Ruairi Quinn plans forum on removing Catholic Patronage

[paolovf]

Multi-denominational body Educate Together is to run five out of seven new primary schools that are due to open this September.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0306/schools.html

More planned for 2013!

[Dr Raskolnikov]

Multi-denominational body Educate Together is to run five out of seven new primary schools that are due to open this September.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0306/schools.html

More planned for 2013!

Woot!

Keep 'em coming!

[chemicals]

Great news

[mkaobrih]

Educate together is still not secular though. My 5 yr old loves baby jesus and wanted gray facepaint on her forehead a week or two ago. It is still a private body providing education that the state should be providing. Most of their "teaching about all religions and none" is still mainly teaching about the catholic religion.

[bipedalhumanoid]

I'm still not convinced that even teaching about religion should be mandatory or conducated at primary level. In my opinion it should be an elective secondary school subject along the lines of Ancient History, Economics and Geography.

I accept the argument that you need some understanding of religion to be able to understand various literature and history, but the same can be said of any of the above subjects and nobody seems to be trying to make a case for those to be mandatory subjects offered in every year of a child's school career.

[Tulip1]

I never got any religious education. We got a subject which was called society study (literally translated). Besides politics, economics, the structure of government and law it also covered some religion. The other bit about religion I got was in history classes.

Other than that it was optional to do religion classes which my parents found a waste of time and I studied something else instead.

But in Holland religion was considered something you do in your own time until the Islam made it a political issue again.

[paolovf]

I'm still not convinced that even teaching about religion should be mandatory or conducated at primary level. In my opinion it should be an elective secondary school subject along the lines of Ancient History, Economics and Geography.

I agree, I think it should be up to parents to sort out religious education for their child outside regular school hours, such as Sunday School or evening classes. If there was at least a way of this becoming the norm I think it would make things alot easier.

Having said that, I ultimately think that any sort of religious indoctrination at primary school level is wrong.

[Tulip1]

I'm still not convinced that even teaching about religion should be mandatory or conducated at primary level. In my opinion it should be an elective secondary school subject along the lines of Ancient History, Economics and Geography.

I agree, I think it should be up to parents to sort out religious education for their child outside regular school hours, such as Sunday School or evening classes. If there was at least a way of this becoming the norm I think it would make things alot easier.

Having said that, I ultimately think that any sort of religious indoctrination at primary school level is wrong.

+1 religion is something for churches and parents to sort out if they really want it, not by schools. Schools should teach facts not fiction

[Tulip1]

in the Times today:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/edu ... 46810.html

My first dose of reality was at the first meeting which the local priest started with a prayer. As I am not religious I did not join in. Afterwards I was taken aside and told I should join in. When I pointed out I was not a practising Catholic, I was told I should have declared this in advance to the bishop.

What became clear to me sadly over the years was that the board is no more than a rubber-stamp mechanism for the management decisions of the principal, priest and church-appointed chairman. There is no meaningful attempt to include the wider school community.

[Feardorcha]

Minister Quinn is to be congratulated on the patronage of the new schools.
As the number of non-sectarian schools increase, however, I fear that the Catholic rearguard are likely to strengthen their claim that existing schools are theirs.
We must keep up the pressure for the 'Catholic' State schools to be secularised.