"Protestant" Schools

Noel Coghlan

Issue 386, vol.97, Summer 2008

However, pragmatic considerations dictated that by the late 1990s Church Of Ireland schools found themselves host to students either styling themselves ‘non-denominational Christians’ or professing to be only minimally committed to religion. This segment had grown to be a significant minority : The relaxed confessional atmosphere of the 1970s and 1980s had been at work; the Religious Orders were thinning out in education (giving way to a stealthy secularisation); and, with demographic shifts, there had been pressure for places in Catholic secondary schools.

As a result, the principle of denominational education was becoming detached from its moorings – So much so that the Department Of Education was taken by surprise to suddenly in 2007 find this principle’s implications being insisted upon by some Protestant schools. The precipitant was the Department’s demand to have suddenly redundant teachers re-employed by schools from a ‘panel’ strictly in sequence. This plan was contested on the grounds that it failed to take into account the suitability of a given teacher to a (Protestant) school’s ethos. Ethos was back in the limelight.

Yet ethos, even if not directly highlighted, had always made itself felt at the informal level. Parents often took considerable trouble to select a school on criteria that went beyond the purely academic. They looked for moral guidelines for their children that reached beyond the immediate event to the nature of the human person. All this was a matter of the acculturation of young persons into a particular approach to society – and of the formation of ‘character’. Ethos always entails a values-system. And education is no more ‘value free’ than is the adolescent (struggling towards an identity) free of values communicated by surrounding society.

One particular over-arching values-system is religion. Religion embodies and gives meaning to the petits recits which frame the aspirations of our everyday lives. It brings hope – and guides us towards that self-transcendence which alone can assure a life that is true to our authentic humanity. But genuine religion must be infused with compassion and matched by action. It is, then, a communal phenomenon that calls for the commitment of not just one or two individuals but of a group as a whole, of the collective. It seeks to implement a way of life grounded in a faith vision (as the case may be, in a Christian one – and one specific to the Church Of Ireland). And that vision – as blueprint for implementation - is termed ‘ethos’.

Noel Coghlan, a former Eurocrat, is an active member of the Theological Circle of the Anglican Archdiocese of Dublin and Glendalough. He writes in a personal capacity.