Greg DalyFaith-based education will be an “inevitable casualty” if the Government pushes ahead with a proposed new programme to teach about beliefs from a secular perspective, a leading expert on religious education has warned.
A consultation document for the proposed Education about Religions and Beliefs and Ethics programme suggests an agenda that “should be of the utmost concern to those involved in the provision of faith-based education”, according to Mary Immaculate College’s Dr Eugene Duffy.
He warned that the introduction of the programme in primary schools could prove “a recipe for confusion” and even lead to greater religious intolerance in Ireland.
The Limerick-based theologian believes that the course, intended to teach about religion and ethics from a secular perspective, would probably cause confusion by introducing children to the beliefs and practices of other faiths before they had a proper grounding in their own tradition.
Questioning the course’s presupposition that it is possible to teach about religions and ethics from a neutral position, he told The Irish Catholic that “parents, if they’re sending their children to a faith-based school, will have a genuine expectation that their children will be formed within their faith tradition, and that isn’t neutral ground.”
Effects
He cautioned too against the effects of introducing the new course into an already overcrowded school day, saying that “the existing religious education in faith-based schools would be an inevitable casualty”.
Other leading authorities on religious education echoed Fr Duffy’s concerns, with Anne Hession of St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, criticising how the course implicitly contradicts the whole idea of faith-based education.
“It would be unacceptable in a Catholic school for a secular ethical programme to be taught – that would undermine the religious freedom of Catholic children,” she told this newspaper. “It violates fundamental human rights – you’re talking about the religious freedom of religious parents to educate their children according to their own beliefs.”
Maeve Mahon, Primary RE Advisor in Kildare & Leighlin diocese, agreed, saying, “The principles underpinning this proposed curriculum are at odds with what we would teach in Catholic schools,” adding that “it’s very hard to see what area of ethics are not being taught already in a Catholic school that we could be asked to include in a curriculum about ethics, except something that would be fundamentally at odds with our ethos.”
