The Minister for Education, Jan O’Sullivan is seeking to amend Rule 68, the regulation which allows primary schools to have their religious ethos integrated with the teaching of the other subjects.
The Department of Education said that Minister O’Sullivan believes “the language and tone of Rule 68 is archaic and doesn’t reflect the reality of today’s primary educations sector.” However, she stopped short of calling for the deletion of the article, as called for by the Irish National Teacher’s Organisation (INTO) and an advisory group to the 2012 Forum on Patronage and Pluralism.
The Irish Times reports that former Education Minister Ruairí Quinn had, while accepting most of the recommendations in the forum’s report, decided to leave Rule 68 in place. Ms O’Sullivan has asked her officials “to consider how best to progress the particular recommendation relating to Rule 68 in the context of the ongoing implementation of the forum report.”
The text of Rule 68 is as follows:
“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.”
Commenting on Minister O’Sullivan’s statement, Dr John Murray, Chairman of The Iona Institute said: “If Minister O’Sullivan merely wants to amend some of archaic language found in Rule 68, few would object to this.”
“However, it is vital that denominational schools still have the freedom to let the whole school day be influenced by their ethos. The demand by the INTO that Rule 68 be abolished entirely goes too far. That would represent an attack on the rights of denominational schools.”
He continued: “Denominational schools have a right to their ethos and if that right is compromised, it would severely limit their ability to be truly denominational. This would also be an attack on the right of parents to have their children educated according to their values and convictions, which the Constitution upholds.”
He concluded: “It must be borne in mind that a survey of parents in 200 schools in various parts of the country, which was conducted by the Department of Education itself, found that very few parents want a change of school patron in their own area. This would indicate they are happy with how denominational schools are currently run”.