Less defensible to divide by religion than by academic ability

Historians have often speculated that Northern Ireland’s history might have been less troubled had Stormont’s first Education Minister been able to realise his vision of an integrated education system. Under enormous pressure from Catholic and Protestant clerics, Lord Londonderry’s 1923 Education Act was amended beyond recognition. The Minister retired from politics here in disillusionment and an early opportunity to draw some of the sectarianism from society was lost.

Eamon McCann revisits those events in his Belfast Telegraph column and laments the lack of any current impetus towards integrated schooling in Northern Ireland. Whilst current Education Minister, Caitriona Ruane, deplores separating children using academic criteria, she is supportive of the religious division and indeed she actively encourages further partition of pupils along community lines by championing separate Irish language schools.

In truth the situation in education is merely one of the baleful consequences of political carve-up between Sinn Féin and its DUP ally. The two parties are content to horse trade their respective communities’ sectional interests and call the process government. Commitments to integrate housing as well as education, which were outlined in the Belfast Agreement, have now been forgotten. Indeed the Shared Future policy document was dropped in the early days of DUP/SF coalition.

It would certainly be wrong to force an integrated education system on children and parents. The argument which I advanced in a previous article (linked above) still stands:

Of course choice is important. Ultimately the responsibility for educating a child rests with its parents and it is the state’s job to enable them to discharge that responsibility by the best means possible. A ‘choice’ argument should not, however, be used to obfuscate half-hearted commitment to principles that integrated education in Northern Ireland is positive, welcome, needs to be encouraged and exerts a constructive influence on our society. After all, the integrated movement has been very much been driven by parental demand from its inception.

A report by the Integrated Education Fund has stressed the importance of persuading church leaders that integrated schooling is not inimical to religion and is overwhelmingly beneficial to children. From the IEF’s perspective, that is a laudable aim. Sustained and genuine commitment from the education minister and from politicians across the spectrum would add weight to its cause. A simple acknowledgment that integration and sharing is a best case scenario for Northern Ireland’s young people would be a start. Concrete encouragement for those schools which seek integrated status, and schools within both the controlled and voluntary sector that wish to cooperate with each other and share resources, must also be forthcoming.


Ironically the divide which serves no educational purpose is not the divide which most concerns Ruane.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Football fever in Russia

Russia Blog is getting excited about Euro 2008. Indeed it is drawing parallels between Guus Hiddink and Peter the Great in terms of successful Russo-Dutch exchanges of expertise. Meanwhile, in Moscow, fans have been taking to the streets in order to celebrate the national team’s achievements.
Read more

Stormont might not collapse but paramilitaries continue to disfigure Northern Ireland

Image
The devolved institutions in Northern Ireland are supposedly ‘teetering on the brink’ of collapse yet again.  After repeated failures to agree a balanced budget or implement welfare reform created months of uncertainty, the Executive’s future is now in doubt because the PSNI believes members of the IRA were involved in murdering a republican hit man.  Despite its apparent seriousness, this particular predicament is unlikely to bring the shaky edifice at Stormont crashing down. The IRA was supposed to have disbanded its military ‘structures’ and decommissioned its entire arsenal of weapons back in 2005.  It was on the basis of this understanding that power-sharing resumed in 2007 and the DUP entered government with Sinn Féin.  From the outset it was a fairly flimsy pretext.   Less than a year after John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general, oversaw decommissioning, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA retaine...
Read more

Walker loada rubbish

Former BBC employee Brian Walker has overrun Slugger O’Toole lately with countless poorly structured, poorly written posts. It is possible quickly to recognize and avoid these by subjecting each Slugger piece to a cursory inspection and identifying those which feature characteristic lack of paragraphing and a tenuous grasp on the technicalities of linking source articles. Although I generally evade Walker’s posts by this method, occasionally (and unfortunately) I have persevered and found that their content is as unrewarding as the style in which they are written. Today, for instance, I inflicted upon myself Brian’s thoughts on a mooted Fianna Fail / SDLP merger . In actual fact, he is right to welcome news that the Southern Irish party has dropped this proposal from its agenda; however, the logic by which he arrives at this conclusion is parochial nonsense. To summarise, Walker believes that pursuing realignment with larger parties, whether they are from the rest of the UK or fro...
Read more