Madam, – The decline in standards in Irish education, highlighted recently, should not come as a surprise, even though Irish education has never had as much money pumped into it, by the State, as it does now.
Ever since the religious orders were expunged from the front lines of education in Ireland (and in particular from the early 1960s onwards), the standard and quality of Irish education was inevitably set for decline. This is because formal education in Ireland lost the incredible passion and zeal that priests and nuns brought to the vocation of educating young people.
The task, since then, of educating the future adults of Ireland was almost exclusively transferred to lay public sector employees. While there have been, undoubtedly, many examples of very good lay teachers down through the years, too many have had lazy minds and have lacked the passion of their predecessors in the vocation, and were more concerned with securing paid holidays and increased pay than instilling the true value of education in the future adults of Ireland. They lost sight of the role of a teacher as being a “vocation”, and began to regard it as merely a “career”. We are the worse for this. – Yours, etc,