Tom Hickey,
a PhD student from NUI Galway, has written the most extraordinary article on
school patronage for The Irish Times today in which he repeatedly refers not to
children, but to ‘child citizens’.

The article
bristles with hostility towards denominational schools, religion, and is even
suspicious of the influence parents have over their children. For Hickey, the
primary relationship of the ‘child citizen’ is not with their religious
community or even with their family, but with the State. The mission of the
State is to mould the child into the kind of citizen the State wants and all opposition
to this must be eliminated.

At one point he tells us
that “child citizens must be capable of critically assessing their own
inherited religious or non-religious commitments, for instance, so that they
are not permanently in thrall to those of their parents”.

Here I half
agree with him, in fact, but only if he really means it. For example, does he
really want ‘child citizens’ to be able to critically evaluate the sort of
politically correct, egalitarian, ‘republican’ nostrums he himself espouses?  I wonder.

But the
sentence just quoted implies that the ‘child citizen’ is in need of liberation
from his or her parents. Presumably Hickey believes that parents, even religious
parents, can sometimes be a good influence on the ‘child citizen’, but he doesn’t
tell us. And what happens when the State believes they are a bad influence?

Later,
quoting John Rawls, he says that the ‘child citizen’ must be trained not to
engage in political debate based on reasons grounded in their own comprehensive
doctrines, but Hickey is himself offering a comprehensive doctrine based, it
seems to me, on a sort of French Republicanism circa 1789, but he doesn’t
seem to recognise that fact.

He allows
that denominational schools might be able to produce the sort of ‘child citizen’
he has in mind but only if they are forced to accept some version of the left-wing, secular
republicanism he espouses, otherwise denominational schools must presumably be
closed down.

Hickey mentions
the principle of parental choice towards the very end of his article but it’s
clear he barely believes in the principle because parents might make choices
that would fail to produce the sort of ‘child citizen’ his brand of republicanism
wants.

His views
on education are, at bottom, deeply illiberal in the classical sense of
liberalism because of the extremely expanded role he would give the State in
educating the child, and the very diminished role he would give to parents or
religion. Citizen, you have been put on notice.