Educate people to work and to think

ABBOTT Mark Patrick Hederman, who was principal at Glenstal Abbey until 1991, is the latest in a long line of admirable commentators to point out that our educational system can hardly be described as such.

Rather it is, he contends, a way of inculcating as many students as is possible with as many facts as is possible and awarding the highest exam marks to the student who can regurgitate the greatest number of those facts — relevant or not — at a given moment. That may be a slightly tongue-in-cheek assessment of the Abbot’s remarks but it is not too far off the mark. Addressing the annual conference of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors in Waterford he warned that creativity and imagination, those essentials for a full and rewarding life, are being stifled by a system “enslaved to economic growth”. It is unfortunate that creativity and imagination are as nebulous as accounting and arithmetic are the essential cogs in our society’s modus operandi but that is the way of our world.

In a heartfelt denunciation of our education system and aspects of our public life he pointed to an alternative that could be easily achieved if we were to accept that education works on a number of levels and that a highly qualified accountant can be little more than a calculator with legs unless that person’s soul has been touched by something more than numbers. The abbott’s world view may be more idealistic than is fashionable but it is not wrong.