Opinion: the miraculous powers of education only work if - and only if - the right sort of education is in place
By Vittorio Bufacchi, UCC and Jennifer Horgan
When French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvétius declared "education can do all," he implied a diversity. He imagined education as having far reaching and indeed transformative consequences for all of society.
So what would he make of our current system in Ireland? It's a system that grants superiority to the university educated individual, while leaving citizens without the skills to build homes or infrastructure to help combat our climate emergency.
Grounded on the revolutionary assumption that we are born ignorant not stupid, Helvétius' motto betrays the optimism characteristic of many leading figures of the Enlightenment period. Such optimism relies on a deep understanding of what is meant by the word education. An outsider looking at Ireland would have to conclude that education here means getting students to university, regardless of their individual strengths or interests. Diversity is lost and so too our system’s ability to transform and liberate its citizens. In the Irish context, education cannot do all; instead, it carries on doing a lot of the same thing.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime, Della Kilroy reports on a conference on education reform hosted by Equate, an organisation that campaigns for diversity in Irish schools
From Plato onwards, philosophers have considered education the cornerstone of a just polity, which is why getting our education system right is our highest priority. Outside of the home, school often has the most profound impact on a young person’s life. Of course, the miraculous powers of education only work if, and only if, the right sort of education is in place. Not just any education will do. In fact, the wrong sort of education can do more harm than good.
What makes for the appropriate, or desirable, type of education is itself a philosophically loaded question. Here, we are going to ask more down-to-earth questions: is the Leaving Certificate up to scratch? Should the Irish education system be radically reformed? The simple answers to these questions are 'no’ and ‘yes’ respectively.
The main problem with the Leaving Cert is that it is oppressive. In her book Justice and the Politics of Difference, philosopher Iris Marion Young defines oppression as restrictions on self-expression, the structural phenomena that immobilise or diminish a group. Oppression can take many different forms, including marginalisation, powerlessness and violence. These are all ingrained in the education system in Ireland.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's News at One, Leaving cert students say they are 'unsettled, disheartened and stressed'
When the Catholic Church lost some of its power over Irish education in the latter half of the 20th century, it was quickly replaced by a market understanding of education. This system of competitive testing driven by individualism and self-interest rewards the already privileged and punishes the already disadvantaged. It is a system of education defined by capitalist values and it is no longer appropriate.
We know that a quarter of Irish students have additional needs. Thousands of children currently await assessments and adequate supports in classrooms across the country. We know that the ten percent of children who don’t make it to the Leaving Cert are disproportionally represented by lower income and often marginalised communities. We know that attending a private school immediately puts students ahead in the points race. We know the race is fixed.
The Leaving Cert doesn’t just pit individuals against each other. It also pits schools and communities against each other. Due to its rigidity, it neglects the neurodiverse child and erects barriers for anyone who might desire an alternative route beyond secondary school.
Our system seems to elevate money and prestige over selfhood and community and that has consequences for us all.
If we want an education that aspires to do all, we should no longer allow ourselves to be oppressed by a system that sets us against each other, competing for the ‘best’ schools and the ‘best’ college courses. We should be embarrassed by the media frenzy and the singular narrative created around the Leaving Cert. We should plan and invest beyond it, recognise that it champions a specific type of intelligence, that it favours a specific kind of background and that it fails to account for our diversity as humans.
Schools must cater for the plurality of our students, and we need to value other options of further education as part of our main framework. Ireland still has one of the highest proportions of school-leavers progressing to third level in the world, and one of the lowest proportions opting for apprenticeships. Too few schools in Ireland offer a qualification beyond the standard Leaving Cert. When our Leaving Cert papers are designed, universities are consulted. What are we telling young people to value? Our system as it stands seems to elevate money and prestige over selfhood and community and that has consequences for us all.
We need to revise what it is we value. We need to talk about the fundamental purpose of education in our country. To break this cycle of oppression, we need to reform the Leaving Cert and explore other options, other forms of assessment and learning. Until we broaden the Leaving Cert and the points system, we’ll continue to maintain and perpetuate a system of oppression, to do damage to our young and, by extension, our country.
Helvétius was certainly right when he said that ‘education made us what we are’. We need to ask ourselves if we like what we have become.
The ideas in this article are explored in greater detail in Jennifer Horgan’s ‘O Captain, My Captain’: One Teacher’s Hope for Change in the Irish Education System
Dr Vittorio Bufacchi is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at UCC. He is a former Irish Research Council awardee. Jennifer Horgan is a teacher and journalist who has spent the last 15 years in classrooms in Ireland and abroad.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
