Teachers must look to the future, even if they don’t like the present
Joe doesn't have that device handy at the 'town hall' sessions he's currently chairing for the Department of Education, but judging from the first outing last week he's likely to face individuals from some teachers unions using the occasion to say the minister should sort today's problems rather than looking ten years down the road.
I hope I'm wrong. None of the great teachers I've known would want to stop people thinking about tomorrow. It doesn't make sense.
Transpose the issue from education in 2004 to business in 1975. Let's say the boss of a business, in that year, calls a staff and management meeting to brainstorm about emerging possibilities in communications technology.
"This is rubbish," one guy says. "Suit you better to put money into repairing the telex machine. I'm worn out dealing with it breaking down. That's what needs fixing. To hell with this wide-blue-yonder, pie-in-the-sky futurology. If you haven't the money to fix my telex machine, how the hell are you going to get the money for high-techery down the road? Answer me that?"
Now, there's a real possibility that as you read this, you're asking yourself what a telex is. Or was. Which is precisely the point. Telex, a great technology in its day, looked like the offspring of an electric typewriter that had been interfered with by a knitting machine. You typed a message into your machine and the matching machine in some other office typed it out.
Back then, any boss dragooned into investing in telexes rather than looking at future possibilities would quickly have found everybody else connecting by fax and (a little later) by e-mail. There's not much point in having a super, upgraded, heavily invested-in telex if it has no matching machines to talk to. A bird never flew on one wing. As the business went down the tubes, the Telex operator would have had the time to pen a poem: "Is there anybody there?" cried the Telex, tapping on its moonlit desk Refusing to examine the future because you don't like the present is short-sighted. Refusing to examine the future because you don't like the Minister is even worse.
No offence to Noel Dempsey, but he's the least important aspect of this process. If he stays quiet while students, parents and teachers examine the kind of Ireland they want, 10 or 20 years from now, and the kind of education system capable of delivering that Ireland, then the sharing of ideas and the capacity to influence policy other than through party politics or sectoral groups will have profound value. Were the elements of an impelling, radically different vision of education to emerge, even better: impelling visions tend to create their own advocates and income streams.
Some of the elements of that radically different vision are inescapable. Globalisation means we can't afford, in the future, to prioritise skillsets like electronic engineering and assume they will see us right. The key skills in the future are flexibility and emotional intelligence. The most successful individuals will start their career doing one thing with one team, and within a few years find themselves doing a myriad of quite different things with quite different teams. They'll see education not as a process that's done and dusted when they get their first qualification, but as a recurring exigency and delight.
For that to happen requires that the system itself can change constantly and quickly to cater for emerging needs. But it also requires that, from the first time a child sets foot in school, some factors are constant. Like a sense of belonging. A four-year-old Traveller child should enter a classroom where the pictures show settled AND Traveller homes, while Nigerian/Irish children should see people like themselves in the books and examples used in the classroom.
Belonging is about more than materials or language. It means getting good warm food into children who don't get it at home in a way that doesn't make an exception of the child. It means each child knows there's always someone looking out for them, so they can't slip through cracks in the system into a chilly place of abuse and terror where hope and possibility get flattened by bullying cynics.
IT also means schools should be in a cluster of buildings as bright and inviting as a shopping mall. In an educational shopping mall, a teenage boy could combine his talent for the guitar and his love of motor-mechanics by getting modules of skills on the same campus where his aunt gets her Masters Degree. Pre-schoolers could explore sand and water around the corner from where their grandparents take computer classes.
Clustering learning in one place would eliminate the barriers between education and training. It would also inculcate the continuity of both better than any slogan, while at the same time making such continuity possible for families and individuals.
Wouldn't it be great if some of the 'outlets' in that educational mall offered speech therapy for children with learning disabilities while other outlets helped teenaged parents learn about parenting, while a crèche in a third outlet took care of their baby? Such an educational mall could, in its design, pick up tips from Singapore, one of the most far-sighted states when it comes to educational planning. There, they meld art and academics because research indicates that improving the visual sense has enormous knock-on benefits for the individual's capacity to visualise and analyse: both vital when setting out to solve problems.
In this shopping mall, you'd see people in their seventies and eighties taking classes alongside teenagers. Or even better FROM teenagers. Because, for the first time in world history, younger people know more than older people about some subjects, and nothing could be better for the development of inter-generational respect than older people learning from very much younger people.
The education cluster could operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to meet the needs of night-workers and shift-workers. It would incorporate gyms, libraries, quiet areas for reading and homework clubs. In video-game booths, teenagers could learn to ride a motorbike, drive a car, operate a forklift, control a crane or pilot a plane long before they were old enough to do any of them for real, and get certificates to prove their competence.
Within the campus might be traffic schools allowing children to actually drive cars and ride motorbikes earlier than when they'd get on the open road, and complete courses that would make them expert at defensive driving. This area might also have purpose-built wrecked buildings allowing volunteers to learn how to rescue people from disasters and become competent in CPR and other life-saving techniques.
Educational clusters would deliver the full range of life skills, ranging from an understanding of safe sex to retirement planning. The road-rage offender could take his anger-management class next to the room where the creative writers' group explores plot-development.
Off-the-wall? Quite possibly.
You have a better idea? Great. Tell me about it. Or, rather, tell Joe about it.
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