Ronan Lyons has a piece on his blog which is worth a read even though it’s not really anything majorly new in terms of what anyone with an interest in the economic well-being of Ireland should be aware of. He has pointed out that we’re losing a generation of young men to unemployment and education.
The question is, what do you do about it? Well there are two problems. There’s the short term problem of the current lost boys, and then there’s the long term problem of future generations and what worries me is that efforts will be made to correct the short term problem – possibly – and that the longer term will get ignored.
We can’t sustain an army of construction workers to the extent that we did from about 2001-2006. Unfortunately because this industry allowed young people to stay closer to home rather than moving to the bigger cities, the jobs were seen as positive. They just weren’t sustainable. So with the best will in the world, a significant number of people – predominantly men will have to retrain and find an alternative activity.
What that would be is open to debate although as I’ve mentioned on other occasions, the Green Party would have you believe it’s environmentally related energy generation that’s a key option. I don’t know and I am not equipped to solve that problem right now.
I’m more interested in the lacunae in the education system that brought about this situation. We don’t do education well and the way we are doing it continues to disimprove. There are various reasons for this; some practical, some financial, some entrenchment in the old way of doing things.
We are weakening in basic skill sets in the way of literacy and numeracy. Craig Barret formerly CX Intel has highlighted maths and physics as key areas to sort out in this country. I utterly agree with him. Our tendancy to sort out failing maths standards is to make maths exams easier over the years, and we have had an Education Minister suggest that universities reduce their minimal maths requirements to include foundation maths, which, if you’ve seen the foundation maths syllabus, should highlight just how bad things must be at some levels.
Issues with numeracy don’t just start with foundation level maths though; they have their roots in how we approach education at the earlier stages. So we need to address how we teach at primary school so that it feeds effectively into secondary level, and likewise.
If I were to suggest something, it would be to reassess the entire school cycle. In some respects, it’s just not working any more. The generalist approach to primary teaching continues too late in my view. I can’t object to it up to about 10 or 11, but from then on, we need to look at things like maths and science in more depth. The situation whereby we start languages at the age of 13 – for the most part – is ridiculous.
We need to look very hard then at the third level courses we offer. We’ve an overabundance of soft courses which we can’t really build an economy on. These need to be knifed. We don’t need a load of media studies courses for example. We need a certain amount more cross disciplinary study. We may have to look at extending the university cycle by one year to cater for that. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. We need to target funding for courses. Make it more attractive – and rewarding – for kids to do course that feed into building an economy. One of the things I never understood about the Irish economy for most of the past 10 years was why we valued construction so very highly (and paid it accordingly) but IT and science comparatively low (try getting research funding…).
But that being said, we need to recognise that not everyone is going to have an aptitude for high level science and research so we need to look at what skilled and semi=skilled jobs can be brought into Ireland; what we can generate ourselves and what can employ large numbers and pay them a reasonable salary. In the past, this has typically been manufacturing. We can’t depend on that alone. We can’t depend on call centres alone. And we need to provide an education system that feeds into that reality too.
I used to live in Germany. They had a tiered system whereby you did a particular stream depending on whether you were likely to hit university, technical college or other trades. It has the benefit in recognising that different aptitudes can be more suitable for different skillsets. I also used to live in France where they split up the school leaving exam streams in terms of subject aptitude. I see a certain value to that also.
This isn’t going to work if there isn’t a whole sale change in how we perceive education in this country. Put simply, we take it for granted and assume that we are entitled to an education that will get us a well paid job that makes us better off than the neighbours. That is unrealistic. Education is one of those things that gives you more the more you put into it but you wouldn’t know that from too many people I hear talking about their youngsters today.
If we get some of the top level stuff right, it should have a top down effect. I realise that China manufactures everything but it doesn’t have to be that way. If we get a few people generating ideas that can be created and manufactured here, we can use this to create jobs further on in the chain. Which will have other knock on effects in terms of support.
The thing is, a monumentally improved education system is key to this.
In the meantime, we need to look at the profile of young people losing jobs now and start moving them in a similar direction although possibly on a lesser scale.
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