Ireland’s new government faces a number of daunting challenges. Probably many of the new ministers believe that their biggest problem is the economy and that it needs to be given their highest priority. It is indeed a huge issue, but it is at least arguable that education is beset by a crisis as serious as that for the national banking system.
The main problem for Ireland’s education system is that it has been lulled to sleep by complacency. For generations we have persuaded ourselves that we are among the very best in the world, that we have lots of well-educated and well-trained young people who can compete with anyone, anywhere. We have sent missionaries to far-flung places where they have established religious schools, and we are used to hearing people from overseas saying how proud they are to have received an Irish education.
We became highly self-satisfied, and in that state we hardly noticed when things began to fall apart. Here are just some of the issues.
We have no properly co-ordinated system of early childhood education, which for social policy reasons in particular is our most urgent need. This has been pointed out repeatedly, not least by the National Competitiveness Council, of which I have been a member.
If we invested even a little in this we could tackle deprivation, social exclusion and even crime and the drugs culture much more effectively. It is estimated internationally that every dollar spent on pre-school education yields the state seven dollars later on.
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We have a primary school system based almost entirely on ownership and management by religious denominations that no longer represent the ethos of large sections of the population. Our primary schools have an unbalanced curriculum that gives too much time to religious instruction and not enough to science. Too much of the infrastructure is outdated.
Our secondary schools are hardly educational institutions at all any more; rather, they are training camps for the Leaving Certificate, built round exam content prediction and the idea that they should prepare students for examination techniques, with rote learning as the most effective weapon in the pedagogical armoury.
Secondary students are discouraged from taking subjects that matter to the country, particularly honours mathematics and science. They are not taught to be independent thinkers; in practice this is discouraged because it is not exam-efficient. We have a final exam, the Leaving Certificate, that follows an out-of-touch curriculum and offers students an antisocial prize in the form of a Central Applications Office points score. The points system is maintained as a market mechanism that pushes young people into the wrong careers. It distorts the labour market, encouraging the next generation to go for “safe” professions that the country doesn’t need and keeping them away from discovery and enterprise.
We have known all this and yet have done absolutely nothing about it.
Ireland’s higher-education system is, by the standards of developed countries, ludicrously underfunded and yet it is constantly accused of wasting resources or underperforming. We have targets for some of the world’s highest participation rates but no real idea of what we want to do with all these graduates.
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Throughout our education system we have lost track of basics such as literacy, numeracy, linguistic proficiency and communication skills.
All of this has led to a point where, apparently to our surprise, multinational companies say our graduates are not as good as they would like them to be. And in a global labour market they are having to compete with highly mobile graduates from abroad.
And yet, as far as I could tell, none of this featured in the political parties’ election manifestos. Nobody seems to feel any sense of urgency about the education crisis we face.
The landscape is littered with reports commissioned by the government that point out at least some of the above and yet we have just plodded along, somewhere between complacency and denial.
It cannot continue. Educational excellence is our future. We have almost nothing else to offer right now, and if we cannot educate young people to be skilled, cultured and imaginative we face long-term decline.
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Nobody will invest in Ireland, our graduates will not measure up to international standards, and our labour force will be focused on mindless bureaucracy.
It is very late to be correcting the problems, but not yet too late. We still have an opportunity to produce something better. No new commissions of inquiry or reports are needed; we have all the information we need. We now need action.
We need to introduce proper early childhood education. We need to reform primary education to ensure the curriculum meets modern needs. We need to reform, or preferably ditch, the Leaving Certificate. We need to abolish the points system. And we need a proper funding model.
Let’s get on with it. The government needs to move on education as one of its very first priorities.
Ferdinand von Prondzynski, a former president of Dublin City University, is principal of Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen