There is a need for a radical overhaul of how second-level students are taught and tested in Irish schools, a conference in Waterford has been told.
Dr Kieran Byrne, director of Waterford Institute of Technology and a former dean of education at the University of Limerick, said that while society has changed in the last 20 years, a similar transformation has not occurred in Irish education.
"How individual children learn best has not received due attention while the need for students to make personal statements is too often overlooked. Education systems that don't build creativity fail society.
"While there have been changes in Irish education during the last quarter of a century, there has been no shift in our educational mindset. Interdisciplinary and evidence-based learning are still too rarely evident in second-level schools where I would also like to see continuous assessment counting far more towards results in the Junior and Leaving Certificate."
Citing the huge interest among students in the Esat BT Young Scientist & Technology Exhibition in January as well as in Science Week Ireland last November, Dr Byrne said it was "most unfortunate" that this zeal is not reflected in the uptake of science subjects in secondary schools.
"There is a worrying 'interest to action' conversion rate and it may be that negative learning experiences at school are brought more sharply into focus by events like the Young Scientist and Science Week.
Dr Byrne made his remarks at a conference at Waterford Institute of Education where 200 delegates from Denmark, Germany, Finland, Sweden, Latvia, Spain, Greece, Germany and the US considered how a far-reaching theory on human intelligence can be applied in further and higher education.
The Theory of Multiple Intelligences developed by Dr Howard Gardner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education rejects the notion that there is only a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric testing and provides a much broader definition of what it means to be "educated".
Prof Áine Hyland, professor of education and vice-president at University College Cork, attacked the culture whereby children can be labelled "failures" at a young age. "Teachers of mathematics are particularly prone to thinking of lesser performing students as simply 'not intelligent' rather than considering that they may simply have different intelligences.
"There is no justification for labelling children as failures. It is one reason why I oppose over-testing, particularly at too early a stage. If a child is convinced at the age of seven or eight that their school and family see them as a failure, then they will almost certainly meet that expectation," she added.
"Assessment regimes are too narrow and teachers are reluctant to move away from what they themselves are used to. The successes achieved in adult education with people who have first been labelled as 'failures' shows the flaws in the mainstream education system."
A Danish delegate, Mr Finn Rasmussen, who leads an EU-funded project aimed at finding and developing hidden intelligences told the conference that rather than simply focusing on whether students may have learning disabilities, consideration should be given to the possibility that their teachers may have what he termed "teaching disabilities".