The reason our young people don't care about maths and science is that we have smugly neglected ICT education, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
WHAT IRELAND did in the 1990s is something that had never really been done before by anyone. We imported development. Most modern economies plugged foreign direct investment into an existing set of skills, traditions, resources. But, to an overwhelming extent, we depended on the attraction of fully-formed global corporations, who brought with them world-leading technologies and processes.
Finland, for example, developed mobile phone technologies, took a leading share of a growing world market and used its indigenous resources to link itself into that market.
We just brought in the whole package. Our emergence as a global player in high-tech industries didn't reflect any profound organic change in our society.
For a long time, it looked like this wasn't really a problem. It seemed like we had actually done something new - skipping the whole tedious process of developing a world-class society and moving straight to the end result of leading-edge technological production. It seemed reasonable, too, to expect that, with time, the presence of Intel and Microsoft and Google and the example of some superb small-scale indigenous software companies, would in themselves change the prevailing Irish culture. But yet again, the Leaving Cert results and the CAO process tell us that this is not happening.
The generation that has grown up with high-tech Ireland isn't high-tech. It's no good at maths, and it's not interested in science, engineering and technology.
The numbers graduating in computing applications from Dublin City University, for example, actually dropped from 224 in 2005 to just 74 this year. And third-level courses in science, engineering and technology are struggling to get enough qualified applicants to fill their places. Entry requirements for engineering programmes have dropped by as much as 45 points.
The gap between the number of points required for entry to science in UCD (300) and to law in the same university (500) is evidence of a society whose aspirations have been weirdly unaffected by 15 years as the poster child of the global economy. Barristers are still infinitely cooler than boffins.
What lies behind this is the delusional nature of our "knowledge society". The smugness and indolence of governments over the last decade have fed into a fundamental failure to turn Ireland into a society in which technological thinking is really part of everyday culture. Some of this has been due to sheer incompetence - the stupidity of handing Eircom over to foreign vulture capitalists just when we needed a huge national investment in broadband, for example.
But some of it is a result of what happens when you import development. Because you end up with some of the global leaders in technology operating here, you start to imagine that you're actually producing this technology. You don't get around to educating your young people to be scientifically literate.
One simple question illustrates the breathtaking smugness. We introduced a computer studies module in the Leaving Cert in 1980 and a computing course in the junior cycle in 1985. When were these courses last revised? Answer: never. The curriculum for the Leaving Cert computer studies programme is the same as it was before PCs - never mind laptops - were commercially available, before the internet, the world wide web, e-mail, social networking sites and YouTube. (There is an updated Information and Communication Technology course for Leaving Cert Applied students, but just over 1,000 young people sit that exam every year.)
There is one computer for every nine pupils in our primary schools and one for every seven in secondary schools - the leading countries have a ratio of one to five.
Fewer than a third of primary teachers, and a quarter of secondary teachers, rate their own ability to use Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in teaching as "intermediate" or above. Fewer than half of post-primary schools have a written ICT plan.
Department of Education inspectors saw ICT being used in just 22 per cent of lessons in primary schools and rated the use of ICT in the classroom as "competent or optimal" in just a quarter of cases.
Almost half of primary school pupils can't create a document by themselves, and 88 per cent don't know how to send an attachment with an e-mail message.
At secondary level, the inspectors judged that just over one in 10 lessons involved the effective use of ICT and noted "that the tasks undertaken by the students were largely word-processing and presentation".
Investment in equipment has been obviously inadequate. A third of the stock of computers in primary schools is more than six-years-old - a long time in ICT. In England, two-thirds of primary schools and almost all secondary schools use interactive whiteboards in the classroom - the figures in Ireland are five per cent and two per cent respectively.
Most schools at every level don't have a sufficient budget to maintain the computers and digital equipment they do have, so much of it is out of order much of the time.
And with all this we're surprised that we're not producing a decent number of students with an enthusiasm for technology, maths and science. We should know that with this kind of smug indifference, the rhetoric of a knowledge society does not compute.