CONNECT: The gated communities and ghettos of Ireland's education system are much too far apart for absolute equality of opportunity to happen, so hope seems lost and fatalism prevails, writes Eddie Holt
Watching a BBC screening of Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film If . . . at the end of a week of squirm-inducing squabbles about the numbers of students Irish secondary schools send to Dublin's two largest universities was thoroughly educational. If . . . is allegorical, charting the course from adolescent discontent to violent rebellion at an English boys' public school. It's uneven and, of course, dated, but its subversive melodramatics, shocking three decades ago, remain pertinent.
In fact, the squabbles over the published lists make Anderson's old movie particularly pertinent. At the film's climax, three rebellious sixth form students (and their leader's girlfriend - for feminism was getting angry then too!) bomb and machine-gun a school group which includes a royal, a bishop, a general, fogeys in suits of armour, a headmaster and their entourages. Sure, it's way over the top - even for an allegory, it's extreme - but its simplistic and bullish anti-establishment message is its strength.
The published lists (with their exclusive emphasis on UCD and TCD leaving them rather stuck around 1968 themselves) disclosed no grand revelations. Everybody knows that Irish education is ludicrously class-based. Certainly, in terms of specifics, the lists, though ignoring proportion, generated great interest. That's understandable even though the principal lesson to be learned from them is how Irish education utterly confounds Ireland's republican rhetoric.
The lists merely prove what everybody knows: the Proclamation's ideal of "cherishing all the children of the nation equally" is sanctimonious and hypocritical guff. That's not, of course, the fault of youngsters. They go to the schools to which their parents send them and many parents make considerable financial sacrifices to give their children the education they (the parents) consider to be most socially and intellectually advantageous.
Fair enough. But as an overall social plan, such a system, at the start of the 21st century, is despicable. It's true that within rigidly maintained parameters, it can and does reward key abilities, aptitudes and application. But it's also self-sustaining and paralysing and ultimately predicated upon Victorian notions of people "knowing their place in life".
Certainly, for huge numbers of poor kids, the system, being so anti-dynamic, is a sick joke. Little wonder many of them fail to prosper.
Even though the education system is not the fault of youngsters, or even, at least individually, of their parents, it is a full-blown political disgrace. Poverty in a society such as 21st century Ireland is primarily due to collective inertia permitting political chicanery. There is simply no need for the vastness of the gap between the typical prospects of a pupil at an exclusive, fee-paying school and those of a pupil at a school in a poor area. If political chicanery isn't to blame, then something even darker must be.
Anyway, back to 1968. The date is mediaeval history to today's school-leavers but it was a year when people throughout the world faced and challenged their governments. In France, the US, England, Germany, Czechoslovakia and, of course, Northern Ireland, it was a time of often violent revolution and change. America's hopeless and ruthless war in Vietnam was the catalyst. Sure, that year is often absurdly romanticised or absurdly scorned and it was never going to be the dawn of an new age.
But it was a year in which people in many parts of the world realised that political leaders and mass media had consistently lied to them. So they got angry, protested and often said and did ridiculous things. The egalitarianism many hoped for did not come to pass and the passions of the period faded. A film such as If . . . , for instance, could not be made now - not after the slaughter in America's Columbine High and other schools.
Much of the protest politics of 1968 emanated from middle-class people who, for better and for worse, rethought politics and the world around them. The idea of even attempting such rethinking seems to bore people nowadays. Fatalism prevails.
In a world stressing individuality, it seems futile to turn to politics. So discrimination in educational opportunity persists. It seems as though enough people can play the system to personally satisfactory levels and screw those who can't. Very enlightened, eh? It's also little better than feudal that poor people should fork out tax to subsidise the rich at third-level. The "personal responsibility" arguments of some wealthy people (though such arguments are not baseless and personal responsibility, regardless of class, can't be simply evaded) unravel completely at that point. Self-help educational projects among less wealthy communities are commendable and deserve support, but are too few to redress the appalling imbalances in Irish education.
It would, of course, help education overall if we had some concept of the kind of person we wish it to produce. The current system produces some academically brilliant, many academically competent, many academically incompetent and many illiterate people. But education itself becomes a subject for study only at third-level. Might it not benefit secondary school pupils in the senior cycle to be taught about the system within which they are studying in order to open up young minds to the inequality of the farce?
BY the time they get (or don't) to third-level education, it's too late. Sure, even the senior years of secondary school are rather late, but at least many poorer kids are still within the education system at that stage. The least it could do is to tell them the truth about itself and arrange cross-school debates and intermingling between rich, average and poor pupils. Economic and class segregation can begin in playschool, of course, but youngsters of 15 or 16 - rich, average and poor - deserve the truth.
In fact, failure to alert them to it perpetuates the masonic-like manipulations of the entire educational project. It is thoroughly anti-education and helps to sustain the current inequalities. Alongside basic media literacy, basic education literacy is required at second-level. A secondary-school programme on education, even one with appropriate exams delivering college points, wouldn't change the system overnight. But it could encourage reflexive thinking and gradually erode some of the divisions upheld by silence and ignorance.
Economic capital and the kind of parental cultural capital that already aids some students at the expense of others will continue to bestow advantages. As the jilted dog in the vodka ad knows: "That's life". Absolute equality of opportunity is not going to happen. The gated communities and ghettoes of Ireland's education system are much too far apart for that.
Still, the teachers' unions and the university departments of education could lobby to make the government's Department of Education include education as a fully-fledged Leaving Certificate subject. After all, teachers have to study it to gain their professional qualifications. Savvy youngsters know the score anyway, but official recognition of it could help to transform the ugly, discriminating system highlighted by the published lists. If there's a will . . . If, indeed.