The Schools Equality PACT

One area Im curious about is the whole teacher training area, does the state finance in anyway the cost of the religious aspect of this either by paying for lecturers, facilities etc.?

Michael Nugent wrote: »

The State pays for it in state-funded teacher training colleges, students pay for it in Hibernia online training college which is independent.


We did think of using Public (that was actually in the fist draft) but in Ireland patronage is the way the lack of public schools manifests itself.


A public schools system should be run by the State, or at a minimum should be run in accordance with rules set by the State that treat everybody equally.


Well, they don't need to be divested. The State already runs them. It just has to choose to run them in accordance with human rights principles.


It is there because it exposes the State's argument that the only obstacles to ending discrimination are the constitution obliging them to allow churches to discriminate, and the reluctance of the churches to divest. The State could lead by example in the schools that it runs directly.


There are nine of them. They were established during the 1800s to facilitate teacher training. The Minister for Education is the patron.

The Department of Education says of them: "Although originally established as non-denominational schools, in practice these schools have evolved to provide primary education within a Christian ethos."

.

thanks for your replies, i said divested as I didn't know what else to call it, seems the gov divested themselves of ethos control, so you want faith taught after school in those schools, i doubt those schools would e happy about it, particularly the COI ones

looking to see who is on the board of management of any of those model schools havn't found any list yet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14VGG-1ZjBcAGesmBTTVtc3gIosMQsz9M-SlmU0D-rvA/edit?usp=sharing

I believe the model schools all become denominational fairly early on. They were generally among the first (free, public) schools to be established in any district, and they were viable as multidenominational schools largely because there were no denominational alternatives available. Once denominational schools became available they were preferred by the majority of parents, and in time it became difficult to fulfil Stanley's orginal ambition of having clergy of different denominations supporting them; they all felt they should put their efforts into their "own" schools. So, basically, the multidenominational character of the model schools lapsed because there wasn't support for it from either parents or churches. This happened well before 1922.

Expectationlost, I think that, formally speaking, the boards of the model schools consist of one person - the Minister for Education.

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/four-ways-to-end-school-discrimination-against-atheists-and-minority-faiths-1.2331115

Good article by Michael Nugent in today's Irish Times.

It's great to see this issue getting a lot of media coverage lately, but I fear that's mainly because (a) it's political silly season with not a lot else happening (b) it's back-to-school time. There is a lot of unhappiness and upset and anger among non-catholic parents out there on this issue, I hope the pressure can be kept up (by the wider public, not just AI, ET etc.) and this is not allowed to slide off the media and political agenda in the run up to the next election.

recedite wrote: »

There is no doubt that the model schools were undermined by the clergy. However, I don't believe that they lacked support from parents. Most towns and townlands only had one national school. Are you suggesting that multi-denominational schools were abandoned by parents as soon as denominational schools opened nearby? . . .

Not as dramatic as that, no. But once parents had a choice between the model school and a school of their denomination they tended to prefer the latter (and no doubt in may cases were encouraged to do so by the clergy). So within a relatatively short time the bulk of enrolments in the model school would be from the parents who didn't have a convenient denominational alternative, and the model school would be default come to cater for the denomination(s) that weren't catered for (or were last to be catered for) by a denominational alternative.

recedite wrote: »

AFAIK parents only abandoned the schools after they were taken over by a single religious faction, because they wished to avoid the unwanted indoctrination.

The model schools always offered "indoctrination", and we have no reason to think that it was "unwanted" by any significant segment of the parents. The Board of Education saw it as essential if the schools were to secure acceptance, and as they were closer to the situation than we are I am inclined to think they were likely correct.

The situation in Ireland is sufficiently different, I think, that we can't translate the UK finding to Ireland. In Ireland we don't observe a parental preference for denominational over non-denominational schools for the obvious reason that there are no non-denominational schools. Do we observe a parental preference for denominational over multi-denominational schools, where parents have a choice? I'm not sure that we do. And, if we do, is it accounted for by the denominational schools outperforming, or being perceived to outperform, the multidenominational schools? I don't think so. Whatever the case for individual schools, I'm not aware of any evidence that either group tends to outperform the other, and I'm not aware of any popular perception to that effect either.

At the secondary level, there might be such a perception as between fee-paying vs. free schools. But that's a different issue, and I think unrelated or only coincidentally related to denomination.

The bottom line, I think, as far as national schools go is that any perceived preference for denominational patronage isn't satisfactily accounted for by pointing to an association between denominational patronage and academic performance, because I don't think there is any association, or any perception of one.

It wouldn't amaze me to discover that there is actually some research into this already in Ireland - parents being asked not only which school type they prefer, but why they prefer it. Any boardies know of any?

recedite wrote: »

I see what you are saying, but you have still not backed up this assertion that the parents had a choice in the matter.

All I meant was that, as long as there was only the model school, parents had no choice. But once the district also contained a "regular" national school, they had a choice - the model school, or the regular national school. And they mostly chose the regular school.

This may or may not have been because they preferred a school with a denominational character. Certainly they were encouraged by the clergy to choose the denominational school, but there could have been other factors at work. In a regular school, your child would be taught by a qualified teacher who was themselves a graduate of the model school. But in the model school, your child might be seen as a "guinea-pig", on which inexperienced student teachers (aged between 14 and 18) got to practice and hone there skills before being considered good enough to teach in a regular school. So, I don't know, that could have been a factor. The model schools didn't lose this character until the 1870s or 1880s, when teacher training was transferred to teacher training colleges.

recedite wrote: »

The model schools themselves were intended to be models for all the other schools in the National School system.

No. They were called model schools because they were intended to model teaching practice for the benefit of the student teachers.

recedite wrote: »

I think we have all seen these little one or two roomed schoolhouses dotted around the country. Many have since been turned into private houses. Others have since developed into large multi-building denominational primary schools. There was never a choice of different primary schools in these localities. There was one National School and that was it. Only in a very few areas did two schools exist near to each other (one CoI and one RC) and IMO that was a response afterwards to the breakdown of the multidenominational school system; not a reason for it.

Oh, sure, in country districts there might have been little choice (though in most parts of the country there was at least a choice between Catholic and Protestant schools. But any town that was large enough to have a model school - a town like Kilkenny, for example, or Athy, or Ballymena - would certainly have had other national schools, and they would have been denominational in character. So everyone who was in a position to choose a model school - everyone living in a town with a model school in it - would from pretty early on have had the alternative of a denominational school.

expectationlost wrote: »

even the one on the grounds of the dept of ed?

I don't know for sure, but my guess would be that that would have been one of the first to be "normalised", since the first teacher training colleges were established in Dublin.

I think that, right from the get-go, there was a tension between (a) the objective of having multidenominational schools, and (b) the requirement for local patronage. The only realistic prospects for local patrons were the churches, and they were used to, and in favour of, denominational schools. The other factor that I think had influence here was that in many areas the labouring/lower middle classes - the likely users of national schools - were overwhelmingly of one denomination, so even if the school was formally multidenominational, the school community was going to be nearly, and sometimes actually, 100% of one denomination.

The National School system started in 1831 - just two years after Catholic Emancipation, to put that in context. An awful lot of conservative Protestants would still have been suspicious of Catholicism, and would not have wanted their children educated in a formally multidenominational but overwhelming Catholic school, so they quite favoured the concentration of protestant pupils, where possible, in certain schools. Plus, there was an existing network of Church of Ireland schools which enjoy some government support; they weren't going to come into the National School system if if involved complete loss of their character. And, on the Catholic side, there was a profound suspicion of the government and its motives and its attitudes to Catholicism, so they needed reassurance too, if the system was to win any kind of popular acceptance.

So, to be honest, I think the prospects for true multidemoninationalism were never very good. And there's a view that Stanley, or some close to him, knew this very well. On this view the aspiration to multidenominationalism was spin for the benefit of Westminster politicians who were going to have to approve the scheme, and the funding for it, and who in many cases were anti-Catholic in varying degrees, and who had to be told what they wanted to be told to secure their assent to public funding of national schools.

Be that as it may, I've read that by the mid-nineteenth century - say, twenty years after the system was set up - less than 4% of the schools were multidenominational in practice. What usually happened fairly early on was that a school would become in practice overwhelmingly of one denomination, after which the clergy of other denominations would tend to withdraw from the board of management, either resigning or simply not participating. Because there was no formal change in the status of the school, we don't have hard figures on this. They were all formally multidenominational until, I think, the 1890s, though from the 1870s onwards there was a campaign to recognise the reality of the situation and introduce formal denominational patronage. I think it was formalised in the 1890s at about the same time as the introduction of compulsory education. The view was argued that you couldn't compel parents by law to send their children to a school to whose ethos or character they objected (or possibly to schools whose true ethos or character was concealed by a formal multidemoninationalism) . And of course by this time the Home Rule movement was in full swing, and British governments had to be very wary of being seen to impose on Ireland in matters of values or belief.

On edit: Finally, remember we're talking all-Ireland throughout this period. The sensibilities of Ulster Protestants, and the Protestant/Catholic tensions in Ulster, are a big political consideration.

recedite wrote: »

That was possibly the view among some, but if so it was the flawed thinking of the time. If the state was capable of putting a secular police barracks and a secular courthouse in every town, then it was capable of putting in a multi-denominational primary school.

From our perspective, of course, yes. But, remember, this was 1831. The Irish Constabulary was only nine years old, and there certainly was not a barracks in every town. There were perhaps two or three depots in each county; a few more, maybe, in large counties like Cork and Mayo, but certainly not more than half a dozen. Plus, the job of of the constabulary was the protection of property, which was something the ratepayers were prepared to pay for. The notion that it was the business of government to provide free education to the children of the labouring classes would have seemed like dangerous chartist nonsense to many. They didn't do that in England; why on earth would they even consider doing it in Ireland?

As for courthouses, there were again two or three in each county, and they were revenue centres - they were funded by fees paid by litigants, and they acted as tax collection centres.

We think of the capital contributions of local patrons as negligible and, today, they are. But back then they were a very significant part of the funding of the entire system. If the proposal had been for an entirely state-funded system, I doubt that it would have been implemented.

But the idea behind local patronage was not just financial; it was also seen as important in securing popular buy-in. They didn't want the new schools to be seen as government schools, and the choice of the name "national school" was intended to emphasise that these were schools not only provided to, but provided by, the entire community, not just the Dublin Castle administration. So even if the political will had been there to pay for a countrywide system of free government schools, that wasn't what they wanted.

recedite wrote: »

I disagree, for 2 reasons.
1. You are slipping into stereotypes here. Even leaving Ulster aside, in RC dominated rural areas of what is now RoI, the CoI population were mostly ordinary farmers, not gentry with their own private tutors teaching their kids at home. In Dublin they were typically in low level manufacturing, civil service or admin jobs. Also their overall % of the population was higher back then.

Well, there’s some truth here. But in fact the Protestant population was more urbanised than the Catholic population; Protestants were more likely to be craftsmen, small traders, urban workers and less likely to be farmers or farm labourers (and farm labourers were much more numerous than farmers). Protestants and Catholics weren’t uniformly distributed with the result that in many rural areas a randomly selected set of likely national school pupils would be 85% or 90% Catholic, or even more.

Urban areas were more mixed, but in urban areas people were more likely to have access to more than one school, so it was feasible for segregated patterns of attendance to develop. And they did develop.

recedite wrote: »

Another factor you ignore is "mixed marriages". Where did those kids go to school? In the case of the (more recent) notorious fethard boycott, they didn't go to school at all.

The rate of mixed marriages was extremely low, so I don’t know that the children of mixed marriages were sufficiently numerous to have much impact on the development of the national schools. Prior to the Ne Temere decree, which didn’t come in until 1908 and so is outside the period we are looking at here, I believe the convention was that boys were raised in their father’s tradition and girls in their mother’s. This, of course, required them to go to separate schools, if they were to attend the “approrpriate” denominational schools (if such were available). But this wasn’t a big deal, since there were separate boys; and girls’ schools; they would have been going to different schools in any case.

recedite wrote: »

That's the thing about a school community that is 100% of one denomination. It doesn't mean the entire local population is of one denomination. It means the minority population in that area are forced to conform, or send their kids to boarding schools if they have the money, or home-school/no-school them if they don't have the money.

Look, I agree. But if, in fact, the local community is substantially of one denomination (or ethnicity, or language, or any cultural marker) then you have to find a way to negotiate this. You can’t magically wave a wand and make the community homogenous for the convenience of the Department of Education.

The Stanley model looks attractive to our eyes, but it failed to work, largely because the people for whom it was intended - Catholic and Protestant - didn’t buy into it. The model that emerged instead was one of denominational schools (which suited the majority of both Catholics and Protestants) with some protected rights for people who couldn’t access a school of the “right” denomination.

That worked in the nineteenth century, or at least it worked sufficiently to make the system of national education viable and effective. But it’s not working now.

recedite wrote: »

2. Even if every single local family had genuinely been a devout devotee of just one religion, the Stanley type school was still suitable for them with its religious instruction on a separate day. While also being suitable for any other family that might wish to move into the area subsequently.

You, two hundred years later, may think it was suitable for them, but what matters is whether they, at the time, thought it was. And the evidence points to their mostly not thinking so.

recedite wrote: »

I think you would have to delve into the records of each individual national school to find this out, looking for the exact meeting at which a row broke out among the BOM/committee managing the school. I suspect in most cases you would find that the majority or controlling religion had stepped too far in imposing its version of indoctrination outside the allotted time on a separate day, and the representative of the minority religion then withdrew in protest.
So this amounts to a failure by the British govt. to regulate and govern the system. Perhaps they made the decision, "well if the people want segregated education, let them have it". But whatever the reasons, the results of that failure to develop the multidenominational education system were probably catastrophic to the future welfare of the whole island.

It would be a fascinating exercise, but I doubt the individual school records survive. All we can do is speculate.

But, for what it’s worth, my speculations are quite different from yours. My speculation is that the majority and minority religious representatives were both quite happy to see the schools denominationalised. Catholics, Anglicans and Protestants all favoured denominational schools, and if the one school in a district became characteristically Catholic (or Protestant), well, that increased the political case for the establishment of a second school. And if there were already two or more schools within reach of one another, everything was ready for a neat denominational carve-up with the tacit or explicit agreement of the clergymen concerned.

As for whether this was “catastrophic to the future welfare of the whole island”, that’s another historical what-if. In general cultural minorities do badly under a homogenised system, for obvious reasons, so I don’t think we can assume that this would have increased the security and sense of well-being of the Protestant minority, and made them less likely to oppose the dominant nationalism.

On edit: I think my views on this general question are coloured by the fact that the proposed multidenominational model never really took off; we didn't have a multidenominational system which later became demoninational; we had a proposed multidenominational system which developed, almost from the outset, as a denominational system. Within the first 20 years the system was 96% denominational, and that points to most schools in the system never having been anything other than denominational schools. That's a pretty comprehensive rout of a multidenominational model which enjoyed official support.

You can account for this by a sinister conspiracy theory in which small but powerful elites get their way in the teeth of popular will and popular interest, but in general I am sceptical of conspiracy theories and prefer theories pointing to organic development. I suggest that the system developing the way it did, despite the intentions of the founders, points to the founders' intentions in this regard having been unrealistic, and not taking sufficient account of the environment in which the schools were to operate. Do we know of any case at all where a majority of parents chose a multidenominational school over denominational alternatives? Even today, we observe the demand for multidemoninational education, while significant, is still a minority demand; my assumption is that that would have been a much smaller minority two hundred years ago.

So, basically, I think the national schools evolved as denominational schools because denominational schools were better adapted to survive and thrive in the social and cultural environment of the time. Educational Darwinism?