TALKBACK:A scene in a television comedy shines a light on our adult illiteracy crisis, writes BRIAN MOONEY
MRS BROWN, the star of the new RTÉ comedy series Mrs Brown's Boysisreprehensible in many respects. Listeners to RTÉ's Livelinelast week expressed concern about the bad language and general content of the programme.
That’s an issue for another day. But Brendan O’Carroll (as Mrs Brown) has performed a huge service to Irish education by handling the literacy issue in a very thought-provoking way in one key scene.
In the scene, Mrs Brown’s son, a plumber, has turned down the offer of a supervisor’s position, because he cannot read or write. Amid all the profane language and hilarious laughter, the issue of literacy is handled with huge sensitivity, and will hopefully reach out to many thousands of adults suffering daily from the tyranny of illiteracy.
And there are thousands suffering.
Isn’t it shocking that there may be hundreds of thousands of adults in Ireland, who have spent at least 10 years in our national education system, who can neither read nor write? They have never read a newspaper or a book and cannot even own a cheque book, as they may not even be able to write their own name.
Nothing I write in this column will directly touch the lives of those in Ireland who can neither read nor write, as they have no way of accessing my words. But those of us who have mastered the wonderful gift of literacy can do a huge amount to lift those with a literacy deficiency out of their ongoing predicament.
To reach out to an employee, a neighbour, a member of a local club or team, is ultimately an act of self-interest. Educational disadvantage disables the entire community, even if you live a relatively comfortable life seemingly insulated from such dysfunction.
Children, whose parents have low to non-existent literacy skills, grow up in homes without books, where there is no support or affirmation for the learning being transmitted in school. In time, these children fall behind in school, become disruptive in class, drawing huge time and energy from the teacher, which slows down the work of the entire class, and therefore shapes the education of all children.
In time these children either fail to make the transition from primary to second-level schooling, or if they do, quickly create huge discipline problems, which again disrupt the education of all their fellow students.
If you think that by putting your child in a fee-paying school you can isolate yourself from the fall-out from this societal failure, think again. You and your children will be paying hundreds of thousands of euro in taxes over the lifetime of these unfortunate childrens’ journeys through the social welfare system and in some cases, criminal justice system. If only out of total self-interest, we who have the good fortune to have the power to transform the lives of the severely educationally disadvantaged adults should, wherever we encounter such individuals, do whatever is our power to facilitate them in engaging with the adult literacy services provided by bodies such as the National Adult Literacy Agency.
In Dublin, the National College of Ireland (NCI) has a programme, co-ordinated by Dr Josephine Bleach. It reaches out to parents, and offers them support to overcome any educational deficiencies which hold them back in assisting their own children of primary school age in Dublin’s north inner city.
It is a model which should be copied in every town and city in Ireland. It’s to be hoped this valuable programme will survive the latest round of cost-cutting at the NCI.
Brian Mooney is a former president of the Institute of Guidance Counsellors.
