There is nothing more important than the education of our children.
Everyone pays lip-service to it. Politicians cannot help but meddle, educationalists examine teaching methods and the intricacies of how children learn, and parents worry incessantly about how their children are performing in the classroom.
We’ve all been through the system. We are all experts.
Yet too many children are being failed by a system that isn’t fit for purpose - forced to learn in a ‘one-size fits all’ structure that doesn’t meet the needs of modern society.
Our current education system was set up to service the industrial age. It is designed to produce compliant workers, who do what they are told and take orders.
Schools themselves are organised like factory production lines. Raw material comes in at Primary One, and pupils are processed through school, in their age groups, working their way through the curriculum.
It’s not that different to the way a haricot bean starts its journey ending up covered in tomato sauce, baked and sealed in a can.
The Irish school year is organised with long summer holidays so pupils of the past could be working in the fields. The hours are set to maximise convenience for working parents.
Streaming, and I touched on the 11-plus last week, is designed to identify high flyers who will go into middle management, and the rest of us who are fodder for the factory floor.
Higher Education funding is based on the notion that graduates earn more and will be able to pay back loans over their working lives.
Look around you. Where are the factories? Where are the 9-5 jobs? Where are the jobs for the young men and women who graduate with decent degrees?
We are in denial about our education system, and unwilling to take the steps needed to make it fit for purpose because there are too many vested interests.
We live in a post-industrial age needing new skills – creative, enterprising, empathetic, technical, emotional - skills ignored or underplayed by the current structures.
The first thing that needs to be knocked on the head is the reverence for academic intelligence as it is commonly understood – the ability to master words and language, and grapple with abstract ideas, critical analysis and reasoning.
This is what society prizes and what the school system is set up primarily to support. As a result children are tested to death – constantly under pressure to perform like monkeys doing tricks. We need to focus less on the crude marks, and more on the learning.
Secondly we need to look at how children learn best, and put in place a system that supports that. We know children who start school later in life do better – yet we try to get them into primary school as early as possible.
We know that each child learns at a different pace, and that boys and girls mature at different ages. Yet we force them into year groups because it is convenient – rather than taking the trouble to find out where they are on their journey and teach them in groups based on capability.
We know that children need more sleep and learn better later in the day, yet we force them out of bed and into school early. Mine started class at 8.30am.
We know that the modern knowledge-based economy needs people with a broad base, yet we have compromised the teaching of arts and culture; failed to give our children language skills to allow them to thrive in an increasingly connected world; and we have not done enough to support their emotional intelligence, their interpersonal skills, and their ability to reflect on their own strengths and weaknesses.
As a result, we have sown the seeds of the mental health crisis engulfing our young people and which will have repercussions through succeeding generations.
Finally we have failed to recognise that learning is for life, not just for children. Yes there are mature students in higher education, but we do not have adequate funding in place for the type of continuing education this modern fast-moving world needs.
In short D-minus. As one teacher said to me on my school report. “Fails to meet his potential.”
