required by Catholics today, and not just in the area of sexuality. In doing so the schools betray their own mission, their responsibility to parents and, above all, the students entrusted to their care, depriving them of the joy that comes from a full and informed commitment to Jesus. But this takes us to an even bigger issue - the huge, ongoing failure of the irish Church to provide for the intellectuala nd religious formation of her members. again and again we are told int he gospels that "Jesus taught the people". Irish Catholics, however, are, to an alarming extent, starved of doctrinal nourishment for their own personal faith adn for their own role in the Church's mission. Can we be surprised then, that so many, ignorant of the faith, see no point in it and are turning away from it? Even at Sunday Mass, too often, people are given trite, half-baked homilies that are no help whatever to them in responding to the challenges to faith that they encounter. In recent times several Catholic magazines ahve ceased publication. Many churches no longer sell Catholic booklets. Apologetics is ignored. The laity are rarely encouraged to read the lives of the saints. So, just how do we think they will grow in understanding of their faith? That they will be able to recgnise and resist the false ideas of our time?" Mr Murphy concludes by calling each of us to take responsibility for personal renewal first and then for the renewal of others. This is spot on the button. Get the current ALIVE and read the whole thing. Mr Quinn would not be in a position to drive faith formation out of schools if the Church authorities had not neglected it themselves for so long. Here are a couple of relevant texts: (Matt 5:13) You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled by men.
For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? So also you, unless you utter by the tongue speech that is clear, how will it be known what is spoken? For you will be speaking into the air. (1 Corinthians 14: 8-9)
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Post by loughcrew on Apr 4, 2011 11:03:53 GMT
Comrade Minister Ho Chi Quinn is determined to break the link between the Catholic church and the education of our children, this is is 'big idea' and if there is no one in Fine Gael willing to stand up to him on this issue then it will not go down well with the supporters of that party. It is a vanity project of the consumate champagne socialist.
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Post by caroline on Apr 4, 2011 12:12:46 GMT
I do not like what Ruairi Quinn is trying to do, but unfortunately I have to agree with him on something. Religion "can" be a waste of class time. Much of what passes for religious instruction in our Catholic schools today is rubbish, and therefore a waste of time. And we can not blame him for that!
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Post by guillaume on Apr 5, 2011 5:56:24 GMT
I do not like what Ruairi Quinn is trying to do, but unfortunately I have to agree with him on something. Religion "can" be a waste of class time. Much of what passes for religious instruction in our Catholic schools today is rubbish, and therefore a waste of time. And we can not blame him for that! That's make sense. ;D But I don't think the minister has that in mind... ;D And Welcome to the forum Caroline.
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Post by assisi on Apr 5, 2011 20:38:27 GMT
If he thinks that the 30 minutes 'wasted' on religion is a lot then he may be in for a shock.
My kids went to an 'integrated' primary school in the North (mixture of Catholic and Protestant).
Now I was amazed at the number of other types of events that the kids had to train for and attend - these included 'Harvest Service' and 'Multicultural night'.
Now there is nothing inherently wrong with the above but they are examples of events in a school with a Christian ethos. What would happen in a non-Christian school?
I am pretty sure that any time gained by dropping religion will be used up in a variety of 'stocking filler' type events which in themselves may have their own 'soft' political agenda or direction.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 6, 2011 11:45:19 GMT
No doubt the school authorities would say these are not "wasted" as they promote cultural understanding. It all biols down to the question of what is the purpose of education. Catholic education is supposed to see spiritual formation and intellectual development as inseparable; Quinn's approach ostensibly assumes an utilitarian model in which education is all about transmitting specific skills and questions of ultimate purpose are confined to the private sphere (in practice they will be taught under the guise of social studies, with secularism taken for granted). Caroline is right - many/most Catholic schools have no real sense of the aspect of religious education which involves transmitting a body of knowledge, so RE classes have very vague content (or develop along the lines of comparative religious studies). I remember when I was in secondary school in the early 80s RE was seen as a "doss" class with very vague content, and that was in a school run by a religious order with a clerical headmaster and a couple of Order members still on the staff (though teaching subjects other than RE).
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 4, 2012 16:11:18 GMT
This week I noticed the education page of the Irish Times reproduced a number of messages from bulletin boards in which posters claiming to be teachers complained about having to pretend t be religious believers and train in RE in teaching college. At least two of these posters specifically referred to the ALIVE-O programme, subject of much trad criticism, as "mind-numbing". I also recently noticed Cato, one of the regular atheist posters on Politics.ie, remarking that one of his children was taught ALIVE-O at school and remarking that it had very little intellectual content and seemed almost NEw Age in its content.
[Sorry I do not have exact references for these as I did not note them at the time.]
This is the fruit of the "facilitator" and content-free approach to catechesis. We now have atheists citing its intellectual vacuity as "proof" that Catholicism lacks intellectual credibility, when in fact this is only true of this particular anti-intellectual approach to religious education, which is based on the view that children should not be "stretched" by teaching them doctrines which they are not ready to fully understand (so when is anyone to be taught the doctrine of the Trinity?) and that children should be left to pick up the Faith by osmosis from parents and "community" at a time when communities are more fluid and fragmented, parents busier and more remote, and society as a whole more secularised, than ever before.
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Post by Beinidict Ó Niaidh on Mar 5, 2012 15:36:44 GMT
Any chance this will register with either the Catechetical establishment or the bishops?
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 6, 2012 21:46:20 GMT
Not a sausage. Too much emotional (and other) investment has gone into the view that the content-free approach is self-evident and to question it is like suggesting Galileo was wrong. (The fact that some of the people questioning it - we have had one or two on this board in the past - DO think Galileo is wrong doesn't help.) The facilitator approach is part of a wider malaise in educational theory, a view that to say the teacher knows more than the pupils leads to authoritarianism. This view is evaded in practice in most secular subjects, but the educational establishment fight tooth and nail to keep it from being questioned in theory. I suspect in RE we would also be told that to present children as "passive learners" who must take instruction from teacher or priest leads to deference, clericalism, authoritarianism, and abuse.
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Post by assisi on Mar 6, 2012 22:17:34 GMT
The top five secondary schools in NI, ranked by the % of students achieving 3 or more A levels at grades A to C are Catholic:
1. St Mary's Grammar, Magherafelt 2. St Colm's High School Draperstown 3. Lumen Christi, Derry 4. Our Lady's Grammar School, Newry 5. St Dominics High School, Belfast
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 13, 2012 10:52:59 GMT
Caroline McCamley's blog has a devastating analysis of the report of the Forum on Patronage and pluralism. Here's a sample: EXTRACT The section looking at other jurisdictions is actually quite interesting. It includes Denmark, Finland, Germany (Federal State), Northern Ireland, Scotland, Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Of course none of those countries is majority Catholic, and one would think that they might have specifically chosen some of the most liberal countries in Europe to compare us with. Despite this, religion features strongly in most of the schools. In an appendix we get the Toledo Guiding Principles on teaching about religions and beliefs. These are pushed earlier in the text by Atheist Ireland. And who was the driving force behind them? The then Spanish socialist government which chaired the OSCE back in 2007. END She might add that the Spanish Church strongly opposed the Toledo Principles and complained that they appeared to be deliberately designed to promote secularism at the expense of religious belief. As Caroline notes, our bishops have not cottoned on to this at all and are busily praising suggestions which will produce the same result. www.mccamley.org/blog/report-of-the-advisory-group-of-the-forum-on-patronage-and-pluralism-in-the-primary-sector
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Post by shane on Apr 13, 2012 17:47:03 GMT
hibernicus, one quibble: that is the blog of Christopher McCamley, Caroline's husband.
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Post by hibernicus on May 2, 2012 1:05:29 GMT
Here we see a writer on a US conservative magazine discussing a "teach-in" held by the Occupy movement in New York. Whatever you think of the Occupy movement and its right-wing opponents, the sort of educational theory it is described as advocating here is merely the reductio ad absurdum of views widely held in education schools and particularly widely-implemented in RE (because it would encounter much more resistance in subjects where parents see their children's livelihood at stake): www.nationalreview.com/corner/297417/occupys-free-university-charles-c-w-cookeEXTRACTS I have just returned from the May Day festivities in Madison Square Park, having attended a tediously earnest “Free University” class on “Horizontal Pedagogy,” and am struck by something that hadn’t really occurred to me the last time I wandered into an Occupy franchise — namely that the OWS brigade does not just wish to have others pay for their education, but wishes in parallel to establish a system of higher learning that essentially reduces teaching to therapy... I am not sure quite what I expected. Perhaps I’d anticipated hearing stories about brilliant poor children who cannot go to the universities of their choice, or being told that America was falling behind in the world because student debt was crippling its finest minds, or maybe hearing older graduates describe the parlous state of their finances in this horrible recession. Instead, those who took part in the conversation at the same time as I did seemed hooked on a single, bizarre question, best distilled as, “Is the fact that some people possess differing levels of knowledge from others an unacceptable symptom of inequality?” This was not, as I initially assumed, a means of arguing that the educated are effectively disenfranchised, but instead the overture to an asinine debate about whether the very act of one man imparting knowledge to another is sufficiently hierarchical to be undesirable. One man even described the “traditional” means of conveying information to another as “intellectual violence.” His audience lapped it up; the consensus being that education would work better if we just shared our experiences with one another and valued each contribution equally. A woman who claimed to be a “radical teacher” added that each person should be free to absorb the facts that best fit his “narrative” without outside interference. This approach, it need not be affirmed, is the path not only to the establishment of 2 + 2 = 5 as a “truth” that stands on equal footing to 2 + 2 = 4, but to the labeling of anyone who has the temerity to disagree as a bigot. To her immense credit, one girl — a student in her early twenties — kept pushing back at this idea. “I want to go to college to learn things,” she said. “I want to be taught by people who know more than me. That’s the point!” But she was alone, at least among the vocal. “Who are you to decide who knows more than someone else? Who are you to decide what is right and wrong?” came the replies. Well, she answered, “I’m a physics major. My teacher does know more than me.” At this there was a moment of welcome silence — and then she blanched at all the attention her apostasy was inviting and asked the mediator to change the topic, which he did. The rebellion having been crushed in the name of “open dialogue,” a second theme reared its head ... END OF EXTRACT
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