Madam, - In The Irish Times's well-flagged supplement of November 14th, your Education Editor expressed concern at what he described as the "increasingly polarised education system" - but argued that your publication of school "league tables" served merely to reveal, not stimulate, this unfortunate development.
To one side of this rather sombre front page, we had a heading about the "top schools on the master list" for details of which we were invited to look inside.
What surprised most in this publication was the underlying and rather alarming assumption that schools - and by extension their students - were somehow "failing", or at least underachieving, when a certain indefinable proportion of the student body opted for alternative routes through career and life - for example, the students who opted for further study in the burgeoning FETAC/PLC sector. And what about the vast array of young people who choose to go straight into the world of work to serve in the many tertiary industries, including the banks and civil service, in the retail, hospitality and entertainment industries as well as in the traditional trades of the secondary manufacturing sector?
But even within the very narrow confines of your study, another variable remains unaccounted: namely, the number of students who obtain private out-of-school grinds to boost their results - in the process corrupting the very figures upon which your league tables depend. My evidence is merely anecdotal, of course, but I am inclined to think we are talking about a significant percentage.
However meaningful or superficial they may be, leagues of any kind with their winners and losers affect that subconscious, unthinking part of the brain like the kinds of advertising to which none of us are immune.
In the circumstances, one finds it difficult to avoid the conclusion that your decision not just to publish but to seek to make news out of "feeder school" lists may indeed be fruitlessly fuelling the growing morning and evening traffic jams in urban and rural Ireland. More seriously, it may also serve to increase the pressure on each of the current league-toppers to keep "special needs" and "less promising" students out of the team.
As they say, however, publish if you want to, and be damned. But, please, spare us the crocodile tears. - Yours, etc,
BILLY FITZPATRICK,
(Former president,
Teachers Union of Ireland),
Dublin 6W.
Madam, - Well done, Limerick. With all the bad press the city gets I would like to point out that five Limerick schools (four of them non-fee-paying) featured on the top-scoring schools' master list in your edition of November 14th. - Yours, etc,
MADELEINE YOUNG,
North Circular Road,
Limerick.