I Heart Internet wrote: » I suggest, in all seriousness, that you visit a couple of weekend masses (where you'll get a sermon) in the next month or so and listen to see what kind of message is being given. Also, talk to some parents with children in RCC run schools and ask them what message is being given to their children. Please come back and let us know what you heard. You MAY find some reason to be less unhappy about the current state of affairs.
lazygal wrote: » And I happen to know many teachers in the school who loath having to do indoctrination on the church's behalf, and get annoyed when their lesson plan for the day is disrupted because the parish priest calls in for an unannounced visit, or who resent having to exclude non catholic children from art and music in sacrament years.
Brian Shanahan wrote: » To illustrate, a non-religious child attending a religious state school gets 732 hours [...] of religious instruction from Junior Infants all the way up to 6th class. Bloody ridiculous.
robindch wrote: » 732 hours maps to ~150 five hour days, ~30 weeks, an uninterrupted seven months of uninterrupted five-hour days. And all to make innocent kids think that some nasty fairy tales are true. Quite apart from anything else, what a dreadful waste of imagination.
I Heart Internet wrote: » It is a tragic waste when these children could be better employed honing their practical skills to better toil in the gleaming call-centres and secular admin hubs of the future. Every day they waste on impractical, non-core subjects is a dent in our future productivity. If anything has turned these kids bad, though, it's all that free time spent playing......ugh.
bumper234 wrote: » Would rather my child did ANY of those jobs than become a priest!
eyescreamcone wrote: » When you said child you meant boy didn't you? Girls can be presidents or astronauts but they are only good enough to be the parish priest's housekeeper. And when I said housekeeper - I meant "housekeeper" ;-)
Brian Shanahan wrote: » I remember doing a week at the local National School a few years ago when I was thinking about going back and getting the H. Dip. [...]
robindch wrote: » Nobody cares what "occupies its thinking" most of the time. What pisses people off is that these are the public policy issues that it chooses to go to war with the rest of us over.
jank wrote: » Many can provide an answer to what their religion is and isn't but one is not interested in the answer, they just want to provoke a response and poke holes just for the fun of it and sake of it. At the end of the if you are an Atheist, who gives a crap?
Now, before you go off on the whole "school patronage" thing
I am surprise you that I agree that people should be offered choice and that religion in state schools should be taught after hours and only by the patents consent. I am very much in the separation of church and state on that one.
Sir, – I think Ruairí Quinn’s proposal to reduce and soon eliminate the teaching of religion in schools is brilliant! With absolutely no moral education, future generations of Irish jail inmates will be able to read and understand Ulysses, while simultaneously counting the number of years they will be “inside”. – Yours, etc, MARY O’MAHONY, Bawnard West, Midleton, Co Cork.
Sir, – With regard to Bill Bailey’s suggestion (January 28th) that increased religious education is some kind of panacea for the inherent dishonesty, corruption and general lack of integrity throughout the elite of the country, let us not forget that the Catholic Church had a moral monopoly in this State for much of the last century, a period during which our elites (including the Catholic church) hardly covered themselves in glory. It is also worth noting that, according to the world ranking on corruption perception in 2012, the least corrupt country out of 174 was Denmark, a country which emerged as the third least religious country out of 143 in a 2009 Gallup poll on the importance of religion (18 per cent of Danes said religion was important; 80.5 per cent said it was unimportant), while the most corrupt country was Somalia – the fifth most religious country in the 2009 poll (98.5 per cent of Somalis said religion was important; 1.5 per cent said it was unimportant). To contend that there is a correlation between religiosity and reduced dishonesty and corruption is not borne out by the evidence. – Yours, etc,
swampgas wrote: » Dare I ask what a "secular admin hub" might be - is this another name for "an office", by any chance?
I Heart Internet wrote: » (There's nothing at all wrong with working in a call centre btw, but structuring a childs education to promote only core/essential/necessary skills is missing the point of education.)
alaimacerc wrote: » I apologise for the sidetrack (though, I see IHI is posting in this thread, so there'll be a few of those regardless! -- will take it elsewhere or to PM if people would rather, though), but I'm curious as to protocol of such. Are schools generally able and willing to make use of volunteer labour/pre-qualication teaching assistant/whatever they're having themselves on that sort of basis? And wouldn't it make more sense to do so at a secondary, as that's the teaching the Dip is targetting as a qualification? Of course, it's no longer the HDipEd but the Masters of Something More Important Sounding, but I assume the same would apply regardless.
Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore said he believes the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in the Louise O'Keefe case changes the view, held in Ireland up to then, that the school patron was responsible for running certain schools and not the State. Speaking on RTÉ's This Week, Mr Gilmore said the implication of the ruling is that that relationship is likely to change. He said that he supports the review of the State's relationship to school patronage - initiated by Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn - and added that he believes the court judgment adds to the urgency of the matter. This week, the European Court ruled that the State was liable for abuse that Ms O'Keeffe suffered as a primary school pupil in 1973.
alaimacerc wrote: » The sad thing is that it takes European courts, the touchstone of all that's great for whipping up a ton of outrage in the tabloid press at short notice, to poke the Irish state into resolving a relationship that's blatantly a 19th century hangover of epic proportions. Should have been changed a long time ago!
lazygal wrote: » See also abortion law; decriminalization of homosexuality.
