Sir, – “The Government needs to explain why, with 1.8 million people still at work in Ireland, the 300,000 employees in the public sector should be required to shoulder the entire burden” writes Gerry Donnelly (April 5th).
Does it really need to be explained that people all across Irish society are sharing in this burden?
Mr Donnelly is quite correct in suggesting the tax system could be used in a fairer way than it is currently being employed, but ultimately, when the private sector is suffering, there’s less to spend on the public sector.
When this simple reality is ignored, working people in this country are naturally casting a critical eye over where their taxes are being spent. It’s probably fair to say that most people fully support investment in essential services, such as teaching, but there are many bureaucratic processes within the State that should have been streamlined and even automated years ago. Keeping them for the sake of industrial peace, and inventing new taxes to pay for them, is not only unfair and unaffordable; it is also adding layers of red tape that is making our economy inefficient, stifling the very source of funding that the State (including our teachers) desperately needs.
Public sector workers, in general, shouldn’t be expected to shoulder any more burden than their private sector counterparts – nor any less. However, their unions would gain a great deal of support among the wider public if they were more proactive in cutting out the fat that we all experience when dealing with State agencies.
Remove the spectre of disrupting industrial peace, and maybe our leaders can display some long-term vision, rather than getting heckled at conferences for not kowtowing to the narrow, short-term interests that have been forced upon them. – Yours, etc,
MICK McMULLIN,
Granville Close,
Dún Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.
Sir, – Brian Mooney (Education, April 2nd) exhorts teachers to be well behaved and not speak against the next tranche of proposed cuts in pay and working conditions. While this call to patriotism is noble, the logic behind this argument is ill-informed, misguided and inaccurate.
Teachers have every reason to express deep concern at the demands of the troika for further diminishing our public education system. It is timely to call for a national debate on the purpose of education in Ireland in these challenging times, to move from a narrow focus on OECD PISA testing, and make a special plea for a diversity of voices in this regard.
For the past decade neo-liberal education policies across the globe have introduced market values into public schooling. These policies deliberately introduce “individual competitiveness” and fast capitalism into the system at every level and include such measures as employing teachers on different contracts; reducing the curriculum; prescribing teaching by yellow-pack standards so that teachers are controlled and exhausted trying to meet individual needs in large classrooms; testing teachers regularly and randomly like battery hens so that the system can measure results; introducing private competition into a public system to keep everyone on alert; when teachers complain of burnout asking them for scientific evidence in this regard; giving a diminishing stipend of public funding each year to education while pushing more responsibility toward boards of management; paying lots of lip service to social justice while largely reframing disadvantage as individual laziness; and finally, closing what are deemed to be failing schools and firing teachers who do not comply with long lists of regulations.
If you think I am dreaming this up I invite you to read Prof Stephen J Ball’s account of the dumbing down of public education by New Labour in the UK, Prof Pauline Lipman’s account of what is happening to schools in Chicago and Prof Kathleen Lynch’s account of the carelessness and commodification of education that is taking place in Ireland under new managerialism.
The public and all teachers need to awaken to the neo-liberal agenda of the troika and the inherent dangers that loom ahead if we have no public forum for a lively and robust debate about what kind of education system we want for our young people.
In the meantime, our Scandinavian neighbours continue to invest heavily in their schools, respect their teachers as professionals, grant-assist their continuing education to master’s level and have no inspectors policing their teachers on any basis, never mind on the random, incidental and unannounced basis that has been introduced here in Ireland to coincide with the night of the bank bailout. I rest my case. – Yours, etc,
Dr GERALDINE
MOONEY SIMMIE,
Lecturer in Education
Faculty of Education
and Health Science,
University of Limerick.