The promoters of school league tables are doing a grave disservice to Irish education, the ASTI claimed at the weekend.
The union's general secretary, John White, stressed how this society, for all its flaws, still has the human dignity of each pupil at the heart of our schools and our education system.
He said; "The raw, utilitarian impulse represented by the league tables must be resisted and we must never cease to reiterate that those who promote such tables are doing a great disservice to education.
"Placing the human dignity of each pupil at the heart of the system demands an appropriate curriculum, appropriate care and attention for all pupils." Our education system, he declared, must learn not to privilege one form of intelligence over another. "The best schools are those which are attended by the full ability range from all sectors of society. Ghettoes of the disadvantaged or of the advantaged should be discouraged."
In his keynote address to an ASTI education conference, he also criticised the gross under-funding of second-level education in Ireland and called on the Government to redress this imbalance in the forthcoming budget.
"We are ranked 21st out of 27 countries in the OECD in our spending on second-level education. This is simply not good enough and I call on the Government to take the first steps to address this problem in the forthcoming budget.
He said other infrastructural deficits, such as in roads, were being addressed "but the deficits in our second-level education system are not being addressed. We need a coherent, planned strategy to increase the proportion of our GDP which we spend on second-level education.
Mr White said the underfunding was undermining efforts to boost students interest in critical areas like science.
Turning to teachers' pay and the forthcoming discussions on benchmarking, he warned that the recruitment of high quality personnel into the profession could become problematic, as in other countries, unless pay levels keep pace with the private sector.