A chara, – Brendan Butler (March 13th), responding to Jennifer O'Connell's article "Fairy tales have no place in the classroom" (Life & Style, March 9th), thinks it wrong that children be taught the faith of their parents.
It is an odd view; parents quite naturally wish to pass on their values to their children. Indeed, it is their right to do so, both God-given and under the law of the land.
And those values include, whether some like it or not, their religious beliefs.
In any case, even if parents for some reason chose not to take up this right and allow instead a “one size fits all” secularist school system to be introduced, the result would not be that children would grow to adulthood as so many blank canvases, free to seek out their own system of values from some vast smorgasbord of available ideas; they would instead be indoctrinated into the orthodoxies of secularism, a way of looking at the world whose advocates like to portray as being some kind of neutral option even as they act to promote its very particular and far from neutral beliefs and values.
Quite why anyone would expect parents to be so monumentally foolish as to agree to the philosophy of strangers forced upon their children and think it better and fairer than their being taught the tenets of their own faith is beyond me. I can only imagine that those who keep bringing up this idea again and again must equate faith with stupidity. – Is mise,
Rev PATRICK G BURKE,
Castlecomer,
Co Kilkenny.