Ruairi Quinn on Beyond Belief tonight

UDP

Apparently he is on Beyond Belief on RTE tonight to discuss "Should Religion be taken out of Irish classrooms?". Its on pretty late at 11:20pm.

pauldla

Sans RTE in this part of the world (more than made up for by having China Central Television, which is like a really big RTE full of Chinese people). What did he come out with...?

ShooterSF

Am I the only one who on reading the thread title thought of that show with William Ryker in it?

MrGeneric

pauldla wrote: »

Sans RTE in this part of the world (more than made up for by having China Central Television, which is like a really big RTE full of Chinese people). What did he come out with...?

I didn't watch it, but hopefully you can access it online here: http://www.rte.ie/tvplayer/ie/search/?q=beyond%20belief

pauldla

MrGeneric wrote: »

I didn't watch it, but hopefully you can access it online here: http://www.rte.ie/tvplayer/ie/search/?q=beyond%20belief

The RTE player is hit-and-miss over here, but that episode seems to be coming across fine. Mercy buckets!

expectationlost

treasa lowe community national school, faith central to child

expectationlost

so both ET and CNS spending a hell of lot of time trying to cover all the religions under the sun as if supernaturalism is not just plain wierd.

expectationlost

Quinn: religion is fundamental to who we are

eyescreamcone

Everybody trying to be nice to the priest. The priest wasn't offering any concessions himself.

Nobody brave enough to say that religious instruction is not an academic subject and therefore has no place in public schools.

Dades

Wasting of fu*king time then, excuse my French.

Corkfeen

Dades wrote: »

Wasting of fu*king time then, excuse my French.

Indeed it is, we get a discussion on it every few weeks. But the odds of them doing anything about it are low. It took over twenty years for the children's referendum and abortion is still getting feck all legislation. In 2040, they're still likely to be having same conversation. :mad:

Peregrinus

eyescreamcone wrote: »

Nobody brave enough to say that religious instruction is not an academic subject and therefore has no place in public schools.

I think you probably should be open to the possibility that no-one on the programme would have agreed with that proposition.

magicbastarder

expectationlost wrote: »

Quinn: religion is fundamental to who we are

it's a sufficiently vague statement to be vaguely justifiable.

Corkfeen

Peregrinus wrote: »

eyescreamcone wrote: »

Nobody brave enough to say that religious instruction is not an academic subject and therefore has no place in public schools.

I think you probably should be open to the possibility that no-one on the programme would have agreed with that proposition.

Theology is academic but religious education in primary schools is not. They're teaching a specific religion as fact.

Michael Nugent

eyescreamcone wrote: »

Everybody trying to be nice to the priest. The priest wasn't offering any concessions himself.

Nobody brave enough to say that religious instruction is not an academic subject and therefore has no place in public schools.

In fairness to the producer of this show, he invited Jane Donnelly to take part, but she could not do so as it was prerecorded while we were in Warsaw for the OSCE human rights meeting.

I haven't had time to look at the show yet, so I can't really comment on what was said on it.

joseph brand

Fr Michael Drumm: "There's nothing as alive as a school." 38:15

Mind-blowing stuff.

More of a friendly chat than heated discussion. Needed an injection of Hitchens.

I think they were all afraid of d'local bishop.

Nodin

expectationlost wrote: »

Quinn: religion is fundamental to who we are

Much like when commented that "nobody" wanted to bankrupt the religous orders, I have to say "speak for your fucking self Ruari".

Solair

It was interesting to hear the principal of Welsey College in Dublin on this morning on RTE Radio 1 arguing the case for the continuation of funding for private schools on the basis that that it protected people from minority religions' right to education in their own faith environment.

I can understand his point, given that there are almost no alternatives in most areas of the country other than religious educational institutions and the vast majority of them are Roman Catholic.

However, it just shows how nutty our system is that we have a situation where people from minority religions cannot get access to a proper public school system and that the result of this is the state is spending tens of millions of Euro per year on subsidies for "private" schooling to ensure 'choice' of schools.

How much money would we save, and how much better would the education system be if we had a genuine, secular public school system that was accessible to everyone ?

All this duplication and triplication driven by religious ownership of schools, discrimination based on gender and also on social class (via a requirement for small top-up fees to exclude people) is absolutely crazy.

Nobody seems to be prepared to challenge the fact that it is absolutely nuts and a complete waste of money.

Even without the pro/anti religion teaching arguments, the simple fact of the matter is that the current "system" provides terrible value for money.

I think there's a massive, practical, economic argument for removing religion from classrooms and removing segregation especially the single-gender schools! It's nuts that we just continue on with these daft systems without any analysis or comparison against school systems in other countries.

How come almost no other developed countries have single-sex schools? (Ok the UK does on a smaller scale, but that's equally nuts and comes from the same inability to challenge notions derived from utterly obsolete 19th century educational philosophies).

Let's not forget that the reason that we have single-sex schools is largely down to the fact that girls were given substandard education in the past and were not expected to go to university (as they weren't allowed in!). So, boys and girls were educated separately because they were 'different'. The standard of education in girls schools has improved and is en par with boys schools now, but the logic of keeping them separate is just mind-bogglingly backwards and weird.

If someone suggested gender segregation at 3rd level they would be laughed out of town nowadays, yet it still persists and is accepted at 2nd and primary level.

All we're doing is massively increasing staffing costs (principals salaries for every school) and increasing building maintenance costs, reducing funds for facilities and depriving kids of subject choices and access to facilities - sports, science, IT, library services, educational psychological support, etc etc. For the state and for parents it also increases transportation costs as kids have to be ferried to umpteen different schools.

Yet, for some utterly inexplicable reason, we seem to be completely incapable of thinking beyond this backwards, ridiculous, socially divisive, sectarian, sexist, waste-of-money, anachronism of an education system.

To me, the Irish primary and secondary education system has always seemed to be utterly fixated on : religion, uniforms, making sure boys and girls didn't mix, knocking creativity out of people i.e. disciplinarian approaches and rote learning exam systems and teaching Irish. Sport in Irish schools usually means an obcession with a single sport i.e. GAA or Rugby - if you don't like that, you can sit and get fat and be considered a weirdo. The rest of the educational experience seems utterly secondary to those core objectives.

Our system has huge flaws, but it looks at itself through some kind of magic sunglasses that cause it to be utterly self-congratulatory too. It needs to compare itself with more progressive systems and start to learn from them!

I also think that because most of us have been brought up in that education system (including most of our journalists) we cannot see that there are alternatives to it, so there is no constructive criticism.

Apologies for the long post, but I think the religious education aspect of our school system is only one of a huge number of issues that need to be looked at. It's just not fit for purpose at all.

CerebralCortex

joseph brand wrote: »

Fr Michael Drumm: "There's nothing as alive as a school." 38:15

Mind-blowing stuff.

More of a friendly chat than heated discussion. Needed an injection of Hitchens.

I think they were all afraid of d'local bishop.

Very soft edged stuff.

Solair

I'd be fun to have the bishop on with some coldly logical secular economists and accountants doing a value for money and cost : benefit analysis of the current system.

magicbastarder

Solair wrote: »

It was interesting to hear the principal of Welsey College in Dublin on this morning on RTE Radio 1 arguing the case for the continuation of funding for private schools on the basis that that it protected people from minority religions' right to education in their own faith environment.

I can understand his point, given that there are almost no alternatives in most areas of the country other than religious educational institutions and the vast majority of them are Roman Catholic.

they're talking about secondary schools, generally, and i understood the state secondary school system was not linked to religious orders?

Solair

magicbastarder wrote: »

they're talking about secondary schools, generally, and i understood the state secondary school system was not linked to religious orders?

*ALL* secondary schools in Ireland, other than a few private grind schools are religious.

An Educate Together school is only coming on stream now.

There is no such thing as a 'state secondary school' system in Ireland. It simply does not exist at all. We have privately run state-funded schools, over 99% of which are religious.

Even the VEC schools are religious.

expectationlost

Solair wrote: »

*ALL* secondary schools in Ireland, other than a few private grind schools are religious.

An Educate Together school is only coming on stream now.

There is no such thing as a 'state secondary school' system in Ireland. It simply does not exist at all. We have privately run state-funded schools, over 99% of which are religious.

Even the VEC schools are religious.

and the new so called community schools look to be even more religions if yerone is anything to go by

most of so called public schools are private too.

smokingman

Tonight's show is on gay marriage....getting my popcorn for this one

Solair

expectationlost wrote: »

and the new so called community schools look to be even more religions if yerone is anything to go by

most of so public schools are private too.

It's quite an odd system in most respects. The state picks up the bill for most of it and is the employer of the teachers, however, it outsources the 'management' to a private organisation (yet pays the principal).

So, you get all the headaches and expense of a public system, without any of the advantages in terms of economies of scale, inclusiveness etc.

Hotblack Desiato

You'd almost think we lived in a country with a constitution that prohibited the State from endowing a religion, and that guaranteed the right of parents to not have their kids religiously indoctrinated in State funded schools.

Insert 300 pixel wide :rolleyes: here

expectationlost

i was just listing out secondary schools, i thought they were some of the vecs (and a very few of the community schools) that didn't have the archbishop of dublin as patron but then i look them up and most have reference to either christianity, spirituality, a priest on the board or archbishop referenced, but then most dont say that the archbishop of dublin is a patron,

although archdiocese list most of schools of dublin http://education.dublindiocese.ie/schools-database/?task=az&type=pp (inlcuding some under the le cheile patron)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqAEiinGYynOdGlGSjdsc3dfNm1BeEd2c2ZLaGM4NkE

maybe the vec that also colleges of further education? I know most of the community schools you would say have co-patrons, but all the vecs too?