Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As we are discussing education, it would be appropriate to begin my remarks by paying tribute to Seamus Deane, one of Ireland's great academics and intellectuals, who has just passed away. I was privileged enough when I was studying English literature in UCD, having entered there in 1987, that Seamus Deane was already an intellectual legend teaching in UCD. I remember reading his wonderful book, Celtic Revivals, which was a tour de forceof an introduction to and critical essays on some of the great Irish literary figures. He was fearless in de-sanitising some of the Irish literary canon and showing its radical and often political content. He played a big role in the Field Day project, another radical intellectual project in this country. His loss is a great loss, I am sure most importantly to his family but also to intellectual life and academic life in this country, so it is important to make that tribute in the Dáil.

The revolt of the school students against the leaving certificate in the midst of the Covid pandemic was not just about the unfairness of forcing them to sit the exam given all the difficulties of Covid - the restrictions, the unfairnesses it would have imposed on certain students, who may have had difficulty accessing online education, and the public health threat itself - but was also a long-overdue revolt against a thoroughly archaic system of education, if one could even say the leaving certificate has anything to do with education. I would argue it has very little to do with education. That is not in any way a critique of our wonderful teachers, who have to deal with all the difficulties of giving the students the choice they have asked for in this year's and last year's leaving certificate. It is a critique, however, of the failure of imagination of successive Governments and politicians in general to re-envision education, how we do education and how we allow young people and people of all ages to fulfil their educational potential.

As an English student, let me point out the ridiculousness of some aspects of our education system. You study Shakespeare from the page and you do a written exam on, in my case, Othelloor Julius Caesar. What on earth has reading Shakespeare from the page got to do with Shakespeare if it is not about acting it out, having the teaching resources and bringing the actors and directors into our schools to bring Shakespeare to life? This is an indication of the way in which our education system sanitises and, to use that horrible word, standardises education. If anything, Covid and the revolt of the school students should have led us, and even now should still lead us, to a radical, revolutionary change in the way we do education, and that is just one example. It is all about the words "standardisation", "bell curves", "testing" and "assessment", is it not? What have they to do with the human imagination, the human intellect and fulfilling human potential?

Sometimes people should remember the origins of these things.

Where did the examination system originate? It came from imperial China in 605 under the Sui dynasty and was later expanded by the Song dynasty as a way of selecting people largely from elites - first, military elites and then bureaucratic elites - to serve in the imperial civil service and military. It was imported into Europe in the 1500s by the Jesuits and was first pioneered on a mass scale by the British Empire in India to select people for the imperial civil service. It was later established for the same purpose in England. In other words, it was testing a particular type of intelligence for particular reasons. In its origins, it was very much about perpetuating elites.

Let us apply that to the situation today. Whatever rationale there was for rationing access to any level of education, and I do not believe there was much, what possible rationale is there for rationing access to higher and further education or, indeed, postgraduate education in the modern world? It is, by definition, perpetuating hierarchies and elites. We should be thinking that now is the opportunity to revolutionise education, to bring meaning to the expression that education is a right, not a privilege, and to give everybody access by removing the leaving certificate barrier to full educational fulfilment and potential, instead of a system that stresses, alienates and degrades the real meaning of education.

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