Teach Them Together

This hasn't always been an option. To get Malone and other integrated schools up and running was not easy. Malone obtained European Union funding in 1997 so that a rubbish dump could be cleared for the mobile homes used as classrooms for the first 126 students. The teaching staff risked their careers by quitting their jobs at segregated schools before they knew whether Malone would make it. "It was a complete leap of faith for the teachers and the parents - and for the students," explains Sarahjane Patterson, one of the women who worked to set up the college. "When my daughter's friends went to see their secondary schools, I took my daughter to see an empty field. And I said — this will be your school; I promise." Now Malone is well equipped, fully funded by the Northern Ireland Department of Education and will see its first group of students graduate next year. "The struggle was worth it," says Patterson. "We need to continue to teach students at a young age the norms and values that they will fall back on later in life, and which can break the cycle of hatred and violence."

Norman Robertson, the head of religious studies at Stranmillis University College in Belfast, agrees but says there are still many barriers to making integrated schools the norm rather than the exception. It is not that most parents consciously choose to put their children into a segregated school, he says, rather they often do so because there is no viable alternative. When his own children were of school-going age, he put them in a "separate school," as he prefers to calls it, because that was the most convenient and safest option. "People still feel more secure among members of their own community," Robertson explains. "It's not an apartheid-type thing, just that many parents choose to send their kids where they always have gone and where they feel safe." Roberston says that if there had been an integrated school in his community, he would have seriously considered it as an option for his children. One obvious barrier to expanding the system is the prohibitively high cost of opening new schools, despite the endorsement of integrated education in the 1998 Good Friday Peace Agreement. De-segregating existing schools is another option, but this can be a difficult process. The Northern Ireland Department of Education has an exhaustive list of requirements a school must meet before it can attain integrated status. For instance, after a parental vote for transformation, 10 percent of students from minority traditions must have enrolled in the school by the start of the following academic year.

The figure needs to rise to 30 percent over time, which can be difficult to ensure given the societal divisions, according to NICIE officials. Malone, like other integrated schools, is essentially Christian in nature, but its syllabus has been approved by the four main Churches — Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Church of Ireland and Methodist. As part of the curriculum, local clergy are invited to speak with the students, and arrangements are made for Catholic pupils to receive the sacraments at church. "We learn about all different religions here," says James, a 15-year-old student at Malone. "And I like that. Most of the time I don't think about what religion anyone is. It doesn't matter in here." It is this neutral religious training that attracted Nuala and Damian O'Connor to Malone College. "It's difficult enough to bring up kids in Northern Ireland as balanced adults," Nuala O'Connor says. "Integrated education helps introduce them to more than their own tradition and prepares them for life in an imperfect world."