Abbot laments cloying teaching system

Children’s creativity and imagination are being stifled by an education system that is enslaved to producing people for economic growth, according to the abbot of Glenstal Abbey.

Abbot Mark Patrick Hederman, who was principal at Glenstal fee-paying secondary school from 1985 to 1991, says the system is potentially a weapon of mass destruction where imagination is concerned.

“The Murder Machine, as Padraig Pearse described it, is an educational system based upon memory alone, where children are required to commit to memory unconscionable numbers of facts which they are then required to regurgitate at a particular time of examination,” he said.

“Unfortunately, this is the only way to get into third-level education, and access to the professions is so competitive at present that most children have to sacrifice the last two years of their secondary school career to cramming for points,” he said.

The head of the Benedictine community of more than 40 monks in Murroe, Co Limerick, was addressing the annual conference of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors in Waterford.

“We refuse to listen to the poets who tell us that facts are important only to those who have never really lived. We have neglected the three-ringed circus of the imagination where children’s flights of fancy are given free rein,” he said.

The abbot said while the industrial, scientific and technological revolutions have transformed our lives, there is more to life than science, and more to science than technology.

“That more is an inner garden of the imagination which each of us should be allowed to cultivate, where we should be encouraged to dwell for at least some part of our days and lives. The trouble is that these other very important realities have been allowed to crowd out the tiny flowers of imagination,” he said.

“Our children have no time for dilly-dallying, no space for inner or outer exploring, no opportunity for dreaming. Every minute of every day is full up with learning. The core subjects of the curriculum, homework, cramming, examinations, points awarded for examinations — we’ve no time to be children, we’ve grown up before we were allowed to know what was happening.”

The abbot said education leaders are being short-sighted in their efforts to stay economically competitive, and education is being increasingly treated as if its primary goal was to teach students to be economically productive, rather than to think critically and become knowledgeable and empathetic citizens.

He laid the blame for leaving children as the last item in the pecking order with the main stakeholder groups in education.

“We are overloaded with bureaucracy. Government ministers, departments of education, teacher trade unions, fill up three-quarters of the picture,” he said.

“When the adults have finished quarrelling and negotiating we turn to the topic of what they are meant to be there for in the first place.

“In the meantime, the children grow up, one year at a time, for every year the ‘authorities’ spend shoring up a model that is out of date, and producing finished products unable to cope with the complexities of the world they have inherited, and out of touch with the reality of who they are in themselves.”