Forty-five years ago, a professor who, in the early decades of the State, played a significant role in our political system, overheard part of a conversation between me and a civil servant who later became cabinet secretary. Garret FitzGerald writes.
The latter had asked if I might at some point in my life enter politics, and if so what cabinet post I would most like to hold. When I replied that I might at some time do so - as, in fact, I did six years later - and then mentioned education as my preferred ministry, the professor cynically remarked: "That shows how little you know about politics. There are no votes in education."
Within a decade, he was proved totally wrong. For, in 1966, Donogh O'Malley (in response, it now appears, to hearing that I might be about to publish an education policy for Fine Gael) persuaded taoiseach Seán Lemass to allow him to announce a free secondary education scheme without prior government approval.
This move was the outcome of early recognition within the Department of Education and also in political circles that education is, in fact, a key element in economic growth. Irish governments were among the first to grasp this reality and, in a country which in the 1960s was starting to emerge from economic stagnation, this realisation stimulated investment in education on a scale that before the end of the century had helped to transform the Irish economy.
If that connection with economic growth had not been established 40 years ago, our education system would never have been developed at such a pace. However, it seems to me that there may have been a downside to this linkage, for this recognition of the economic role of education seems to have taken precedence over the non-economic concept of young people having a right through education to develop their own intellect and personal capacity to the full. The economic factor seems, indeed, to have introduced into our education system two serious distortions which, between them, have proved potentially damaging to our society - and, in the long term also, I believe, to our economy.
First, at the level of public policy, our preoccupation with the economic role of education has yielded an increasingly short-sighted utilitarian approach. Subjects and courses which are judged to be linked directly to economic growth are given priority and boosted at the expense of others which, in the longer run, might better develop the capacities of many young people. The three-quarters of all school students who now go on to further or higher education after completing their secondary studies face pressures that favour vocational training or education of one kind or another.
I must make it clear immediately that there are, of course, young people with a natural bent for particular careers whose futures may be best served by an early entry to vocational education or training - for example, in areas such as business. For these particular students, their interest and imagination may be most readily stimulated by such courses. But, given the relatively early stage of personal and intellectual development of many young people when they leave school at 17 or 18, it is difficult to believe that more than one in five of all Irish young people of that age going on to higher education will benefit most from immediate immersion in business studies, for example.
Some at least of these young business students might have been more stimulated intellectually by some other discipline had they looked elsewhere before embarking on training for business - and might in that way have acquired a greater capacity for leadership later in life. In fact, many businessmen recognise this and prefer new employees with third-level education which has not been confined to business issues.
Associated with the bias of public policy towards vocational education and training, there has also been a huge emphasis on non-basic scientific research linked to industrial development which, however desirable in itself, could carry a risk of undervaluing basic scientific research. Moreover, the resource allocation consequences of this bias within the university system currently risk weakening the crucially-important teaching role of these institutions, which is the primary concern of a majority of students.
Secondly, there has been a disturbingly short-sighted tendency by many parents to push their children towards courses they believe are either likely to secure for them in due course high levels of income or, at another level, towards vocational courses which they think will offer a greater certainty of immediate post-higher education employment.
The first of these parental concerns, relating to their children's future earnings, risks producing doctors more interested in wealth than in caring and lawyers more interested in high fees than in justice. And the way the points system works for such high-points faculties means that many potential medical or law students, especially from less prosperous families, who may have exactly the kind of motivation which would eventually most benefit society, are in practice excluded from these professions.
And in a country which is today almost unique in the scale of demand for indigenous labour, and is so short of workers that it will require up to 50,000 immigrants each year, there is little reason for parents, through fear of unemployment, to push their children towards careers that may not correspond to their particular interests or capacities. One does not have to be an educational psychologist to realise that for most young people at 17 or 18 who have the opportunity of higher education the courses most likely to stretch and thus develop their minds - and accordingly benefit them in the longer run - will be ones which respond to their interests and enthusiasms.
The truth is that a curious combination of short-sighted economics-dominated public policies and equally short-sighted attitudes of some parents towards their children's futures is currently distorting the higher education choices of many young people - and thus threatening to diminish the eventual quality of our human resources pool.
I recognise that many people feel - with justice - that we have been as lucky in our education system as we have been unlucky in our health system, and our education system has, of course, many strengths: it educates a relatively high proportion of our younger age cohort to a level which makes business people from outside Ireland want to employ them here at good salaries.
Nevertheless, the issues raised above need to be debated, and I find it worrying that, outside the ranks of professional educators, there seems to be insufficient interest in fundamental educational issues of this kind.