Adult Education: Motion.

Professor Murphy

I move:

That Seanad Éireann calls on the Government to formulate a policy on adult education, provide a comprehensive adult education service with adequate funding and resources, and identify priorities in the development of adult education within the Government's development plan.

I am very glad that the Minister is present to listen to this debate. Senator Hussey will not only formally second the motion but will make her contribution after I have concluded.

The purpose of the motion is to ask the House to think and deliberate about the topic of adult education and, having done so, to join with me to press the Government to take the subject seriously, to put it on the agenda, so to speak. My own interest stems from a number of experiences, not least an unforgettable and harrowing experience as a young Higher Diploma student-teacher in an institution in Cork called the "one day week". The intention, laudable enough I suppose at the time, was that people who left school to become messenger boys should be brought back to learn civics, basic English, basic numeracy and so on for one day each week. It reminded me of the inequities not only in our society but in our educational system. Later on in happier days, I was glad to play some small part in a very interesting experiment undertaken by the trade unions in Cork called Scéim na gCeardchumainn, which sponsored an attempt at a daon-scoil or folk school. It was entirely a voluntary effort and it was very enthusiastic in the nature of things. The experiment did not last long. Finally, since I became a member of the staff of University College, Cork, I have been too glad to make what contribution I could to the adult education programme of UCC which is a pioneer in this field. One's interest in adult education goes deeper than that, because it is part and parcel of one's concern for educational opportunity and for social justice.

To be honest, before I did my homework on this motion I had only the vaguest idea of what adult education was about, although I had some dealings with it. In my experience adult education was the services benevolently, and perhaps condescendently, provided by universities primarily to rural areas giving courses in social science, rural science and, for women only, domestic science, to people who had their education terminated prematurely at primary level. The kind of courses provided tended to be, in the past, watered-down versions of sociology, Catholic social teaching and so on. It is important to realise that the concept of adult education has moved a long way beyond that crude and superficial level. In the thinking of educationalists and sociologists today adult education has the connotations of something much more total than that. It still stands for second-chance education because the community still have their basic obligations to those who, although financing by taxes the many-tiered edifice of learning themselves, have no opportunity to benefit from the process. Therefore, the community must continue to provide a kind of conventional service in the form of extra-mural courses. Society must retrospectively still pay its debt, so to speak. This is the rationale behind, for example, evening degree courses which are carried on by our universities, sometimes at considerable inconvenience. As society changes and as the pace of change quickens in the economy, more and more there is the need for the continuation of these conventional courses.

In the present day and age, demand and need go much further than that. Perhaps the reason why Governments—not only the present one but all Governments—have been largely inactive in this field was the failure to grasp how all-embracing the sweep of adult education has become, if not in Ireland at least in other countries. The Murphy Report is a report of a committee appointed by the Minister for Education and is entitled Adult Education in Ireland. In that report is an attempt at a definition of adult education which I find stimulating, and I quote:

The provision and utilisation of facilities whereby those who are no longer participants in the full-time school system may learn whatever they need to learn at any period of their lives.

Adult education is now put by educationalists and by sociologists in the context of permanent education, a never-ending process in which all of us are involved at once as learners and as teachers. More particularly, it finds its expression in the idea of recurrent education, an idea which is being repeatedly endorsed at recent international gatherings. Through the far-reaching dynamic idea of recurrent education, society would do its utmost to compensate those of its members who have been deprived of educational fulfilment because of basic injustice in the whole system. The Stockholm Resolution of 1975, to which our own Minister, as far as I know, was a signatory, spelt out lines of development which the various Ministers undertook to encourage actively in their own country. These principles included, and I quote from Aontas, A Review of Adult Education, Volume 1, No. 1 1979, page 4:

—the recasting of the rules of admission to higher education so that work experience is more widely taken into account as a basis of qualification for entry.

—the redesigning on a modular basis of extended programmes of post-compulsory education and training, so that qualifications can be obtained in different ways and at different times through recurrent periods of study.

—the further development of measures which give the individual the right to take paid educational leave.

All in all, that is a far-reaching, not to say a revolutionary, concept. It is significant that the idea received this detailed elaboration in Stockholm since the Swedes are already implementing the policy of open access to higher education, a radical example of the recurrent education idea. In Sweden 25-year-olds, with at least four years work experience, are free to enter institutions of higher learning. More than half the students in Swedish universities and colleges of higher learning, are 25 years old or over. This policy is running into various difficulties but still one must hail a great social and educational experiment from a great and progressive country.

At a less adventurous level the need for and the uses of adult education are many and varied and bound up with all aspects of everyday living. In this country there is no shortage of individuals and institutions who recognise the need for adult education and who are actively involved as adult educators. Admirable work is being carried out by such agencies as the Churches—and perhaps it is rarely that I find myself paying a tribute to the Churches—the universities, the trade unions, voluntary institutes and vocational education committees who alone are the bodies charged under the Act of 1930 with statutory responsibility for adult education. One hopes the contribution will be increasingly substantial from community schools. The notion of community schools is inspired partly, at any rate, by the contribution they could make to adult education. There is ever-increasing awareness among all these people of the vast vineyard to be tilled.

There is no end to the scope of adult education. Functional illiteracy is alarmingly widespread and cries out for remedial treatment. One can only mention some of the other areas which are encompassed within the scope of adult education. Preparation for retirement, the education of itinerants, education for leisure which is going to be increasingly with us, the education of drop-outs in rural Ireland, that is those who are involved in our vital industry of agriculture who leave school at a very early age, are some examples. The list of the work to be done which to a large extent is being done is endless.

I am concerned here with the role of Government, and there are all kinds of reasons why governments should be committed enthusiastically to the development of education. Some of them are brought to our notice by Paul Bertelsen, the Chief of the Adult Education Section of UNESCO, and his address to the annual conference of Aontas in 1978 is given in the review Aontas I have already quoted, which I recommend to Members. Bertelsen is a Dane and, therefore, has a special insight, perhaps, into the topic because we are all aware of the vast importance of the folk school movement in Danish cultural, political and economic history. It is not an exaggeration to say that the prosperity of Denmark is linked in no small measure with the folk school movement, which is essentially an adult education movement.

Bertelsen in his address to Aontas gives various reasons why governments should commit themselves to adult education. In doing so he rather embarrasses us—I hope that he embarrasses governments at any rate by reminding them that they are, if not legally, certainly morally obliged when they return home from international conferences to implement as far as possible what has been decided at these conferences.

At the 19th General Conference of UNESCO in 1976 an international recommendation on adult education was adopted which committed the signatories to promote the cause in their respective countries. Our Government put their hand to this commitment, but one wonders what became of it subsequently. For example, why was the text of that recommendation not widely circulated to the public at large or to the bodies most concerned with the matter? Our Ministers have attended, together with their European colleagues, various conferences, at Brussels in 1971, Berne in 1973 and Stockholm in 1975, where they signed resolutions which endorsed the principle of recurrence in post-secondary studies and recognised the need for redistributing educational opportunities throughout life in accordance with the concept of permanent education. Despite this articulation of this dynamic idea, there has been no general follow-up to this in Ireland, in the sense that there is no co-ordinated policy on the matter. We have had reports of the NCEA working party and the question of facilitating the return of workers to formal education. We have had the national committee of the Minister for Labour to advise on the introduction of paid education leave. Both of these actions, which I shall mention again in a moment, were not, however, responses to international resolutions but to specific stimuli. The NCEA action was a response to the Murphy report. The committee of the Minister for Labour was a response to the 1974 International Labour Organisation convention on paid educational leave. These two items of progress do not represent any coherent policy or any declared status on recurrent education.

Therefore, the general question arises, is our endorsement at ministerial level of laudatory principles at international conferences a piece of hypocrisy or at best a pious aspiration? It would seem so from subsequent lack of action.

Apart from this obligation of implementing the decisions of international conferences, there are other compelling arguments why governments should take adult education very seriously indeed.

There is the argument of justice for the older generation which I mentioned already. After all, it is the sacrifices of the over-twenty-fives and more particularly the sacrifices of the over-forties, as taxpayers and as parents that have made educational progress and educational opportunities possible which, however limited, exist today. Surely the over-twenty-fives and the over-forties are entitled to some of the fruits of that development, in all justice.

It has been suggested with considerable force that adult education is the test of a government's commitment to social equality. The government who are serious about promoting social equality must make access to education as wide as possible for all their people.

We must accustom ourselves to making another demand in addition to the one we make for educational opportunity irrespective of class. We must think also of educational opportunity irrespective of age. At the more pragmatic level governments, if they are to be serious about improving the efficiency of the economy, should, for that reason alone at the level of economic self-interest, promote adult education. In these days initial education, formal education obtained under a certain age, is no longer enough in an age of rapid, bewildering change. Unlearning and relearning are essential nowadays if we are not to lose out in industry and trade. I suggest to the Minister that money spent on adult education is money well spent and the whole purpose of the motion really presupposes the outlay of considerable financial provision.

We should put all this in the context of Thomas Davis's splendid slogan "Educate that you may be free". He may have had a particular narrow political purpose in mind when he penned that phrase, but it has, I suggest, much wider and deeper meanings. At the most fundamental level of interpretation of that phrase "Educate that you may be free" is the notion that it is through education largely that a man is freed from ignorance, from personal insecurity, from the bewilderment which so many people face in front of this complex world.

In other words, the kind of blight there is on so many human beings that leads in many cases to depression, to alcoholism and crime could be largely prevented, I suggest without being too starry-eyed, by the Government and the State taking adult education seriously. There is an analogy here with the health education programme the essence of which is how much less expensive it is to prevent ill-health than to try to cure it. It is not too far-fetched to apply the same principle to the extension of adult education. In other words, it is far more expensive to cure the social diseases that stem from ignorance than it is to make prudent provision for the prevention of these diseases in the first place.

There is another aspect, too. Irish society, as we can gather from our own recent observations, will no longer be satisfied with a bread and circuses policy. Bread and circuses, even if they could be constantly supplied, will no longer do as is evident from recent electoral developments in the southern regions of the country. Bread and circuses make a restless and ruthless society rather than a contented one.

Finally in this general connection, let me make the point that a more educated public means a more educated electorate and therefore, one hopes, a better political system. It is to be hoped that our politicians regard this as a consummation devoutly to be wished.

What has been the level of Government commitment to date? Ministers frequently go to adult education conferences and say what splendid chaps all those involved in the movement are. But unfortunately, again, there is no follow-up. I suggest that our European partners take the notion of adult education much more seriously. It has a much more central place in their educational thinking. In France, just to quote one example, all firms of a certain size pay 1 per cent of their wage bill to the Government for educational purposes or else they have to spend it on education for their own personnel. In May 1969 the then Government showed an initial concern for adult education when Mr. Brian Lenihan, then Minister, commissioned the Murphy report which had the most wide-ranging terms of reference to report on the needs of the community in the matter of adult education and to indicate the type of permanent organisation to be set up in order to serve those needs. The final report, which was produced in November 1973, is an extremely comprehensive one but it must be regretted that neither the National Coalition Government, which had then something like three-and-a-half years to run, nor the present Fianna Fáil Government took this report at all seriously. For the most part the Murphy Report has been ignored.

There is no evidence that our governments regard adult education as any more than a peripheral area in what is up to now a ramshackle system. It is the Cinderella of the educational services. The concept of paid education leave has been accepted and the NCEA idea of open access or enlarged access to recurrent education, now that the Act has become law, will hopefully soon be dealt with in legislation. But again as I have said before, there is no connection between these two separate pieces of progress and, as Professor Rex Cathcart observes—again I quote from Aontas Review—

Thus we may deduce from European experience that if in Ireland disparate policies are promoted as at present which on the one hand offer easier access to higher education and on the other unrelated paid educational leave, there is a danger that the promise of recurrent education will be frustrated.

All this argues for the overriding necessity of a planned system, a policy as is argued in the Murphy Report.

One welcomes the recently declared, and indeed already implemented, decision to create 50 adult education organisers throughout the country. But again since this has happened in isolation one must be forgiven—and I think the suspicion is widely current among those involved in adult education—if one suspects the decision to create 50 adult education organisers was more of a sop to the job creation idea than any really important contribution towards a policy on adult education.

Their position is unsatisfactory to a certain extent because they are apparently to be responsible within their particular areas to the CEOs who are not themselves adult educators. In parentheses, I may observe here that the chief agricultural officers throughout the country have deputies or assistants who themselves are directly involved in the adult education system. The whole agricultural advisory service in fact is relatively well organised in this respect. But these new organisers, it is to be feared, may have their hands tied by being responsible to the CEOs at local level, though the Minister himself has expressed the strong wish that these officers be supported in the total development of adult education in the areas to which they are assigned. Their appointment also begs the question, to what extent is a training programme and administrative support envisaged as a back-up to these new officers? What advice are they to be given in matters like counselling, information and so on?

The Murphy Report made a very important recommendation which has unanimous agreement among all those working in the field, namely, that in pursuit of a policy and a plan, it is essential that there be a separate section—perhaps division is a better concept—in the Department of Education which will have exclusive and sole responsibility for the promotion of adult education. To date no such division exists. Some people I have discussed this with say that if there is a separate section, is that not just another bureaucratic dead hand on the system; that is not so because it should be set up and set up as a developmental division, as a division which would be not so must an administrative or bureaucratic one as one which would be developmental and innovative and would, moreover, perhaps fulfil the function of informing us about developments in adult education in the international sphere generally.

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

Might I remind the Senator that he has two minutes left?

Professor Murphy

Again I want to pay tribute to the voluntary bodies and particularly to Aontas, which is the national association for adult education. It is the advisory body, the consultative body in this country and it is grossly underfunded. It is dependent on a miserable Government grant and up to now it has been dependent on commercial sponsorship which is nothing short of a scandal. Let me point out that Aontas, like so many other bodies in this field recognises no border. One of the great reasons for having the Government seriously promote the whole idea of adult education is that already this is a field which is non-controversial, which involves the cooperation of institutions and bodies North and South. So let me say in conclusion that there is no shortage of enthusiasm, no shortage of voluntary workers. But what we need is Government direction and Government resources to make adult education a dynamic concept, to make it an agent of change in society rather than something which reflects society. The cause of adult education is the cause of community development; it is the cause of democracy and it is the cause of social justice. I recommend this motion to the House.

Mrs. Hussey

I am very glad indeed to second this motion which I consider a very important one. I am happy to see that the Minister has indicated his own view of its importance by attending today as he did last week. Senator Murphy has covered most of the areas in this important subject so I will not go over what he said. It might be useful if we looked briefly at some figures to put the need in proportion for us. The 1971 census showed that 60 per cent of the population finished full-time schooling at primary level; 28 per cent finished full-time schooling at secondary level and 6 per cent at university level. I should like to quote Seán O'Connor who was Secretary of the Department of Education and Chairman of the Higher Education Authority. Referring to those figures he said:

The educational profile which the 1971 Census draws for us screams out for second chance education.

Those figures require that sort of dramatic language.

It seems that adult education is very much a discovery of the seventies. It is an extremely important discovery for this country and it could be a gold mine if it was properly approached by governments and by people working in the field. It has obviously been considered internationally in the seventies as an extremely important area judging by the number of documents to hand from international conferences on the subject. We had documents from Tokyo in 1972 and from UNESCO in 1976. We also had the Murphy Report here in 1973, the foundation of Aontas in 1969, which was timely, slightly ahead of the posse, and the important NCEA document in 1978. That is some of the enormous documentation which is available on this subject and which by its very diversity shows the necessity to draw together the strands of thinking in this area and form it into one definite policy, one definite path to be pursued by governments.

One of the points mentioned by Senator Murphy as justifying a call for realistic Government involvement was that a generation which by its labours has provided the present educational opportunities for young people deserves to benefit. Parents of children who are coming up to teens and late teens, who themselves may be what they would consider quite well educated, find that their children are approaching subjects in quite a different manner and, in many cases, a manner which they cannot follow themselves. It is amusing from the point of view that perhaps mothers and fathers are not able to help their children with the new mathematics but it is not so amusing when many people feel themselves to be rejects or outdated, that their own knowledge is obsolete at the age of 45 or 50. It is important for the country that all of us unlearn and re-learn all the time. To stand still educationally now in the acquisition of knowledge is to go backwards and individuals in a country who go backwards too much will draw their country down with them; internationally it is important to have a lively, well-educated population.

There is one area which Senator Murphy had time to cover which is that it is extremely important to identify target groups. People will not flock into the institutions of education in their area avid for knowledge. We have discovered that. The excitement of sitting down and watching television or going to the pool hall is very great. People need to be approached in a gentle way, in a very scientific way in order to draw them into the adult education scene, in order to allow them benefit and to allow the country to benefit from having them drawn into that scene. We could use the services of such professions as nurses, social workers, priests and doctors. People who work among the community and who very often work among underprivileged communities can identify and be used to help in the development of adult education. It is also important that the physical facilities are there. I think particularly, for example, of the young women in housing estates.

In planning large housing estates nowadays it is essential that a real community centre be established with the housing estate. If necessary five fewer houses could be built and three classrooms and a day care centre for children put up to enable people who are in these housing estates to go out and benefit from any kind of adult education that they want, at the time that they can do it and not in the evening time when it would be quite impossible for them to get out and when their domestic duties require their presence in the home. That sort of target needs to be carefully identified. I suggest that that target can only be established by the full involvement of the Department of Education in it.

There is another area which was not touched upon but which must be mentioned in any extension of adult education. That is the broadcasting of parliamentary debates as part of the adult education broadcasting area or open university which is at a stage of infancy here. An educated electorate should be the goal of politicians. It should not be left to a handful of politicians or civil servants to understand the issues of the day. We should be concentrating very much on bringing that sort of real democracy into being throughout the country.

I would like to mention the points that Aontas make in their public submissions to the Government. They ask for—and I would join with their call—a comprehensive statement of Government policy on adult education, a broad-reaching comprehensive statement so that we could see where we are going for the next ten years in adult education. This would obviously require a separate section. The Murphy Report, or Aontas—I am not quite sure which—regretted that the group of people who had assisted the Murphy Commission in drawing up that report were not immediately made into a specific section in the Department of Education to form the nucleus of a separate group working on adult education. There is a need for an adequately supported training scheme for adult tutors, for organisers, for directors. This is a crying need if one is to bring adult education to the vast number of people who want to have it, who should have it.

A final point which has also been mentioned and which I would like to reiterate is the recommendation of the ILO Convention in 1974 for the implementation of paid educational leave, to which the Government has agreed to in principle as part of adult education. I would wholeheartedly support this motion which has been supported, as evidenced by his presence, by the Minister. I believe it is extremely important. I would not like to give any impression by any wording of the report or by any words of Senator Murphy that this is a motion to attack the Government. It is put forward, and certainly I put it forward, in a very constructive manner hoping that we may see some real departures in this very vital field which should be given full status as part of our educational system.

Mícheál Cranitch

Tá an-thábhacht ar fad ag baint le haon rún nó aon díospóireacht ar oideachas, oideachas dos na daoine óga, dos na daoine aosta, dos na daoine meán aosta, agus is ceart agus is cóir go dtiocfadh tairbhe as an diospóireacht seo anocht. Tá sé de phríbhléid agam labhairt anso agus is mór agam é. An t-aon snag amháin, tá an t-am an-ghairid, is dóigh liom deich noiméad.

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

Cúig nóiméad déag.

Mícheál Cranitch

This motion can be divided into three sections. It calls on the Government to (a) formulate a policy on adult education, (b) provide a comprehensive service with adequate funding and resources, and (c) identify priorities in the development of adult education within the Government's development plan. The basis of the whole idea is that it is up to the Government to get all these things done.

First of all what is adult education? As good a definition as one can find is to be found in the first Murphy report in which it is stated that the advisory committee adopted as their definition of adult education that it is all the educational activity engaged in by some people who have broken with full-time continuous education. That is a fair definition.

Now let it be said quite clearly that from time immemorial we have had adult education here. We always had a special grá for education in all its forms. We can never emphasise enough the fact that education is one thing and instruction could be another. I, as a youngster growing up, went to school to a dilapidated national school where I got a wonderful education because we had dedicated teachers but it was nothing to the amount of knowledge I picked up through listening to adults, whether it was a priest giving a sermon on Sunday or the people assembled after Mass; we were all the time learning. I have no doubt but that when all is said and done if there ever is a full report written on the education processes down through the years in this country cognisance will be taken of what I might call the parish university which came together every Sunday after Mass. People stood around; they talked; the women went into the local shop; they came out and they talked and they learned. Now there we had adult education. The latest news was swapped and exchanged; the latest ways of doing this, that and the other thing were exchanged. There was adult education at every threshing when we had threshings. We had adult education when men sat down together. It is going on all the time.

Adult education is nothing new but nowadays we are inclined to say we must formalise this. There is a point made by Con Murphy in his first report which I have here with me. He says that 10 per cent of the total population engages in formal education annually—that is where people come together for a specific purpose in a class, be it a woodwork class, a language class, a crochet class, a knitting class or any sort of a craft class. What about the other 90 per cent? The other 90 per cent were not idle either. They all read the newspapers and at that time newspapers were newspapers—one got the news in full and made one's own assessment afterwards. They read books from the library when they could get them; so did we all. For better or for worse, a lot of my youth was taken up with reading "Buffalo Bills" and I do not think I lost anything by reading those books. But we read everything we could lay our hands on.

I referred already to the sermon by the priests on Sunday and in the local Church of Ireland church where our Protestant friends went to service they listened to the rector there and that was education. It was adult education, education for adults. Now along with that, this 90 per cent had and are having social contacts through various jobs, societies in the parish, hurling and football clubs and if I may add with respect, the local Fianna Fáil cumann and the Fine Gael branch and the Labour Party branch. I suppose we have positive and negative. We may differ as to which is which. However, all that is education, adult education. Of late years now we have had Macra na Feirme and Macra na Tuaithe. We have the great advent of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. These things actually go back. When I think of these things I think of the scoileanna filíochta in the 18th century. If one wants to know the extent to which adult education was fostered and enjoyed during the terrible times our ancestors went through in the 17th and 18th centuries all one need do is take up Corkery's Hidden Ireland and one will see for oneself. Maybe people were a little better educated then because they had to live a tough life. They had to put up with hardships and it was not the type of food they had, remembering the little verse—

Prátaí ist oíche,

Prátaí um ló,

Agus dá n-éireoinn i meánoíche,

Prátaí gheoinn.

These were the facts. Maybe we had a little more appreciation of what real education was then than we have now.

Formulating policy is the first point there. "Seanad Éireann calls on the Government to formulate a policy on adult education..." But if we get down to the formalities of it we could find that too much formulism is hardly education at all. Our society is advancing so fast, especially in the technological area, that what would be pertinent to education at present might, in ten years, become obsolete. Our society is changing very rapidly. As I said, technology is advancing at an ever-increasing rate. We have higher living standards, increased incomes, more leisure and greater security and these bring a lot of further complex problems with them. If we lay out policies today they could become out of date in a very short time. The validity of the knowledge we acquire or have acquired up to now becomes questionable; at best the knowledge proves inadequate. We must consistently try to look ahead, to see what the position will be in the very near future. I put it to you that possibly the best people to do that are the people themselves. A wonderful job is being, and has been done—please God more will be done—to support those agencies throughout the country that are providing adult education perhaps in its best and most natural form. We certainly could do more.

We could all identify the activities we would like to commend; I could personally commend the encouragement of a study of our own country in all its aspects—and by the whole country, I mean the whole 32 counties—study the various peoples there. That could be done by lectures, distribution of literature, by the local library having all sorts of documents and reports, from the various Departments here and in the Six Counties, available for people to study. They can then, in a discerning way, find out the truth about themselves and their country, above all, its language and culture. We are a very small country, and unless we have an inherent sense of patriotism our country is bound to collapse sooner or later. We have not vast resources. We speak about the big states in Europe, the United States, Russia and their vast resources in material and in tradition. We have not got those things. We must make up for it by our enthusiasm.

On that aspect, my mind always goes back to that extraordinary group of men, the first of whom went into action about the last year or two of the last century, about 1898, Tomás Bán Ó Conceannain. I am referring to the Muinteórí Taisteal, who went around on their bicycles, preaching about the Irish language, what it meant, its culture, its music, its songs, its dances. These men went through untold hardship, and it is worth reading this little verse from a beautiful poem by Alice Milligan, regarding the work of those men who were responsible for that scheme of adult education which was from the people, for the people, by the people. This man came along on his bicycle late one night; they thought he could not come on account of the bad weather. He arrived in, drenched to the skin, and she says:

"And the fire he has brought to-night through the winter rain and storm

Is the rallying hope that our race shall live and shall yet prevail;

See the eyes of the young men glisten, and the aged lean to listen

To the glorious glowing speech of the yet unconquered Gael.".

That is the spirit we want in our activity as far as adult education is concerned. We are living in extraordinary times, and unless we arrest this decay of selfishness and covetousness then we cannot survive as a nation. That spirit would fit in nicely in regard to a possible solution to any problems we have to deal with. The solution could be found if one reads the Report of the Broadcasting Review Committee of 1974, which has quite a number of paragraphs dealing with radio and television. One of the difficulties at that time was that we did not have a second radio or television channel. Now that we have, could we not use that to a better purpose than the purpose it is being used for at the moment? If we use that to give out courses in adult education, in language, culture, instruction, and so on, we would be doing a great day's work for our country. My final word is this: somebody referred to Thomas Davis. He said "Educate, that you may be free". I say, educate, that you may appreciate and enjoy your freedom.

Mr. Connaughton

I am delighted to be given this opportunity of saying a few words on adult education generally. Firstly, it is only fair to say that great strides have been made by various organisations over the years as far as adult education is concerned—by the vocational education committees, the universities and a host of voluntary organisations that I could not possibly mention individually. I remember, back over the years, that my esteemed colleague, Senator Keating's Telefís Feirme, for me, and for thousands of people who were beginning in rural Ireland some years ago, in organisations like Macra na Feirme, was a remarkable achievement. I have often wondered, even with the changing times, why Irish radio and television could not, possibly, have done something like that. That, to my mind, was adult education at its very best.

There was always a tag about education and, particularly, adult education, up to, perhaps, ten years ago. The problem always was that the people who were then reasonably well-educated had an appetite for more education. It always appeared, with respect, that it was the local schoolteacher, or the local clergyman who went on further. They were the people that had the appreciation and the appetite for further learning. I am thinking about the 60 or 70 per cent of people, the housewives who never get a chance of adult education. The fact that it is so called immediately puts them off. I find myself in agreement with one thing that Senator Cranitch said, which was that some people were taking part in adult education without actually knowing it. However, the Senator's remarks were over-simplistic. In my opinion, they do not take into consideration the great achievements, the technological era, and so on. I had to smile when he spoke about people having a chat outside Mass; there are parts of this country where some of them might not go to Mass at all. If you were depending on that to put word around, you would be in serious trouble. Nevertheless, I appreciate that a lot of good work is done that way.

Rightly or wrongly, when you talk about adult education, most people's minds swing over to the universities. There was a time when the universities of Ireland usually had a big wall surrounding them, ten or 12 feet high. Certainly, that was an area not to be entered by people other than of a certain stratum of society. A tremendous amount of good has come from the universities deciding to put on a certain type of course in rural areas and small towns. In the case of University College, Galway, however, it is not very feasible or possible to do this, because of the limited staff. They cannot use that limited staff over a wide area—perhaps as far as Donegal. The budget given from the Department to this university, while it does not preclude adult education, has nothing specific about it. If the financial situation became critical, obviously the normal institution of the university would have to be affected. Our problem, in the Galway area, was that nothing was earmarked for adult education; the adult education committee within the university was always fighting with the authorities to get more money for this, because they believed in adult education but not everybody in the universities agreed with them.

The question of voluntary involvement is vitally important. If I have any misgivings about the motion, I would be the last one in the world to approve of the Department of Education, or the Minister, having full control of our entire adult education business. That is not to say that the Department are not playing their part. I want to place on record my thanks to the Minister for the appointment of 50 adult education officers, which I believe to be a good thing. It is not as comprehensive as we would like—what is, for that matter. Nevertheless, I see a great role for these people and hope that the established organisations and committees will not get a chance to muzzle them. While an officer of that type might be in danger of standing on a lot of corns—I will not mention the corns he might possibly stand on—I hope he will be given the necessary responsibility.

Mr. Wilson

That is what he is for.

Mr. Connaughton

I hope he will do that and I personally thank the Minister and his Department for these appointments. I worked for a number of years in that area with Macra na Feirme and I believe that the involvement of a paid officer of this type, and the obvious enthusiasm and goodwill that exists for the type of business he is doing, will marry very well. At the same time if anybody in any part of Ireland believes that he or she has something to contribute, or a talent which can be shared with the community, I trust that it will not be seen that people have to be paid to do that kind of thing. Those adult education people will be motivaters in their own field and I hope that they will be accepted as such. The great progress to date concerning extra-mural study courses from the universities has been very impressive; one has only to look at what happened in University College, Cork, with their extra-mural programme in dairy science over the years. There is no doubt in the world that that course meant that there are literally thousands of farmers today who are able to stand with the best of Europe and all because they got the necessary type of education at the right time.

I believe in the concept of community development, sociology, the emphasis on leadership as something we badly need. Incidentally, leadership is there in reasonable quantities but we are not able to identify it. So many people are running around talking about leaders and leadership and all that is involved is that little bit of self-confidence and knowledge, and doing what you believe is right. I believe that universities have a big part to play in that, but it is not confined to them.

Most people now have a great hunger for knowledge because of television, papers and so on. It is only right that we have a corresponding upsurge in the methods by which they can get that knowledge. Some speakers said that because of television and the singing lounge mentality, you will not get people to attend this type of course, but I believe that when people have a group interest, they will certainly cling to that, in so far as they believe that they are getting something out of it. The problem was that most of the courses held by certain organisations were too broadly based, with not enough interest for the participants; however, once people begin to attend courses dealing specifically with their particular interest, they will automatically show enthusiasm.

I should like to mention a project we carried out in the Tuam area, concerning adult education as far as family life was concerned—this is also an important aspect of adult education. There were certain topics and local speakers, and the project was sold on a door-to-door basis, on the grounds that it was important for both parents to appear at these discussions. In fact, in some small rural parishes, there were between 150 and 200 participants each night for five weeks. That has now been running for four or five years, which leads me to believe that there is a tremendous reservoir of goodwill and of a need for adult education. I would be the very first to accept that the co-ordinating body, Aontas, are certainly not sufficiently financed and have not enough staff to do all they would like to do. I would particularly plead with the Minister to ensure that the Government's subvention to Aontas will meet the requirements of the eighties. It is very important, because an organisation like Aontas have a lot to offer; you must have a co-ordinating group.

It would be fair to say that, if we are to tap the 60 per cent of the population with nothing more than primary school education, the effort in adult education will have to be doubled or trebled in the next four or five years. It is vitally important that the image of adult education be changed. For too long, adult education has been regarded as the poor relation, something that you bother about when you have nothing else to do. It is also vitally important that the method of choosing the actual participants be tightened up, to ensure that the people who get the chance, perhaps of a fine two- or three-year course, will be of some use to the community, for which the whole thing was intended in the first place.

I would also hope that, over the next five or six years, any person, in any walk of life, with a talent that can be shared with the community, will be given the chance to share it with his or her fellowmen in that area. If we must have cohesion and co-ordination, that is where the 50 adult education officers will play their part, and it is to be hoped that there will be many more of them in the future. So many persons within an ordinary community have so much to offer, if only they realised it and their potential was brought out. This idea of having to get somebody to drive 60 or 120 miles to talk to a group is completely out, because at that stage you are coming to a very specialised field, and it might be that the participants might be asked to travel shorter distances than that. I am talking about the teeming thousands of people who have a real hunger for adult education, but who are totally unaware of how to go about getting it. There is also the competition of television. There is a wonderful trend, and the years to come will prove it, for people to hunger for more education and a better understanding of the universe. There is no doubt in the world that they will certainly come forward and it is up to the various agencies to fulfil their need.

It is one thing to put on adult education classes of one description or another at a time when the idea is not so receptive and people are banging their heads off a stone wall, but I have not the slightest doubt that the general masses are ready for adult education, provided that the subject is handled properly. The Minister, the Department of Education and all the voluntary organisations, working in close liaison with one another, have a huge job to do. It can be easily said that the Government are not doing enough—what Government ever did enough, for that matter? I like the idea of the adult education officers and hope that that scheme will be extended and that, when we are back here in a few years time, adult education will be on the pedestal where I believe it should be. So many people who, heretofore, did not get a chance in education, will certainly be on the right road.

Mrs. Cassidy

This is the second motion in this session of Seanad Éireann which calls on the Government to identify their priorities in education. I must say, at the outset, that my priority is concern for the understandable frustration of the average young student who, having completed the leaving certificate course and hoping to have done well enough to qualify for a place in university, gets a rejection slip from the CEO informing him or her that there is no such place available, but then reads in a daily newspaper of a venerable greybeard being conferred with a primary degree. I do not say that education is the prerogative of the young, but I do say that the right of young people to an education—academic or technological—which will equip them for employment is a priority which should take precedence over other priorities, however well-meant and however desirable in a utopian situation that we do not now have.

We have a constitutional obligation to provide free primary school education for our children. We also have a legal obligation to provide free second level education and we all know the difficulties facing the Department in ensuring that these obligations are met. We are all familiar with the difficulties of making more places available, of building more schools, of repairing and adding to existing structures, of adapting curricula to cater for disadvantaged students. I would venture to say that the Minister is put to the pin of his collar at the moment to meet his existing obligations.

The main problem any Government have on coming into office is to translate Opposition options into Government priorities. In the Government's Green Paper, Development for Full Employment, laid before the House in June 1978, certain options were put forward. In the White Paper, Programme for National Development, 1978-1981, published in January of this year, a priority was established, and that was the provision of adequate places for teachers and students at each of the three educational levels.

Young people need to be well educated at all levels to get a job and as long as it is a priority of the Government in office to provide them with employment then there is an obligation on that Government to see that scarce resources are allocated in such a way as to meet that obligation. We have for the first time in two centuries a growing population of young people. We all remember that a little over a century ago, an unknown number—certainly at least one and a half million of our people—were sacrificed to prove an economic point. We now have a Government who have their priorities right and are determined to face up to the challenge that this growing population poses. The parents of this country will not thank any Government in office if they allow themselves to be deflected by allocating already scarce resources to provide additional educational facilities for those who, though they may have a very laudable desire to better themselves, are fortunate enough to have employment. They already have their place in the sun. They have already had what has been called their first chance.

Mrs. Robinson

Like other Senators, I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate because it enables us to focus on a very important area of education which has been described, rightly, as being the Cinderella, the poor sister, the neglected sector of education. I particularly welcome the opportunity because it will allow us to look at education in a broad context and perhaps to begin to re-evaluate education itself and so I propose to begin by discussing some general values in this broader context. I then want to turn to the question of developing a recurrent education policy and I would like also to refer to some immediate practical problems and bring them to the attention of the Minister who is present for the debate.

Beginning with the question of general values, we realise that education has become a specialist and a sectoral subject. It has become such a specialist subject that politicians are wary of entering into the field in case they might not be aware of the language which is appropriate to each specialist sector. Indeed, one can safely say that we no longer can see the educational wood for the educational trees that are demanding attention. The focus on adult education and the terms of this motion are a very good invitation to us to stand back and to identify some of the basic problems, values and needs in our whole educational system. If we are honest and look in this way at our educational system we must see that it is riddled with discrimination, with the complement of discrimination, which is privilege, with lack of equality of access to education and, indeed, with a deployment of the resources of the State which diverts a very substantial part of those resources to areas where there is already a substantial contribution to the better-off sectors of the community who will benefit and which, therefore, deprives those most in need of these resources. These are fair, overall characterisations of our educational system. They are features which have existed since the foundation of the State; they are aspects of which all of us can be to some extent ashamed—the fact that our educational system has remained one which provides education more as a privilege to a certain sector, which diverts resources to certain more privileged sections and which has not been able to provide the basic value of equality of access to education. Nor have we seen education itself in its proper context because education must be looked on as a lifelong process. This is not least because we have the capacity to continue learning throughout our lives and the kind of society that we are now living in demands that we learn and that we adapt to social change many times during our lives. In order to do that, we have to see education as a lifelong process, as a continuing process and, in any strategy which we evolve, we must place education in this context.

Most important of all, in any approach to adult education, we must place it in this context. In a way, for the reasons mentioned by a number of other Senators, adult education has become a debased term. It means, to most people, night classes and it means night classes under difficult conditions and with considerable problems, some of which I will refer to later. It is better to try to evolve an approach to the whole strategy of a recurrent education which will be available to more people at more times in their lives, and will be encouraged and facilitated in particular for those who do not have access to education at the moment or the possibility of a second chance or in some cases even a decent first chance.

The development of recurrent education should have a very strong community focus. We need to see education in the context of the needs of the local community, within that local community for opportunity. This requires a very considerable understanding of that community and of their resources to provide this recurrent education.

I welcome the appointment of 50 adult education officers. It is hard not to welcome the allocation of manpower and the building up of specialisation by the appointment of adult education officers, but it is being done in an ad hoc and unstructured way which is not moving in the direction of a genuine recurrent education policy and strategy.

I would like to refer to the submissions compiled by the Dublin VEC and submitted to the Minister on the forthcoming White Paper on Education. I would like the Minister to give us some indication in the course of his contribution to this debate of when we may anticipate this long-awaited White Paper and whether it is envisaged that it will deal in detail with the subject of recurrent education. There is a need for some clarity in the use of terminology. I have already said that I regret the fact that adult education tends to be perceived as the provision of night classes. There is a very good UNESCO recommendation on the development of adult education which contains a clarification of what is meant by adult education. It states that adult education denotes the entire body of organised educational processes, whatever the content, level and method, whether formal or otherwise, whether they prolong or replace initial education in schools, colleges and universities as well as in apprenticeship, whereby persons regarded as adult by the society to which they belong develop their abilities, enrich their knowledge, improve their technical or professional qualifications or turn them in a new direction, to bring about changes in their attitudes or behaviour in the two-fold prospective of full personal development and participation in balance and independent social, economic and cultural development.

The recommendation brings in the need for a much broader perception of adult education which was adopted in the Murphy Report. The Murphy Report has not received a positive and wholehearted response, nor have its recommendations been implemented in full measure. When we talk about a strategy or a policy, which this motion invites us to do, we must think in terms of a strategy for recurrent education which understands that young people and adults must be adaptable and flexible, and must have the challenge of living in a society where there is an immense amount of alienation and a need for improvement, not only in the quality of the environment in which people live but also in the quality of their participation in affecting their environment.

If they are to exercise any local power in relation to their environment then they need to be assisted by opportunities for further education. We need to move from the approach of thinking in terms of night classes or even day classes for adult education and instead to ask what are the ways in which we can open opportunities for education to every adult in the country on a recurrent basis related to the needs, abilities, capacities and motivations of those individuals. How can we ensure that the young worker has an opportunity to train and retrain perhaps several times? There is increasing evidence that young workers may have to adapt to at least three different kinds of skills and work in an average working life under the rapid technological change which our society is already going through. How are we going to ensure this?

A number of Senators have mentioned paid leave. This is something which other countries, notably Sweden, which was mentioned, and other European Community countries, are approaching very positively. I would like to know if the Minister has any policy of trying to develop the perception in employers and in industry of the need for paid leave for educational purposes as a recurrent feature in the work-life and approach of the workforce in our society.

I would also like to refer to the specific factors which have to be borne in mind in talking about a recurrent education policy. These factors are identifiable and have to be dealt with if we are to succeed in evolving a positive policy. First, in regard to the social factors, I would refer to the submission made by the VEC on this, which points out that the access to education here is very narrow for a broad section of our community. Even access to adult education is confined to what is referred to as the easy 20 per cent, a middle class. Access to adult education is virtually unobtainable for a significant working class element and it is not recognised as relevant to their needs or to the communities that they live in. Very little has been done in regard to this and there is a need for very positive programmes to counter it.

There are the political factors related to the strategy of recurrent education. The immediate political factor on which the Labour Party have a very positive policy is the question of equality of access to education at all levels. This is the basic value underlying any policy of recurrent education. The third element which has to be taken into account in evolving strategy is the cost factor. It is possible to say that as a country with very limited resources, we cannot afford the immense economic commitments that would be required in devising a system of recurrent education. I believe that, because of the demographic structure of our population and the needs of our society, we cannot afford not to have a policy of recurrent education. We must see it in terms of the life style of every citizen and ensure that the kind of comprehensive approach that we have does encourage this kind of participation.

It will end by referring to a few practical problems in the kind of adult education courses which operate at the moment, particularly under the vocational education system. I had an opportunity of speaking to the Principal in Crumlin College, which has about 800 participants in adult education courses at present. I asked the Principal what were the main problems that he would like to have drawn to the attention of the House in a debate of this nature. He pointed out, first of all, that the rate of payment for teachers for part-time classes at £4 an hour is quite inadequate, that it is almost impossible to get a good response, that he is begging people to put on courses, that he is not able to get the kind of good teachers in the particular area that he would like to get. So, the first point he would make is a money point.

The rate for teachers for part-time class courses is too low. Secondly, he sees a need for guidance for people who are undertaking the courses in the adult education system. Very often it is a second chance and they are motivated to go back to a particular course for career or vocational reasons but they do not get career guidance or vocational guidance. They do not get a structure in what they are doing. They participate in those individual courses and that is the end of it, whereas what is needed is great emphasis on this career guidance and vocational element, particularly in relation to adult education courses.

There is a very exciting challenge to us as a people to understand the need for recurrent education, to put every available resource into this and to create a different kind of society where we educate more of our citizens for more of their lives at the relevant times in their lives. We must adjust our whole approach to education to that basic consideration.

Lady Goulding

I was not going to speak to this motion but something that Senator Connaughton said has forced me to my feet. I welcome the motion and I welcome all types of adult education. Senator Connaughton said that adult education should be for those who could give something back to the community. I really cannot agree with this. Anyone who can should benefit and especially those who are disabled in any way and who in their adult years, perhaps, have a chance to learn a little. These people possibly have been illiterate but at the age of 19 or 20 due to various reasons they are able to learn again and if they can learn to read and write they will gain a lot but the rest of the country will not gain. Does that matter? Surely these people should have an equal chance with those of us who, according to a lot of us, have a very high academic IQ, which I do not have, but others do. I would like to speak to those who have not a high IQ but deserve to have a chance to learn to the best of their ability to read, to write, to have the enjoyment of being able to understand poetry and prose. Apart from that, I agree with what all the other Senators have said.

Professor Keating

I speak to this motion with some emotion. I do not mean that as a pun. Senator Connaughton was kind enough to make mention of some of my own activities in the area of adult education. The contract that I had with RTE in those days was as head of agricultural broadcasting and consultant on adult education. At that time I contemplated giving the remainder of my life to it. It did not work out like that but I have been extremely interested in it all my adult life.

I want first to approach the matter rather as Senator Robinson did, in terms of the wideness of it. She used the phrase "recurrent education". In my own mind I always thought of it as continuing education. It does not matter, we need not get into semantic things. The reality about the production of enough to keep us alive is that our grandfathers were no better off than the Romans. They had to work practically all their hours to keep themselves fed and warm and to rear their children. Now, with the technological explosion, people have two needs. Firstly, there is the structuring of time beyond the time in which they work. Secondly, they have to face the fact that their life environment and the necessary knowledge brought to their work is changing with accelerating rapidity.

There is the truism that the amount of knowledge in the world doubles every decade, and so on. I do not know how those things are measurable. It is only a way of saying that we all have to increase our knowledge all through our lives. For none of us, whether we happen to have been "highly educated" when we were young or whether we happened to get "very little", does it not matter. We all have no option but to go on learning all our lives. The more one lives through and experiences things, the more one realises that only continuing self-development and self-fulfilment become worth while. They become a goal that anyone could define as something to be striven for.

The need for adult education seems to me inescapable. I was sorry that Senator Cassidy counterposed the education of the young with the education of the adult. In cost-benefit terms, if it is put as cynically as that, we have to consider both. We have to look at those persons in our society who simply did not get education or rejected it or hated it when they were young. The Senator assumed that the education of the adult is directed towards the adults who have had their chance and who are employed. Surely it is important to educate those persons who cannot read, who are very numerous in our society.

In cost-benefit terms, again cynically, what could be more useful expenditure of money? Surely it is important to provide the structuring of time in an acceptable way, if it can be devised, for the adult unemployed. Lots of adults in our society have not had their first chance at all and desperately need continuing education. Even the words we use are off-putting, because the image of education in our world is so terrible. Whatever euphemism we have for adult education whether it is recurring or recurrent or continuing, it is still off-putting. Those are broad considerations.

I want to make a few pleas to the Minister which are based on my own experience. First, the thing has become cheap and possible because of the communications revolution. There really is a communications revolution of a very extraordinary kind. It is so extraordinary and so rapid that none of us, even those who work in a communications industry, as I sometimes do, cannot digest it. Not alone can you speak to everybody in the country simultaneously and rather cheaply now, but nowadays you can store what you say, whether it is on a tape or a video-tape, and that can be reproduced cheaply and sent through the country at the time and place of the audience's choosing. There is an absolutely incredible multiplication of the possibility through communications and, therefore, there is a reduction in the cost of the unit of enrichment or the unit of information. That is something that has to be digested. A very good model for us to think about is the open university in Britain. I do not like the word "university". I am not going to spend a lot of time on this now. I hope we will get a White Paper we can discuss, but I think with respect both to the Minister and to his staff, we have a really desperate and profoundly divisive education system. We divide religions, the sexes and the classes. It is very hard to think of more that one can divide. We divide everything that is measurably divisible. We have this dreadful thing of dividing all of our education into two strands, one based on classics and aimed at producing clerks and the other based on manual skills and aimed at producing persons subordinate to the clerks. That is another vile division in our system and we are perpetuating it in a binary third-level educational system as well. We cannot solve those things here and the solving is going to take a lot of time because there are a lot of entrenched opinions and a lot of entrenched people as well. However, we might make a start in the area of continuing education for adults if we do a number of things. One is to avoid all of those divisions by income, by sex, by religion and by class, all of which are absolutely stamped into our current system. I mention the other thing with regret and with no disrespect for the persons involved.

It is my profound conviction that the Minister has got to say that this resolution enjoins him to do three things and the first of them is to produce a policy and in the producing of a policy, and in the hope that it will be done democratically and then can be discussed, he has got to stay away from his own staff. If he thinks that his own staff are capable of useful administrative things in regard to education, then I ask him to consider what is now called the National College of Art and the Museum. If education of the sort that we are talking about—where even the word "education" would disappear and where the continuing development and enrichment of the person would be the objective—it has to be of its nature somewhat subversive—not more subversive than our society will currently permit but certainly a good deal more subversive than many of our current educational institutions. That means that it must be got away from a whole series of currently entrenched positions.

The Minister does not possess the people who are open-minded and flexible enough to initiate and to make popular enough this sort of policy. I know of instances where one might detect a bitterness in this, and there is a certain bitterness. The experiment of Telefís Feirme, which in its way was a world leader and aroused interest as far away as Japan and India and had a whole series of innovations in it, was sabotaged by two Government Departments, the Department of Education and the Department of Agriculture, for reasons of their dog-in-the manger vested approach to the purveying of information. They throught that they and their staffs were the people to do it and that interlopers had to be got out. If that is the approach, anything serious in adult education is doomed.

We lack the appropriate words for this discussion because even the word "education" itself, because of the people's school experience, is intensely off-putting. Let us face it, most post-school people in Ireland hate their school experience. They become sentimental in drink usually and say they were the happiest days of their lives and they reminisce but if they are asked about their day-to-day experiences they will say that they were bitter and unhappy experiences and they do not want any more. I regret to say that but that is my experience in talking to people.

I listened to the plea about Irish culture and what Senator Cranitch said about our language and culture. I wanted to make the plea for Ireland that language and music get an extraordinarily important role in our whole national ethos and in what we teach people, and that the skills that change the nature of the materials of the earth are very much despised and neglected. At this moment of high unemployment we have shortages of craftsmen all over the country. How ridiculous we are in our educational balance and educational efforts, because we are held up at a time of high unemployment in industrial development because there are not craftsmen and the clerks are so much more important in our culture than the doers. I beg that there be no false division of that kind between so-called manual skills and intellectual skills—as if a brain did not guide the hand in manual skills, because they are not, of course, separate. There is another split introduced nonsensically by our clerkridden phoney culture in this island. I use the word "clerk" in that sense in both of its meanings and its less common one perhaps more strongly.

I hope that the Minister will initiate discussions, therefore, before he does anything, that he will get a wide forum and that he will seek all of the prodigious talent in this country and all of the clamour which seems to me to be prodigious also. He has to give a structure to both the talent and the need, that the continuing development of personality and of skill all through life can be helped. I am sure that in cost/benefit terms that is advantageous. It is advantageous to the reduction of delinquency which perhaps is not a good motive. It is advantageous with the provision of extra skills from adults so that we avoid the bottle-necks that I have referred to, which is in itself not a good enough motive either. It is advantageous in the total enrichment of our society so that all of our citizens are more productive and more useful and less prone to do evil, and—to use an old fashioned word—are better people. Then in cost/benefit terms it must be desirable, but to do this the Minister has to avoid all of the cleavages in our society which are fostered by our education. He must get away totally from the image of an authoritarian and unloved thing which is the image of education at present. He must also look for totally new institutions and stay away from the existing ones which all have a dog-in-the manger approach to their particular bit of this subject—I even hesitate to use the word "education".

When I say "he must" I hope he will forgive me, I do not mean he is compelled to do this or that: it is a mode of expression. Obviously, the Minister is his own man and will do what he feels best, but it seems necessary that he should recognise the extraordinary strength that the communications revolution has given to him and therefore, enlist the advice of people who really understand that communications revolution, who really love and trust it and are prepared to exploit it to the full. Along with the need and the thirst, it is the third element. The technology for life-long education now exists and above all he must go outside the existing institutions and avoid all the cleavages that we have introduced.

We have an anti-educational system. I do not propose to bring Pearse into it to any extent. He has been fashionable in political debate these last weeks. The "murder machine" is a suitable term still for what passes for education. The Minister must break out from all of these things and then it is to be hoped that the revolution that will then get into third level and second level and first level education can be started at the adult level. Above all, since the person is an entity and since culture is a unit, in the continuing development of feelings and skills through life which is called education—that is an entity too—and crafts must be as important as the arts and the very poor, very ignorant, very disadvantaged and illiterate must be more important than those who had their first chance. These last are, in fact, quite few and by their educational experience are quite able to help themselves later on in life.

I leave one last thought. The great submerged, disadvantaged and undeveloped section of our community, programmed by their life experience to believe in their own inferiority, are women. A programme of continuing education that does not set the liberation of women to a position of equality as a central target will not be able to attain its objects.

Professor Hillery

My remarks will focus on the higher education system which might at first sight not seem very relevant to adult education as generally understood. However, higher education, if we are to meet the challenges of the next decade or so, must extend beyond catering for a particular age group over a specific period of time. In common with many other countries, Ireland has experienced in recent years a very substantial growth in enrolments in higher educational institutions. Following the recent census we can expect an everincreasing school-going population with the consequential demand for places in educational institutions at all levels. There have been welcome relevant developments in our educational system in recent years as illustrated particularly by the establishment of the regional technical colleges and the national institutes for higher education in Limerick and Dublin.

Universities, of course, continue to make a valuable contribution and indeed the institution in which I work, University College, Dublin, last year had over 700 evening students pursuing courses in arts and commerce. In addition last year there were more than 6,000 students in extramural courses. In the light of our social and economic development to date and the direction of our development in the future, technical and technological education must be regarded as a priority area from now until the end of the century. Technological institutions—and we need more of them—are well equipped to serve the needs of industry which is of crucial importance in generating employment for our young population in particular. A well educated labour force with appropriate knowledge and skills is one of the best incentives this country can offer to our own native industrialists and to the much sought after foreign industrial investor.

In Ireland as elsewhere we concentrate a massive amount on education in early life and there is also strong emphasis on providing access to higher education for that minority among school leavers who seek entry into higher education institutions. In the complex modern society in which we live, of which rapid technological change is so prominent a feature, the higher education system is presented with the challenge of educating people for a work life which will continue to change, as has been emphasised by several Senators, with increasing speed. Knowledge is expanding rapidly but so too is the obsolescence of that same knowledge. Ideally, of course, people should have access to and control over knowledge during their entire lifetime.

Where then does higher education fit into the picture? I suggest it has a role to play in helping the adult and in helping the employee. This is certainly a considerable challenge with widespread implications particularly for the educational institutions themselves. While there has been some progress it is unrealistic, at least in the short term, to expect employers, whether in industry or the public service, to be prepared to engage in widescale release and financial support for employees to attend courses, whether to update knowledge and skills or to gain new knowledge and skills.

In addition to conventional higher education, one approach to tackling this challenge could be along the lines of the open university in the United Kingdom. Here, the proposed NIHE in Dublin plans to introduce what they term a distant study series of programmes with the theme of recurrent education. This distant study idea deserves close attention and the progress in NIHE, Dublin, should be closely monitored. The distant study programmes as envisaged by the institute would be based on correspondence material supplemented by audiovisual material and local tutorial services. Interestingly enough in their deliberations I understand NIHE, Dublin, have considered the idea of radio and television services by way of supplementing their efforts in this field and they say that the cost is prohibitive. There are many advantages in the distant study approach. First, it would provide educational opportunities to the community at large. This could lead to reduced demand for places in higher education institutions thus easing a very real pressure point and problem for the educational authorities. One suspects that at least some students pursue qualifications in higher education institutions immediately on leaving school because they feel they may never get a second chance. Under distant study the actual time spent on study can be controlled by the individual to take account of a variety of circumstances, including domestic arrangements. One further advantage—and there are many—is that employees would have the opportunity to pursue courses irrespective of geographical location thus avoiding the isolation from access to further educational qualifications. To those who might have misgivings about the concept of distant study, there is abundant experience from several countries abroad that it is possible to teach at a distance while achieving academic excellence. I have confined my remarks to the higher education field but clearly it is the hope of all of us that our ideal, and indeed our aim, should be to provide educational opportunities for the entire community at any age whenever and wherever possible.

Mr. Kilbride

I do not intend to detain the House very long but in the course of this debate, listening to the contributions being made, I felt obliged, as somebody from a country area who has only a slight spattering of second level education, to say something. I welcome this motion. In supporting it I would emphasise that, as far as the obligation to provide adult education is concerned, the area where it is most necessary is that area of educable people who have completed primary education and who, for one reason or another, were not able to further their education. We are obliged to give that section of the community the opportunity for further education so that they can carry on the everyday life for which education is becoming more and more necessary. There was a time when people who could barely write their own names could get by; they could go to the fairs and the markets and to all the places where money was exchanged and property bought and sold and could work out calculations in their heads and pursue their business effectively and discreetly in a manner that many who were aware of their lack of education marvelled at. That day is now gone. With the increasing use of technical and scientific terms, the use of scientific instruments, measurements, calculators and so on, those people are in the position where, unless they have an education, they are completely at sea.

It is quite possible to impart the amount of education required at this stage to a person who is able to take up employment. For example, AnCO training courses could properly include two or three hours of literary education each day and a person who had brains but had lacked the opportunity could be given an education appropriate to his ability. In addition, education should be imparted in the atmosphere of the workshop or the road works or wherever a person works so that it would not be divorced from his everyday environment; it should not be given in circumstances where people are hustled into a desk after working for a considerable number of hours and told that they are back again at school. If the imparting of education were pursued in that way there would not be the same reluctance there is to going into the schoolroom and being taught by a teacher who is more accustomed to teaching children and who is not acquainted with adult education. That is the first area that should be looked at. These people would be the most responsive and that is the area where education would be most beneficial to the nation. For that reason I urge the Minister to provide educational facilities of this section of the community.

Second and third level education for other sections of the community are all very worthy causes. But the nation is impoverished if it is looked at on the basis of those that have no education, no opportunity to fend for themselves in the technical days in which we live. The Minister will find in a very short time that this section of the community has to be catered for and I hope that he will cater for it.

Dr. Whitaker

There is no disagreement in this House about the importance of adult education for the contribution it can make to the development of the individual and the betterment of our society. There is no disagreement about the need for a life-long process of learning and relearning. I do not see this as just responding to the need of the individual but also to the desire of the individual for enrichment of his understanding and appreciation of life. Obviously it is so important a matter that the Government must have a policy about it. What has not been established by the debate, I think, is the second part of this motion which is that the Government must provide a comprehensive adult education service. Various speakers, beginning with Senator Murphy, have mentioned the very wide range of facilities already available. Apart from the vocational education service there is a whole range of voluntary services provided by the Churches, universities, trade unions and institutions like Aontas and Macra na Feirme. If any case has been made it is that the Government's place is to support, supplement and complement these services, not to override them or replace them by some comprehensive state adult education service.

I say this also because a qualification must enter into one's mind about the future form and environment of adult education in particular but also of all forms of education. The rapid technological change which has been mentioned this evening affects not just what needs to be learned from now on but also how it can be learned and the cost of learning it. This aspect is extremely important because a lot of our discussion took place in the old fashioned environment of classrooms, extension of community centres, attendance at courses and so on. That is becoming rapidly outmoded. This approach ignores the enormous changes in telecommunications which will transform the whole scene within the next five to ten years. Information, education on the principles, instruction in skills will within a few years be capable of being provided by television cassettes in one's own home as and when one finds it convenient. The capital cost of the whole education process will be greatly changed—I would hope greatly lightened—by these new developments.

Minister for Education (Mr. Wilson)

Is maith liom an rún seo faoi Oideachas do Dhaoine Fásta a bheith faoi chaibidil sa tSeanad, anois go díreach nuair atá beartais idir lámha chun tábhacht an ghné sin den chóras oideachais a threisiú agus a neartú. Tugann sé caoi dhom tuairimí a chloisteáil ó Sheanadóirí— chuala mé a dtuairimí agus ba mhaith iad na horáidí a chuala mé—i dtaobh na bealaigh a b'fhearr, dar leo, a ndéanfai forbairt ar an seirbhis seo agus i dtaobh na ngnéithe di ar chóir tosaíocht speisialta a thabhairt dóibh. Cuireann sé ar mo chumas, freisin, ráiteas beag a chur i láthair ag insint cén chaoi a bhfuil an scéal ag an am seo, agus ag míniú aidhmeanna na schéime nua chun Oifigigh Oideachais do Dhaoine Fásta a cheapadh.

Feictear dom nár mhiste cleachtadh foghlama ar bith a dtéann duine fásta leis, tar éis dó an córas foirmeálta oideachais a fhágáil ina dhiaidh, a áireamh mar chuid den Oideachas do Dhaoine Fásta, go háirithe i gcás go mbíonn pleanáil agus ceapadh amach don fhoghlaim sin i gceist. Aithníonn daoine fásta riachtanaisí éagsúla ina saol nach ndearna an scolaíocht fhoirmiúil a fuaireadar ina n-óige aon fhreastal ortha—riachtanaisí narbh fhéidir a fhreastal ar scoil go minic, go háirithe i saol an lae inniú nuair tá an iliomad rud ag athrú chomh tréan sin, agus chuir na cainteoirí go léir anseo béim ar an ghné sin den scolaíocht. Ní thagann na riachtanaisí seo chun solais go dtí go mbíonn ar an duine áit ar leith a ghlacadh sa teaghlach, sa stát daonlathach, agus in eagraíochta ceirde nó gairme. Béidir gur fágadh bearna nó dhó ins an oideachas fhoirmeálta a fuair siad nuair a bhíodar óg, agus gur gá na bearnaí sin a líonadh, nó b'fhéidir i gcásanna eile gur gá casadh ar ais ar oideachas fhoirmeálta de chineál éicint. Uaireanta bíonn fadhb thraenála nó athtraenála le réiteach, nó sean-cheirdneacht le tabhairt suas chun dáta. Ní mór do dhaoine áirithe a muinin astu féin a neartú chun dul i ngleic le hathruithe dúshlánacha ina saol.

Le blianta beaga anuas leagadh béim, in Eirinn agus i dtiortha eile, ar na gnéithe sin den oideachas do dhaoine fásta a bhaineann le patrún forbartha na h-eacnamaíochta, a bhí ag athrú go mór. An claonadh i leith na tionsclaíochta, thug sé sin spreagadh chun cúrsaí oiliúna de gach cineál a bhunú, le feabhas a chur ar éifeachtúlacht tairgthe agus margaíochta earraí. Mhéadaigh ar an speisialtóireacht i gcúrsaí talmhaíochta, agus dá thoradh sin theastuigh scil agus saineolas níos aoirde, chomh maith le tuiscint níos doimhne de na h-athraithe a bhí ag tarlú i gcúrsaí margaíochta, thar mar bhí riachtanach roimhe sin. Ach cé go bhfuil sé an-thábhachtach freastal a dhéanmh ar na riachtanaisí seo san saol eacnamaíochta, san saol ghairmiúil agus sa cheardeolaíocht, níor chóir, dar liom, dearmad a dhéanamh ar na buntáistí eile atá ins an oideachas do dhaoine fásta, buntáistí atá dobhraite ach a bhaineann le forbairt pearsanta an duine féin.

Is féidir le daoine as gach uile short slí bheatha an leas céanna a bhaint as staidéar ar an gceol, ar an dráma, ar phéintéireacht, ar obair cheirde nó ar mhór-réimse abhar eile a leantar ar a son dílis féin. Ba chóir go gcoimseódh oideachas do dhaoine fásta go leor leor imeachtaí eagsúla, agus measaim nár mhór go mbéadh an ilghnéitheacht sin go láidir i gceist i bhforbairt an oideachais sin. Chun na críche sin ba ghá saoráidí leabharlainne is iarsmalainne, saoráidí spóirt, lár-ionaid phobail, hallaí tionóil, féilte ceoil is drámaíochta, agus eile, a fheabhsú is a fhorbairt. Ta súl agam go bhfuil an ceart ag an Seanadoír Whitaker nach mbeidh gá le cuid des na hallaí tionóil agus eile, ar aon chaoi, na rudaí is daoire. Toisc go bhfuil eagar níos fearr tagaithe ar chúrsaí soisialta le blianta beaga anuas tá tuiscint níos fearr ag daoine den ghá atá le cúnamh a sholáthar do phobail nua atá ag iarraidh tathú le céile. Labhair an Seanadóir Hussey go háirithe faoi na mná sna ceantracha ar imeall na cathrach. Bhéadh tionchar aige sin ar na pleananna forbartha a dhéanfaí maidir le saoráidí den chineál sin a leathnú amach. Dá thoradh sin is mó ná ariamh an tábhacht atá anois le leas an phobail a bheith ina ghné d'aon phleanáil a dhéanfaí ar chlár oideachais do dhaoine fásta.

I have made notes of the suggestions made by Senators. I will try to deal with as many of them as I can in the time available.

In making a brief reference to the development of adult education in Ireland it would be appropriate to emphasise the importance of the provisions of the Vocational Education Act of 1930. This legislation provided for the statutory provision of adult education courses at local level to meet the demands and needs of local communities. The provision made over the years, consisting of part-time day courses and part-time evening courses, grew to such proportions that it became the largest single statutory platform for adult education courses. The fact that the vocational schools are dispersed over the whole country has meant that they could reach all areas and make available fulltime and part-time teaching resources for a wide variety of purposes. The numbers participating in the courses provided by the vocational education committees have grown regularly from year to year.

It should be noted that secondary schools have in recent years in many instances also become involved in adult education and I feel confident that, under the new arrangements being introduced by me, their contribution to the adult education provision will assume greater proportions in the coming years, with particular regard to the provision of facilities and of teaching personnel. There is a great field for improvement there.

The establishment of the comprehensive and community schools was also of great significance in relation to the expansion of provision in the adult education sector. They were established with the intention of fulfilling the educational needs—formal and informal—of the community in which they were located and the numbers participating in their adult education courses has been increasing steadily. I would invite the Members of the Seanad to examine the courses which the community schools provide. They usually have a handbook which gives details of these courses and I think Senators would be truly amazed at the efforts that have been made in this area.

The contribution from the third-level institutions—universities, colleges of technology and regional technical colleges—should also be noted. Apart from the provision of part-time courses leading to degrees, about which Senator Martin was particularly proud the last time I was here and about which Senator Hillery spoke tonight, the university colleges have separate adult education or extra mural departments serving the adult education requirements, not only of those adults in the immediate surroundings, but also in adjoining and even distant counties. Senator Connaughton is familiar with the adult education department of University College, Galway and he gave us his ideas on how beneficial it was to that area. The colleges of technology in Dublin have always been associated with adult education activities, operating as they do under the control of the City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee. The regional technical colleges operate under the vocational education committees and make a valuable contribution to the adult education provision in their respective regions.

There are also voluntary agencies in receipt of grants for their adult education activities. Senator Whitaker made the point that the Government should be supportive of these and that their input should be sustained by the Government but that the Government should not dominate them or exclude them, and I agree with that point of view. Other examples are the Dublin Institute for Adult Education; The College of Industrial Relations, Dublin; Muintir na Tíre; Macra na Tuaithe; the Irish Countrywomen's Association; and the National Youth Council of Ireland. There are many others—The National Association of Adult Education have a particular function of seeking to effect the cohesion of the efforts of all statutory and voluntary bodies to promote adult education and to act as an advisory and consultative body to them.

The National Institutes of Higher Education in Limerick and Dublin, working in harmony with the NCEA, may be expected to make a particularly substantial contribution to the promotion of adult education in the future. Indeed, Senator Hillery in his contribution mentioned one particular innovative area where they are going to flex their muscles.

In this short review I did not refer to the excellent work done in many areas under the auspices of the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labour, RTE and a variety of cultural and recreational bodies, grant-aided or otherwise. I consider, however, that I have indicated in sufficient detail the present pattern to enable me to proceed to explain the aim and purpose of a new scheme for the appointment of 50 adult education officers which has been introduced this year. I thought Senator Murphy's reference to them was singularly begrudging and unworthy of him. He was followed in the same lines by, I think, Senator Robinson. The idea for appointing these came from my perusal of the Murphy Report. It was my own idea. It was from the purely educational point of view that I approached it and, consequently, I feel somewhat resentful that it should be suggested that these officers were appointed by me, or the idea thought up by me, for other than educational reasons.

In a circular to vocational education committees in August 1979, it was stated that I had given consideration to the basis on which a scheme for the appointment of adult education officers throughout the country might most effectively and equitably be organised, and that I desired to inform the committees of the arrangements which I considered to be most appropriate for the purpose.

It was envisaged that the organisers should discharge functions of an organising and co-ordinating nature and you can see from the use of those words that this can embrace both the voluntary bodies' efforts and the more structured efforts of the vocational eductation committees and others, and that these functions should include liaison with all appropriate local community interests. It was the intention also that the organisers should have a role to play from an educational point of view in the context of the provision of courses for local economic development. An outline of the most specific functions, duties and responsibilities of these organisers would include the following: to identify the educational needs of adults in the area—this is a research idea; to examine the existing provision of adult education courses and facilities; to suggest possible areas of co-operation between agencies and services engaged in the provision of adult education; to prepare for the VEC Adult Education Sub-Committee a Draft Annual Programme of Adult Education activities; to organise the programme as approved by the VEC Adult Education Sub-Committee and by the VEC; to provide an information and advisory service on adult education courses and facilities; to co-operate with other local statutory and voluntary organisations, especially with those with a particular interest in adult education; to prepare an annual report on the adult education programme for the VEC and for the Minister for Education; and to liaise with local economic interests in relation to the organisation of courses for the provision of skills needed for local development.

I would envisage there, courses in situ in the area covered or if necessary through proper liaison to organise courses elsewhere outside the specific area of the organiser.

It is proposed that at least one organiser should be allocated to each county area, with provision for more than one in some county areas and with an appropriate allocation for certain county borough areas. Three of the organisers are to be appointed to cater on a regional basis, namely in the northwest, midlands and south-east, their duties being specifically related to the Arts in the context of the report entitled "The Place of the Arts in Irish Education: Report of the Arts Council Working Party on the Arts in Education 1979". In the distribution of the services of the organisers, particular regard was had to special requirements, which include Gaeltacht districts.

It was considered, in general, that the organisers might most appropriately be appointed by vocational education committees, under the procedures normally operative in the case of the appointment of vocational teachers, subject to the approval of the Minister in each case. The full co-operation of vocational education committees and of the sub-committees appointed for this purpose was expected, to ensure that adequate consideration should be given to needs and aspirations in the matter of adult education of all the schools—vocational, secondary, community and comprehensive—in each area concerned so that a co-ordinated scheme might be developed for the benefit of the whole community.

It was considered that each vocational education committee to which the services of one adult education organiser, or more, would be allocated, should appoint an adult education sub-committee under the provisions of section 21 of the Vocational Education Act, 1930. Such committee should, as appropriate to the area concerned, be representative of such local interests as another vocational education committee and secondary, comprehensive and community schools within the area, as well as including, to whatever extent should be feasible, representatives of voluntary bodies whose experience and advice in adult education matters would be advantageous. The voluntary bodies in question would include Aontas, Muintir na Tíre, Macra na Tuaithe, Macra na Feirme, Banntracht na Tuaithe.

The organisers would be required to hold qualifications recognised for purposes of appointment as teachers in post-primary schools, and would be expected, in addition, to have a capacity for work in adult education and/or community development, to have had, in fact, experience in that field, to have a track record. For purposes of appointment in a permanent whole-time capacity, it would be necessary for an appointee to satisfy the Department of Education as to his competency in the Irish language before taking up duty.

This new scheme for the appointment of adult education organisers represents a continuation of the measures introduced in the sixties and seventies to provide greater educational opportunities for all our people. I refer to the arrangements for comprehensive and community schools, the free education scheme, special free school transport scheme, the scheme of higher education grants and so on. All of these brought about an extraordinary expansion in the numbers availing themselves of formal education. It is particularly relevant, because a number of Senators very properly said that the whole idea in adult education, as in the other areas, is to provide access to every body and to provide equality of opportunity to our citizens.

I am very pleased that it should have been possible for me to take this step in the matter of expansion of adult education provision as a significant feature of the system of education as a whole. It carries forward the movement initiated in the sixties for the expansion of education facilities which has been so successful and has contributed so magnificently to growth and progress in the economy and the sense of individual well-being and satisfaction.

Now, I said I would take some of the points that were made during the debate and deal with them as quickly as possible. I must say a word of thanks to the people who contributed to the debate and also say that the points made have been noted by me and I will take account of them, even if I cannot, in the time available to me, deal with all of them.

Senator Murphy spoke of his own experience in a limited way in adult education—in particular, his experience with the Daon-scoil which was organised by the Ceard Cumann in Cork city, and went on to establish the thesis that what was really at issue was educational opportunity, a simple matter of social justice. He dealt with the adult education provision in University College, Cork. He said that some of the courses which they provided were simply watered-down versions of various disciplines at various areas outside the university city itself. The whole idea of éducation permanente, which was very much the “inthing” a few years ago, seemed to have got lost somewhere along the way; the French were very keen on it, the whole idea of the formal period, retraining period, middle life period, education and training for retirement and so on. The canvas was wide and well filled in and there has not been the follow-up on it and the commitment to it that we thought there would be when the whole idea was mooted.

I am glad that Senator Murphy referred to the community schools. I have mentioned them already and would like people to have a look at their programmes because I think they deserve great credit, apart altogether from the old-established educational system which has been providing adult education since 1930. I would like to have statistics on a national basis with regard to functional illiteracy. We have some statistics on it, but I am not at all satisfied that we know the full extent of the problems. By the very nature of functional illiteracy it is difficult to reach it and those people who have been pioneering in this field have discovered that the true illiteracy, where it exists, and functional illiteracy which exists on a wider scale, tend to conceal themselves. It is very difficult to get at them. There is an obligation on us to try to find out what the facts are and to provide the remedies to deal with them.

The Senator referred to both city and rural drop-outs and the obligation which we have to those. He referred to the folk schools in Denmark. It is interesting to recall that the folk schools in Denmark were originally non-technical; they were not concerned with skills at all. They were concerned with the folklore and history and the spiritual side of their community, but it is generally agreed that, flowing from this, there developed a love for country, a love for education, a desire to develop the skills which sustained the economy. In other words, though the specific purpose of the school was not the imparting of skills in effect, it meant that there developed as a result of the work of those schools, a more highly skilled community.

The point that Senator Murphy made was a very valid one—that the over 45s, by their own sacrifices as taxpayers and in other personal ways, were responsible for the developments in education for the younger people that have taken place over the last few years and that there should be something available to them by way of adult education—some of the fruits of what they themselves, by their sacrifices, had made available to others. I accept that fully. I accept also the Senator's point that "Educate, that you may be free" is capable of bearing a far wider meaning than, possibly—although we may do him an injustice in this—Thomas Davis had thought of at that time. It is true that education when it maximises the choices of people is in fact freeing them to a great extent, and perhaps it is an aspect of education that we should emphasise more—the greater the education provided, the greater the freedom.

I dealt already with the Senator's suggestion that my appointment of the 50 adult education officers was more a sop to job creation than to educational development. I said I reject that suggestion and I reject it totally because it was purely in the educational context that I thought of it, and it was purely for the development of adult education services that it was put into execution.

Senator Hussey supported Senator Murphy's main theme and she quoted the former chairman of the Higher Education Authority about the importance of recurrent or second-chance education. I should think that our adult education provision should develop in that line and I would like to comment here on something that I think Senator Connaughton and others said: it is not enough to have the provision, you have to sell it, also, you have to inform the people that the opportunities are there, and even induce them to avail of them. I worked for a while in London, where there were great opportunities in adult education available. Many of the exiles from Ireland did not know about them; they were not sold to them; they were not helped to avail of them. This was a great loss to them. Of latter years, people have taken it on themselves to make known to exiles in the various Irish centres what the education opportunities available to them in adult education are and they are being availed of. This is in line with social developments and so on in that particular area which I know well.

Senator Hussey said that especially young mothers in suburban areas should have provision made for them. I do not know if it was not slightly utopian to think that each housing estate should have a special adult education school built; she even said she would sacrifice five houses to have one education centre. The general thesis is correct, that it could only enrich their lives and it could have a significant bearing in community development where young couples in new estates, thrown together from various parts of the city, do not know each other and there has to be some social vehicles for welding them together into a community; if it is an educational vehicle, so much the better.

Senator Hussey mentioned the importance of a training scheme for adult educators. There is at least one university course available in the country and I think it arose directly from the Murphy Report. The graduates of it are available as adult educators fully trained in that field.

Senator Cranitch said that the onus seemed to be put on the Government to get everything done. Some of the Senators referred to the voluntary bodies that make provision for adult education and said they should be sustained. I am in agreement with that particular thesis. Senator after Senator referred over and over again to the expansion of knowledge, the quick obsolescence of skills and the role that adult education should play in dealing with that problem. I see that there will be an obligation on adult educators to look after that factor in the future.

Senator Cranitch referred also to the use of radio and television. It was interesting to hear Senator Hillery say that NIHE, Dublin, in its study of this matter had found that perhaps that particular aspect would be much too expensive.

I want to thank Senator Connaughton for his appreciation of the development which provides adult education officers in the various areas. He made one very pertinent point and I think the organisers of the open university have also adverted to this, that those who have a certain amount of education have an appetite for more. There is the danger that courses that are provided will be patronised by people who already have reached quite a sophisticated stage in their own education. There should be a caveat lest they be allowed to monopolise it.

Senator Connaughton also expressed his support for the continuation of voluntary effort. He said one other pertinent thing, that general courses often did not excite any interest in areas where there had not been an earlier solid foundation in education. He made the point that where specific courses, related to the specific needs of individuals, were organised the response was good in terms of numbers and of interest. He was talking there in terms of what he called the 60 per cent who have nothing more than primary education. Some people during the debate have been using statistics that are a bit out of date in that regard. We must realise that a very high percentage of our population is now under 25 and that the statistic of those who have had only primary education has changed considerably. I agree wholeheartedly with Senator Connaughton when he says that there is a great ocean of talent, great potential, which adult education can help to develop.

Senator Cassidy made the point that there is a heavy obligation to look after places for the youth and that is a first priority. She was taken to task for this by Senator Keating, and I think unjustly so. We must realise that we have a very heavy commitment to the formal, ordinary education course, as of now. It is an interesting statistic, and a true one, that we have exactly three times the birth rate of the Six Counties at the moment in the Republic of Ireland, and a much higher percentage birth rate than they have in the United Kingdom. It is our duty to see to it that to the maximum extent possible provision should be made for the young people. They are not mutually exclusive but I agree, to a certain extent, with Senator Cassidy that we should not deprive the young people of first chance education, to develop adult education. The resources are scarce, as she said, but what we have to do is try to cope as best we can with the formal period and make as much provision as possible for adult education.

Senator Robinson talked of adult education, very properly, in general, as she said, with regard to the provision of equality of opportunity. She said that adult education was the Cinderella of the educational world; I do not accept that—it has not been from the very beginning of the century; it has had a very honoured place in our education system. I think that she was on an ideological binge in part of what she said. The intention of Government is to make resources available so that across the full spectrum of our society, irrespective of the economic situation, of the family, educational provision should be made; all parties in the Houses of the Oireachtas are committed to that. I think one can get oneself hung up on an ideological clothes hanger and I think we should be very careful about that. She said that what we have of adult education is ad hoc and unstructured. I suggest the Senator does not understand the words ad hoc and unstructured, because what adult education is provided is structured, and well structured, in this country. She made a very useful contribution but I think that in some areas—perhaps she did not have enough time to develop her points—she was a little off beam. She gave a long definition from UNESCO about adult education. It put me in mind of the Spartan statesman who listened to a diplomat from another country and said, “Your speech was so long that I had forgotten the beginning of it by the time you reached the end of it.” The essence of a definition should be that it be brief and intelligible.

Senator Robinson said—and I do not think anybody will dispute it—that we cannot afford not to have a policy for adult education, for recurrent education. She misquoted the payment available to teachers in the Crumlin College for the part-time work. The rate of payment she mentioned is lower than one of the scales, at least, of payment available. I agree fully with her that career guidance, paricularly in certain suburban areas anyway, is of the greatest importance, so that people who, some Senators said, may have hated school and hated formal schooling but have found a niche for themselves in adult education and want to go some place, should have the benefit of career guidance.

Senator Goulding made a plea for the handicapped and said that consideration should be taken of another aspect of adult education which surfaced in the debate in the speeches of several Senators—that is, the importance of adult education for personal development. I do not think that Senator Connaughton meant to exclude that aspect when he said that people would get adult education in certain areas and thus be able to put something back into the community. I do not think that he meant to exclude that important part of adult education which is connected with personal development.

Senator Keating, I think, looks on education with a jaundiced eye. His basic thesis, again correct, stressed the importance of the speed of change. He stressed the importance of keeping on the learning process, that history had evolved, that now all the waking hours have not to be spent on toil, as they had been, and that what is done with the time saved by technological advance is very important and should be filled with education. He talked about the possibility for adult education in the communications revolution. He said that the telecommunications revolution made the advances in adult education cheap and possible. Senator Whitaker referred to this area as well. The money saved in one area may be available to be put into this area of telecommunications. This is something that will be very much alive in the next 20 years, at the end of the century.

I reject Senator Keating's very pessimistic view of our education system. He talked about division between clerks and their subjects. He talked about division on grounds of sex, religion and so on. He over-emphasised the blackness of it. Thousands of people are educated co-educationally from the primary grade upwards. Those who are not are not necessarily lost for ever. He came back to a thesis upon which I heard him expatiate in another place about the clerks and the people with dirt under their fingernails. This dichotomy is not what he claims it is in our normal society. I would not accept that the clerks would arrogate to themselves any superiority over the people who are using manual skills. Senator Conroy sent me a note with the words Consilio Manuque on it which he assures me is the motto of the College of Surgeons. It was also that of the saint King Louis of France. It means “brain and hand”. I do not think there is in our society any superiority complex of the clerk over the skilled person, whatever may be the situation in other societies. I am not being chauvinistic about this. The skilled person in Ireland has a very honoured place even in our mythology.

The Senator said that our education was authoritarian. Perhaps Senator Keating is a little out of touch with the schools. I will admit that our educational system was over-authoritarian. I do not think that that over-authoritarian attitude continues today. He made a plea for the women who have been programmed to believe in their own inferiority. I must be consorting with the wrong women. He mentioned illiteracy and it is a question that we should take to heart.

Senator Hillery went through the institutions that were providing adult education and instanced the very interesting project of NIHE, Dublin, to develop what is called distant study. He also emphasised the acceleration and change in skills and how important it is that we should deal with it.

Senator Kilbride made a plea for the rural dwellers who had to leave primary school for one reason or another and who now have to cope even on a minor scale with scientific instruments and the skills that were not necessary in former times. I accept this point that provision should be made to help him or her to deal with such circumstances.

Senator Whitaker talked about needs and he also referred to the desire of people to have an adequate adult education facility available to them for their own personal satisfaction. He emphasised that the Government should be supportive of those who are involved in adult education and that this was a proper role for the Government in addition to making their own developments. I was very pleased to hear him say that there was a possibility that some of the capital costs would be lightened in the future by the developments in technology, particularly in telecommunications.

I thank Senator Murphy and Senator Hussey for having put down this motion. I have learned a good deal from the debate and I hope that I may be able to act on some of the suggestions.

An Leas-Chathaoirleach

I call on Senator Murphy to conclude the debate. Unfortunately, as there is a time limit I cannot call on any other Senators to speak.

Professor Murphy

I promise not to detain the House too long at this late hour as we have already reached the normal time of Adjournment. I am very thankful to the Leader of the House who has made time available for this motion, to the Minister for his attendance and interest, to all my fellow Senators who have contributed and to those who have sat and listened with great interest throughout the course of the debate.

There is a large measure of agreement on what our priorities would be if we had endless resources and if we could achieve the kind of society we all desire. Because I wanted to give the whole subject a full airing I see no point in attempting to divide the House on this motion. I accept and thank the Minister for his assurance that he has taken a note of the points made during the debate. I do not intend to cover again what everybody said. I made notes on what everybody said but the Minister has spared me a lot of the trouble there. As he said, certain themes kept recurring throughout the debate. One of the problems mentioned in the Murphy Report is that the real human tragedies of the people who are educationally deprived are not so much those who come along to adult education classes and who are aware of the opportunities, but the vast majority of the educationally deprived who are simply not aware that these opportunities and facilities are available. The Minister, in the course of his statement, listed the facilities available but subsequently in his own comments made it clear from his own experience in London, an area where these opportunities were, that the pity was that people were simply not aware of them. One of the most valuable activities being undertaken by voluntary institutes in Dublin and Limerick is to engage in what in jargon is termed "outreach", that is to say, you try to contact our social system who are so demoralised by poverty and ignorance that they have not the faintest clue where adult education classes are or what potential improvement there is in the system for them. How to contact that 80 per cent is a problem. One, perhaps, naive suggestion as to how it could be done links in with another theme which kept cropping up throughout the debate, namely, the importance of telecommunications. Why not use the concept of an education information bureau something on the lines of the Health Education Bureau? If we think it sensible that the people can be reached through television, radio and press advertising in regard to their health, why could not the same idea be implemented in regard to the possibilities of self-fulfilment that lie in education?

Senator Keating, Senator Whitaker and others referred to the communications revolution and said that the time to start availing of these facilities is now. Senator Cranitch said that we have two radio channels and, two television channels. I suggest that people do not want an endless supply of soporific entertainment. In 1974 Radio Telefís Éireann put on a series of adult education programmes. It was a series called A Question of Identity. Modesty would normally forbid me mentioning that I myself contributed to that programme, but it was a pronounced success. It made few concessions to the viewing audience. The presentation of the programme was in a rather austere, conventional classroom format and yet the response was highly enthusiastic. I do not understand why RTE, in view of their known interest in this kind of programme, did not follow that up with a whole systematic series of educational programmes.

I accept everything that has been said here about the primacy of economic information at the moment and the need to redress our white-collar and clerical preoccupations but it seems that the people of this country need illumination on ideology and on concepts which are bandied about every day in the newspapers as much as they need technological education. What a splendid idea it would be if on television there was an objective programme on the true nature and meaning of republicanism. We would be rendering a service not only to our people but to our political parties.

I want to comment also on the references that Senator Hillery made to the role of the universities. I praised the role of the universities in this field, but the recent decision to do away with the gradual accumulation of credits for entry was a reactionery decision which runs counter to the kind of approach we should be having to adult education.

I listened with interest to what Senator Cassidy had to say. She has a point and, to an extent, she corrected perspective. There is no reason why the resources for one area should necessarily exclude the other. She said the Minister was put to the pin of his collar to maintain the existing services. If that is so then we should all be rowing in behind the Minister to get in toto a greater percentage of the national budget for education. There are in our public services a large number of areas where there is a considerable wastage of money.

At the risk of annoying the Minister further I will elaborate a little on what I said about Aontas. Aontas are in some ways a more ambitious organisation than some of their European counterparts who have substantially more funding from Government. Aontas, with a very tiny staff, attempt to hold seminars, publish periodicals and act as an advisory service and even as an in-service training unit. They have 125 organisations affiliated to them and they are quite unusual in their comprehensive and representative nature. It costs about £35,000 to run the organisation and they are running out of money. Their revenue from Government sources was initially £10,000 in 1974. It has now gone to £10,500. I would like to divulge between ourselves the source of their main revenue. It comes from a commercial interest who have motives of their own but it is quite undesirable that this organisation should ever have been funded by commercial interests and that their small staff should be preoccupied seeking commercial sponsorship. It seems to be a crazy way of running this organisation. I would recommend that point to the Minister.

I appreciate the Minister's generosity of comment on my contribution and I am sorry that I made him feel rather resentful when he understood from me that I attributed to him rather low motives for appointing the 50 adult education organisers. In a sense I was reflecting a widespread feeling among those in the adult education area that in the absence of any other more overall comprehensive policy statement this was the interpretation placed upon that action. I accept fully what the Minister has said and perhaps he would attribute my petulance and lack of generosity to the momentary symptoms of tobacco nicotine withdrawal.

I thank the House for its interest in this motion. This is one of the moments when I am proud to be a Member of Seanad Éireann.

The Seanad adjourned at 8.50 p.m. until 2.30 p.m. on Wednesday, 28 November 1979.

Seanad Éireann díospóireacht -
Wednesday, 21 Nov 1979