"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Although that old taunt - usually voiced by carpers who can neither do nor teach - shows an undeniable wit, it expresses, at best, a limited truth. More ominously, it accords with the coarsening mentality of New Ireland which values little beyond the practical and the functional. It could stand as a mission statement of hard-headed business and, with functional reworking, it already does: "Just Do It," says Nike, and even business doesn't come much more hard-headed than that.
In an age when people "do" lunch, "do" drugs and even "do" Europe, increasingly few want to do teaching. Seven in every 10 secondary schools are finding problems getting teachers for certain subjects, and almost no physics or chemistry graduates are entering secondary teaching. Primary teaching is experiencing even more acute shortages, especially of male teachers. Why has teaching, formerly prized, become, like nursing, unattractive at a time when the country is wealthier than ever? The no-nonsense answer is because, as in nursing, the pay is often lousy.
There are other factors, of course, but clearly the lack of loot is the dominant deterrent. Average salaries for secondary teachers (from rookies to veterans) are between £25,000 and £26,000 a year. Graduates who land a first permanent job start on £17,406 a year, which, given the grind they will have been through, is a meagre reward. In a generation, teachers, though there is as much pressure on them as ever, have seen their status plummet like the grades of a student who has taken to the bottle.
It's not mere coincidence that this drop in the standing of teaching has occurred simultaneously with the drop in the standing of the Catholic Church. Teaching in this State was made an arm of the Church and consequently was seen as a pillar of a dominant power now in decline. In at least some sections of the public mind, teaching, albeit often unfairly, has become tainted by association with the highly publicised sins of the fathers, brothers and sisters and continues to suffer by attracting residual resentment.
Sure, there were tyrant teachers - even some pathologically dysfunctional brutes - in the Old Ireland. Most middle-aged people can swap horror stories of their schooldays. But most can also recall dedicated, generous and even inspirational teachers - clerical as well as lay - who didn't merely dispense impractical information and dour discipline but generally treated children as human beings. They haven't gone away, you know, but they will if this society, or rather, this economy, continues to degrade their contributions.
They went away in Britain, where rampant privatisation of the economy resulted in such severe teacher shortages that £6,000 "Hello money" had to be offered to tempt science graduates into the classroom. It's not yet quite that bad in Ireland - partly because only one in 10 Leaving Cert students opts to study chemistry and one in eight to study physics - but the lesson is as clear as it is ironic: in what's called the Information Age, teachers, hitherto prime dispensers of information, have been devalued.
Then again, "information" is measured against a changed scale of values. Knowledge of the ablative absolute or of relative pronouns counts for relatively little nowadays. Even basic grammar has been devalued. In reality, society best awards the sort of information - legal, technical and financial - that can easily be used by the economy and transformed into cash. This shift means that education is increasingly valued as a service rather than for its own sake, and that teachers are often seen more as trainers than traditional educators.
The emphasis on practicality and marketable skills produces undeniable benefits, of course, but it also coarsens society's value system. Many forms of knowledge are nowadays dismissed as nothing more than intellectual trainspotting because applied skills are vital in maintaining Irish wealth and power. Fair enough - skills are crucially important. But as even the voracious market knows and preaches, there is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is a price to be paid for practicality and the shelving of less economically "relevant" knowledge.
Looking back, it's easy to recognise that Irish education (like every other country's education) was never just about enlightenment. It was also a primary (and secondary) instrument of official propaganda. Religion, history and Irish are obvious examples. But state education is never free of official propaganda (private education has its own self-serving projects too!) or the prevailing ethos of the age. The stress on promoting a Catholic, Gaelic, nationalist Ireland has largely and properly declined (though attempts to remove history from the curriculum were beyond Stalinist and were barbarously ignorant).
Yet the old nationalist project has been replaced, not - as the prevailing propaganda would have it - by a new openness, but by a new orthodoxy of values primarily determined by the demands of economic globalisation. Integration with the world's economy, not isolation from it, is encouraged now, and while that's evidently necessary, it's still an ideology which, in practice, disproportionately benefits wealth. The world's wealthiest three people have more money than the poorest 600 million. It's not even an argument.
Still, perhaps teachers are not blameless in contributing to their current plight. Naturally, they, like every other group of workers, lobby for increased pay and better conditions. Too often, however, they have appeared passive in debates about what education actually is or ought to be. They work within a very hierarchical system and know that they are expected to uphold traditional values which are increasingly at odds with the world in which they and their pupils live.
That world offers more competing influences and authorities than ever, particularly because of the Information Age's media explosion. Media depictions of teachers tend to be either unflattering or ludicrously sentimental. At the local level, Fair City's Barry O'Hanlon is decent but monumentally boring and this apparently makes him ideal material to become a headmaster. Hollywood has given us the triumphal sentimentality of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society and the idiotic Dangerous Minds cast Michelle Pfeiffer ("she broke the rules . . . and changed their lives") as a glamour babe capable of sorting out the kids in the hood. Yeah, right, Michelle!
Some social scientists argue that, in a competitive society, teachers are hamstrung by having to fulfil an "ascribed" rather than an "achieved" role. But "achievement" in today's context is not always synonymous with undisputed worth. Time was when "big brother" was probably the bloke who, in his ascribed role, took charge of the school football team. Now, appearing on Big Brother is the kind of achieved role that promises instant, if temporary, fame. It's a debatable kind of achievement.
Anyway, how Irish teachers ought to adapt to New Ireland and the globalised new world is probably best left to teachers themselves. Of course, there are issues of quality control, and excessive self-regulation can lead to cosy clubs (court actions are expensive so you can supply your own examples). But league tables of schools' performances in state exams feign an equality which doesn't exist. Were all schools equally well-financed and drawing from an equally-motivated and culturally-supported population, they might mean something. However, they're not. Clongowes Wood vs. a VEC school from a drug-ridden area of Dublin? That really promotes equality and fairness, eh?
Given the economic base of our new social architecture, it's obvious that equality and fairness count for little beside efficiency and functionality. You can't sell equality or feast on fairness and the obscene disproportion between the wealthy and the poor in New Ireland is mirrored in access to education. Some improvements have been made, but they still fall far short of what's required. It's a sad reflection that our education system produces so few critics (albeit with notable exceptions) of its results. Although more people than ever can - in the name of "sophistication", no less - quibble about trivia such as wine and fashions, prosperity does seem to have made us more bovine about big issues.
"It is vital," says Dr Peter Conroy of Trinity College's Education Department, "that able and committed people continue to be attracted to teaching. Although the process of education in contemporary society is not confined to the school, the roles of the school and teacher remain crucial. In this era of accelerating change, it is equally crucial that education is not reduced to the provision of a relatively narrow range of technical skills that reflect the prevailing division of labour in the economy."
But even though it's "vital", attracting "able and committed people" to teaching will become increasingly difficult if teachers' labour is not economically rewarded. "Secondary teachers' pay must be adequate so as to attract and retain good quality graduates," the ASTI general secretary Charlie Lennon said just a couple of weeks ago. The principle applies in primary teaching too, and the outcome of the ASTI's industrial action will show the real worth this economy places on teachers.
In a society in which money and power are becoming synonymous, worth is measured in hard currency and assets. There are cranks who, resenting the length of school holidays, complain that teachers are already overpaid. But doing the business in front of a class or classes every day is no gig for the faint-hearted and, while every occupation has slackers and chancers, most teachers more than earn their money. Even if June, July and August remain the three top attractions in teaching, dedicated teachers also earn their holidays.
However, as we appear on course to learn the hard way - by replicating Britain's disastrous diminishment of teaching - it's probably pointless to argue that if we don't pay our own teachers properly, we'll all be punished. It's also time to amend the old taunt because, if able and committed people desert teaching, it won't just be a case of, "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach". With less able and less committed people doing the job, we could end up having to say: "They can't teach but they'll have to do".
Meanwhile, the market and its pulverising pragmatism ("those who can do you, do you" is often today's truth) will continue apace. But if we don't wish succeeding generations to live on planet Nike or planet Microsoft, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, it's time to rescue teaching from the goals of an unsympathetic culture of commerce. There's money around to pay them better - just do it!