Ireland's education system has failed many people, the President, Mrs McAleese, said yesterday. While our education system would be envied by many countries, "for so many Irish people, that same system has been anything but a source of liberation", she told a conference in Dublin.
She was delivering a lecture on "The Marginalised Child". The conference was organised by the Lillie Road Centre group of homes, which has three children's homes in London and is setting one up in Edenderry, Co Offaly.
"I am thinking in particular of the thousands of individuals who have gone to primary and secondary schools and are unable to read and write, either at all or only very poorly," she said. Educators should bear in mind that the parents of children in their classes may themselves have been scarred by bad experiences, she said. In some homes, education was not seen as a positive experience and may even be denigrated.
Parents must be centrally involved in the education process, listened to and valued to change this, she said. "In building fluent working partnerships between parents and teachers, we are ma king much better use of the available energy sources which help empower a child."
Referring to what she described as the 20th century's "one long debate about the family", she said no single model was "a sure guarantee of a child's safe transportation from the womb to a fulfilled adulthood.
"The traditional family model based on marriage certainly has its fair share of fallout and failure and we have seen increasing numbers of people turn their back on it, dismissing it as old-fashioned and out of step with the demands of modern individualism and freedom of choice.
"But then there is the fallout too from the increasing number of alternative models characterised by single parenthood, large numbers of births outside marriage and many couples setting up homes together outside marriage. Children need families, however constituted, that work well for them and families need to know the truth or truths about themselves," she said.
"The harder those truths, the more they need to be known, discussed intelligently and owned." Those described as marginalised "are a large part of our national, unlocked potential."