Delusion is replacing achievement - Taking education for granted

THE empowering, liberating experience of education is an utterly transformative gift we have come to regard as a universal human right.

That belief stands even though the generation now contemplating retirement is the first, in Ireland at least, to enjoy the kind of access to the comprehensive education system we now regard as everyday. We take that privileged access so for granted that we have become blasé and wasteful, focussing on opportunities and imagined rights, but ignoring the great challenges and demanding workload needed to make best use of that great gift.

A recent OECD report reached chilling conclusions about our education system — and our expectations of it. It pointed out that one-in-five college graduates has only a basic grasp of language or numeracy and that Irish university students have some of the poorest literacy and numeracy skills in the developed world. The report concluded that about one-in-five university graduates struggled with basic comprehension — like understanding the instructions on a bottle of aspirin — and that more complex tasks remained a mystery to this bewildered cohort. How can this be?

These findings, reported in The Irish Times this weekend, so fly in the face of our self-contented narrative around our “world class” schools and colleges that they challenge far more than our education system. They challenge our comfort and dishonesty around our stewardship of what should be a core, self-preserving enterprise for this society.

How can it be that 20% of those leaving third-level institutions struggle with basic reading and basic numeracy? More to the point, if they are so very disadvantaged, how did they get into a third level institution in the first place? Is this not a kind gross social betrayal, deluding the graduates, their potential employers and most of all the society that has invested huge, but insufficient, resources, in their education?

The pressure on third level institutions is unrelenting. The CAO has reported a record number of college applications this year — 73,000. This growth reflects one of the highest rates of third-level attendance in the world but is matched by funding cuts. College leaders have warned for many years they cannot provide the education expected to ever more students without more resources. These issues are behind the TUI walk-out planned for Wednesday when institutes of technology staff will hold a one-day strike over “a crisis in the sector.” Key concerns include chronic under-funding, and a 32% rise in student numbers over a period when lecturer numbers fell by 10%. How typically Irish it is that this strike comes just as yet another Government scampers off to the polls without, in the previous five years, finding the time or backbone to confront the issue of college fees.

Author HG Wells once described history as “a race between education and catastrophe” and unless we grasp this nettle, which may include restoring basic grammar and arithmetic as cornerstones at primary school level, it seems more than likely that pretence and delusion rather than real achievement will become ever more important in our education systems. That would indeed be catastrophic.