Feedback Kathryn HolmquistOur education system is old-fashioned and completely unable to deal with the needs of the individual. Many of you think it's time it was given anoverhaul
Many parents and children know about feeling blamed - because they're allegedly not good parents or because they are inattentive students - when, deep-down, the real problem is the system itself.
This e-mail came from a young woman who started out saying that she is a fan of pop duo tATu, but confessed that the real purpose of her correspondence was to point out that she is not a fan of secondary school.
"I'm in third year and I finished my mocks last week and I'm receiving some of my results this week. My results have been, unfortunately, totally crap," she wrote. "I think that the teachers are to blame for this. Okay, fair enough, I should have done more study, but I had one teacher come in and give out to my class for not writing a page or whatever for the answers, but he never told us how much we had to write! How could we know, we're not psychic!
"People I know from other schools have told me similar stories, I'm not alone!
"Most teachers, I am actually sorry to say, aren't very good at all. Part of being a good teacher is being able to control the class, and, okay, I admit some people in my class do give teachers a hard time, but they should be able to control them and be able to teach all at once! Teachers seem to be only able to do one at a time.
"I'm not really sure what kind of article you could write with this, but please write something so that people might actually get a chance to know what our schools are like and, hopefully, the education system will get sorted!"
Shortly after this e-mail, a conference on secondary-school education was covered in the news pages of The Irish Times: "Rather than simply focusing on whether students may have learning disabilities, consideration should be given to the possibility that their teachers may have 'teaching disabilities'." The quote was from a Danish delegate, Finn Rasmussen, who leads an EU-funded project concerned with finding and developing hidden intelligences. He was speaking at an international conference on education at the Waterford Institute of Education.
He was supporting the view of Dr Kieran Byrne, director of Waterford Institute of Technology, who stated that education had not kept up with social changes of the past two decades. He believes that the "Theory of Multiple Intelligences", developed at Harvard in the US, shows that there is more than one single form of human intelligence that can be measured by standard testing.
On the same day on the Letters Page, Eoin Ryan commented on my column regarding teenage angst, which discussed the fact that one in five 12 to 15 year olds have symptoms of psychological distress, such as depression.
Ryan wrote: "Our society seems obsessed with treating problems, while never really looking at what causes them. I suggest that as going to school is the way most 12 to 15 year olds pass their days, examining school conditions would give valuable insights into the causes of teenage depression."
He went on to say that "school is not a nice place to be", with the mental bullying, peer pressure, and physical discomfort of cramped desks and damp classrooms. Never mind the unstimulating approach of "read, this write it out, learn it off".
To all four of you - tATu fan, Rasmussen, Byrne and Ryan - all I can say is that I wholeheartedly agree.
There are many inspired educators in this State, but there is also a hard core of people who were educated by a system that was characterised by a patriarchal "we know best" attitude. For them, the child's role is to fit into the system - even if that means being psychic - rather than tailoring the system to the child.
Parents of children who don't "fit in" (which is probably every child at some stage) find this frustrating, to say the least. Some children do extremely well in the traditional system of learning - which is to memorise, repeat and regurgitate - others think differently. And sometimes their parents think differently too.
Being told that you and your child are to blame, and not the system, is hurtful. You have two choices. Either you agree with the system and find ways to help your child conform, or you try to find another system of learning for your child.
With so few choices in our homogenous education system, finding an alternative can be impossible. So parents and children feel trapped in conformity. There is a third alternative: change the system.
On Family Friendly Workplace Day, I was asked to give a talk on the subject of equality to an audience of people working for equality. They included employers, gardai, civil servants and workers for voluntary organisations. What I told them was basically this: equality is not just about gender, or disability. Fifty per cent of us, at least, are disabled in some way, when you include physical disabilities, learning disabilities, mental distress and all the other cards that life plays us.
Equality is really about connection or, as Robert Putnam puts it, social capital. Being able to be involved as yourself, and appreciated as yourself, is a right that we all have. An education system that does not recognise those who "think differently" is not an education system, it's a conformity machine in which there can never be equality.
