THE SKILLS required to convert knowledge into something productive for society are not being cultivated in our young people, the MacGill Summer School has heard.
In an departure from the political reform themes in Glenties earlier in the week, yesterday’s event was focused on the Change Nation initiative founded by Ashoka Ireland. It aims to support social entrepreneurship and to tackle social, economic and environmental challenges.
Director of Ashoka Europe and founder of Change Nation, Paul O’Hara, said there were thousands of young people starting up new social innovation projects across “all manner of social problems” through the education system.
Mr O’Hara said he believed it was “a myth” that the knowledge economy was going to be the source of our competitive advantage.
“I think the knowledge economy is flattening around the world. The kids in India and China are learning the same maths and science as the kids in Ireland. Academic performance alone won’t be the determining factor of success.”
He identified five key skills that were key to success: empathy, creativity, leadership, the ability to collaborate and resourcefulness.
“We believe that schools kill creativity and that’s a terrible problem when you think about the innovation process.”
Mark Ryan, country managing director of Accenture, said the debate about skills was the most important debate at present. There was an “acute” shortage of IT skills here, he said.
Dr Don Thornhill, chairman of the National Competitiveness Council and a former secretary general of the Department of Education, said we had to be “ruthless” about our current ranking internationally in education.
Our reading and maths skills in younger people were declining relative to our competitor countries, he said. Unless we maintained high performance levels in maths and literacy, our success as an economic entity was going to be seriously at risk, he added.
Speakers from the floor outlined challenges in their own fields, in teaching, in the health and disability sectors, in areas such as mental health and addiction services.
The sessions also heard positive experiences from members of the audience about voluntary ventures in their local communities. Yet there were also concerns about the high level of unemployment among young people and about negative perceptions of mental health problems in Ireland.
Another speaker said a “key inhibiting factor” was the lack of women in decision making.
Christy Lynch, who works in the disability sector, said there was a “huge appetite” among people in the sector for sharing ideas and collaborating. There were lots of example of better, more cost-effective and more customer-focused ways of delivering, but they were “fragile by nature” because they were new.
Another man noted the unemployment rate of 39 per cent among young people.
“That’s horrific,” he said. He asked that people would “share the cake”, that everyone would take less, with the money being put into social programmes to employ people, to take them away from “despair and depression”.
Cormac Shovlin had worked as a field officer with the Department of Agriculture for more than 40 years.
He was worried about the effects of the “technological age” on older farmers and the widening gap between young and old people when it came to technology.
In addition, the voluntary sector was “dying” because it was not being encouraged and was seen as “old-fashioned”.
Joy McCormick (88) asked what was available for “end-of-life” people so that they might continue to be creative and to contribute to their communities and to society.