Sir, - To the casual observer, teaching can look like a safe, undemanding, well-rewarded job. It is not. I have been teaching for 25 years and have severe difficulty making ends meet in this booming economy.
What concerns me at present is the new mindset that is obsessed with measurement, with league tables, with competition, with "product" and with payment by results.
In a phrase, what is on the agenda for the architects of the new pay agreement is the industrialisation of education. Competition may be the life of industry, but industry is not education. Education is not industry. The most startling proposal in the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness is the gradual, step-bystep industrialisation of education. Pages 21 and 27 of the document make this clear.
If competition and "product" are given precedence, to those students and to the schools who have most advantages right now even more advantages will be added. And as for those who have the least advantages . . .
Although we have grown accustomed to national pay agreements, I do not believe the sky will fall if the new agreement does not pass in its present form. The end of the world will not ensue. - Yours, etc.,
Aidan Hayes, Drumcondra, Dublin 9.