Education
Education in Northern Ireland is heavily segregated. Most state schools in Northern Ireland are predominantly Protestant, while the majority of Catholic children attend schools maintained by the Catholic Church. In all, 90 per cent of children in Northern Ireland still go to separate faith schools. The consequence is, as one commentator has put it, that "the overwhelming majority of Ulster's children can go from four to 18 without having a serious conversation with a member of a rival creed." The prevalence of segregated education has been cited as a major factor in maintaining endogamy (marriage within one's own group) However, the Integrated Education movement has sought to reverse this trend by establishing non-denominational schools such as the Portadown Integrated Primary. Such schools are, however, still the exception to the general trend of segregated education. Integrated schools in Northern Ireland have been established through the voluntary efforts of parents. The churches have not been involved in the development of integrated education.
Read more about this topic: Segregation In Northern Ireland
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“... education fails in so far as it does not stir in students a sharp awareness of their obligations to society and furnish at least a few guideposts pointing toward the implementation of these obligations.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war?—not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)