Mary Kenny
Every September we read reports of disgruntled secular parents who object to the fact that their children are being taught about religion, in religious-ethos schools.
I find it difficult to understand why a parent would send their child to a faith-based school, and then complain that faith values are taught there. However, I suppose we have to make allowances for practical considerations that may occur – perhaps there isn’t a secular or non-denominational school that is in their area, or that they consider suitable.
But there are also other agendas going on. Some parents take a have-your-cake-and-eat-it attitude: they want the benefits of a faith school, which may include good grades and an admirable community ambience, without actually having to subscribe to, or even hear about, faith values.
There is also a growing secular body of opinion that children should not be taught any religious values at all, as this constitutes ‘indoctrination’. And that any compulsion in the matter of faith education is unacceptable.
But surely education about faith, at the very least, is essential to being educated at all?
History
Two books published this year have really illuminated this – and I’d make their study a compulsory part of learning about history and humankind.
One is Tom Holland’s magisterial tome of Christian civilization Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, which I have previously alluded to. It is a sweeping history of the ideas that have made our world, and elucidates how Christianity has, literally, ‘made’ the western mind. Christianity, as we know, has frequently failed to live up to its ideals, but the ‘values’ are part of law, morality, charity, the literary and artistic expressions of the human mind, art and architecture, and even conventions such as manners.
Even those – perhaps especially those – most opposed to faith are drawing on faith values”
Tom Holland’s is a large tome of 594 pages: but a slim paperback by the philosopher John Gray, entitled Seven Types of Atheism is under 160 pages of reading, and it’s brilliant.
Gray, who writes for the left-wing New Statesman, embraces no religion himself, and yet he shows, case by case, how every contemporary strain of secular and atheistic thinking depends for its intellectual substance on religion in general, and Christianity in particular.
Secular thinking
From John Stuart Mill to Voltaire, from Locke, Kant and Schopenhauer, to Marx, Dostoevsky, Comte and Russell – they all derived their thinking from traditions of faith. “Secular thinking,” writes Gray, “is repressed religion.”
Even those – perhaps especially those – most opposed to faith are drawing on faith values.
Not to know and understand this, it seems to me, is to be woefully under-educated. That’s the perspective I would, personally, put to those parents seeking to withdraw their child from religious education while attending faith schools.
Tragic side to left-behind dreams
Oughterard has very different connotations for me than the present controversial conflicts over the placing of refugees there in Direct Provision.
Oughterard was always the ‘Gateway to Connemara’, and during family holidays, when we crossed that bridge over the Owenriff river, by Lough Corrib, we felt we really were in ‘the west’.
It was always such a picturesque town, famous for its fishing. Back in the old days, the Anglo-Irish gentry would refer to it as ‘Outer-ard’, but if their pronunciation was eccentric, their affection for the place was genuine.
An old lady recounted a touching story of life in Oughterard before World War I, when she was a young girl there.
Each year, many of the officers who were serving in the British Army, would come to Oughterard in the mayfly season, in May and June, to fish. She remembered it as a magical time, when there were summer lights around the town, and parties of young people.
Hostilities
Then, they heard, in mid-summer of 1914, that hostilities were threatening in continental Europe and the troops were recalled to prepare for a possible conflict.
So convinced were the anglers that “it would all be over by Christmas” that, she remembered, they left their fishing tackle behind, confident they’d come back to continue fishing.
But none of them ever returned.
What’s in a name?
Margaret Atwood, the Canadian feminist writer, lost her spouse on September 18. The British mainstream media reported that the writer Graeme Gibson was Ms Atwood’s ‘husband’: in Ireland, it was reported that he was her ‘partner’ – perhaps ‘wife’ is now regarded by some ‘woke’ progressives as antediluvian.
But the lady herself described Graeme as not only her husband, but an ideal husband. So there!
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l ‘Does feminism hate motherhood?’ That’s the theme of a talk I’m due to give next Wednesday, October 2 at the Davenport Hotel, Dublin at 7.30pm, tracing the genesis of hostility to motherhood to the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir. The talk is sponsored by the Iona Institute and entrance is free.
The Irish Catholic will be hosting an Education Conference on October 24th 2019. Visit our website to purchase tickets. Early bird special ends September 30th 2019.