Last Tuesday's vote in the House of Commons on university "top-up" fees, which the government won by a very narrow majority, was the culmination of a controversy in Britain in the course of which striking differences between British and Irish attitudes to education emerged, with important sections of British opinion expressing negative attitudes towards higher education, writes Garret Fitzgerald.
Thus, the British Conservative opposition attacked their government's aim of raising to 50 per cent the current very low proportion of school-leavers in Britain who enter higher education. And some industrialists were quoted as saying that British industry simply did not need more graduates.
Of course, England has many excellent, although often extremely expensive schools, and a very wide range of universities, including both a number of former polytechnics (some of which Margaret Thatcher unjustifiably promoted to being universities), but also many universities of very high standing. That's one side of the picture.
However, another side that has attracted little attention is the fact that class divisions in English society are reflected in a huge drop-out rate after the end of compulsory education. Even as late as the end of the 1990s the proportion of British students remaining in education at age 18 was only 53 per cent, by far the lowest in the EU. The next-lowest figure for any other EU country was 65 per cent, and the Irish figure for 18-year-olds in education that year was 74 per cent.
Because education is more esteemed in Scotland and Northern Ireland than in England, it is likely that the English figure was even lower than 53 per cent.
This means that the Irish proportion in education remaining in education at that age must then have been about 50 per cent higher than the English figure; which is a quite remarkable negative differential for a neighbouring country where until the 1990s the level of income per head was almost three-fifths higher than ours. There are no OECD figures for the rate of completion of second-level studies by British students because Britain, with Portugal, is alone in the EU in not submitting such figures to that organisation. But the OECD data confirm that in 2001 the proportion of the 25-34 age group in Ireland with upper secondary education was also more than 50 per cent above the British figure.
In marked contrast to England, the proportion of Irish students who take the school Leaving Certificate has for many years past exceeded 80 per cent, and of this number more than two-thirds now enter higher education here.
That represents about 55 per cent of the entire age cohort, and if Irish students entering higher education institutions in Northern Ireland or Britain are included, that figure would be about 58 per cent. One-half of these Irish students are in universities (all seven of which, in contrast to Britain, fully justify that title), while the other half attend one or other of our institutes of technology.
Ireland is also shown as having a much lower university drop-out rate than any other country in Europe or North America, as low as 15 per cent. However, the drop-out rate for what is technically described by the OECD as "Tertiary type B education" - which in Ireland appears to mean our institutes of technology - is shown as being greater than anywhere else, at 50 per cent.
What these educational contrasts between the two neighbouring islands reflect are very different public attitudes in our two countries to the value of education. It is worth recalling that a British parliamentary survey in the 1820s established that there were then more than 11,000 Irish hedge schools, providing fee-paying education to some half-million Catholic children, at a cost to their mostly impoverished parents of up to £1 a year per child, which in today's money would represent well over £100.
This pressure for education in Ireland led the British government to begin to establish a national education system here, well before this was done in Britain itself. This was in response to an initiative in 1831 by one of the first Irish Catholics to be elected to the Westminster Parliament, Sir Thomas Wyse of Waterford.
One hundred and thirty years later the same kind of concern that education be made widely available led to the enlightened government scheme that enabled all but a couple of dozen Catholic secondary day schools to eliminate fees. Since that time the number of second-level students has multiplied 3½ times over. But even more striking, perhaps, is the fact that since I was at university, the proportion of Irish young people entering higher education has multiplied sevenfold, from 8 per cent to more than 55 per cent.
We owe this educational revolution to some civil servants and ministers for education who in the 1960s had the foresight to grasp something that was little understood elsewhere at the time - and still seems to elude important sections of British opinion - namely that education is a key to economic growth.
And once Irish governments - including even ministers for finance - came to understand this fact, investment in education became a high priority and has since become a major driver of our economic growth. For education is estimated to add between 0.6 per cent and 1 per cent to our national output annually, as well-educated entrants to the workforce each year replace a generation almost half of whom had received primary education only.
Undoubtedly our low corporate tax rate has provided one of the principal attractions to US high-tech firms locating in Ireland but, as I discovered for myself some years ago when I had to interview the chief executives of a number of the larger US firms in Ireland about their reasons for locating here, our educational system comes a close second in this respect.
On the one hand many such firms have been attracted here by the non-specialised nature of our second-level system, with its broad-based Leaving Certificate, which they say yields flexible, adaptable and well-motivated workers, and which they contrast with the narrow, specialised English A-level system.
And at the higher education level these high-tech firms have been anxious to draw both on the technical skills of those who come through our institutes of technology and on the consistently high quality of Irish university education, the standards of which are maintained by external examiners drawn mainly from outside the country.
Our quite disproportionate share of US high-tech investment, when compared with that of England with 13 times our population, owes as much to contrasts between the two educational systems as it does to differences between our corporate tax rates.
But most of all it reflects the contrast between political, business and general public attitudes to education in our two countries.