Jennifer O’Connell: Fairy stories have no place in the classroom

Why are Irish children spending 2½ hours a week learning about heaven when they could be learning about space?

In the US, if parents want their children to learn about religion, they send them to Sunday school and pay for it privately. Photograph: Thinkstock
In the US, if parents want their children to learn about religion, they send them to Sunday school and pay for it privately. Photograph: Thinkstock

A parent wrote an anonymous piece for this newspaper recently, in which he argued that it was “plain nuts” that his children should be forced to spend more than 10 per cent of their time at school on Irish, “a language many of them hate and will have little or no need for in later life”.

I sympathise with his resentment at waste of hours on what seems to him to be a whimsical endeavour. But during the two years my child attended national school in Ireland, it wasn't the time spent learning Irish that I objected to. It was the 2½ hours every week she spent being taught fairy stories.

I have nothing against organised religion. People are entitled to believe whatever they want to believe, and to practise whatever they want to practise – as long as it doesn’t have a negative impact on anyone else.

But there’s the rub: when religion is brought into the classroom, it does have an impact on everyone else. Not just on the schoolchildren and their parents, but also the prospective employers who wonder why the much-vaunted Irish workforce is struggling to compete internationally, and the graduates who are pitting themselves for jobs against students who didn’t spend somewhere 10-13 per cent of their formative education learning about heaven when they could have been learning about space. It has an impact on the taxpayers who are footing the bill for those 2½ wasted hours, and it has an impact on the teachers who are coerced into acting as spokespeople for an organisation whose moral code they may very well not share.

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Let me tell you what’s happening in other schools, whose pupils your children might one day be competing against for jobs. In the public primary my children now attend in Silicon Valley, the 2½ hours they aren’t spending on religion are spent – in the case of the eight-year-old – learning coding through Scratch, studying music or doing science. My seven-year-old first-grader uses a Chromebook laptop in the classroom once a week to help with his spelling and maths. Their school offers extra after-school classes in coding, science, chess and engineering fundamentals using Lego, along with French and Spanish. It has an annual science fair for grades three and up; this year, students submitted projects on ways to tackle the drought and how to make batteries out of fruit. And yet many of the parents at the school believe – rightly, I would say – that their children should be getting even more Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) education.

Here, if parents want their children to learn about religion – and many do – they send them to Sunday school for two hours every week, and pay for it privately.

Under the European Convention on Human Rights, the Irish Constitution and the Education Act 1998, you can choose to have your child opt out of religion at school. But since schools are not obliged to supervise children outside the religion class, this is fine in theory but hardly in practice.

Why isn’t there an outcry that an organisation that colluded for decades to shelter and protect criminals, which turned the other way when children were beaten and abused within its walls, still has access to the impressionable minds of so many Irish children for 2½ hours per week? Why is this endemic indoctrination of the next generation allowed to continue?

I know why, of course. I have been just as guilty of passively accepting this as everyone else. When I couldn't get my child a place in our nearest Educate Together school, I dutifully enrolled her in the local Catholic national school. It was a fantastic school with enthusiastic teachers and a strong sense of community, and instead of railing against the hours she wasted on religion, I regarded it as the price we had to pay. I now see that we shouldn't have had to pay it. She shouldn't have had to pay it. Fairy stories have no place in the classroom.

The study that ruined my X life

Now to a serious sociolinguistic inquiry. How often do you X? Do you sprinkle them liberally at the end of every text message, email, tweet and

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comment, or reserve them for your mother’s birthday card? Are you more of an XO type? An Xxxer? Do you emote with emoticons?

I am a bit free and easy with my Xes, and I like being Xed in return. To me, an email signed off with a neat X signifies informality and friendliness, and has virtually nothing to do with the actual exchange of bodily fluids.

But it also, I have discovered, signifies that the sender is very likely to be Irish, or possibly English. A trawl through my inbox reveals that my Australian and American friends don’t X each other nearly as liberally as we do.

Further investigation into this cultural minefield reveals that men don’t X as much as women, and that psychologists who have studied the phenomenon (yes, actual studies) say the X is our way of wanting to appear likable and feminine, so we can get away with being mean.

Now that I know all this, it is ruined for me. I’ll never be able to X unselfconsciously again. My life is set to become one long, digital version of that moment when you go to shake someone’s hand and they lean in for a kiss. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted. X