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?