Gender Roles In Ireland

The issues of sexuality and gender are ones which have come to the forefront in recent years whilst religious and cultural ideology has been imbedded in our society and has been practiced for thousands of years, which therefore makes humane issues such as sexuality and gender to be seen as controversial issues to those who practice these religious and cultural norms. Education is more than just issues of academia, but also a medium in which children can learn about things which may occur in their environment. In many schools in Ireland there is a strong catholic ethos which has without doubt had an influence on the opinion of children on certain issues. Ireland has a strong background of being traditionally conservative with regard to religion

Women in history were often thought of as feeble and nurturing figures, whilst men were always strong and showed little emotion. Gender roles need to stop being taught to children, every child should be given the right to explore any aspect of their personality that they may want to explore. Too often, it is seen that boys are restricted from playing with dolls and girls are often restricted from sports because they are historically associated with the opposite sex. This is just the start of how gender roles are taught, children are also taught certain mannerisms that associate them with a certain gender, such as crossing their legs or walking in a certain way. These may seem like small factors, but these all contribute to the way gender roles are dispersed, these factors have an influence on the way the child grows up and learns. Children are morphed into acting out gender roles without even realising it, this needs to stop. Children need to learn, they need to be creative, and they need to figure out their own qualities. Even in secondary schools in Ireland, there is a presumption that boys will go on to flourish in careers in mechanics and engineering, whilst girls are often pushed into jobs such as nursing and teaching. This is morally wrong, all sexes should be allowed to grasp what qualities they

Children are segregated from children of different religions and different ethnicities because of religious education, which shows that this type of education has no other purpose other than to split up minority groups and to enable discrimination. Discrimination within society is something that affects the majority of minority groups, which is especially worrying with the significant rise in refugees within Europe whom are predominately Muslim, this is worrying because the majority of European countries are primarily Christian according to (Masci, 2015). Throughout history, it has shown that when religions are forced to mingle, they do not correlate together very well, and gives rise to hate crime. According to an article by (Riegel, 2014), hate crime is significantly rising in Ireland within the past few years due to issues over religion and ethnicity, this may be due to the vast amount of globalisation which Ireland has seen within the last decade, if children were exposed to diversity as a child, perhaps hate crime wouldn’t be increasing. If religion was kept out of the education system, then children would be able to see their peers as humans instead of associating them with a particular group. If children are taught acceptance rather than fear from an early age, then it would undoubtedly reduce hate crime throughout society.