THE main reason why more young people from low-income backgrounds do not go into higher education is that they don't have the money middle-class people have to buy educational services, a University College Dublin sociologist has told a conference on education in Dublin's inner city.
Dr Kathleen Lynch and a colleague, Dr Patrick Clancy, said one way to ensure that more young people from areas like the inner city stay on at school to do the Leaving Cert would be to give them and their families financial incentives.
This might be expensive but justice demanded that the Government should take the necessary money from privileged sectors.
Dr Clancy compared the inner city, where fewer than 5 per cent of 17 to 18-year-olds go on to higher education, with areas like Blackrock, Clonskeagh and Rathfarnham, where the figure is near 60 per cent.
Dr Lynch said people did not get angry about such figures any more - they had become "normalised".
She criticised "the national complacency" about inequality in Ireland. There was a "culture of self-interest, encouraged by certain sectors of the media, which makes secure, well-off people feel very insecure because they have to pay taxes".
Yet Ireland was the most unequal society in the advanced world outside Britain and the USA. A recent ESRI poverty report had shown that income differentials in the Republic had actually widened during the economic prosperity since the late 1989s.
She asked how there could be educational equality when 80 per cent of Leaving Cert students in fee-paying schools were getting "grinds", costing £15 an hour, and going abroad or to private summer schools to improve their languages.
By "buying these extra services outside the main educational sector, upper and middle-class parents can maintain the advantage of their economic privilege".
She also asked how there could be equality between a 1,000-student community school in a Dublin working-class suburb and its fee-paying equivalent when the latter had an extra £1,500 per pupil to spend on teachers and other resources.
Added to this, working-class parents did not feel any sense of ownership of the schools their children attended. When parents went to the schools with a problem, they were often lectured and talked down to.
She asked why there were no people from working-class community and women's groups on the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment - a "nice cosy cartel" made up of representatives of the churches, the unions and the VECs, with some marginal involvement by middle-class-dominated national parent bodies.