Madam, - Gemma Carney (September 28th) deserves to be roundly applauded for her indictment of the mindset that has blighted Irish education for years.
She cites the two questions that were asked with the same depressing frequency when I was doing my own Leaving Cert just over eight years ago: What are the points? What are the employment prospects? Even worse, these insane points totals can be attained only through a syllabus which, for 99 of every 100 students, will serve no other purpose than achieving them. Kevin Myers, in one of his Irishman's Diaries last year, condemned the uselessness of students wasting countless hours struggling with such things as "algebraic abstracts" and Irish grammar.
And even those lucky enough to gain acceptance to the course of their choice become enslaved in the rat race later and many of them end up lacking career and life satisfaction. Then there are students who score high grades in subjects in which they have natural ability, only to be unjustly denied places in their chosen courses. Why should a student who, for example, achieves A1s in English and history be denied a college place because of an E in maths or in a language they will use only for a joke, such as Irish?
The failure rates in ordinary level maths and the increase in pupils sitting foundation level maths every year in the State exams has elicited no response from the authorities. If the Irish education system is so world-renowned, why is there a failure to see the students' strongest and weakest subjects at Junior Cert level and accommodate those strengths afterwards?
Do students study law, business and medicine because they really want to - or because qualifications in them guarantee tangible career prospects? That is the way it seems. Natural talent in activities such as acting, music and creative writing are seen at best as irrelevant distractions, or else they are sneered at. "What job will you get at the end of that?" is a stock response.
It is high time the classroom bell rang time on this criminal insanity. It has become wrong to have dreams of self-fulfilment; only accumulating material prosperity will do. Life is too short to spend four years of it in college studying because you are merely advised to, rather than being inspired to. As Billy Joel once put it, "So the graduations hang on the wall, but they never really helped us at all". - Yours, etc.,
ROBERT BYRNE,
Grange,
Co Tipperary.