Cathal Barry
Rolling out the proposed new curriculum on religion and beliefs in faith schools would be a “gross contradiction”, a leading educationalist has warned.
Prof. Eamonn Conway of Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, told The Irish Catholic that the proposed curriculum would amount to “schooling pupils, at best, in an agnostic understanding of their own religion”.
“To run it in a faith-based school would be a gross contradiction,” he insisted.
Prof. Conway was part of a team of experts that submitted to the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) a critique of the proposed Education about Religions and Beliefs (ERB) and Ethics curriculum.
The team included Dr Kerry Greer, Dr John Murray, Dr Rik Van Nieuwenhove, Dr Thomas Finegan and Anne Hession.
In their submission, the experts argued that the proposed new ERB component “is virtually certain to conflict with the characteristic spirit of faith-based schools and faith instruction taking place in such schools”.
They insisted it “endorses constructivist and pluralist epistemologies, which entail that there is no objective truth, or at least no way of knowing objective truth. Such an approach to truth is incompatible with the realist epistemology presupposed and endorsed by all Christian denominations”.
Critical thinking
“The NCCA assumes at the outset that its proposed curriculum is necessary to foster inclusivity, conscientious and critical thinking, and a sense of social justice.
“This completely overlooks the very great extent to which faith-based schools already achieve these aims,” they claimed, adding that the NCCA “does not acknowledge the problem that faith-based patrons and parents of faith may have with its proposed course in relation to its compatibility with the characteristic spirit of faith-based schools and on-going faith instruction taking place in these schools”.
“On the basis of our analysis we cannot recommend to the patrons of faith-based schools the introduction of this curriculum in any of the ways suggested by the NCCA,” they said.
Fr Conway told this newspaper he “hoped that the authorities within the NCCA will review the matter and realise to make this mandatory is simply unacceptable”.