Marie Louise O'Donnell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. I am a "quare" old historical source like Methuselah. I have been an educationalist all my life, so I was arguing a counteraction to this wind of change for change's sake, with not a lot of thought process. My arguments were philosophical and outside the vested interests that I hear sometimes in the Seanad, philosophy may be what saves us. I will let Members think about that.

The Minister for Education and Skills is a fine Minister. He was a historical architect in the sense that he was one of the people who saved Georgian Dublin, so he has a tremendous sense of what history is and what it stands for. My argument was not about compulsion, but about realigning history to a short course method. It was not about whether something should be compulsory or not. Sometimes we need to argue more about the "how" of things. We have a great aspirational formulaic learning system for outcomes, but we rarely have pamphlets. I would love to see somebody write a pamphlet about the "how" of all this, and not the "why" of it. How are we going to achieve it?

We rarely do that. We spend most of our time cloaking learning in all these great learning outcomes rather than discussing how to do it - and by that I mean the how and why of the subject, the training and the teaching. Of course, people do not like to use the words "teaching" or "training" now because we are meant to be helping and project managing, but we are getting nowhere through that approach. That comes from knowing that history is a heartbeat - it is basically our exit and entrance on to the planet.

Short courses do not work for young minds; they fragment knowledge. We need to talk about that. If I was arguing for compulsion, I would be arguing in favour of making the arts a compulsory subject, and many Senators would agree.