Education needs creative clean-out

YOUR “time for an honest discussion” editorial on educational reform (Dec 23) rightly welcomes the current widespread airing of re-assessment, re-evaluation and recalibration of the stagnating education system.

Apart from the calculated predictability of Leaving Cert questions suiting rote learners garnering high points, the whole swathe of the educational spectrum from primary to tertiary needs a full and creative clean-out — creativity being an absolutely key and core component of transformation.

This isn’t only to do with artistic creativity as we experience it through the performing, poetic or visual arts (though they all provide vital lifelines), but an integrated creativity of all intellectual, experiential and practical perspectives, within an engaging interpersonal template of endeavour involving student/pupil and teacher/lecturer.

The short-cutting shallows of banal fodder-learning, exam-orientated cliched tractual consumption and unexperienced regurgitation (to say nothing of gross internet “abuse”), is well nigh a crying shame of deprivation. Children and young adults (nay all adults), blossom and thrive authentically, only if there is genuine submersion in person-centred, group-aware and globalised learning patterns.

Such is not airy-fairy, soft-discipline, rigourless play-acting, but a “true-to-species” holistic education, preparing real people for real life in community, society and international activity — not merely for the prescribed market-place straightjacket. It meets thus, all the necessary criteria.

As you correctly highlight: “This debate has been influenced by too many special interest groups for far too long and it is time to return to first principles“, but let’s have these first principles copiously imbued and woven with flare and creative impulse, rather than the blare and bluster of “rote-ism and mote-ism”.

Jim Cosgrove

Chapel Street

Lismore

Co Waterford