FORGIVE this column, Father, for it shall sin.
In terms of placement on the sports pages, the tedious link is that its train of thought re-emerged while watching highlights of Sunday’s MacRory Cup final.
The bare statistics say that a high percentage of those involved on Sunday will go on to university when they finish school.
Around 40 per cent of young people in the north go on to university now.
But having made it through their A-Levels, and how the high-achieving nature of playing top-end sport often marries with studies, the figure out of the MacRory final will be significantly higher.
A degree opens so many doors. As employees, an undergraduate will typically earn around 20 per cent more across their lifetime than non-graduates – around £130,000 extra for men and £100,000 for women, according to Luminate.
For nationalists in the north, there’s a deeper meaning attached to educational achievement.
The significance of Michelle O’Neill, who took the hard road back after becoming a young mother to continue her GCSEs and A-Levels, heading up the Stormont steps as the maiden First Minister of a statelet designed precisely so that it would never happen was not lost on anyone.
In a 2015 report by the Equality Commission, it was found that the education gap between Catholic and Protestant children was continuing to widen in favour of Catholics.
“Within higher education, Catholics were over-represented in both undergraduate and postgraduate enrolments.
“There was a trend of slightly increasing shares of enrolment for Catholics and stagnant shares of enrolment for Protestant – this resulted in a small widening of the gap between Protestants and Catholics in higher education. This is a persistent inequality,” the report found.
When Martin McGuinness left the Christian Brothers school on the Lecky Road, he was turned down for a job as a car mechanic simply because of his surname. So became a butcher’s assistant instead, because that was open to him.
He would end up as Education Minister.
His brother Tom was midfield on Derry’s Ulster-winning teams of the mid-70s.
They were both, as with so many others, condemned to failure when they failed the 11-plus. That meant they didn’t get to St Columb’s.
“St Columb’s was for the privileged, for those who were bright enough to go at 11 years of age! How many students were considered failures at 11 and went on to be bright lights in their field?” he said to this newspaper four years ago.
Nationalists have educated their own way into a position of strength.
They knuckled down in school and left universities with no choice but to give them places.
Then they achieved degrees and gave employers no choice but to give them jobs.
Barriers that were resistant to bombs and bullets found themselves dismantled by the pen and paper.
For the people that it works for, there’s no question that it works.
But what of the 60 per cent that don’t go on to university?
They are being so badly served by the way that a formal school education is packaged and delivered.
Beyond the baseline Maths and English qualifications, what do thousands of young people gain from 14 years of formal education?
Learning has changed so much, industry has changed, but what kids are taught has largely remained the same.
They’re still learning about sedimentary rocks, what the capital city of Guatemala is or the chemical symbol for iron – things that Google will tell you the answer to if you ever do need to know.
Almost all of your life skills still come from home. Children should leave school knowing how to change a car tyre, how to cook and eat well or whether you should go for a fixed-rate or variable mortgage.
That’s not to mention some actual preparation for the working world outside of graduate jobs.
The idea that you don’t give up on a child’s pursuit of formal education until they’re at least 16 is noble, it’s also misguided for a lot of people.
In this part of the world, even moreso.
Tyrone, which has provided all the finalists from the last two MacRory Cups that ended in back-to-back successes for Omagh, has an engineering and construction profile that has played a far more significant part in the county’s on-field success than you could ever imagine on the outside.
If those jobs didn’t exist locally, so many more young footballers would be lost to England or Scotland or Dublin or Perth than are already.
There is an inherent snobbery around formal education that says if you aren’t book smart, you aren’t smart.
If it wasn’t propagated by the system itself, it wouldn’t annoy me so much.
It is a system that has done so much for half the population, but virtually nothing for the other half.
Some of the highest earners I know had zero interest in the Spanish Armada or which road Robert Frost did or didn’t take.
You do not have to go to university to be a success in life.
Indeed, going there is less of a guarantee than it ever was. On average in 2022, employers received 39 applications per graduate vacancy. That’s 39 other people with the same qualification as you that you have to find a way past.
The employment sector places far too much weight on that piece of paper.
In South Korea, 70 per cent of people between the ages of 25 and 34 have a university degree. There aren’t enough graduate jobs to meet that demand. Half of South Korean degree-holders end up working in a completely different sector to the one they trained in.
“It is not unheard of to find graduates working as caretakers,” wrote Sonia Sodha, chief leader writer of the Observer, in a Guardian piece in 2018.
There are very few Sean Quinns, just as there are very few Richard Bransons. They made their fortunes in very different ways having both dropped out of school in their mid-teens.
Quinn was not built for the classroom.
Handed a sheet of paper one afternoon and asked to paint a picture of men cutting the hay, he painted half the page blue and the other half green, turned it over and folded his arms. The teacher came to inspect and inquired: ‘Where are the men?’
“They went home because the grass is not ready for saving, it’s still green,” the young Quinn smirked back.
His agricultural viewpoint was viewed as troublesome. He didn’t fit in the box. Whatever about how he managed the success in later years, Quinn was anything but a failure.
School failed him, just as it fails thousands of others. He got nothing out of it.
Bryan Caplan’s book, ‘The Case Against Education’, covers a lot of these arguments. It talks about the Sheepskin Effect – that you have to have the piece of paper (printed of sheepskin in the old days, hence the name) saying that you have these skills or nobody will believe you.
More power to those that want to pursue the sheepskin. They have never been better catered for.
But the system is badly failing the rest.