Vague religion syllabus and poor teaching leave pupils without a prayer [IrishTimes]
- Published: 12 April 2011
ADDRESSING A crowd protesting against the Pope’s visit to Britain last year, Richard Dawkins fulminated with the passion of a fundamentalist preacher against the Catholic Church for filling the children’s heads with the “vile obscenity” of original sin and “the terrifying falsehood” of hell.
Unless religious education in British Catholic schools is much more effective than it is in Irish Catholic schools, Dawkins need not worry: most Catholic children will not have heard of original sin, and will only have heard of hell in popular culture.
In 2007 the Iona Institute, a body committed to preserving orthodox Catholic teaching, conducted a survey among Irish people aged 15 to 24. Only 5 per cent could quote the First Commandment, 32 per cent could not say where Jesus was born, and 35 per cent did not know what is celebrated at Easter. Fewer than half knew what the Trinity is comprised of, and only 15 per cent knew what transubstantiation is.
In a response to the survey’s findings, reminiscent of Father Ted, the Catholic bishops argued that it was unfair to expect young people to know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and that “in a stable” should have been an acceptable answer. Their lordships clearly favour multiple- choice questions in scripture.
This pitiful ignorance of the basic facts and tenets not just of Catholicism but of Christianity raises the question of whether the significant resources devoted to teaching religion in Irish schools are largely wasted.
In the 1980s, the imparting of traditional doctrine was abandoned in Catholic schools and was replaced by a syllabus so broad and vague that practically anything that is connected, however tenuously, to religion or spirituality can be taught.
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