It's a bit embarrassing to admit it, but some of the newspapers I dutifully recycled yesterday were six months old. Feng shui advocates may be quietly passing out at that disclosure, but then, they never get to savour the joys of old newspapers, writes Breda O'Brien.
One from March was open at a page which featured my colleague Emmet Oliver analysing Prof Patrick Clancy of UCD's research on those who attend college. It painted a damning picture. The analysis came complete with diagrams showing which leafy suburbs produced the most students attending college, and the deprived area where only 8.9 per cent of its young people were admitted to college in a particular year.
I remember some mild public dismay at the figures, but nothing like the passionate debate which raged after this newspaper published third-level college entry tables the week before last. Arguably, the March article was a much more complete picture, given that data from all the colleges, the CAO and the Department of Education were analysed, and presented as percentages. The contrast in the reaction to the two different approaches to the same topic is striking. This newspaper may have wanted to start a campaign for greater educational opportunities for the poor by publishing tables, but all it resulted in was a kind of frenzy in the middle classes, as they sought reassurance that their particular fee-paying school was delivering the right product for the price.
Presenting college entry to just two colleges,Trinity and UCD, in the form of raw figures serves to bolster and reinforce the consumerist mentality which lies at the root of much of the problems afflicting both second and third level education today. This market-driven attitude equates education with something which you can buy. To hell with benign liberal notions of helping human beings to blossom, how many A1s do they deliver?
One friend told me of a couple who changed their mind about sending their child to a northside Dublin school, when they read the college entry tables. When my friend remonstrated with them, and said that the rejected school had dozens of students attending DCU every year, it made no difference. Such stories were commonplace.
The college entry tables also whetted the appetite of the usual suspects who leaped to their word processors to demand proper league tables, the kind where you can skewer individual teachers like kebabs if they fail to deliver those all-important points. As a secondary school teacher myself, all I would wish for those lovely scribes are 10 years of Friday afternoons taking Leaving Cert Pass Irish. Or if I were being really vindictive, that they might get their wish, and that their children would pass through the grim penitentiaries which would result.
Have these people ever thought through what our education system would be like for students if all schools acted like grind schools as a result of league tables? Perhaps they should speak to the academic staff of universities, and hear them talk about having to break the training of those who have attended grind schools. Having lived through the battery-hen farm approach to education, many of these students have next to no intellectual curiosity.
The rigidity of the notes-based grind school approach means that they want the "right' answer, and feel cheated and suspicious when their lecturers tell them that no such thing exists. Sadly, this is a feature of many who have sat the Leaving Cert., but is doubly true of those from grind schools.
Many of them cannot cope. A minority of them should never have been in a university in the first place, save for the fact that they are obsessed with the passport to middle-class comfort represented by certain degrees, or rather their parents are.
Grind schools wait while other schools guide pupils through the traumatic early years of upheaval which happen when hormones kick in between first and second year. They do not run transition years, with all the effort that takes, and the documented advantages which they bring, but they do cream off pupils afterwards. Grind schools strip away everything which is humanising and liberating about education (which God knows is little enough under the system teachers are forced to operate) and then claim credit for the results they achieve.
Under a league table regime, all schools would be in competition with each other. Teachers would be always nervously watching their backs, knowing that they could be shafted if a particularly weak or poorly motivated cohort did badly in their exams. Teachers already spend a significant amount of time second-guessing those who set exams. If league tables are the be-all and end-all, that would become a consuming focus which would drive out all the other - often invisible - things which teachers do to help guide young people through the choppy waters of adolescence.
But do people really care about education in the broad sense? The outraged reaction to Mr Dempsey saying he may reintroduce third-level fees would make you wonder. It is blatantly obvious that it is wrong for the wealthy to receive free university tuition, which of course is not free at all, but financed by taxes. Those resources should be targeted at those most in need.
Perhaps the howls of protest which greeted the Minister's proposal were caused by scepticism about the promise to increase grants for those families who really need help. Abolition of fees without major and generous grant reform would be a disaster. There is abundant anecdotal evidence that grants are inadequate for those who really need them, and abused by many who do not.
It would be nice to think that there was a genuine groundswell of support for education worthy of the name, which has as a central aim real accessibility at all levels for those who are currently excluded. There is little evidence that this exists. Year after year we accept the fact that a significant percentage never make it from first level into second, much less from second to third.
We subject teenagers to inhuman stress, and we treat teachers as shady characters, only involved in education for the holidays, who need to be held to account by those paragons of accountability and accuracy known as journalists. No wonder we get into a frenzy over league tables. It may reflect the style of education that we deserve.