Madam, - Prof Tom Collins, head of education at NUI Maynooth, appears to talk down the problem of indiscipline in Irish post-primary schools (Education Today, February 20th). Is this the same professor whose department colleague, Dr Maeve Martin, noted in her 1997 report on discipline in schools that some schools were "already in the grip of indiscipline"?
Prof Collins's view that students speak "mostly only when spoken to" is quaint. His choice of jewellery-wearing or school uniform infringements as the matters teachers are "prone" to see as acts of defiance is remarkably out of touch. Teachers would love to be faced with such trivial dilemmas, but their daily working lives are more fraught than that.
A recent TUI survey showed that 77 per cent of teachers encountered unacceptable talking or shouting out of turn in their classes in a single week last year; one in five of them had encountered threatening or intimidating behaviour directed at them by students in that same week. This evidence hardly points to the "remarkably orderly" schools the professor perceives. If one doesn't see much of a problem, then not very much needs to be done, does it? Such complacency would also explain continued Government failure to respond robustly to the critical problem of disruption in schools.
Minister for Education Mary Hanafin can change the culture of complacency that has long prevailed. It now falls to her Department to carry out the many sensible recommendations made in three separate national inquiries into school discipline since 1985. Our young people deserve no less. - Is mise,
DECLAN GLYNN, Assistant General Secretary, Teachers' Union of Ireland, Dublin 6.