PHILIP BOYD,
Sir, - The recent announcement by the Department of Education and Science to cut back on special educational projects (including the School Retention and the Back to Education initiatives) is a cause for serious concern.
Publication of entry statistics to UCD and Trinity only serves to underline the fact that participation in third level education depends on having financial and other resources at your disposal. We believe the same applies at all levels of the education system. A fundamental flaw in our centralised education system is the adoption of a "one size fits all" approach that fails to take into account the different educational needs of children from disadvantaged areas.
Some correspondents imply that low levels of educational achievement are largely the responsibility of parents or teachers. This is grossly unfair and serves to allow the Department of Education to avoid its responsibilities, and the wealthy to perpetuate their already well-established hold over the educational system.
Poverty, like wealth, is transferred from one generation to another. One of the most important mechanisms in breaking this transfer is the education system, as acknowledged by the DES in initiatives such as "Breaking the Cycle". If the Department is to be taken seriously, it must take a critical look at how education is provided in disadvantaged areas.
To maintain profiteering in highway building at the expense of services aimed at the poorest confirms an emergence of the crudest form of neo-liberal economics in Government policy. This offers little chance to those born into poverty, except to stay in poverty and in turn hand on that poverty to their children. The question arises: who exactly is running the country - the elected government or fundamentalist economists in the Progressive Democrats? - Yours, etc.,
PHILIP BOYD,
Co-ordinator,
SEANIE LAMBE,
Chairman,
Inner City
Organisations Network,
Lower Buckingham Street,
Dublin 1.