A radical repositioning by religious orders still in Irish education has been called for in a new document from the Conference of Religious of Ireland (CORI).
The values dominant in Irish schools were "excessively consumerist" and "very much at variance" with those of the founders of religious orders in education, it says.
The "reflection paper", published by CORI's Education Commission, Religious Congregations in Irish Education. A role for the future?, also criticises the points system.
It heightens "an already strong competitive element, ensuring that the focus of students is not on the attainment of excellence but on doing better than other students who have applied for the same course", it says.
Education was replacing inherited property "as the mechanism by which inequalities are preserved from one generation to the next" in Ireland, it says.
Every year 25 per cent of school-leavers have educational qualifications that leave them disadvantaged where jobs are concerned. Over 85 per cent of those who leave full-time education without formal qualifications are from working-class backgrounds.
A young person whose father has a professional/managerial job is seven times more likely to go to third level than someone from a semi-skilled/unskilled background.
Seventy-five per cent of families in poverty are headed by an adult with no educational qualifications, while 43 per cent of men and 36 per cent of women in Ireland left school before they were 15. An Irish adult without educational qualifications is nine times more likely to be poor than someone with a third-level education, it found.
These statistics show "that it is not poor people who benefit from the education system" and that it is "the nature of the education system itself, rather than access to schools, which keeps poor people poor".
Religious "now need to find new ways of positioning themselves in relation to the education system, creating new educational experiences for young people".
The resources which religious now "devote to maintaining the present system could be redirected to identifying unmet needs, working with the poor and generally being a counter-cultural voice", it says.
They would be in a far better position to act in accordance with the vision of their founders if they were "free of their current responsibility for the trusteeship and management of schools," it says.
In this new vision "there is an emphasis on the empowerment of poor and marginalised people, which is, by definition, counter-cultural", it says.
The challenge for religious was to identify forms of education that would promote this new vision.
Just under half Irish pupils at second level are in about 360 schools established and owned by religious orders. A further 10 per cent approximately are in 55 community schools where religious share trusteeships with the local Vocational Education Committee.
Figures for 1998, the most recent available, show that 605 religious were involved in second level. An estimated 40 per cent were within 10 years of retirement, with less than 5 per cent under 35.
In 1969-70 2,300 religious taught at second level, a third of teachers in the voluntary sector.
