Sir, – Nobody should be surprised about the spectacularly low application and success rates of Irish applicants for positions in the EU administration, as highlighted by Naomi O’Leary, “Only 22 Irish candidates have passed the competitions to join the European Commission since 2015″ (News, November 2nd).
While the lack of focus on the teaching of EU languages is a factor, given the language requirement – the disastrous axing of the minuscule funding for the Modern Languages Initiative at primary level immediately after the financial meltdown is throwing a long shadow – the more important reason is a broader educational policy failure. The initial enthusiasm about the EEC/EU after Ireland’s membership eventually petered out with Ireland’s growing affluence. The European Studies Project for secondary schools, for instance, made possible largely by EU cross-border funding, disappeared from Irish secondary schools in the 2000s and was not replaced. The State went for the cheap option of outsourcing the European dimension to the European Union in the shape of the Blue Star programme for primary schools and the European Ambassadors Schools programme for secondary schools. The EU, as a consequence, always remained external and additional rather than an integral and core part of the school curriculum, to be taken up by only a limited number of schools. European Studies at third level declined and is now down to two CAO-listed undergraduate courses. The teaching of EU languages declined until the trend was halted to some degree by the Languages Connect language strategy of 2017, as result of Brexit.
It is noteworthy that the languages strategy is anxious not to prioritise EU over world languages such as Mandarin and Arabic. This is a result of policy shifts within educational thinking. The international dimension within the educational curriculum has clearly taken a global turn in which Europe is seen as old hat. At third level this had financial reasons as Asian students paying high fees were essential to make up for the chronic underfunding of the sector. In schools it had the effect that for very worthwhile educational reasons global justice came to occupy the limited space available for the international dimension, prioritising global citizenship over European citizenship. While there can be no question that global inequalities is indeed a hugely important subject for the next generation to grasp, why precisely this has to come at the expense of teaching about the European Union is less clear, all the more as the EU is not simply a perpetrator of global injustice but also a key player in alleviating the consequences.
Evidence of the global turn and the more worrying fact that it is likely to continue is the new Draft Primary Curriculum Framework, the blueprint for the next decade, where the word Europe, let alone EU citizenship, is spectacularly absent, all the more noticeable by the introduction of the area of citizenship education. The very welcome reintroduction of modern languages again does not distinguish between EU and world languages.
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What Irish children learn at school is that Europe is part of an old more boring world which is now replaced by a wider (purely anglophone) world, preparing Irish young people, as evidence suggests, not for jobs in the EU but for jobs in Australia, Canada and the US, perhaps even the UK, none of them EU member states. Unless there is a fundamental rethink of the priorities of Irish education and unless the Department of Education and the Department of Foreign Affairs start talking to each other, there is little hope for an increase in interest among the next generation in applying for jobs in Brussels and getting involved in building a better European Union, with, as Naomi O’Leary rightly points out, detrimental political consequences for Ireland in the post-Brexit dispensation. Rather than asking the European Commission or indeed the new Irish EU immigrants to fix the problem, it may be more appropriate to start with a public debate where exactly Irish education is, or should be, heading, and whether the question of why exactly all Irish school children hold a passport indicating a dual Irish and EU citizenship on the cover should not be a central rather than peripheral aspect of Irish education. – Yours, etc,
Prof JOACHIM FISCHER,
Jean Monnet Chair in
European Cultural Studies,
University of Limerick.