I should like to remind Senators that this motion relates to a very wide range of issues and that, consequently, there would not be sufficient time to cover any one of these in great detail. I should like to refer, however, to one or two of these issues which I believe are raised by the question of an independent examinations board. The first is that our educational system has tended to concentrate upon the acquisition of information, the acquisition of knowledge to a certain extent as if that knowledge were some sort of commodity which could be measured out and subsequently given some sort of quantified status. One of the possibilities and one of the necessities which an independent examinations board must consider is the transformation of our educational system into one which concentrates upon the development of skills, skills not necessarily in a manual sense, but in an intellectual sense as well. By that I mean the development of those skills which enable the pupil and subsequently the adult who is continuing to be educated all the time to acquire further information and to develop new knowledge.
Another aspect is that of teacher participation. In some of the experimental schemes which have been carried out in this country in recent years it was found that many teachers, particularly in rural areas, found themselves very isolated from the mainstream of what was going on in education and they welcomed these private schemes as a means of involving themselves in new developments. The new examinations board, therefore, if they approach the teaching profession in the right fashion, will find a massive fund of goodwill, a fund of knowledge and a fund of creativity. So far as costing is concerned I would remind the Minister and his advisers that the costing of this kind of scheme has been examined already and will be found, for example, in the final report of the Public Examinations Evaluation Project. That report was presented to the Minister's predecessor.
It is also particularly important, when the examinations board proceed about this business, that at the earliest possible stage, they should clearly specify their objectives. Often when we find ourselves engaged in a project of this kind if we do not specify our objectives clearly we find ourselves involved in waste and proceeding up a cul-de-sac, which is an expensive and wasteful occupation.
Another matter is the necessity to encourage flexibility in the curriculum or, indeed, flexibility in the curricula, that is to say to encourage within the educational system educationalists and teachers, to experiment and to find new ways of doing things. With regard to teachers, the Department and the examinations board must be prepared to invest in training. Those who may have been adjacent to a radio last night may have heard an extremely interesting debate about the teaching of science in our schools. I would recommend very much to the Minister that he should try to get a transcript of that programme. Many of the problems with regard to the teaching of science and, in particular, the necessity for in-service training, were raised. If we are to make the best of our educational system and to get the greatest benefit from our examinations we must be prepared to spend some money and to spend it intelligently in the area of teacher training. It is important also with regard to any innovation in education that the teachers be given due notice of what is proposed and that they have time to prepare themselves for any changes that are to take place. There have been occasions in the past, and one thinks particularly of the introduction of the new mathematics syllabus, when the Department in their enthusiasm to be involved in new things moved ahead too quickly and the teachers were not prepared for it.
With examinations we have tended in the past to concentrate on the academically more able and have not given due attention to those who are less able. There have been experiments in various countries in this area. One thinks, for example, of the CSE in Britain and there are lessons to be learned there. Something that we should try to aim for is some kind of certificate or recognition which a less able child can work to acquire and take away with him or with her, as the case may be.
I have just touched on a number of items there, each of which possibly could be developed in greater detail, but I would like to concentrate now on what I regard as the major issue which arises, for me at any rate, with regard to the proposal to have an independent examinations board that will note that there are developments taking place mainly outside education which will radically challenge our concept of what education involves and our concept of what constitutes that specific area of human activity which we label as education or which we label as the school or as institutions of schooling. I referred to this briefly before. This is the concept of a third technological revolution. This has a very important bearing upon the way in which this board are composed and the philosophy or the objectives or the terms of reference with which they are provided. If this board are framed and composed in a manner which is fundamentally looking backwards and rooted in our past attitudes or past philosophy in the education area, we will be making a very substantial mistake. The further technological revolution about which some writers have published a certain amount of material is that which follows the agricultural and industrial revolutions. The revolution to which they refer is a technological revolution based on information. Their suggestion is that information will become the key resource and the handling of this information is the touchstone or the criterion which will separate advanced from less advanced societies.
In speaking about information one is considering here not just what one might call interesting facts, that is to say, relatively isolated snippets of knowledge, some of which might be connected to each other, or a sort of glorified encyclopaedia, or the kind of thing with which people prepare themselves for a quiz or a mastermind competition or something of that nature. For most of us who were educated in the schools of the earlier part and middle of this century, it is possibly difficult to differentiate between information and data. There is no clear dividing line between them. Obviously we are talking about statistical data. We are talking about economic data and matters of that kind but we are talking also about a whole area of technology which deals, for example, with the control of complicated industrial machinery — service machinery and so on. It is important to stress that the dividing line between that kind of highly technical area and the information with which we are more familiar is blurred and is one which is causing problems already, problems which are concerned with our world picture, how we see the world and how we see things developing.
One of the propositions I should like to put forward is that this new information technology or, as some people call it, a telematic society, strikes at the very basis of our traditional concept of education, a traditional concept of education at the centre of which is the teacher. By and large our education has been up to now what one might call teacher-based. There is another whole area about whether education is subject oriented or whether it is child oriented. But the point that we are trying to make here is that the organisation of education has had the teacher at the centre. The traditional position of the teacher in the education system is based on his superiority or perceived superiority in three areas. First, his personal store of knowledge: the idea of the teacher as a kind of polymath who has the answer to any question that may come up in his or her classroom; secondly, his or her skill in the handling of information, the tricks, if you like, that he or she can play with this information and thirdly, the skill of the teacher in imparting information, putting it across and also in teaching information-handling skills.
There are other areas also in which the teacher has a vital place in education. One must speak, for example, of the role of the teacher in the socialisation of students, the socialisation of children, and as a human being in the classroom providing, we hope, an example of what a human being should be. But in the three areas which I mentioned before, that is to say with regard to the teacher's personal store of knowledge, his skill in handling information and his skill in teaching information-handling skills, we are moving towards a situation in which the teacher can be challenged by what we may call, for the sake of argument, computer-based systems. This is obviously an extremely delicate area. It is a delicate area because it strikes at the whole concept of what a teacher is. It strikes at what one might call the self-concept of teachers. It has also got a very important implication with regard to employment. But it is something with which we are going to have to reckon very quickly if we are to make our educational system one that is comparable to the more advanced systems in the world and comparable also to the ones that are beginning to develop. In this context I should like to welcome the distance education unit which was announced recently.
However, without any disrespect to that institution I should like to suggest that in the context of some of the developments that are taking place and are about to take place in other countries, this is very much only a beginning. It is crude and, if one were to be rude about it, can be described as no more than a one-way blast of data at the present stage. I will try to explain what I mean by that.
In that kind of education we are talking about an emission or a transmission, a one-way transmission of a certain amount of data which is set out and left there for whoever is available to pick it up. What have been developing in the United States and in Britain are inter-active systems. In considering how we are to approach the question of an independent examinations board — and referring again to the fact that examinations determine the character of our education and also reflect what is in our education — we must take cognisance of the fact that there are things happening in education which are going to transform the whole of our examination system, or at any rate to challenge it. When one speaks of computer-based systems, of distance education or about the kind of simulations which are available in this type of system and then goes even further and begins to talk about artificial intelligence, the reaction of some people listening or reading is to switch off, if I can take a technological analogy or, alternatively, to begin to feel very deep stirrings of unease. But the facts which we have to take into our minds when we are considering the future development of education and of information systems are facts such as this. There were, for example, in 1980 no fewer than 200 satellites flying around our globe dealing in information, man-made satellites dealing in information, transmitting information data of one kind or another. There are systems available in the United States whereby any family, which at the moment has a certain amount of money but maybe not too much, can get their own aerial to plug in to the systems. There is something called Docfax which is a system by which documents can be transmitted from one place to another at great speed and with total efficiency. We have already in Europe various systems such as Cefax and Prestel. There are systems in Japan, West Germany, France and in Canada. Prestel is a system which makes available no fewer than 200,000 pages of information at the press of a switch.
There are other developments as well, such as simulated 3D colour presentations. There are systems which can now reproduce the human voice and which can identify variations of the human voice. If one thinks of this as something that is far away and belonging to another country, I might note that some of the research that has taken place in artificial-computerised voice production has taken place in University College, Cork. We have a process called electronic mail which can deliver something like 3,600 pages per hour. Already in the United States two-way cable television by which the broadcasting — the new word is narrowcasting — station can produce a certain amount of information and then the receiver can react back to that by means of press-button systems.
There is a whole area in education now called computer-aided learning, or CAL as it is known. There are interactive computer-based systems. There are interactive computer-based guidance counselling systems in the United States and I will not tire the Senators by reading out the list of initials which are used to denote the names of these. What I am trying to get across is the idea that our traditional concept of education as something that happened in a classroom in which one man or one woman controlled everything that was happening in which there was — I speak as a teacher — a sort of continuous one-man virtuoso show. This kind of conceptive education is now being challenged. We are moving towards a situation in which we may find that the student or the child does not need the school at all.
Up to about 15 or 20 years ago there had been little significant change in educational methods and technology in Irish schools since the Middle Ages. When I say that I am not trying to indulge in rhetoric or trying to push an image too far. If we consider what went on in a classroom and consider the methods used we will find that there was very little change since the Middle Ages. In fact the methods used in the schools, even allowing for the very high standard of teachers, was not much different from and sometimes less satisfactory than those practised by Socrates.
Even today the majority of Irish teachers still rely on chalk and talk. At the same time that business, industry and even some areas of public administration are adopting and adapting technology which qualitatively and quantitatively revolutionise their work, the educational sector remains almost entirely unsullied, technologically, by the faintest breath of a wind of change. The only adequate analogy is the contrast between the primitive manual technology of subsistance agriculture in under-developed countries and the highly capitalised expert and mechanised agriculture of the developed countries of the industrial northern hemisphere. If we look at this objectively we are using Third World methods to educate the future adults of the 21st century.
Within what is, compared to what is going on in other aspects of human life, compared to what is going on in business and administration in industry, still basically an antiquated system, the bottleneck is the teacher. As a teacher and as one who has reached this Chamber largely as a result of the knowledge and practical experience of organised teachers, I have seen immense transformations taking place in my profession over the last 20 years. There is no doubt in my mind, particularly if one looks at the more glamorous aspects of teaching that emerge, say, in the Young Scientists competition, or the various projects, expeditions and so forth, which show that teachers are alive, that they have been trying to move forward, that there have been positive transformations. The fact nevertheless remains — I am willing to say this even among teachers — that in the information society of the very near future almost all of our teachers are, methodologically speaking, anachronisms. In the context of sophisticated information handling machines, a global telecommunications system and computer-based learning systems, the claim of the teacher in the classroom to a monopoly of knowledge and control over his pupils' learning process is no longer unchallenged. A time is approaching when the school will no longer be necessary for instruction and maybe no longer necessary even for education.
The major, most powerful, argument against the likelihood of such an alternative education system appearing in Ireland in the immediate future is its undoubted cost. To provide that kind of background, that kind of machinery and those resources will undoubtedly be expensive. However, that fact of cost is precisely the reason why the educational authorities must confront the issues now.
One might note here that the failure of previous governments to confront the impact of modern technology and the needs of modern society in the area, for example, of the telephone system is only too evident to all of us who occasionally have to use such machines if we can find them. The developments hinted at here, because only the very few and the very rich will in the short time be able to afford them, give to the children of those very few and very rich a massive advantage. Not only that, but they will give to those countries which take the appropriate decisions now or have already taken the appropriate decisions as have, for example, Japan and France, an advantage of what can only be described as of algebraic proportions. I claim originality for this assertion for it is merely stating in a few sentences what has been for several years the official policy of some governments at any rate, and other countries are moving in the same direction.
It may seem curious to cite Pádraig Pearse in this context but it was given to him to spell out more clearly than any other Irishman before or since the unarguable proposition that the basic natural drive to learn of the human child is our greatest national resource. The conjunction of a teaching environment and methods, which unleash, guide and urge on that drive to learn and a technology which makes information and resources available on a scale which no teacher, unaided, could ever match, offers to this country the possibility of exploiting and deploying this national resource and natural national resource to an extent almost beyond our capacity to understand.
At the very moment that we are speculating on this future we also face the combination of a growing youth unemployment position and the real prospect, as Professor Dale Tussing has suggested, of a virtual breakdown in the provision of higher and further education in this country. The methods and concepts hitherto applied to educational policy cannot cope with this crisis and the governments which will have to deal with this crisis face the harsh alternative of either admitting that we cannot educate all our children or cannot educate them to the level that we regard as reasonable or, alternatively, of adopting revolutionary proposals involving, among other things, individualised learning and distance learning and inter-active telematic technology.
If we are to educate all our children and give them equal opportunities in education, if we are to emphasise and deploy educational methods which take the restrictions off what those children can learn — I mean their ability to learn, I do not necessarily mean the matter or content — and take the restrictions off their power to make the most of their potential, the approach we will have to adopt will be different in important respects from those which we have used hitherto. A revolutionary situation can only be met by revolutionary methods.
In conclusion on this topic of an independent examinations board, and remembering the vital influence which that board must have upon the character and content of our educational system, I urge the Minister to do his utmost to ensure that the board is a force for useful, constructive innovation. If he can manage to do that he will have left behind him something for which he will be remembered with gratitude by the entire nation.
