"For too long the attitude of some has been, at best, grudging acceptance of Catholic education and, at worst, outright hostility.
"It is time for that attitude to be finished in Scottish society.
"We must celebrate
– not tolerate – diversity and distinctiveness within our education system.
"The way to solidarity is not to diminish the role of faith but to promote regard, respect and understanding of all faiths in Scotland.
"Nowhere matters more as a place to promote this thinking than Scotland's schools."
So in Salmond’s book "diversity" and "distinctiveness" are best "celebrated" by dividing children on religious grounds at the school gates?
Those Scots who believe in both Scotland’s independence and the concept of the modern secular democracy should pay very close attention to what Salmond is saying here; by wholeheartedly praising the religious apartheid presently existing in the Scottish education system, he is giving you a clear signal of how he sees the intertwining roles of religion and the state in any future separate Scottish nation.
6 comments:
Scarcely believable that in this day and age someone could actively promote segregation in education. At a time when people are attempting to promote integration in Northern Ireland, Salmond seems intent on increasing segregation in Scotland! And people wonder why we detest nationalism of all guises!
"At a time when people are attempting to promote integration in Northern Ireland,"
AFAIK it's only the Alliance that are really pushing it. I'm almost sure SF back separate Catholic schools.
Blair was encouraging faith schools before he left office. Nobody could accuse him of being a Scottish nationalist.
Part of Salmond's reasoning no doubt is for the Catholic vote. For many years Labour has had a stranglehold on the West of Scotland Catholic vote and has accused sote voce the SNP of being an anti-catholic organisation. Pace the SNP immediately after WWII allying itself with the Orange Order (!) to harass Polish servicemen who settled in Scotland after war for bringing an "alien religion" into the country.
SNP leader during the 70's and early 980's Billy Woolfe also made anti-catholic remarks and said the Pope was not welcome to visit Scotland. Ironically Woolfe later not only did a mea culpa but married a Catholic with Catholic rites with the sermon being carried out by a former SNP MP who had gone off to become a priest after losing his seat in 1979.
All this was grist to the Labour mill and a sort of Irish-Catholic-Celtic supporting mafia has dominated that part of the country for decades. There has not been a non-catholic Lord Provost since Labour took power in Glasgow around 50 years ago.
Things started to change under Cardinal Winning who famously said "that the Church might not endorse Labour". Tammney Hall politics.
Winning was generally seen as SNP leaning.
Not of course the "Unionist" Party, the Tories were not guilty of using sectarianism. Much of their organisation in central Scotland was based on orangism (refer to Thatcher's autobiography). Indeed Teddy Taylor was on record as saying that the Common Market was a plot by the Vatican.
Personally since Aberdeen only had three Catholic Primary schools, I have always been puzzled by sectarianism in the Western Central belt.
I quite like the German, Swiss and other countries' systems. You want to send children to religious schools then you pay church tax - as indeed you should pay it for any other religious service such as weddings, funerals and baptisms. In Sweden for example, no church tax then funeral service is carried out by a registar by means of a civil ceremony.
Whether (and this might be good for NI) there should be an abolition of religious marraige as there is in Germany is another question. Bismark, in an effort to stop the Catholic church from exerting too much influence by forcing mixed religious couples to promise their children as catholics in return for the church marrying them, abolished religious marraige, firstly in Prussia and then in the whole of Germany.
Everyone marrying in Germany since then must marry first in a civil ceremony. After that if they so choose and have paid the church tax, they can have a religious wedding afterwards. Churches are forbidden to marry people who have not already posess a civil marraige certificate.
"AFAIK it's only the Alliance that are really pushing it. I'm almost sure SF back separate Catholic schools."
They do. My point is simply that the integrated sector has grown substantially and one of the routes schools are looking down to revive their numbers increasingly seems to be integration. SF certainly do back Catholic schools and similarly IM schools. SF are anti-integration. If Ruane wanted to do something useful in re-ordering schools it would be to concentrate on greater integration.
Aberdonian,
It might make political sense for Salmond (and by extension the Scottish administration) to give such strong backing to not only religious schools but also the church's line on abortion etc (http://unionistlite.blogspot.com/2007/09/keep-matters-of-conscience-at.html); that still doesn't make it morally right in the modern, cosmopolitan and progressive Scotland that he says he's trying to build.
In a liberal democracy if parents wish to send their children to faith schools, then that is their democratic right. It is however not the place or responsibility of the state to support such religious division within the country's education system; the example you mention of the "religious tax" seems a very sensible one.
hahaha your money pays for our schools
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