Former FF minister suggests family limits

IT MAY be "economically rational" to encourage higher-income parents to have more children and low-income groups to have fewer, the former Fianna Fail minister for education, Dr Martin O'Donoghue, has suggested.

Dr O'Donoghue says this should lead to "superior" educational results from a given level of resources, assuming low-income children are less likely to be "successful" in conventional education programmes.

Writing in the current issue of Administration, he says that an increased share of the child population is accounted for by single parents and low-income families. To provide these children with adequate educational resources requires more public financing.

"If children are regarded as a form of public good ... it is economically rational for the higher-income, low-child groups to pay the taxes needed to finance these programmes for the low-income, large-family groups."

In another contribution, Prof Pat Clancy of UCD argues that reducing unemployment and family poverty would lead to a significant cut in educational disadvantage, rather than the reverse.

The relative success of Sweden and the Netherlands on eliminating inequality ink their education system is associated with a more general policy of socio-economic equalisation, he says.

Dr Clancy's remarks appear to run counter to the orthodox view that inequality in education must first he eliminated in order to arrive at a more equal society.

"Intervention through the educational system will not be sufficient to counteract the deep-rooted structural inequalities in society at large, inequalities which have been exacerbated in the 1980s by very high levels of unemployment and increasing income differentials," he writes.

"Thus the burden of tackling disadvantage must not be left to education alone."

Dr Clancy, who is associate professor of sociology at UCD, says it is clear that some progress has been made in reducing inequality in Irish higher education, although there are still great disparities between different groups.

For example, 89 per cent of higher professional groups were represented at third level in 1992, compared to only 13 per cent of unskilled manual workers. However, the latter group has improved its representation from 3 per cent in 1980 and 4 per cent in 1986.

The proportion of university students whose fathers were semi-skilled or unskilled manual workers was 5.3 per cent in 1992, compared to 1.8 per cent in 1980 and 0.3 per cent in 1963. The equivalent figure for farmers in 1992 was 22.9 per cent, and 31 per cent for professional and intermediate non-manual workers.

According to Dr Clancy, there is a strong east/west divide in participation in higher education. Western counties have the highest rates, while the lowest are found in Leinster and Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan. Compared to 1962, Roscommon and Limerick have seen participation levels drop, while Wicklow, Mayo and Meath show increasing participation in third level.