TEACHING MATTERS:MARY HANAFIN has signalled her intention to use her power under the Education Act to prescribe the primary-school curriculum. For those unfamiliar with the issue, this means the minister is proposing to make the delivery of the curriculum a statutory or a legal requirement.

At first glance, it seems a fairly harmless decision, one that could be categorised with the thousands of routine, bureaucratic actions that politicians often take to give the illusion of progress usually when there is little scope for real reform. The reality is very different.

I want to leave aside the widespread belief among the primary-school community that this proposal is the result of an ideological battle between the minister and Gaelscoileanna on the issue of immersion education which is now before the courts. Most believe that having failed to persuade the Gaelscoileanna by force of argument, she is determined to bully them into submission by force of law.

Instead, I want to focus on what has thus far been in the small print of the prescription proposal - that the minister intends to use her power to determine learning outcomes for each child at each stage of primary schooling.

Few could disagree that all children are entitled to be taught the curriculum in schools. After all, among the reasons for primary school children going to school in the first place is to become literate and numerate, learn some history and geography and gain an appropriate appreciation and understanding of the arts.

The reason we have a primary-school curriculum in the first place is so that there is a public understanding of what we expect primary schools to do. The current curriculum does this well. It outlines clearly the areas of learning for children at different class levels along with recommended amounts of time to be spent on each subject area. It also has the advantage of not just being a public document but one that has widespread support within the education community, it being the result of a decade of labour by all interests at primary level.

Introduced into schools less than a decade ago, it utilises the most up-to-date methods of teaching, recognises the individuality of children and respects the professionalism of teachers to make crucial decisions based on their knowledge of individual children and groups of children.

In other words, it is not a prescription for what must be done in every classroom each week of the year, but rather a roadmap to success that the professional teacher interprets for the benefit of the children in her or his class. School development planning, primarily involving teachers but also parents, ensures that, at school level, the curriculum has widespread support.

Experts at primary level refer to the curriculum as a "menu curriculum", from which learning activities are selected. This enables teachers to take account of children's individual strengths and weaknesses, their interests and their parents' wishes in respect of their education. It also allows teachers to utilise school facilities and resources, which differ from school to school.

The minister's proposal will, if followed through, consign all of this good practice to the educational wastepaper basket and replace it with a centrally determined set of learning outcomes for all children at each stage of their primary-school education. No doubt among these learning outcomes will be the pre-election, headline-grabbing nonsense of the minister's Fianna Fáil colleague Johnny Brady that all children would be able to sing Amhrán na bhFiann.

Even if one could concede that such de Valera-type arrogance were acceptable, looking into her heart and knowing what is good for the children of Ireland, there are certain other more practical issues that need to be addressed.

The first is that the present curriculum would need to be completely rewritten. As it is structured at the moment, it is not possible to define it in terms of the specific learning outcomes suggested by the minister. If we were to use the timeframe for the development of the current curriculum then it might be in place when children who will be born in 2014 start school.

The natural follow-on from defining all of these learning outcomes will be the requirement to record each child's progress in relation to every one of them. Far-fetched, some might argue, but this is exactly the route followed by our neighbours in England and Wales. There, the lunacy has reached such proportions that non-trained teaching assistants are now taking classes so that teachers can cope with the huge paperwork engulfing every classroom in the land.

Primary school as we know it will be transformed from centres of child-centred, enthusiastic, interest driven learning to ones where learning outcomes are imposed, mandated and prescribed by those who think they know best - like second-level schools, where state examinations drive teaching and the first casualty is the love of learning.

Surely the minister cannot have forgotten her own direct experience of the tyranny of prescribed learning outcomes from her time as a second-level teacher. This more than anything should convince her to give up this flawed propoosal.

Aidan Gaughran is a primary teacher in Clonmel, Co Tipperary. He is also a member of the INTO's Education Committee