Mark Daly (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the motion. The words that struck me most in the motion were "active citizenship" in regard to youth work, an issue I addressed previously in respect of the education system when the Minister for Education and Skills, Deputy Ruairí Quinn, was in the House. If we sent our children to school for 14 or 15 years but did not teach them Irish it would be foolhardy to expect them to speak Irish. We do not teach them how to be active citizens yet we are surprised and perplexed as to why we do not have active citizens. While we have civic, social and political education, CSPE, and other modules - this is the point I made to the Minister for Education and Skills in respect of the proposed changes to the junior certificate cycle - the leaving certificate does not care about CSPE because we do not measure it by giving points for active citizenship. Teachers do no teach it, and students do not study it and, therefore, we do not have as many active citizens as we might at the end of the education system.

Pádraic Pearse described the education system, 100 years ago, as the murder machine because it churns out economic units of production. Individuals are taught how to make a living but we do not teach them how to live, in a country where we have a pandemic of suicide, depression, mental health issues and the tragedy of young girls taking their lives by cyperbullying and all manner of reasons. Part of the reason for the failure is that in school they are not taught how to deal with the most basic elements outside the school. They will be working eight hour days, 40 hour weeks. For the rest of the week and during the day they are dealing with issues of alcohol, relationships, mental health, drugs and drugs awareness and yet in the school system they are not taught how to be active citizens, why they should vote and why they should volunteer; the reason being the system does not measure it.

The proposal I made to the Minister for Education and Skills was that active citizenship should be a leaving certificate subject. It should be an optional extra subject whereby one would be granted a maximum of 50 points.

It would be the only subject a student could do for the leaving certificate as a seventh subject that would give extra points. For good or bad the leaving certificate is all about points. Unless we make active citizenship part of the leaving certificate machine, teachers will not teach it, students will not study it and the country will be worse off. We need to teach children to understand the democratic process, why they should vote, why they should be involved in public life, and why they should look after their mental health and that of their neighbours. The only way to do that is through the educational system because we cannot rely on all parents-----