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To target education is to undermine our future
By Jim Power
The week after Easter has become synonymous with teacher conferences.
In what is normally a quiet week on the news front, the media give extensive coverage to the proceedings and the incumbent minister usually gets a rough time from some of the delegates. This year has been no different.While teachers have many justifiable grievances, it is not terribly gratifying to see them interrupt and heckle Education Minister Ruairi Quinn during his speech. To interrupt anybody in the middle of a speech is bad manners, but coming from teachers and directed at one of the most senior elected officials in the country, it is simply not acceptable.
It displays ignorance and a basic lack of manners, and more worryingly, sends very mixed messages to those pupils that these teachers are meant to be grooming into future model citizens.
The education system is under serious pressure. For teachers, effective pay cuts have been delivered; the personal tax burden has been increased; full-time teaching posts are becoming a thing of the past; pension arrangements for incoming teachers are a lot less attractive than in the past; and they are being forced to work longer hours and become more efficient in how they deliver education.
A simple response to this set of conditions is — welcome to the real world. In the private sector, all of the same issues are equally applicable, except that thousands of private sector workers have lost their jobs and their pensions.
What is happening teachers, workers and self-employed people is just symptomatic of the grave crisis in which the economy now finds itself. Effectively, the country has been on the brink of bankruptcy for quite some time.
Private sector business has responded to this set of circumstances through a combination of wage cuts, job losses and cost-cutting and cost management. The same thing has to happen in the public sector. There has been no choice other than to cut expenditure and try to grow revenues, given that our policy makers made a binding commitment in 2008 to stand behind all of the financial commitments of our reckless banking system.
If the bond holders in the banks had been forced to take a haircut, as the free market system would dictate they should, then the fiscal crisis would be less severe, but there would still be a fiscal crisis given the manner in which the imbalance between revenues and expenditure was allowed develop after 2000.
Teachers or anybody else cannot argue that all of the current ailments are down to the mess that was made of the banking system. The failure to control day to day spending; the benchmarking of public sector pay; and the various special allowances given to public sector staff under a range of different criteria, have all contributed to the excessive cost base of running the country. There were also huge failures in the private sector.
The reckless and brainless behaviour of bankers and the total failure to regulate their behaviour are also hugely responsible for the mess. I totally sympathise with teachers, just as I sympathise with many other groups in Irish society.
But the Government needs to be particularly careful about how it treats teachers in general and the overall education system in particular. Cutting back on teachers, undermining the career guidance function and forcing schools to do a lot more with less resources is a recipe for disaster.
The Government must cut expenditure, but why not concentrate on areas such as local authorities, hospital consultants and highly paid management across the public sector?
Education is an easy target, but if we undermine it, then we undermine our future. Teachers should be recognised for the key role they will have to play in the resurrection of this country.
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