A chara, - As a student beginning a post-graduate course at university in September, I have listened with interest to the annual debate which accompanies the release of the Leaving Cert results. I recognise the achievements of those students who have done well and anticipate taking up a place in third-level education; good luck to them, they have worked hard.
However, I feel a sense of unease at a system which, although producing many successful students, marginalises many more of our young people to a future alienated from formal education, to form an underclass, and spend a life in menial, low-paid employment.
There seems to be a perception that the Irish education system is among the best in the world. I don't understand where this myth has come from. Ireland has among the highest rates of functional illiteracy in Europe, one of the lowest rates of participation in third-level education by students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and by international standards very few mature students.
We should look at the areas from which our universities draw their students. I don't have figures, but I know that few come from north inner-city Dublin compared with affluent suburbs on the south side of the city. Is it that students in Blackrock or Dundrum are brighter, or is it because of poverty and the social and educational problems that result?
The abolition of fees for undergraduate courses was an important step in opening up higher education to those from poorer backgrounds, but in terms of educational equality its effect is minimal.
Too many of our second-level students never make it as far as the Leaving Cert, having problems with basic numeric skills and literacy. Their fate, at best, is low-paid employment - where, it should be remembered, their taxes help to pay for the education of those from more privileged backgrounds, allowing them to enter well-paid graduate jobs.
Welcome steps have been made by some third-level institutes to recruit more students from non-traditional backgrounds, but they are a drop in the ocean. As a society we must stop the waste of talent, and intervene at primary and secondary level to make sure that the right to a good education for every citizen is realised.
At present we have an education system that throws a large number of our people on the scrap-heap, and we should be ashamed. It is by grass-roots work on literacy and basic learning skills that we can make the aspiration to a higher education a reality for all our citizens. - Yours, etc.,
John Twamley, Dublin 7.