You would have had to have been living in a Bord Fáilte catalogue, surrounded by smirking dance-maidens with half their toes head-high and pointing, to have been surprised by the recent education statistics produced by Prof Patrick Clancy. The figures for the numbers of students from the city ghettos of unskilled working and unworking classes who go on to to third-level education are still very low. Two questions. Why? And: is this necessarily such a bad thing?
Firstly, we shouldn't be surprised that interest in education among the inhabitants of certain working-class housing areas is so low; on balance, it just about reflects the interest both the State and the Catholic Church took in them, from the earliest days of formal education in the 19th century. The religious orders were far more enthusiastic about educating the middle classes than the shoeless urchins of working-class areas; and with the foundation of the State, the lumpenproletariat were resolutely left to their own modest educational devices.
North inner city
So, in the heart of the north inner city of Dublin, the Christian Brothers and the Jesuits catered for the lower middle and the professional classes respectively with O'Connell School and Belvedere. For children from the tenements, there was almost no educational effort; however, the problems created by such neglect were - happily - easily ignored, for these wretches merely lived a walk away from the mailboat, England, alcoholism, life on the streets and an early death, into which so many of them duly and dutifully fell. How thoughtful it was of them to get out of the nation's hair so early on in their lives.
Alas, after the economy began to flourish, later generations grew less considerate, and preferred to live and - the selfish creatures! - even to die in Ireland. This was simply intolerable. What could the State do about such ingrates, especially since so many of them lived close to Dublin's city centre and could make life so uncomfortable for the middle classes as they shopped and visited the theatre? It was a thorny problem, but one that was settled with commendable resolve; in the 1960s and 1970s, the State vigorously built remote sink-housing estates around the capital, Bantustans without shops or pubs or transport or decent schools, to which it expelled most of the unwashed urban aboriginals.
These are the areas which now record the lowest rates of third-level educational uptake in Ireland: Darndale, 8.4 per cent;, Clondalkin, 12.7 per cent; Ballyfermot-Chapelizod, 7.1 per cent; north inner city, 8.9 per cent. Even these figures conceal the concentrations of non-achievement in certain ghetto sub-zones, where levels of poverty, illiteracy, drug-taking and tattooing are the only statistics which match the figures for college attendance in areas such as Sandycove, Donnybrook and Stillorgan.
That said, it's easy to sentimentalise the poor. Some people are poor because, though personally intelligent, they are unable to overcome their family culture of impoverishment and dysfunctionalism. Others are poor because they are really, deeply stupid, and they produce deeply stupid children, who when they reach their teens, copulate with other deeply stupid teenagers, thereby begetting generations of genetically modified and perhaps violent imbeciles who are destined for failure and even prison.
Test of civility
This latter group is a tiny minority, but it will always be with us; and how we treat it is a test of our civility, not least because of its often compulsive appetite for anti-social and aggressive behaviour. Because it can be so physically coercive and disruptive, it can, if allowed, adversely effect entire communities with its passionate attachment to low social achievement and academic failure. Illiteracy becomes a badge of honour, prison the academy of choice.
Now this is not the kind of thing people buy The Irish Times to read. No, indeed not. You expect to read about proletarian victims in this newspaper, but not about the proletarian dolts who can bring down entire communities with their self-destructive ethos of violence and abuse. Yet such people are as much the enemy of their neighbours today as the State once was in creating their purpose-built prefabricated slums a generation ago.
But there is another aspect of our low levels of uptake of third-level education. It is that academic "achievement" is not in itself necessary or even desirable for large sections of the population of any country. It is snobbery of the most debased kind which judges that people who do not want to go to college are somehow failing in life. Supermarket check-out personnel, private soldiers, hospital porters, street sweepers, binmen, office-cleaners, labourers, lorry-drivers, bricklayers: these are far more vital figures in basic society than, say, journalists, or bank managers.
Letters after names
It is this wretched failure to esteem those without letters after their names which is now causing us to academicise the non-academic. Nurses must now gain a degree, though I doubt their nursing skills will improve because of it, nor our respect for them increase. Their calling requires patience, care and technical skill, but these qualities do not increase merely because their owners can now put B.Pans (or whatever it is) after their names.
Nurses are vital. Just as vital are the men who clean our streets and collect our household rubbish and clean our sewers and who are the first line of defence in public health policy. We can dignify them with titles, B. Brush or B. Bin or B. Pong, but it will not make them more efficient in their duties. A low level of college participation therefore isn't necessarily the hallmark of failure; rather, it could merely be a healthy sign of diversity.