THIS TIME of year, the national thought process turns briefly to what we call education, to the workings of the system in which we sift and sort our young people with a view to maximising their economic usefulness, writes John Waters.
Much the same themes arise year after year: the barbaric nature of the points system, the promotion of rote learning and the inhuman pressure that teenagers are placed under at perhaps the most vulnerable point in their lives.
Every year we have these discussions, but without any real sense that anything might be done, because as a society we lack any coherent idea of what a proper education might be. What we nowadays call education is really a means to extinguish individuality, to squeeze the child's spirit into a shape that, by virtue of being officially and culturally agreed, bears as much resemblance to creativity as a cavity wall bears to Ben Bulben.
For any sentient parent, the idea of allowing a beloved child into such a process is accompanied by the deepest dread. But whether we like it or not we must deliver our children to a machine that, at the culmination of a process designed to grind them into roughly similar shapes, puts them in pressure chambers and turns up the heat.
When Ireland was poor and had to export its young, there may have been some justification for this barbarism, which enabled young people to compete in the economic jungles of Britain or the US. But now we are in a position to declare and implement our own value system, we continue as though there is no other way.
But education is not about retaining facts or information. In its broadest sense it is about introducing the child to reality, to life in all its splendour. The most urgent necessity is to convey to the young that the world has a meaning, as well as giving them tools to extract that meaning. A child who receives such a gift will have a boundless appetite for knowledge.
Other than in the context of decrying the excessive stress caused by exams and the over-enthusiastic celebrations that follow, we do not make connections between the broader psychological and spiritual condition of Irish youth and the issue of education. But there is a profound connection to be made between seasonal stories about exam stress and the stories we hear all year round about increasing alienation and hopelessness among the young.
In a society which is confronted daily by reckless and despairing responses among its younger members, any honest parent of a teenage child, especially of teenage boys, must surely admit to profound anxiety about the future. Something has happened in our culture and we don't know what it is. Perhaps it has to do with having created a set of conditions, which we have called freedom, into which we must allow our children to embark without the most basic sense of the meaning of reality. They are qualified to build skyscrapers and perform brain operations, but haven't the faintest idea what life is about or what to do with themselves when they have nothing to do.
When I was a child, although this idea was rarely explicitly articulated, schooling and education were not regarded as co-terminous.
There was a much broader concept of education rooted in the family, in the community, and in the traditions and rituals of Catholicism. John McGahern said that the church was his first book, and this was perhaps what he had in mind. Being presented with a singular version of reality, and a comparative freedom to question and dispute it, we acquired the means to divine a sense of meaning that served as a toolkit for living. The model of religiosity we inherited may have been flawed, but it offered us at least the essentials of a tradition that had enabled our ancestors to survive unspeakable circumstances.
Much of this cultural circuitry has been disconnected. Having declared war on the past, we created a society cut off from tradition and core meanings. The point of education, as articulated by the responsible apparatchiks and officials, is nowadays to acquire qualifications to carry out specific functions in the economy, with at best a gracing aspect of exposure to tokenistic forms of "culture".
Absolute meanings have been supplanted with ideological responses and relativistic confusion, and the system transmits its own incoherence to our children. At the heart of the process is a void, born of a fear of core perspectives. Far from complementing a broader education of the child by parents and community, this operates to dismantle any cohesive philosophy imparted externally.
Our children absorb a great many facts and cultural fragments, but without a comprehensive overarching superstructure to, by provoking acceptance or disputation, create in them a confident sense of a totality of meaning. Though often eminently qualified to become cogs in machines, they leave the education system knowing little of what it means to be human, and stride into the cultural jungle we have bequeathed them with a false confidence based on an illusory sense of knowing.