Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank Dr. Harvey, Professor Gallagher and Dr. Foley for attending. It has been an extremely interesting and timely debate and I thank Senator O'Donnell for requesting it. I hope the committee will forgive me if I wander a little as I try to make the points that I want to make.

Every year when I see graduation photographs in the newspaper, I wonder how many plasterers, motor mechanics and electricians have been lost to academia. Our value system in this country seems to have gone wrong somewhere. We pride ourselves on having the best education system in the world but we are driving square pegs into round holes at an unmerciful rate and that really bothers me. Regarding teaching and learning - we are talking here about third-level teaching and learning in particular - Dr. Foley's point was, for me, instructive. He sees himself as a mentor, not a teacher. I believe that to be his proper position. The expectations in transitioning from second level to third level education are wrong. We have grown in expectation that we will be taken by the hand through the entire education system by a kindly teacher who will always put us on the right track. We have gone out of our way to build systems to support that type of thinking.

Dr. Harvey mentioned Blackboard, Moodle and other such things. In 1996, I went to Holland for the first time to look at electronic learning systems and I introduced them into further education in the same year.

There was an expectation with the Moodle platform that an educator could put everything on it, sit back and interact every now and then. There was a very interesting conversation - I think it was in DIT - where a lecturer from one of the institutes of technology pointed out that he had gone to all the trouble of putting videos and exercises online, but when he carried out a piece of research he found that he had the same number of failures as before. He called in those who had failed and asked them what went wrong. One of them said he hadn't got up on Monday morning because "I don't get up for lectures on Monday, and it would all be online anyway." The lecturer asked why he had not availed of the online resource in that case, but the student told him he had never got around to it. Going back to the point Dr. Foley made, there is an expectation that students will be managed through the system.

There are a few key areas for me which I am interested in today. Where is the HEA? Why does it not have a representative here? I would love to hear its view on teaching and learning in third level education. I would like to see something in the area of mentor training rather than teaching. I do not believe that teaching, if we look upon it as second level teaching, fits the model for third level. I am deeply concerned by the casualisation of teaching and lecturing in third level institutions. It is happening right across our education system and I believe it is to the detriment of the system. The loyalty that would have existed to the institution is no longer there. If anything, we see ourselves as being in conflict with the institution rather than being a loyal member of it. There is also the issue of the disappearance, or the dumbing down, of the hard subjects. As I throw these points out, I welcome Dr. Foley's comments on them.

I have spoken on a number of occasions about the need for language education. We visited Helsinki recently with Senator Healy Eames. A 12 year old child walking through a school stopped and asked me how Ireland was coping with the crisis. When I asked him which crisis, he said, "The economic crisis." He spoke in perfect English. We had a brief conversation about it and I told him his English was excellent. I asked him if he also spoke Swedish and Finnish. "Oh, I do," he said, "and German and Russian, but my German is a little poor." I remember having a debate in which I wanted to bring one language into further education, and they said, "No, we do not do languages here." And here we are, sitting in the European Union, with no languages.

I can see the Chairman looking at me so I will get through this as quickly as I can. We now have private providers delivering teaching and learning programmes for further education and secondary education. I cannot for the life of me understand why we are churning out thousands of teachers for whom we have no jobs. The third level system was already in place, and I would be interested in Dr. Foley's comments on that.

Dr. Foley's table is instructive on the amount of diverse activities that one must carry out as an educator today. We seem to be driven by outputs. Everything is about outputs today. It is about the number of students who started, what modules they took, and the number who passed. As Dr. Foley said, not only does one have to correct the scripts; one also has a plethora of students outside the door waiting for an explanation as to why they did badly, or well, as the case may be. Then the returns must be sent to some department head, who in turn will collate those and send them up the line. Ultimately, they will finish up with some politician saying that 24% of students did a, b, and c. It is a nonsense, to my mind. I believe - I would be interested in Dr. Foley's comments on this - that if we were to talk about teaching and learning, we could leave that nonsense aside. We have actually started to concentrate on feeding the machine, and the machine is the university system that needs money. We have taken the money from the universities but we still expect the same outputs. Maybe we should shrink the student population and start moving into research. Maybe there should be a greater emphasis on research. I will finish on that, and I apologise if I have dragged the discussion all over the third level education system.