May 26, 2011
Religion in Irish Schools
Our regular blogger Eoin Daly has published an op-ed in today’s Irish Times in which he responds to calls for increased religious “diversity” in Irish schools (such as that made by the IHRC on Tuesday). The full piece is here. Eoin writes:
Generally, suggestions of reform have been limited to readjustments within the logic and form of the patronage model, better tapering the ethos-mix, while stopping short of prescribing a universal model of non-denominational education, which might put religious freedom beyond the crude vagaries of the school recognition process.
The Irish Human Rights Commission launched a report this week with recommendations including: “The State should ensure that there is a diversity of provision of school type within educational catchment areas throughout the State which reflects the diversity of convictions now represented in the State.”
I acknowledge the limited statutory remit of the commission. However, its report falls short of suggesting the creation of a universal, common public school. It essentially suggests reforms within the logic and form of the patronage model.
On the other hand, Minister for Education Ruairí Quinn’s desire to see the church divest control of up to a half of primary schools to the State is radical and welcome.
This State can no more determine a common universal public school than the churches can. The sense that the State is present in its power to provide balance between competing material interests is a fiction, as our IMF/ECB induced ‘crisis’ clearly shows.
Eoin talks about religious freedom as if it is a product in a marketplace to be obtained. Freedoms are struggled for, contingent and fungible . I get the sense from Eoin’s argument that all the State has to do is flick a switch and universal public schooling and religious freedoms are activated. I am also going to assume he has reviewed the IRHC document published yesterday.
Eoin, I should clarify something. To argue for a ‘common public school’ it not necessarily to argue, as you suggest, for an education system in which the State itself imposes a hegemony of uniform values which effectively displace religious values. These are false alternatives. Neither is it to argue that schools must all be the same, or that they must ignore religion, or pretend that it doesn’t exist. Neither is it to argue that state education must be “values neutral” (memo to John Bruton, the Iona Insitute and their motley associates: there’s no need to harp on about how secular education can’t be “values neutral”. Nobody thinks it is. Nobody says it is)
Instead, it is simply to make the following, very modest, and mostly analytic claim:
1. We would both agree that it is the responsibility of the State to provide for free education, through schools of acceptable quality.
2. We would both also agree that it is for parents, not the State itself, to determine the set of beliefs in accordance with which their children are to be raised. We would agree that this applies to parents of all beliefs no matter what their number or influence or power. We would even agree to call this a “right”, meaning a moral claim that all of them enjoy equally.
3. This means, at the most basic level, that in the schools through which education is provided, there can be no arbitrary interference with the claim of parents to raise their children in accordance with their beliefs.
4. Based on (1) and (2), this seems to be where our views part. You seem to think that (2) is best served by the State discharging its responsibility under (1) by providing education through schools committed to specific belief systems. I disagree based on the necessary equality of the right we would broadly agree upon on (2). Only some parents’ religoius freedom will be secured by devolving public education to schools committed to a specific ethos, but the result, for others, will be that they must attend schools which are committed to imparting an alien and incompatible set of beliefs to their own. Surely, we can consensually qualify this as an “interference” under (3), even if we would disagree on the precise definition of what interference with this right constitutes. The basic observation surrounding the empircial and social impossibilty of providing schools specifically attuned to all possible beliefs then translates to a necessity of providing a ‘common’ school in which, at least potentially, the possibility of arbitrary interference in religious freedom – through the imposition of an alien ‘ethos’ contrary to parental sovereignty – is at least minimised (if, I admit, never eliminated completely). It doesn’t mean some dodgy epistemological commitment to value neutrality; it is rather an exercise in practical and public reason rather than theoretical reason about what is the best form of education or the most true and compelling set of values to impart. The question is: on what terms must public education be provided for, given the plurality of incompatible but reasonable beliefs, as a permanent social condition, and accepting that we must set aside, in the articulation of those terms, the relative power, number of influence of each of these beliefs in society. When you or others might say that the above argument it too “abstracted”, I happily accept that charge if all it means is that the principled terms on which a public education system is constructed must “abstract” from the contingent religious landscape in society. That is entirely different from suggesting that when it comes to working out what religious freedom means in specific contexts, we ignore the specifities of faith in its application. It simply means that one’s concept of religious freedom, to be viable in a pluralist society, must be articulable and defensible independently of the contingent interests or experience of particular faiths, or what Rawls termed the “calculus of social interests”. It is partly to ask what would Catholics argue for if they were not a dominant majority, but an obscure sect who were too few in most areas to warrant specific school recognition under a formally neutral “patronage” model. Then, I propose, they would demand the right to access public education without being made subject to interference through the imposition of an alien, incompatible ethos in the schools in which their children had to attend out of necessity. In this lens, the argument for patronage, as a tool for guaranteeing religious freedom, appears to rely on tactical intuitions surrouding the particularist interests of a given denomination, given its contingent set of social and bargaining advantages. The argument for the common school suggests instead that public education must be constructed along the lines of constitutional principles that could reasonably be endorsed independently of the knowledge or use of these bargaining advantages (which Catholics, I would imagine, would have accepted as morally arbitrary). Call this “public reason” if you will. This argument doesn’t rest on an “abstracted” epistemological view of religous freedom; it does rest on “abstraction” from tactical advantages and disparate bargaining powers in the use of public reason.
Your rather clever strategy seems to be to define religious freedom in a thick, loaded, positive sense – something along the lines of flourishing or self-realisation, and then to say that it is definitionally impossible to achieve, thereby invalidating the argument from religious freedom. (The equivalent would be to argue that the aim of everybody mastering their expression and identity is permanently elusive and intangible, and that we therefore should bother with arguments about freedom of expression). Of course you can’t guarantee a public education system in whcih religious flourishing or self-realisiation is guaranteed to and achieved by all. What is realisable is the construction of a public education system which provides a common instutional space in which a pluralist common ethos, robust and constitutionalised, allows for a protection against arbitary external interference in the exercise, expression and formation of a wide, indeterminate range of incompatible yet reasonable beliefs. I suspect you accept that this is a valid aim, and I also suspect you agree that it isn’t served under a system in which some citizens must effectively feign their Catholicism to gain access to public education on equal terms – say through the requirement of producing a baptismal certificate (an unChristian spectre if ever I saw one). Arguing for the common public school is not about arguing for a theoretically impossible “neutral”. It has the more limited horizon of reasonableness; it is not arguing for a dodgy universal that can accommodate and subsume every particular, but simply for a guarantee of religious freedom in education – understood in the sense of non-interference rather than self-realisation – which applies independently of the various forms of human capital that are necessary to achieve recognition under the “patronage” model.