Economics: We seem to be in awe of our education system. We have persuaded ourselves that it is amongst the best in the world. One consequence of this self-congratulatory tone is that we attach no urgency to reforming the system or even taking modest steps that might improve it. It's another case of 'if it's not broke, don't fix it'.
Why do we think Irish education is so superior? It's the economy, stupid! How could we have produced the Celtic Tiger, the best growth rates in the world, the fastest growth in employment and all that without a world-beating education system? Isn't it a well-known fact that the Celtic Tiger happened because of the plentiful supply of well-educated young people?
Of course, there is more than a grain of truth in all of this. Economic theory (perhaps even common sense too) points to a strong link between the accumulation of knowledge and skills imparted by education on the one hand and the enhanced productivity and technological progress that drives economic growth on the other. By way of an interesting aside though, it is worth noting that causation is probably not all one way. There is reason to believe that it's not just a matter of more education boosting economic growth, but also that the higher living standards that accompany economic growth increase the demand for education.
In the Irish case, research on the relationship between education and economic growth carried out by the ESRI and others has undoubtedly influenced public attitudes. That research suggests that the rising level of educational attainment amongst the labour force contributed about 1 per cent per annum to the growth rate of the economy during the 1990s. In this context, what is meant by educational attainment is essentially the average length of time individuals spend in full-time education. Over the past several decades, this average has risen steadily as increasing proportions of children have completed secondary schooling and gone on to third-level.
In so far as the research work in question is telling us anything about the performance of the education system, it is telling us that the system has successfully managed to overcome the problems attaching to greatly increased throughput of students, especially at second- and third-level. It has done so primarily because of huge capacity expansion, during the 1970s and 1980s in particular, in terms of new schools, new colleges and more teaching and administrative personnel.
But a system that is capable of successfully changing from a low-attainment to a high-attainment regime (in the sense of attainment that we are talking about), impressive though that achievement may be, is not necessarily a system that has improved the quality of education outcomes at each of its constituent levels. Nor is a system that changes from a low-attainment to a high-attainment regime more rapidly than systems in other countries are doing at the same time (in large part because the regime change has occurred much earlier elsewhere), necessarily a system where quality of outcomes at each of its constituent levels is superior to elsewhere. In plainer language, the point is that we might be putting a much higher proportion of our young people through second- and third-level institutions than we were 20 or 30 years ago, but this doesn't mean that the quality of education at second- or third-level (or primary level, for that matter) has improved or is any better than elsewhere.
What do we know about how education outcomes in Ireland compare with elsewhere? Well, it would be nice to know a lot more than we do. But what we do know, in terms of hard facts rather than impressions, is enough to suggest that we have no cause for complacency. OECD data, derived from testing the performance of 15-year-olds across a range of skills in 27 member countries, show the Republic fifth in reading literacy, ninth in scientific literacy and fifteenth in mathematical literacy. This data relates to 2000, the latest year for which results have been published. The results for 1995 are broadly similar, suggesting no perceptible trend. These and other OECD data point to a better-than-average education system, but they do not chime with the notion of a system that is beating the socks off the competition.
Of course, education is not just about competition and competitiveness. Indeed, I think to benchmark our education system in this way is to set the bar far too low.
Education should be about tapping and releasing the potential of all our children and young adults across a broad range of intelligences. If we could successfully orientate our system to achieving this objective, rest assured that competitiveness would look after itself.
And in terms of releasing the potential of all our children and young adults, there is ample evidence that the system is not succeeding. Most obviously, it is failing children from deprived backgrounds, as attested to by available information on literacy problems, early school leaving and persistently low rates of participation in third level - the latter starkly illustrated by the crude league tables that the newspapers have started to publish. Less obviously, the system seems to be failing to properly engage boys, who are scoring well behind girls in public exams and across a range of OECD indicators. This is not a uniquely Irish phenomenon of course, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't seriously address it.
A big danger in any society is that the leaders and decision-makers will start to believe their own propaganda.
It is one thing to proclaim the great strengths and merits of the Irish educational system to the rest of the world; it's quite another to think that making such proclamations is where education policy starts and ends. It was a particular asset of the last minister for education that he didn't think in that way. There is much work to be done. Let's hope that the new team at the Department (the first all-woman Minister-secretary general combination in any Department in the history of the State, following the appointment of Brigid McManus last week) has the vision, energy and courage to do it.
Jim O'Leary currently lectures in economics at NUI-Maynooth. He can be contacted at jim.oleary@may.ie
