Now I’ve gone and done it….

What have I done?

Filed under: 1 , formality, phd, registration

Polls and surveys

There’s an animated discussion taking place in the comments of Breda O’Brien’s latest Irish Times column. The comments point out the complexity of educational policy in a State committed to remaining ignorant of the rights of its inhabitants. Breda forces two surveys, the paper’s own recent opinion poll (61% of respondents do not want Catholic Church control of education post-Murphy) and some of her own experiences into a chimera of epic proportion. It being the eve of Catholic Schools Week, Breda felt it important to throw in her own two pence. Her contribution is part of a wider debate that is not really happening (other than on a few blogs and the newspapers) across Ireland that concerns the ‘ownership’ and control of children’s education.

Her column makes reference to the report of a survey that I helped to coordinate and authored called Factors Determining School Choice. This report was an attempt at finding out what is in the mind of parents who send their children to primary schools under the authority of the local Catholic patron, usually that Diocese’s bishop. It’s not a particularly easy read because its messages are complex and not journalistically easily parsed. The conclusions of the research are provided on page 53 of the PDF available here. One of these states that:

There is a sophisticated understanding amongst parents of the variety of the roles for both the Church and the State as they now exist and this model is endorsed by a majority of parents.

And another that states that:

Religious factors are important for parents in choosing a school for their child but not as important as more formal pedagogical factors.

Parents are aware that their child’s school is run out of a set of specific religious values but that other factors are more important to them when choosing their child’s school. To me, although this is not in the report, the report hints that class position is more important than whether or not the Bishop is a patron. Breda recalls in her column that when parents were:

asked whether the churches should continue to have a prominent role in the provision of primary education [schooling], 62 per cent [it was above 63 but anyway] either agreed or strongly agreed, almost exactly the percentage which, according to the Irish Times poll, are rejecting church control.

Polls are very different from surveys and Breda knows this. The report that I helped compile and wrote was based on a survey of parents (who may or may not have been Catholics – let alone those who practice their faith) who send their child to a school under the authority of the Catholic patron. The Irish Times poll was taken using a randomly generated sampling frame of over 1,000 people across the State who may have children and who may not, who are Christian and who are not and who have read the Murphy report’s summary and those who have not. Polls are not surveys. Breda has done a disservice to her own interests when she says that the 2008 survey result is “almost exactly the percentage which….are rejecting church control”. That’s like saying that the 61% who enjoy the taste of Coke is almost exactly the same percentage as the 63% who chose Pepsi the last time they drank at a pub. She does though make a fair point when she says that:

The myth of Catholic schools as places that indoctrinate and control needs to be nailed because it is unfair and unjust. It is being perpetuated by people who are completely out of touch with the broad, liberal education being offered by Catholic schools.

It needs to be nailed however, not because it is anti-Catholic (because it is not), but because any decisions to be taken about educational provision will benefit from its dismissal as a myth. A broad and fair-minded discussion about how we educate children who become voting citizens of this State will be much better served if we can think beyond Cullenist characterisations of the past and techno-utopian futures bereft of what we believe to be just and fair.

Filed under: 1 , Breda O'Brien, education, Factors Determining School Choice, Irish Catholicism, religion, schools

The facts and faith.

I am currently involved in a project to survey school pupils about their knowledge and interest in religious education. At a recent meeting of a group of people concerned with this project, I was handed a copy of this report (in .doc format). The report is entitled Religious Education Knowledge Based Survey and was published in 2007. In the summary provided on the author’s website it states that:

While there are some encouraging responses to the survey, the results overall indicate that most pupils are lacking in knowledge which is essential for authentic Christian faith.

At the end of the report, reference is made to asimilar Iona Institute report published in April of 2007 and available here (as a .pdf). It briefly compares the results to those of the Iona project. In reviewing Eanna Johnson’s report, something problematic stood out: the use of the words ‘essential’ and ‘authentic’. If there is one thing that I have learned over my years as a researcher (in any subject) it is that there is little benefit to claiming authenticity or an essential nature. For example, in his report Johnson says:

…the great majority lack an authentic Christian understanding of Jesus: most are weak on understanding Jesus as truly divine, a person who is more than an exceptionally good human being, while only 10% understand Jesus as our Saviour from sin.

The question asked by this survey from which we get this summary allowed the school-going respondents (13, 14 year olds) to choose from options such as “a great son of God”, “a great teacher & leader “and “true God and true man”. They were instructed to “circle the word or phrase that best matches each sentence”. That best matches. Right. Quite apart from the theological concerns about the options presented to the teenagers (I am assured that there are problems with several questions), I want to use a further example to illustrate my point. The questionnaire asked the pupils:

3-5. Name three miracles performed by Jesus:

And then in the report (but not of course in the questionnaire itself) we are provided with a list:

Miracles of Jesus e.g. Marriage Feast at Cana; Draught of Fishes (x2); Widow’s Son Raised to Life; Feeding of 5,000 & of 4,000; Jairus Daughter Raised to Life; Raising of Lazarus from Death; Jesus Walks on Sea; Tempest Stilled;  Change bread & wine into his body & blood.  (major healings of Jesus also acceptable)

There are mixed results (page 7 if you’re interested) but the point is is that respondents had to name three of these to get the question ‘right’. You might as well have asked third year engineering students to recite the Canterbury Tales. So 21% of first year pupils cannot name any miracles performed by Jesus. The author helpfully marks the ‘right’ answers in the report just in case our indignation at the attempted answers had not kicked in yet, including the following:

The principal mission of the Church is to:

1. spread the Gospel
2. care for the poor and hungry
3. give example of love

22% of the children got this one ‘wrong’ – they didn’t pick the first one. It must be forty years since the abandonment of the Penny Catechism in Irish schools but there’s the sense here that if first year’s could learn about original sin and limbo then everything else would ‘fall into place’. You know, the easy stuff like ‘should I ask for more severance pay?’ or ‘when is it ok to go to war?’ If the respondents knew which Diocese their school was in and they could name the Bishop of that Diocese then they have the “knowledge which is essential for authentic Christian faith”.

Part of the problem with talking and writing about secularisation in Ireland is the insistence by some that the return of the days of reciting Catholic doctrine will get ‘us’ back to where ‘we’ were. No survey can tell us the truth, yes even the one in the Irish Times this week about control of primary education. If you think you ‘know’ the truth, you’ve already lost the argument. To round this off, here’s a cartoon which might help us all in the coming time:

Copyright phdcomics.com

Filed under: 1 , Catholicism, doctrine, politics, surveys, the work

Proposal update. Oh, and Haiti too.

Self-flagellation aside, it’s been quiet here of late and for one main reason: I have not written a word since handing The Supervisor my proposal before Christmas. With the Great Snow of ‘10 over us now, the time has come to emerge from my intellectual igloo. The Supervisor said some very nice things about the ideas contained in the proposal and so now I’m dotting the last few t’s for the application process. All being well, I will be formally registered by March. It is a strange thing to consider being a student again after almost 15 years, albeit with slightly more money in my pocket and fewer ‘borrowed CDs at the bottom of my bed. There’s the small matter of the fees but that too is in hand. My partner, a colleague of The Supervisor, is emphasising that there’ll be no favouritism for my time studying. Pity that, because those bins don’t take themselves out, you know? She was good enough to gift me Taylor’s A Secular Age for my recent birthday.

In the time that I have been ‘away’ there has been discussion online and elsewhere about retribution, the God thing and Haiti. Most of it has been guff of the highest quality but Lara Marlowe’s article appearing in yesterday’s Irish Times gives us a better sense of the issues than any amount of hand-wringing over Pat Roberson’s televisual OCD. Marlowe paints a picture of a Haiti that is coming to terms with daily life after the trauma of the earthquake. Any shock doctrine-type reversion-to-modernity reconstruction will find it hard to separate the faith of people from technocratic imperatives. Kevin makes some salient points about why God cannot do anything about place tectonics and in this reinforces what I was taking from Eagleton’s view of an interventionist God. God no more caused the earthquake in Haiti than She did the lovely fluffy bunny rabbits to be born every spring. Here I am on thin ice so I’ll not dwell on it. We can see though that in much of the Haiti coverage (in the English speaking press) there are prevalent images of religion and faith as if ‘the people’ in Haiti rely on these right now more than us ’secular moderns’. “See, the victims: they need their God in times of crisis like this is. Pff, I say” Aid will help them but patronising depictions of existential despair do not.

Filed under: 1 , Haiti, proposal, study, The Supervisor

Renaming parks and memory

Dublin City Council is going to ask the ‘the people of Dublin’ – however they are defined I am not sure – to help to come up with a new name for a park within a park. We’re going to be asked:

to submit ideas on an appropriate change of name for the park in Merrion Square, now formally known as Archbishop Ryan Park.

Apart from the empty, meaningless and pettifogging political gesturing that this brings on, we are now living post-Ryan and Murphy reports and, as we are repeatedly being told, “we are where we are”. While the Council are at it perhaps they might ask Dublin dwellers to submit ideas on how to improve the 19th century water infrastructure or on their insistence that business representative groups get to decide transport and pedestrian policy. My morning newspaper of choice – that distillation of my own ideological suppositions – tells me that:

From 1930 the square had been leased to the archdiocese by the Pembroke Estate. The intention had been to build a cathedral there.

If there was ever a place in Dublin that represents how the institutional Catholic Church, the landed classes and the civil authorities combined to gloss over the public interest, it is this place. Archbishop Ryan was stated in the Murphy reports on sexual abuse in the Dublin Archdiocese not to have exercised his canon law power to protect children, among other wilful neglects of function. The City Council wants us to feel the full force of its administrative power by renaming a park.

I have a proposal for the City Council: keep it as Archbishop Ryan park and place an additional information panel next to the entrance explaining who he was, why the park is named thus and reprinting the relevant parts from Judge Murphy’s report. Perhaps this one might be appropriate:

All the Archbishops and many of the auxiliary bishops in the period covered by the Commission handled child sexual abuse complaints badly. During the period under review, there were four Archbishops – Archbishops McQuaid, Ryan, McNamara and Connell. Not one of them reported his knowledge of child sexual abuse to the Gardaí throughout the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s. (Part 1, section 1.36; my emphasis)

Do not make it an interactive touch screen affair nor adorn it with logos of any kind. Just print the words on a plain white sheet with the appropriate referencing to the report and where the citizens of Dublin can find copies of the report in the nearest public library. In as much as the Murphy reports are the truth, then we should know the truth. If Archbishop Ryan park is renamed can I suggest that the City Council begin a process to rename vast swathes of residential Dublin that begin with ‘Saint’. Saint Enda’s Road, Saint Michael’s Road, Saint Peter’s Road, St Ita’s Road. The people of Crumlin, Cabra, Drimnagh and Glasnevin would only be too happy to oblige. It seems we are not to be trusted with making up our own minds about our built environment.

Filed under: Uncategorized , Dublin, Dublin City Council, erasing history, Irish politics, learning, Murphy reports, political responsibility, politics, public sphere