State robbed education to pay for tax cheats

In the image we sell to outsiders, and perhaps to ourselves, we are an extraordinarily literate people. Men in pubs hold forth on Beckett and Proust. Codgers at bus stops recite reams of Shakespeare. Taxi drivers don't rant about immigrants and taxes, they reflect eloquently on the relationship between Bloom and Stephen in Ulysses. We all have our noses in books most of the time. We dry our dishes with tea towels imprinted with the faces of Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Behan.

There is, of course, a slightly modernised version of this image. In it, we are still marvellously well-educated but our erudition is lavished on more high-tech enterprises. We are the Young Europeans, a nation of hip, brainy graduates with heads full of binary codes. We have the new knowledge-economy sussed. We positively glow with the radiant aura of Education.

Like all the stories we spin about ourselves, this one is an amalgam of truth, evasions and downright lies. Lots of us are quite literate. Interest in books is probably less rigidly confined to a certain class of people than it is in many other Western societies. We do have a large number of young well-educated people in the new high-tech workforce but we are, as a society, shamefully under-educated. It is long past time that we came to terms with the fact that huge parts of Irish society have been failed by the education system.

Two sets of figures sum up the scale of the problem. One is that almost 40 per cent of the adult population of the State left school before the age of 15. There are 637,800 adults who did not complete a second-level education. Some of these, of course, are older citizens who went through their education when most people got no further than primary school, but there are 173,000 people in the 15-54 age group who have only a primary education.

Even more alarmingly, there are almost a quarter of a million people aged between 15 and 39 (and therefore of an age to have benefited from "free" second-level education) who have only an Intermediate or Junior Certificate.

The second set of figures is even more disturbing. At the start of this century, about 12 per cent of the population was regarded as illiterate. Now, at the end of the century, the International Adult Literacy Survey finds that 23 per cent of those tested do not have the literacy skills necessary to function in contemporary society.

They scored at the lowest of five possible levels, one of which involves being able to locate a single piece of information in a text, where there is no distracting information and when the structure of the text assists the search. The 23 per cent of Irish people mentioned in the survey includes both those who can do only this kind of task and those who can't. So some of those included in this figure are in fact falling below the lowest level measured.

When these figures emerged recently, there was a great deal of shock. But why should we be surprised? The literacy problem we have now is a direct result of choices made in the late 1980s. The State decided that, instead of collecting huge sums of taxes in bogus non-resident bank accounts, it would balance the books by cutting back on primary education. What did we think would be the result of having huge numbers in primary school classes?

What did we imagine the consequences of not having enough remedial teachers would be? How, with a pathetically inadequate psychological service for primary schools, making it immensely difficult for children with learning difficulties to be identified, did we expect to help children with, for example, dyslexia? When we allowed the State to pretend we could not afford basic services for schools, we were deciding to have a major illiteracy problem. Pretending to be shocked now merely adds the insult of mock-ignorance to the injury of wilful neglect.

The cost of the under-education of the Irish population is huge. It is fashionable at the moment to think of that cost in purely economic terms, and there is no doubt that we will not be able to sustain prosperity unless we manage to widen the skilled workforce, but other costs are no less important.

Literacy is fundamentally about the ability to participate in the public world and you can't have a real democracy in which a large proportion of the population lacks that ability. The personal suffering of people who don't have adequate literacy skills is immense: time and again, people who have learned to read in adulthood describe themselves as new people, as if their old personalities were half-dead. And since under-education is concentrated in marginalised communities, it contributes hugely to the process of social exclusion.

This is why, as the Conference of Religious in Ireland points out in its thoughtful and creative response to the Green Paper on adult education, "Social Transformation and Lifelong Learning", a real programme to redress the learning deficit has to involve much more than an extension of what we have at the moment.

What we have now is a superb system of one-to-one teaching for people who decide they have a problem and have the courage to seek help. The people who do this work are outstanding and their work is, by international standards, highly successful.

But everyone recognises that these programmes reach a small minority of those who need to be brought back into the education system. For one thing, most people with literacy problems never come forward. For another, literacy is itself only one part of a much wider picture of educational deprivation.

WE need, as CORI suggests, a far wider, more pervasive and more passionate approach. Education has to involve everyone from the school and adult education structures to a revitalised public library system, trade unions, employers and community groups. It must, above all, be linked to the regeneration and resurrection of broken communities.

People learn and grow not just by deciding to sit down and learn some skills from a teacher, but also by trying to change the world around them.

Long ago, the trade union movement played a huge, if unacknowledged, role in educating its members. Today, that role is played most strongly by community development groups. Involvement in local campaigns about housing, transport and jobs is often the crucible in which people are motivated to learn about themselves and the world around them.

Yet, at the moment, community education grants are minuscule (ranging from £100 to £2,000), haphazard and a marginal part of the education budget (about £7 million out of £2,500 million.)

A real national crusade to place learning at the centre of everyday life in the community, the workplace and the democratic system could do much more than make us a richer society. It could enrich our society by reminding us that progress is not, in the end, only about money. It would also be the State's apology - late but welcome - to those who were cheated of their chance in life by its determination to defend the interests of the wealthy.