THE Great Education Debate since 1992 has been mainly to do with control and accountability in the education system. Now that much of the legislation is in place, I hope the debate in education can move back to the core issue: what is learned and how it is learned.
Our education system has got where it is today because of its readiness to move with the times, and the fast-changing nature of today's world creates an urgent imperative for further change.
Over the past four years, I have had the privilege of a ringside seat during one of the most significant developments in Irish education for at least a generation: the Leaving Certificate Applied. Many of the lessons being learned in that specialised area can, I believe, be applied with benefit to the wider education system. Indeed, they offer a way to address some key challenges which face parents and educators,
The need for the Leaving Cert Applied arose directly from one of the great social movements in modern Irish history: the extension of secondary education to virtually the entire population. It's easy to forget that the Leaving Cert was designed originally for a tiny minority. Its aim was to identify an elite of high performers in a narrow range of academic skills, skills which were judged good predictors of similarly high performance at university and in occupations like the Civil Service.
But with the introduction of more or less free secondary education, different needs arose. Now we could envisage a situation where virtually all 17- and 18-year-olds would not only stay in education, but would aim to leave school with a Leaving Certificate. (This situation is nearly upon us: it's reckoned that by 2000 some 95 per cent of the age group will do the Leaving.)
The problem was that an exam system designed for a minority who were aiming at career paths requiring certain skills was clearly not suitable for everyone. The "one size fits all" approach meant that a significant number of talented young people would always find themselves branded as failures by a measuring system that could not identify or reward their individual abilities.
Hence the need not just to add new subjects to the Leaving Certificate system (it now has more than 30), nor even to lead people towards particular subjects by sub-sets such as the Leaving Certificate Vocational Programme, but to devise alongside these a totally new approach - a genuinely alternative approach which would be just as rigorous, just as tough to do well in, but which would offer a success path to those with different abilities.
HE kernel of that approach has two elements. One is that it seeks to bring together what is learned rather than keeping subjects apart from each other in hermetically-sealed little boxes. The second is that it seeks to apply what is learned to practical problems and practical life. One thing we have found is that these two elements, together with continuous assessment which gives students credits as they go along, have a truly dramatic effect on motivation. They are capable of turning on even young people who had long since decided that school had little to offer them.
I must say that, though I have had many surprises in the time I have worked on the Leaving Cert Applied, this motivational impact was not one of them. I had seen this happen again and again in the world of work - the sudden bursting forth of potential from young people who have a success for the first time in their lives, the joy that comes from being at last able to say "I can be good at this". Within minutes of such epiphanies, mountains begin to move.
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of the Leaving Cert Applied to grasp is that this is not a shift back to vocational education, as Garret FitzGerald seemed to suggest in his recent column. Despite its emphasis on work experience and on developing practical skills which will be eminently valuable in employment, the Leaving Cert Applied is firmly in the tradition of a general education - one of its differences is that it is indeed more general than the other approaches. It identifies a wider range of skills, and builds on them.
In preparing our young people for the new millennium, our over-worked and under-appreciated educators face a daunting triple challenge: to help those young people to be learners for life, to be flexible and creative in responding to the many changes they will certainly meet, and to make the most of their individual skills in the jobs marketplace.
How to do this? Some of the signposts are already emerging from the experience of the Leaving Cert Applied.
