“I WANT TO TAKE ONE STEP BACK TO TAKE TWO STEPS FORWARD”
Oct 28th, 2008 by Donal
“”All I’m saying is that I want to take one step back to take two steps forward,” Batt O’Keefe on Education cuts.
I teach History and English in a medium sized secondary school in Wexford Town. My sister lectures Economics in an Institute of Education. We don’t talk about it much but a big part of why we both work in education is we both know first how transformational it can be.
My sister was the trailblazer in our family. She filled out the forms, figured out the grant system, earned the results and broke through the barriers. Trinity….jaysus! I slagged her for months, mimicked her new friends accents and followed her into third level three years later.
My sister…one step. Myself….two steps. Money for books for those who can’t afford them…three, assistance to travellers to keep them in education, language support, home school liason officers… We’ve painfully learnt to walk with regards to educational inclusion in this country over the last ten years. We still toddle in an ungainly fashion too often, we fail too many, but we were learning. Learning minister.
There are no steps back in education, just people left behind.
Children who have profound learning difficulties who go without diagnosis never mind having those difficulties addressed because their class is too full, their teacher stretched simply to deliver the curriculum to the average student. Those children can’t hang around for the two steps forward, can’t take a “learning freeze”.
Minister O’Keefe reminds us that class sizes were bigger in the nineties and it didn’t stop the economy from taking off. It’s a statement so staggering in its ignorance of educational policy and practice that it almost defies retort. This is the man charged with shaping our education system so that it can compete this century for high-skilled jobs with India, who produce as many graduates as we have in the entire country every year and a new US administration who a) want their R&D jobs back and b) know where they went.
There are no steps back in education, just economies left behind.
How would George Best get on if he was to play against today’s super-fit defenders? I don’t know, it’s a fascinating debate though, pass the peanuts. How would a nineties Irish education system fare against what we’ll be competing with in the coming century? Well it looks like Batt wants to find out, pass the P45.
Education changed myself and my sisters lives. It transformed our opportunities and it transformed this country as those of us lucky enough to be able to fulfil our ambitions began to crawl out from under the yokes of dogma and desperation in the nineties. There are thousands of our citizens who were left outside of that transformation. The current cuts will ensure that exclusion will continue. Those whose opportunities most need to be transformed will be out of step not for one news cycle or one fiscal year but for their lifetime.
There are no steps back in education, just lost opportunities.
In the coming century our economy and our education system will have to not walk but run. There are elements of both that are flabby and need reform. The minister says he considered cutting teachers pay but decided against it. Why? It’s just a guess but I would bet it because the minister decided my union and others would fight more bitterly for our pay and conditions than on behalf of our most vulnerable students. I hope he’s wrong.
The minister will take a stand on this issue. It’s not a battlefield of his choosing. It just happens to be one u-turn too many.
I’m hoping to be in the public gallery in the Dail tomorrow for the debate on the Labour parties motion against the cuts. I want to bear witness to this tin-pot general as he takes his stand against the most vulnerable children in the country.
I want watch the reaction of the craven Green Party TD’s as this government takes “one step back” on behalf of those who started life miles behind to begin with.
I want to see this so that when these pygmies lead us all on our two steps forward and we stumble, and we fall, I want to be able to teach my students why.
I’ll be cheering you on. The line from the govt. (including to their eternal shame the GP) seems to be as you describe it, that somehow this is ‘a U-Turn too far’. I think that’s a stupid way of looking at the world, as well as being despicable…
Well, Deaglan De Breadun was on Nighty Night News with Vincent Browne saying that after talking to Batt O’Keefe in China last week he gets the impression that FF ministers think that if they hold fast they’ll come through all this with flying colours, vindicated in the same way as Ray McSharry and Charlie Haughey. He also said that ‘people don’t seem to realise the extent of the economic problems ahead’.
With journalists like that who needs a ministry of propaganda?
Lot of pertinent points Donal. Am becoming more and more convinced (I was fairly well convinced in the first place) that Green politics and all that ‘biological produce’ lifestyle wank was a fairly obscene middle class / first world luxury. The way the Irish Greens have conducted themselves over the last couple of years doesn’t exactly dissuade me.
Don’t forget to get yourself innoculated against gobshites if you’re gonna be in the gallery above that lot tomorrow