Madam, - Alas, Dr McDonagh's report into the essence and effects of Transition Year is all too timely and all too correct. It confirms what many of us in education have known all along, though few have dared to speak, such is the overwhelming consensus amongst school principals, teachers, the ASTI and many parents.
Transition year crucially disrupts continuity in the learning process, at the moment in a young person's life and intellectual development when reinforcement and development of learning are at a premium.
A recent report in the US, commissioned by the School of Mathematics at the University of Virginia, concluded that "cognitive capacities in mathematical learning are at their most intense, not when one might expect it in third level schools of advanced learning, but in the middle teenage years.
It is crucial that sustained and careful nurturing and development of these capacities are cultivated without interruption in the high school years".
Dr McDonagh's comment in his report that "there is a strong argument for completing formal school programmes first before engaging in programmes which introduce pupils to working life" (The Irish Times, November 18th), is, in my view, indisputably true.
As the report strongly implies, when part-time working is "not linked to a student's course of study", deleterious consequences ensue. Concentration levels go down; fatigue indices go up. Because of interruption to normal patterns of homework and, in many cases, the placing of the academic syllabus in abeyance, students' learning can remain static and even go into regressive mode.
Another serious matter, of course, is what the report refers to as the use of money derived from part-time work to fund students' "hectic alcohol-based social lives". But on educational grounds alone, people need to understand that schools are primarily centres of, and for, learning in a wide variety of subjects.
There is nothing elitist about this argument; it is simply the case.
Schools, parents and students need to combat what I would call the "anti-intellectual snobbery" associated with many advocates of the transition year idea. There is plenty of time in the calendar year outside of term time when 15-year-old students can, and do, engage in part-time "work experience".
I am not against transition year per se, but it should not be in the middle of the secondary cycle. A good place to put it could be as a year between second and third level.
But that, of course, would have financial implications that some would find hard to stomach. What this report confirms is that a debate on the whole question of transition year is long overdue. - Yours, etc.,
Dr CIARAN COSGROVE, Glenageary, Co Dublin.