Listen Up! by Malachi O’Doherty
By Malachi O’Doherty
The findings of the Mori poll into attitudes to Integrated Education are astonishing.The easy assumption about how Northern Ireland works is that most people prefer things as they are. Parents choose the schools to send their children to, and if their choice is sectarian, then the presumption must be that they are sectarian, that a priority in education is that children should be raised uncontaminated by the influence of the Other.
Yet now we learn that most people want integration and want state schools to be open to children of all faiths and none. Well, in that case, why do they not integrate themselves? Well, there are lots of practical reasons why a Catholic family will choose a Catholic school, and not all of them are to do with faith or fear. Usually it is the school nearest to them. It is not just schools that are divided, our towns and cities are.
No matter how much people want, in principle, to mix their children, they are hardly going to send them as isolated pioneers for change across peacelines to be vulnerable minorities and to take the kind of scrutiny and abuse that comes naturally to children. But while these wholly intelligible, practical obstacles to integration prevail, we can not level the charge of hypocrisy against those who say they want integration but do nothing about it.
The problems are huge.
What we can now say is that an Executive which fails to give people what they really want, a drive towards an integrated schooling system, in a shared society, is out of touch with its electorate.
Malachi O’Doherty is a journalist, author and the writer in residence at Queens University Belfast. He is also the editor of artstalk.net, thestreet.ie and blogstandard.org. Visit his personal blog @ www.malachiodoherty.com
Categories: Budget Cuts, Department of Education, Education, Election 2011, Integrated Education, NI Assembly, Northern Ireland Executive, religion, secular education
Tags: Education, integrated education, Northern Ireland
anne odling-smee said
Apr 11, 2011 at 5:32 PM
You are absolutely correct, Malachi,to point out the catch 22 situation in which so many people in N.Ireland find themselves. With still only enough places in integrated schools for 7% of the school population people who express a wish to send their child to one are somehow blamed for not doing so even when they cannot because either there is no integrated school within reach or it is full.!!!
This is then turned on its head to prove, as one politician did recently, that the majority vote with their feet for non integrated schools.!
For 31 years parents have set up new integrated schools against tremendous odds.They were told they would not prosper.That educating all children and all abilities would not work.The evidence is all around us that even before many of the schools, in prefabs on waterlogged sites, or in abandoned buildings, opened their doors, the books were full and pupils were being turned away .
Two of the colleges are the most oversubscribed schools of any sort in the province.So where do those turned away children go?Certainly not to the school of their choice.Some have gone to a controlled school and maybe it has changed to integrated status when staff and governors have had the vision and will to accomodate the Other in a truly shared way.
Yes, the segregated housing areas are a big dividers. Nonetheless hundreds of children have come out of them to got to a school where they could meet and mix with the other half of the population.
Let the politicians heed these pupils and their parents and stop saying it cant be done.