We need even more religion in schools

HAS Education Minister Ruairi Quinn any evidence to support his suggestion that our kids would be better at maths and reading if they were taught less religion?

I can't find any. France, a rich country with a secular education system, did slightly worse than Ireland in maths and reading in the most recent OECD survey.

Our kids are among the best in the world at traditional reading, coming seventh out of 65 countries. Only a small number of countries took the digital reading test, but we did and we came fifth out of 23 countries.

We're not as good at maths, but we're not bad. We came 20th out of 65 countries in print maths and 15th out of 23 in computer-based maths.

Mr Quinn is right to want to put us in the top 10 overall. I want that, too. But where's the evidence that cutting religion out of the curriculum would get us there?

Societies have put their most advanced thinking into religious teaching since the dawn of civilisation. It's where they put their morals, their poetry, their singing, their ethics.

Jews, Christians and Muslims describe themselves as "people of the book". They are people who put their best thoughts into a book that was handed to the next generation so that wisdom was not lost.

I wouldn't have a problem with taking sacraments out of the classroom. It might be good for the Catholic Church to prepare children in their own parishes. But take religion out of schools and you leave children with no sense of where our civilisation comes from. Without those daily Bible stories at my local Church of Ireland school, I would have lost the will to live as a child.

I was always going to be hopeless at maths. But when Mrs Fletcher opened the children's Bible, my imagination was fired by the stories of David and Goliath and Moses in the bullrushes.

Has Mr Quinn looked into the benefits of religious education, which opens discussions about ethics and teaches children how to be part of a society?

I've had lots of chats with a Jewish dad in the US whose autistic son got more from preparing for his Bar Mitzvah than from the rest of his education.

Preparing for his First Communion, my autistic son, Tom, began to understand for the first time how to participate with others in an event. When he walked up to the altar, calm and poised, we were all bawling.

Mr Quinn is complaining that not one denominational school has been "divested" despite many parents' wishes to get the church out of school.

I don't blame him. I wish he'd find a way to take over the running of every school in the country now that the European Court of Human Rights has found he is responsible for what happens in them, in the Louise O'Keeffe judgment.

But instead of cutting down on religion, let's have lots of multi-denominational religious education in all our schools. I have no objection to my kids hearing a bit of sense from Buddha or Allah or anyone else whose words contain the best their societies have to offer.

But I would object to a crass, unthinking attack on religious education which leaves our children adding and subtracting without knowing why.