Challenge of illiteracy - Students are falling by the wayside

IF FIGURES predicting that between 10% and 15% of our working population will be illiterate in 2016 — just the lifetime of a decent car away — are correct, we are facing huge educational and social challenges.

That any person should leave a school in Ireland without basic functionality in the three Rs — reading, writing and arithmetic — is not acceptable in a country that likes to imagine itself a modern, clued-in, happening European state.

The implication of the claim by CORI — the Conference of Religious of Ireland — is that for every 10 people in the workforce, only eight will be able to read and write.

Only eight will be able to contribute to advancing our knowledge-based economy, an economy and society dependent on the products of educated, enlivened imaginations rather than strong and willing backs.

This grim prospect would condemn those people who have failed to make the most of the educational opportunities available to them — if they were — to lives of drudgery and poverty. Lives without access to the labour market except in the most menial and unrewarding circumstances.

These figures are being published at just about the mid-point of the UN Literacy Decade (2003-2012), an initiative set up to confront to reduce illiteracy across the world. The UN believes that there are almost 900 million illiterate people in the world today, the majority of whom live in the developing world and are women.

In Ireland there may be many instances where individuals did not make the best of the opportunities offered to them by good and willing teachers.

However, there must be many who because of overcrowded classrooms or weak teachers fell by the wayside. Many of the crowded classrooms exist because of our refusal to insist that infrastructure and housing development run in parallel, not one after the other.

It is also likely that some teachers have become exhausted by the struggle of acting as educators, crowd control officials and social workers. All the more reason to introduce teachers assessments to protect both the teacher and the students.

Let us hope that the CORI predictions do not come to pass. That hope should be matched by action to ensure that they do not.

Once again, it’s over to you, Minister.