The Irish Department of Education has just closed a consultation period for the revamping of its Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) curriculum for young teenagers in post-primary schools.
The proposal which the minister for education has said will be compulsory for all schools, if retained in its current guise, will force Catholic schools to promote a morality that does not align with Catholic teaching.
The draft Junior Cycle Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) Short Course proposal presented by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment has a stated that its aim is to “to nurture students’ self-awareness and positive self-worth and to develop the knowledge, understanding, skills, dispositions and values that will help them to create and maintain respectful and caring relationships and lead fulfilling and healthy lives” – a laudable objective in itself.
But delve a little deeper and the content proposed is a cause for concern for many parents but also for the Catholic patronage of many of the country’s post-primary schools. With an objective to aid young teenagers to develop an understanding of moral decision-making and to safeguard and promote their own wellbeing, the state through the school attempts to mandate contested issues such as contraception use and gender identity in all schools across the country.
Under the Irish Constitution, the primacy of parents rights to educate their child is clear, with Article 42 stating “the State acknowledges that the primary and natural educator of the child is the Family and guarantees to respect the inalienable right and duty of parents to provide, according to their means, for the religious and moral, intellectual, physical and social education of their children.”
Along with this, the State is required to provide “free primary education [and to] give reasonable aid to private and corporate educational initiative” who are willing to offer education services in the country. The State can step in when the public good needs it – but with the caveat of “due regard, however, for the rights of parents, especially in the matter of religious and moral formation”. The constitution points towards the subsidiary role of the state in supporting others to provide education.
The Constitution would seem to copper-fasten the protection of the rights of parents not to have the State impose a heavy-handed singular morality across the board, irrespective of the rights and desires of the parents sending their children to their chosen school.
Yet, in this case, the proposal is to train children to ‘“appreciate that sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression are core parts of human identity and that each is experienced along a spectrum” and to “explain the importance of safer sexual activity with reference to methods of contraception”, both of which would run contrary to Catholic teaching and understanding of the human person.
Along with this, the proposed curriculum, when discussing sexuality and relationships, leans towards an approach where all relational interaction is founded on the idea of consent, with no inclination towards promoting abstinence, commitment, or marriage.
Constitutionally, it would seem impossible that the State can impose its will in this manner on all the post-primary schools in the State. Its only argument to do this, under the constitution, would be to rely on the clause, that “the State shall, however, as guardian of the common good, require in view of actual conditions that the children receive a certain minimum education, moral, intellectual and social.”
If it is to rely on this, it will place the State directly at odds with the largest school patron in the country, the Catholic Church, by arguing that Church teaching no longer provides the minimum moral education to young teenagers, thereby claiming the monopoly on morality for the country.
With over 50 per cent of the 700 secondary schools in Ireland under the patronage of the Catholic Church – many long established in the country prior to the existence of the Irish State and the rest set-up when the State was content to allow the Church to take on the role of educating the country – the proposal, if implemented, would destroy the ethos of these institution by default.
A Catholic ethos is not provided through teaching Catholic mathematics, or Catholic geography, but through the religious and moral formation of children in line with the understanding of the integral human person. The state proposes to remove this from all schools replacing it with perspectives on the human person, identity, and relationships firmly at odds with Catholic teaching. The State is choosing sides in contested issues and adopting contentious positions with potential to harm children both physically and spiritually. It is looking to impose something as unproven, recent, and controversial as gender expression to overrule millennia old understanding of human nature.
If the Irish government succeeds in bringing into law a proposal that forces Catholic schools to teach contrary to Catholic teaching, it will have done what many secularists have long desired. IT will have wrested control of hundreds of schools from the Catholic Church by fiat, rather than by stealth, subterfuge or genuine dialogue and in response to parental preference. The Church will be patrons in name (and labour) only. The State using taxpayers’ money and the power of the law, will spiritually expropriate the hundreds of schools without so much as a hint of a bailiff.
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