Sir, – While I do not necessarily agree with anonymous contributions to the media, I have always found the series “To Be Honest” in your Education section on Tuesdays to be very useful, in that one gets an insight into what is really happening in our schools.
The contribution on September 17th (“Junior Cert science is too easy – at all levels”) touched on the question of project work for Junior Cert science, which is worth 25 per cent of the examination.
It is well known that project work in subjects where it is required is not always done by the student. People who have expertise in the field in question are often asked “to give a hand”. This gives a distinct advantage to middle-class children whose parents know the people with expertise and have the means to remunerate them. This, in turn, makes a mockery of the notion of equal opportunity in education. However, I read with utter dismay in the contribution of September 17th that a science teacher admits that some teachers “do the project” for their students. As a famous line in Scripture has it, ‘What further need have we of witnesses?’”
This question has been seriously addressed in the UK and has resulted in a move away from project work as part of public examinations.
I sincerely hope that when the Minister for Education finished reading his own article on page 14 (“Pupils should learn to read so that they can read to learn”), he then turned to page 15 to discover why the reading and numeracy skills of our students might not be all that he expects them to be. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL O’DWYER,
Rail Park,
Maynooth,
Co Kildare.