A think-tank of bright 11-year-olds should be given the job of cutting through the cant about university education, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
HERE'S A great idea - let's carry on waiving third-level fees, but just for boys. Boys do less well in their examinations than girls, and this inherent gender weakness could be construed as demonstrating that boys are an oppressed minority within most of the educational systems of Europe.
What a fuss we make about the Leaving Certificate, which has become a sort of mini-Olympics for our teenagers. Surely if we were half as concerned about the future of our young people as we pretend to be we would not schedule their major examination right bang in the middle of the most turbulent period of their lives.
As it is, the Leaving comes at the moment when teenagers are learning an awful lot more than the three Rs: things like surviving in a group, becoming sexual beings, how to drink alcohol, etc.
The Irish educational system clings to a Victorian model of success. It can only deal with academic intelligence; it has no room for the child who understands technology, who has a flair for design, or a capacity to care lovingly for other creatures.
Very well then, if the Irish educational system can only cope with academic children, let them sit the defining examination of their lives at the age of 11, and so give their parents plenty of time to start saving for the university fees.
The other children, whose talents are now neglected and ignored, can enter the workplace at the age of 12, which will improve the ageing profile of our labour force. Most 12-year-olds could earn their living with computers this minute, with no training whatsoever. Better that than another six years of being made to feel mediocre and leaving the educational system at the age of 18 with your confidence shattered.
This is not to say that academically able children in our education system are well served - because they are not. But once we had identified them through this defining examination which they would sit at the age of 11 perhaps we could put the particularly brilliant ones in a think tank, and confront them with the idea of abolishing university fees.
It is unlikely that Ireland's most academically brilliant children would endorse the idea - unless they were planning a successful career within Fianna Fáil. Any logical and intelligent child, even those that had not passed some fancy examination, could conclude that it doesn't make much sense to provide free third-level education to a minority while the general population attends primary school in buildings that are frequently rodent-infested and often do not have enough toilets, let alone enough teachers or adequate playgrounds.
They would spot in a second that children from poor homes would not benefit from the no-fees system in any significant numbers; although our hand-picked 11-year-olds would be bright enough not to use the word poor, and would refer to these young people as coming from the lower-income groups.
They would understand that a properly administered grant system would address the issue of the poor's access to third-level education much more effectively. Being young and full of energy they would not be too lazy, or too mean, to administer such a grant scheme.
Confronted by the fact that a fair amount of the third-level students who currently benefit from the no-fees system come to university from expensive, fee-paying schools which the taxpayer also funds, and that many of the same students have benefited from expensive additional tutoring, and are on their way to careers in which they themselves will charge the public exorbitant fees for very basic services - hundreds of euro for looking at an X-ray (medicine) and hundreds of euro for writing a letter (law) - it is a fair bet that our 11-year-olds would nix the abolition of university fees right there.
The next point might take a little extra tutoring from some cynical adult lecturers (I am available). It is the question of motivation. At the moment Ireland's peasant respect for academia renders us sitting ducks for illusionists.
Many of the gleaming campuses around the country cannot even come up with the prescribed book lists on time; the courses are so unlikely and the teachers are so unfamiliar with what they are supposed to be teaching that the more optimistic among us like to think of some of our third-level colleges as constituting a tribute to our national talent for fiction. Our talented 11-year-olds might be led to understand that a fee-paying student body, and their parents, would be more demanding of its colleges, and less tolerant of current standards that can be charitably described as sloppy.
And unfortunately we've run out of time. We have not addressed the question of boys within our education system. How the female atmosphere of creches, where a football is a foreign object, does not suit boys. How society does not provide them with role models of good men who have managed to become successful without being either sports stars or criminals. I leave that to my colleague John Waters, although I gather that he has moved on to other topics. But that's all for today.