TEACHING MATTERS:THERE IS a sense in which the Democratic Primary contest in the US is one between two generations and two generational world views. The ongoing rise of Barack Obama calls attention to the emergence of a new generation in the US and its contest with an earlier one represented by Hillary Clinton.
As this generation cedes the baton to the one born in the 1960s, it will shortly turn its attention to the legacy it bequeaths to future generations. And in this regard it will inevitably ask if it has left adequate tools to the new generation to deal with future challenges.
But of course the process of generational handover is a lifelong one embodied in the education system. From the moment the child is born, the parental generation aims to extend to it the full reservoir of knowledge, dispositions and skills from which the child can draw the requirements necessary for shaping and surviving the future.
But not all children have equal access to this reservoir. In Ireland there is a grim, environmental desolation in the great swathes of suburbia which now encircle our main cities.
Local authority housing estates in particular, with some notable exceptions, have been engineered to a cold, instrumental functionality of hard barren concrete surfaces; and at best a grudging provision of public services.
By definition, those who are poor in society, and who must procure such goods or services privately must expend a greater proportion of their income on them than those who are well-off.
So whatever shape the future takes, in a context of inadequate public provision, those who are poor are going to secure fewer tools to deal with it than those who are better off.
Failure to tackle educational disadvantage accords it an intergenerational quality where disadvantage bequeathed by this generation is not only inherited by a future one, but appears to be "earned" by it.
While Ireland has made significant progress over the years in tackling educational disadvantage, as measured by indicators such as school participation rates, completion rates and access to higher education, significant weaknesses persist. Perhaps most notable of these is the approximately 1,000 children who fail to transfer from primary to post-primary school each year; the persistence of a drop-out rate from post-primary of about 18 per cent of the cohort and the continuing close correlation between socio-economic background and Leaving Certificate points.
Almost all approaches to tackling educational disadvantage in Ireland share one thing in common, i.e. they are predominantly school-based. Notwithstanding the merits and obvious requirements of DEIS and other such programmes, it can be argued that they rely too heavily on in-school solutions and not enough on out-of-school ones.
A focus on out-of-school solutions would look to enriching the children's overall environment. In particular, it would stress areas such as adult and community education; adult and family literacy; and kindergarten and pre-school provision. In this way the school would become just one - albeit very important - part of a wider educational drive at community level in which it would be recognised that the school's capacity in tackling educational disadvantage is greatly enhanced where it is part of a multifaceted agenda.
In June 2000, the Irish Government published the country's first White Paper on Adult Education - Learning for Life. In this publication, the Government adopted a commitment to lifelong learning as the underpinning principle governing all educational policy.
In the years since the publication of the White Paper, the adult and community education agenda appears to have slipped down the radar in Irish education policy and priority. This is at a time when throughout Europe and the OECD, there is a growing recognition of the critical importance of lifelong learning in the acquisition of new skills and in underpinning the emergence of a knowledge economy and a knowledge society.
It appears that in Ireland this does not amount to a sufficient basis for political determination on the adult education front.
Perhaps a more persuasive argument might lie in the thesis that the benefits of such investment lie less in its returns for this generation of adults, but more in its returns for this generation of school children.
Tom Collins is professor of education at NUI Maynooth
