Religion in junior infants

_Kaiser_

Deleted User wrote: »

I learned Irish at school, and I wanted my son to do likewise. Why should one of my languages be dropped - from the country in which it evolved and the only country in which it is spoken by native speakers - just because of your prejudice against it?

What next? If you decide you don't like Maths, does that mean it has to go as well?

Only getting back to this thread today so apologies for the delay..

I've no intention of derailing the topic into a drawn out discussion of the merits or otherwise of Irish (there's one in AH though if interested) but the reality is that there are finite resources and time available in a classroom and spending it learning a language that most end up hating and never using beyond the LC at the expense of other far more valuable subjects (like Maths for example) to satisfy a small but vocal minority of people who feel it's their "heritage" is a misuse of that time IMO. This is even more unjustifiable given the increasingly diverse makeup of our classes, who have zero connection to the language.

After all, is not the aim to give the child the best chance in their lives after the LC/College? Forcing them to sit through hours per week of lessons on a effectively dead language just to satisfy some parents sense of "patriotism" is doing them a disservice in a country that depends on foreign investment for employment opportunities - and having worked for some of the big IT players myself, I can't say I've ever been asked about my Irish skills. I even worked in a public sector role for a while and it never came up there either.

As I said previously, if you want your child to learn Irish then please work away - teach them yourself or send them to a Gaeltact/Gaelschoil, but it needs to be dropped as a mandatory subject in schools in favour of subjects that will actually benefit the students and give them a fighting chance at the jobs they'll be competing for at the end of it.

pwurple

Kaiser, I expect slightly more from schools than to be factories pumping out good little workers.

I want a fully rounded education for my children. Which includes languages, social development, arts, history and sciences. Irish and religion are not popular, but to my mind they are both essential study topics for a rounded education. I'd like to add another few rather than stripping away at the remaining core subjects we have. It's a shame Latin isn't on the core curriculum. it is massively useful for sciences, history and European language.

_Kaiser_

pwurple wrote: »

Kaiser, I expect slightly more from schools than to be factories pumping out good little workers.

I want a fully rounded education for my children. Which includes languages, social development, arts, history and sciences. Irish and religion are not popular, but to my mind they are both essential study topics for a rounded education. I'd like to add another few rather than stripping away at the remaining core subjects we have. It's a shame Latin isn't on the core curriculum. it is massively useful for sciences, history and European language.

I'll agree that knowledge of religions and the customs/cultures of others is an important topic, but that's very different to the indoctrination that goes on in many schools and presenting of religious dogma as (historical) fact and that I do have a big issue with.

There'd be no harm in having Latin as an option but certainly not a core subject. Things like maths, English and a current/mainstream European language, general science, civics (or whatever it's called now ), history (although I wasn't a fan of Irish history myself - European and world history was far more interesting to me), and technology subjects should be given a lot more priority than cultural legacies that are increasingly less relevant in our society

Again, I'm not saying that people shouldn't teach their kids Irish if they want or instruct them in whatever religious beliefs they subscribe to.. but in a general state school these subjects should not still be holding the positions they do.

pwurple

_Kaiser_ wrote: »

Again, I'm not saying that people shouldn't teach their kids Irish if they want or instruct them in whatever religious beliefs they subscribe to.. but in a general state school these subjects should not still be holding the positions they do.

I don't think my Irish is good enough to be able to teach it, and I certainly don't think someone of non-Irish parents would be in that position either. Integration into communities is important, rather than segregation where we all go off and learn things separately. Our language is part of that.

People seem to be aspiring to the UK system, which in my experience is fairly grim (or the U.S. System, which is even worse). I have family in the UK, as I'm sure loads of us do. From their experience, they get assigned a school based on their address. No choice at all. And if that school has a dismal reputation , tough luck. They took on some financial pressure, and moved house to try to get to a better school district, as loads of people have to do over there.

There are a host of advantages to religious methodologies of teaching. There's that old story about the Mother Superiour asking the novices why they pray when the bell rings in the morning. The novices say something pious like "to honour God first thing in the morning", but the answer she gives them is "no, it's because the bell rings". Routine, structure, repetition has such advantages for academic instruction and learning. Take the example of Mendel. Augustine monk. Published writings on examining successive generations of pea plants identifying dominant and recessive traits. Aka, founder of genetics. There are heaps of similar examples. Christian acceptance of Greek science led wide scale investigations of our natural surroundings during the late Middle Ages, and retained and protected that knowledge in libraries. Roger Bacon, a Franciscan friar, is seen as the person who brought the scientific method to the forefront. Make observations -> question them -> form hypotheses -> Develop tests -> gather data, etc etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Bacon

No educational system suits all. The bottom line is that buying all the schools off the religious communities would cost an arm and a leg. And I'm not in favour of setting up some system where the govt can just take random property off anyone they want. The alternative is that we spend our taxpayer money on quality teachers, keeping university costs low, investing in technology... And take every advantage that the current organisational setup gives us, while working to minimise the disadvantages.