Schools and the Politics of Religion and Diversity in the Republic of Ireland
Separate but Equal ?
Karin Fischer
Manchester, Manchester University Press, septembre 2016, 280p.
Version anglaise entièrement revue, adaptée et mise en jour de l’ouvrage École et religion (2011).
This book focuses on the place of religion in the Irish education system from the perspective of children’s rights and citizenship. It offers a critical analysis of the political, cultural and social forces that have perpetuated the system, looks at how the denominational model has been adapted to religious and cultural diversity in the wake of increased immigration and secularisation in Irish society and shows that recent changes have failed to address persistent discrimination and the absence of respect for freedom of conscience.
The book relates current debates on the denominational system and the role of the State in education to Irish political thought and conceptions of national identity in Ireland, showing that these debates reflect a tension between nationalist-communitarian and republican outlooks. The patronage model, historically an institutional device that allowed for Church control of state-funded schools, has now been turned into a form of public-private partnership in education, while still largely fulfilling the purpose for which it was set up originally. As a result, and despite efforts against instances of discrimination within the system, Irish educational structures still privilege communal and private interests and hierarchies over equal rights.
Schools and the politics of religion and diversity in the Republic of Ireland is essential reading for students and researchers in the fields of education policy and Church/State relations in Ireland or in comparative perspective and will also engage non-academic audiences with an interest or involvement in Irish education. (4e de couverture)
Special Issue : Pastoral : Past, Present, Future
in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, 20, 2016.
Guest Editors : Thomas Pughe, Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd, Charles Holdefer.
Avec une introduction de Thomas Pughe, « Introduction : pastoral and/as the ‘ecological work’ of language » (1-7).
In his Tales from Ovid Ted Hughes writes that in the Age of Gold people ‘listened deeply to the source’. This essay asks what this might mean, what modes of listening might achieve this and how we would recognise it. Beginning this discussion with a georgic folk song, which appears to be about harvest workers pastoralising their work, this essay opens up the first of five modes of listening by suggesting that there is a playful, harvest home, self-ironic listening mode at work here. Discussion moved from Andrew Marvel’s ‘The Garden’ to Bob Dylan’s song ‘Highlands’ to Keats’ ‘The Nightgale’. The final line of Coleridge’s poem ‘This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison’ is tested with reference to a passage from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Recent research offers examples of listening from the Hawai’an people and from Blackfeet country in Montana.