REFORMS IN education should focus on children’s rights and wellbeing rather than merely teaching methods, the Merriman Summer School heard yesterday.
Dr Dympna Devine, senior lecturer in UCD’s school of education, said a longer-term perspective needed to be applied, based on equality of education rather than just quality education.
“What often tends to get emphasised is the quality side. You tend to get this sort of thing about blaming the teachers, standards are dropping in schools . . . It is something that we do need to be mindful of but there is a broader issue that it is not just about quality, it is also about how different groups of children are doing in the education system.”
Research showed that the best education systems were the ones that lessened the differences between different groups of children. “The best systems which are doing well in terms of their standards tend not to have as big gender differences, tend not to have as big differences between children on the basis of their social class, tend not to have as big differences between children depending on their migrant status. You have to have that combined approach.”
The way the system had evolved historically “absolutely needs to be changed”, she said. “It is not working for the type of society we want to create.” While falling standards in maths and increased illiteracy were rightful causes of concern, there was a danger of too narrow a focus on such problems.
“Children thrive when you value them in the present,” she said. “When we are trying to address those challenges that we have in our education system, we need to do it from a child’s rights perspective. When you look after the whole person of the child, then you accrue benefits in all areas of their education.
“You have to get the fundamentals right and the fundamentals are making sure that children are looked after, and then they are in position to learn what you want them to learn.”
Dr Devine said valid questions were being raised around the quality of the education system but they had complex answers. What was unusual about the Project Maths scheme, currently being introduced to secondary schools, was that it was considered so radical “when it is so normative in the primary school system and has been for quite a long time”.
Prof Sheila Greene, director of the Children’s Research Centre at Trinity College Dublin, said there was far more understanding of the need for children to be listened to and stimulated. However, this was threatened by time constraints on parents and confusion about the parenting role.
Prof Greene said she was struck by the number of parents who were not sure about what they should be doing with their children and the numbers who felt stressed out by parenting.
“Some parents are very uncertain about their role as parents and, yes, they know children need love, but they might not know at the same time that they also need love with a firmness attached to it in terms of what is expected from them. Love is allied with things like respect for the child and the expectation that there will be respect back.
“It is very easy to say it, but it is a lot more difficult to know what it means in practice.”
She said that to love their children and give them everything may not be the best thing parents could do “without addressing issues about what is in their best interests”.
“Being able to say ‘no’ is part of being a loving parent as well as being able to say ‘yes’ and I think sometimes people have difficulties around that.”
It needed to be asked whether some of the new ways of rearing children were creating young citizens who were not fulfilling their potential and were not being best prepared for adult life.
“If we rear kids to have very materialistic values, to have very short attention spans, to not be thinking about other people but to be focused more on themselves as individuals, then we may reap the consequences of that in the long term.”