Teach Them Together

Just past the bright blue gate that reads "Integrated School," students laugh as they chase a football across a well-manicured field in southwestern Belfast. Inside the school building, brightly colored paintings of doves and peace signs and children holding hands hang beneath the legend DREAMING OF PEACE. "It's our vision for tomorrow," says Clare, a 15-year-old Malone College student, "for the day when religion doesn't define the whole of a person."

That might not seem like a provocative statement, but in Northern Ireland where the vast majority of people live in segregated communities, divisions along religious lines are deeply ingrained. The vast majority of students — around 95 percent — attend segregated schools, Protestant or Catholic. The sectarian divide can touch the lives of schoolkids in frightening ways. Last year, Catholic students required protection to walk to school through a Protestant neighborhood after being pelted with rocks for weeks. But more and more, Northern Ireland parents want their children to learn different kinds of lessons. Integrated schooling, which brings together Protestant and Catholic students to be taught by teachers from both religions, has largely been a fringe phenomenon since the first such school, Lagan College, opened in southeastern Belfast in 1981.

But as more schools — primary and secondary — have opened and proved successful, the concept has gained acceptance, and demand has skyrocketed. A new landmark will be reached this fall with the opening of the 50th integrated school, Maine Integrated Primary, 60km north of Belfast. In the new school year starting in September, integrated schools will educate 16,000 students of all faiths. While this accounts for only 5 percent of Northern Ireland's students, it represents an impressive trend given the ugly history of opposition to organized integration. A June survey commissioned by the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education (NICIE) shows that over 80 percent of the population now support integrated learning. Asked why they did not send their children to an integrated school, the majority of parents responded that it was because there was no such school in their area.

Last year almost 1,000 interested students had to be turned away because there were not enough spaces in the existing integrated schools to accommodate them. Malone College principal Seamus Leonard says the interest in integrated schools is reflected in the rising number of applicants. "I thought I'd be lucky to make my quota of 130 students," Leonard says. "But we had over 250 applications, making this our biggest turnaway year yet." Deborah Campbell, a NICIE spokeswoman, says the need to expand the integrated system is more pressing than ever, given the recent breakdown of the peace process in Northern Ireland. In October, the power-sharing government was suspended, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair postponed elections indefinitely after allegations of misconduct by Sinn Fein, the majority Catholic party and political arm of the Irish Republican Army. In mid-June, in Londonderry, Northern Ireland's second-largest city, authorities arrested two IRA dissidents suspected of planning to blow up a police station with a 1,200-pound bomb that was intercepted and defused. Political commentators point to this as further evidence that true reconciliation between the two communities has yet to take root.

Supporters of integration, weary of politicians and cynical about the current political process, point to the next generation as the hope for real reconciliation. Leonard says some of the staunchest proponents of integrated schools, ironically, have been former members of paramilitary groups responsible for much of the sectarian violence in the region. Former paramilitary Billy Hutchinson, the Progressive Unionist representative at the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly, sent his son to Hazelwood College, an integrated secondary school in Belfast. Hutchinson says living in segregated communities and studying in segregated schools is damaging. "I wanted to give my son the opportunity I never had to get along with and have an understanding of people from other faiths," says Hutchinson, who served prison time for crimes committed as an Ulster Volunteer Force member. "My view is that school is not the place to teach faith, but should be the place to provide a balanced education, exposing children to all faiths and religions, whether Protestant or Catholic or Hindu or none."