By Selwyn Duke

It isn’t always true that “united we stand.” United in the wrong
things we can fall, and sometimes, for some to stand on principle, we
must stand divided.

Barack Obama is currently taking some heat for what has been
characterized as a shot at Catholic education. While in Northern Ireland
for the G8 summit recently, Obama spoke to an audience of approximately
2,000 students at Belfast's Waterfront hall and said, “If towns remain
divided — if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants
have theirs, if we can't see ourselves in one another and fear or
resentment are allowed to harden — that too encourages division and
discourages cooperation.” Now, it should be mentioned here why this is
considered an attack on Catholic education. While there are Protestant
schools in NI, the government school system is mainly Protestant while
most Catholic children attend schools run by the Catholic Church. And
you can bet that if Obama were authoring an end to school segregation in
NI, his solution would not be to eliminate the government schools and
have everyone attend the Catholic ones.

Yet I won’t criticize Obama here the way some have. After all, there is a controversy
in the U.K. over NI’s school “segregation,” a situation that sees more
than 90 percent of children in NI attending separate schools. So, in
fairness, Obama’s writers were likely just echoing the politically
correct, Kumbaya sentiments of the U.K. press. Instead, I’d like to pose
a question that gets at a deeper issue:

What is the real source and nature of division?

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