OPINION:INTEL'S CRAIG Barrett gave us all a wake-up call when he said at the recent economic conference at Farmleigh House that Ireland's education system was failing to equip students for the 21st century. The problem is that our world has changed, but our school system hasn't.
Irish people tend to have a nostalgic sense of pride in our education system, based on a fading memory of a time when the level of education of our population was cited by IDA-enticed companies as a reason to locate in Ireland. We have lofty aspirations to transform Ireland into a Smart Economy – a creative launchpad for high-value start-ups, with a talented and flexible workforce. There is, unfortunately, a massive gulf between reality and this aspiration, and that gulf is nowhere more evident than in our secondary school system. Budget cuts are currently forcing secondary schools around the country to cut science subjects. This is an embarrassment for a country that trumpets its investment in science through Science Foundation Ireland and the Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions.
Something is going badly wrong at second level, and the problems run far deeper than budget cuts. So what exactly is wrong? Is it the points race, with its valuation of college courses based on demand rather than any specific aptitude? Are we dumbing down our exams? Or is it the lack of adequate resources and technology in schools?
These are all important issues, but there is a more fundamental problem facing our schools. Our education system is a relic of the industrial age. We are so accustomed to the idea of children segregated by age into classes of 30, moving from mathematics to geography or Irish every 40 minutes, that we assume this is the way things must be.
Whereas in the 18th and 19th centuries schools were still organised around the ecclesiastical and agricultural calendars, in the early 20th century schools became assembly lines to equip generations of children with the same chunks of knowledge at the same time, until the child emerged fully equipped for a final examination to ensure all parts had been properly bolted on to the chassis. This all worked reasonably well – children emerged well-suited to working in a relatively rigid hierarchical society, where the skills of memory and rule-following were very valuable. In the 21st century, however, memory and rule-following are no longer key skills. Who really needs to memorise vast amounts of information when you have Google? And what kind of job based on rule-following has not been either transferred to computers or pushed down to the lowest level of reward? Even though there are attempts at reform based on tweaks to the curriculum, it is the obsolete factory-model of education itself that needs to be challenged.
So what would it be like to reimagine the secondary school as an environment to support creativity, rather than rote-learning? To support independent thinking? To stimulate innovation rather than replication? To produce confident, creative, flexible thinkers who are equipped to tackle the challenges we are facing? To reward initiative and teamwork rather than individual achievement? To nurture a generation of people who can move effortlessly between art and science, between technology and design, between creative writing and business? This task has never been more urgent. However, it is not a simple undertaking. Consider the many barriers to change in the system.
The Department of Education and Science was designed primarily to administer the employment of teachers and is not capable of driving an agenda for innovation. The national curriculum and exam systems and teachers’ unions make experimentation with alternative models of education very difficult.
There is, though, a real appetite for change. All we need is the opportunity to design, develop and pilot alternatives to the current, broken system, with input from innovators and creative thinkers in different areas, from architecture to design, from business to technology. The good news is that there are a number of successful models, mostly outside the formal school system, that can be very helpful in the process of redesigning the school – from the Intel network of computer clubhouses, to the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition, to informal science centres and even more radical projects like Not-School, an experiment run by Stephen Heppell allowing teenage offenders to design their own school curriculum.
What we need to do is open up a space for experimentation in second-level education in Ireland, something that does not currently exist despite the presence of many passionate teachers who are yearning for something different. Ireland has a great opportunity here – we are a small and, generally, nimble country. We have great resources to draw on in our creative, academic, cultural and business communities. If there is the right will, we could change the way we do education much more rapidly than larger countries, and lead the way internationally in redesigning secondary school as an environment to foster innovation. A competitive tendering process based around an initial group of five to 10 experimental secondary schools at different locations around Ireland would be a good mechanism to stimulate different multidisciplinary teams to pitch for the business of designing new educational models suited to the 21st century. These “innovation hothouses” would not be stand-alone structures but could be supported through partnerships with local industry, cultural centres and universities/ITs.
After piloting, successful approaches could be rolled out nationally. The children involved in the hothouse schools will all gain from intense attention to the quality of their learning experience, so even if some approaches turn out to be more fruitful than others, all participants will benefit.
A smart economy cannot be constructed by investing in research if a culture of innovation is not infused into every level of our educational system. As WB Yeats said, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire”. It’s time we lit a fire under our second-level school system.
Dr Michael John Gorman is director of Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin (www.sciencegallery.com) and the author of several books including Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility(Skira, 2005)