A proposal by Education Minister Jan O’Sullivan to abolish Rule 68 of the Rules for National Schools, which protects the status of religion in schools, has been criticised by the Iona Institute as “yet another attack on the rights of faith schools”.
“A faith school has a right to have a faith-based ethos,” Mr Quinn said. “Parents have a right to send their children to a school with a faith ethos that can permeate the school day.”
Acknowledging that the “Irish education system must change and there must be more school choice”, not least through “faster divestment of denominational schools”, Mr Quinn added, however, that the remaining denominational schools must be allowed to have a strong, faith-based ethos otherwise the rights of parents who want to send their children to such schools are undermined to satisfy the demands of other parents who have a different educational vision”.
. The Catholic Church favoured amending the rule.
Rule 68 says in full: “Of all the parts of a school curriculum Religious Instruction is by far the most important, as its subject-matter, God’s honour and service, includes the proper use of all man’s faculties, and affords the most powerful inducements to their proper use. Religious Instruction is, therefore, a fundamental part of the school course, and a religious spirit should inform and vivify the whole work of the school.
The teacher should constantly inculcate the practice of charity, justice, truth, purity, patience, temperance, obedience to lawful authority, and all the other moral virtues. In this way he will fulfil the primary duty of an educator, the moulding to perfect form of his pupils’ character, habituating them to observe, in their relations with God and with their neighbour, the laws which God, both directly through the dictates of natural reason and through Revelation, and indirectly through the ordinance of lawful authority, imposes on mankind.”
