One of the biggest - but generally unrecognized - contributors to the problems in Ireland has been the system of separate religious schools used by Protestant and Catholic children. Remaining separate has ensured that suspicions, ignorance, and prejudice could thrive. Efforts to create integrated, secular schools are increasing.

Margaret Nelson writes for Suffolk Humanists:

A small group of parents and others believed that things would never get better unless their children went to school together and stopped demonising one another. They called themselves ‘All Parents Together’ and founded the first integrated school, Lagan College, in 1981. They took out personal loans and ran jumble sales to raise the money for that first school, in a scout hut on the outskirts of Belfast, where they had 28 pupils. Now there are more integrated schools, but still only 10% of the total in Northern Ireland, and they are still forced to raise funds themselves.

I predict that it’ll be a while before it sinks in with our political leaders, currently trying to outdo one another as ‘faith-friendly’ to religious leaders with ambitions to open schools at public expense, that faith schools are divisive, expensive, an infringement of the human rights of children, and a generally bad idea. By the way – who decides what a ‘faith’ is? If they can take the millionaire Peter Vardy seriously, with his creationist schools, why not equally crackpot ‘faiths’ – when will we have the first Flat Earth school, or the first Satanist school? And there are plenty of zealots like that Bradford imam who’d love to have control over their own schools to prevent children from learning anything that conflicts with their beliefs, like sex education or gender equality.

As long as people think that religion is automatically a good thing, they will likely assume that religious schooling is also, therefore, a good thing. Such prejudices are most likely to continue in an atmosphere where pretty much the only religion one encounters are benign forms of a the culture's dominant faith. This can be overturned, however, when uppity religious minorities start demanding equal rights — and start teaching things that are completely at odds with the majority's prejudices or sensibilities. All of the sudden, people "discover" that religion isn't necessarily a good thing in every case and maybe religious schooling isn't always good, either.

Read More:

• Separation of Church and State 101
• Church and State News
• Secularism 101