'Irish Times' article — Julian Girdham

I have an article in the Irish Times, responding to this one on March 30th [subscribers only]. Many thanks to Education Correspondent Carl O’Brien for giving me this opportunity to respond.

Of course, newspaper articles are necessarily limited, and here are some points I was not able to make in the 900-word limit.

You can never ‘future-proof’ education. Instead, it should slowly change over time, and there should never be a time when a ‘reset’ is needed (it’s not possible anyhow).
There is so much creativity in Irish education: musical productions, art clubs, the Young Scientist Exhibition, creative writing, the particular form of creativity that is top-class sport. I can see it in my own school, and I see it in others too.
The idea that virtual reality headsets or any other form of technology can make lessons more engaging is shallow. And the very idea of ‘engagement’ is slippery. As Professor Rob Coe of Durham University has stated, engagement is a ‘poor proxy’ for learning. Inspectors love to see a classroom full of ‘engagement’: this is just not a reliable way to judge that long-term learning is actually taking place.
OECD secretary general Mathias Cormann comes perilously close to the discredited idea of ‘learning styles’ when he hopes that we develop ‘the necessary tools and systems to adapt instruction to the needs of each student.’
Cormann again. In a world deluged in technology, why is it necessarily good to ‘accelerate the transformation of digital learning?’
Professor Luke O’Neill says that ‘Education therefore has to shift increasingly towards teaching life skills, which will have to include how to access and interpret information that is freely available online’. Might I recommend the study of poetry as an excellent route to critical thinking.
‘Leading culture figures lament the fact that music, drama, art and design get sidelined in favour of traditional academic subjects once the points race takes hold at second level. It doesn’t have to be like this.’ The problem here is that the direction Senior Cycle reform is going is likely to reduce such activities. Spreading assessment into Fifth Year, and more extensively through Sixth, will mean that students are less likely to engage with these, and simply less likely to have the time. I previously made this point about the now-shelved proposal to move Paper 1 English and Irish into Fifth Year.
I agree with the novelist Joseph O’Connor: “Creativity is the way we tell our stories. For far too long in Ireland, the chance to tell your story was a privilege, not a right. Too many were told by gatekeepers and power-appointed censors: ‘Your story did not happen. You’ve misremembered. Be quiet.’ The Republic of looking in the other direction. Creativity gives courage, focus, strength.” This expresses well why the Paper 1 proposal was so dismal: it would have removed all creative writing from the final year.