Rite and Reason: Where our education system is concerned more and more students and educators are feeling like strangers in a strange land, writes Fr David Keating.
In sport, technique comes first. In education, relationship comes first, not intelligence. As a child you remember the teacher who enthused you; who made you curious to a huge and amazing world around you. Knowledge and life were together. Lifelong learning is fundamentally about that first tender relationship and how the quality of that relationship enhances our lives through adolescence and adulthood towards human maturity.
There is a danger, however, that we are losing education's dignity with the focus now on the economy and on the economic viability of knowledge and research instead of on the heart of the person and the needs of society.
There is a profound loss of relationship when the metrics of industry are increasingly applied to the learning process, where, for example, the place of learning is seen as the "knowledge outlet", the student as the "service user" or "customer" and the teacher as the "service dispenser" or "provider".
Could not the same be said of a factory producing marmalade?
But students are not pots of jam and have no desire to be.
What genuine gain is there to humanity or future communities if students increasingly enrol into a "quality audit" system of learning where knowledge is accessed by prescription and learning is more than ever becoming a solitary contract in self-direction?
Have we forgotten that humans are profoundly social beings influenced by and influencing other human beings no matter how much knowledge technology is introduced into our lives. By focusing more on the Americanised "how" of learning instead of the universal "why" of learning, more and more students and educators are feeling like strangers in a strange land.
Pastoral care to students in higher education increasingly discovers young lives desperately searching for meaning in a disconnected world of purpose and relationships. Students seek inspiration from an adult world which so often disappoints and a belonging to a culture which offers more than boredom and mild depression.
They are still waiting to be genuinely challenged out of their inertia to debate, express and articulate ideas. They still seek a reason to move beyond their serial dependence on alcohol in order to say something meaningful; a lucrative drink culture created for them, not by them.
Students genuinely seek a future where caring is not diffused by haste or wealth and the abdication of responsibility that wealth brings. Potential graduates require guidance and caution concerning the mirage of wealth and higher living standards that now permeate Irish life because it is - for the most part - not real wealth, but borrowed.
It is a distinctive higher education institution that will recognise these realities and seek to dignify them, one where a dedication to empowering students in life skills and resilience-building holds an equal status to learning objectives and outcomes.
Students need exposure to tenderness and to the possibilities there are in being human. This creates a relationship with third-level learning that connects young adults to meaning-making and to a life that matters.
There was a time in our country when a person's word was their word; it was their honour. There was a time when people spontaneously did good things for others without accolade, credit or applause; when loyalty and friendship were more than just breezy notions and when you knew something of what it means to be a Samaritan. Is it too much to ask that late adolescents/young adults be given a chance to do the same?
I am not suggesting that places of higher education have a monopoly on learning nor that they can be a panacea for all of society's ills, but that they have a duty of responsibility to students and to the wider society that funds education.
There is some opinion, however, that third-level education is still shrouded in status and selective arrogance and that its remit does not include care of the soul or of the civic.
While the temptation to be smug can be hard to resist in any profession, I believe genuine educators do care for their students and wish to make a positive difference to the attitudes and outlook of those they teach.
They also appreciate and understand that you cannot "box in" or pasteurise all knowledge; in fact, one of the most important outcomes of learning is that there isn't one. Instead, we allow our learning to roam freely and keep us young into our 70s and 80s, to help us reach human maturity with honour and dignity.
It may be some time before we have the ideal education system in Ireland that is a worthy benefactor of what has gone before and one that responds to the needs of wisdom and fulfilled lives.
In the meantime, might I suggest that the notion of "standards of excellence" in education be reserved for margarine and biros and the manufacturing industry, from which such a term originated, and that instead we engage with the scholarship of struggle and survival, the inspiration of the human spirit and the beauty of truth.
Fr David Keating is chaplain to Waterford Institute of Technology. dkeating@wit.ie