Should Second Level Fees Be Reintroduced

imme wrote: »

Was Donogh O`Malley right or wrong as Minister for Education to recommend to cabinet that second level fees be scrapped from 1969?

Should they be reintroduced to encourage students to study harder as they`d have to pay for their education.

Should second level fees be reintroduced?

Absolute madness...

The entire basis for our economy - in fact one of the few things we have left is a highly educated workforce. The very least someone should have upon leaving school is their Leaving Certificate under the normal run of affairs. It gives a good general basis to the subjects taught compared to the likes of the British Education system. We are a small country, the least we can afford is to educate our youth - it is an investment.

What would you do imme, with those who cannot afford to pay second level fees? Forcing youngsters to leave School with only a Primary School education behind them is tantramount to condemning them to unemployability for life, with all the problems and expense for society that comes with that. I really don't understand your logic in suggesting this...

No they should not be brought back, it would be pure insanity

imme wrote: »

Was Donogh O`Malley right or wrong as Minister for Education to recommend to cabinet that second level fees be scrapped from 1969?

Should they be reintroduced to encourage students to study harder as they`d have to pay for their education.

Should second level fees be reintroduced?

Interested to hear your opinion on this OP ? I struggle to understand how anyone in their right mind could rationalise the reintroduction of second level fees . . .

With so much focus (rightly so) on the smart economy / knowledge economy we should be making education more accessible, not less so !

danbohan wrote: »

maybe we might have a bit more reality than we currently have from some of our, over educated ,under motivated whinger generation

Sorry, please explain how someone could be overeducated?

2nd level isin't exactly free as it is.

Books (which change every year or two and make 2nd hand useless), uniforms, mandatory voluntary donations etc all add up to a hefty amount each year. And you want to add more cost to that?

donegalfella wrote: »

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That's not to say that excellent education systems can't be (relatively) free. What the OP is suggesting would create an economic barrier to both second-level AND third-level education. He doesn't even want to give disadvantaged children the opportunity to an education, by virtue of where they were born and which family they were born into.

So much could be done to reform our second-level system without increasing current expenditure. Curriculum reform would have to be at the top of the list; I personally feel that our LC curriculum has, year-on-year, changed to allow for the students who do absolutely zero study for nearly 6 years and then break out the books in early May. So much of the exam can simply be learned off by rote through cramming that the LC has not become a test of a candidate's suitability for third-level, but more a test of their short-term memory.

This is evidenced by the poor uptake and/or results in subjects that actually require an understanding of the concepts examined (namely Honours Maths, Applied Maths and Physics).

But most startling of all is how the DoE has decided to address the age-old complaint of students: "But none of this is any use in real life".

The DoE feels that the best way to address that is to change the subject and difficulty of the curriculum to suit the candidates. It is an absolute farce. This results in us having tens of thousands of students coming out with a variety of basic and elementary information in various subjects that still has very little application to their lives or their further education.

Our second-level education system should foster the skills of learning. where are students actually asked to use their critical-thinking skills in the exam? I can think only of the very basic and predictable questions asked in the English comprehensions and the History documents. Where are our students asked to solve problems and use logic? Again, apparently the DoE thinks that logic is the sole preserve of Maths. How many of our second-level students can competently speak a second language, foreign or otherwise?

Students can barely spell or structure a proper sentence with any sort of varied vocabulary, let alone structure a strong argument! (As clearly evidenced by my post! ).

All of these are real problems with our education system that can and should be tackled soon. They won't require much funding, if any. These are reforms to our educational climate; how we, our students, our teachers, our academics and our employers view our education system and what we want our students to achieve there.

However, absolutely none of this suggests that the introduction of second-level or even third-level fees would improve this situation. We need to improve the standards of quality of those students who go from second to third-level, we do not need to improve the standards of their wealth. There is nothing to suggest that students from wealthier families who would be more able to pay second-level fees better perform in second-level schools. They do, however, perform better at exams - and that's not through their own brilliance. That's simply down to their parents wasting thousands on grinds schools to push their kids through the exam because a) kids won't get off their arses and b) the exam encourages grinds schools because it is so predictable.

donegalfella wrote: »

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I don't think 'excellent' and 'free' are or have to be mutually exclusive concepts . . .

donegalfella wrote: »

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For second level, I'll take free excellence. Or uncharged excellence if we'd like to be more accurate but "free" seems to have been the term for the past forty years.

For the OP questions: right, no and no.

danbohan wrote: »

maybe we might have a bit more reality than we currently have from some of our, over educated ,under motivated whinger generation

It's difficult to uneducate people in a controlled manner so your idea isn't a goer and, to be blunt, is mixing correlation and causation if you're correct, which you haven't established either, unfortunately. If you don't like the modern yoof, that's fine but it's nothing to do with the thread unless you join the dots so it becomes so.

donegalfella wrote: »

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While I don't particularly care what anyone else's views are on unions (positive or negative, depends on the day of the week for me), we'd have a far better discussion minus the pro- or contra-union bit. Leave it outside please.

/mod

donegalfella wrote: »

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Thats fine - let the private schools pay teachers full wages themselves.

See how long the private schools last then....

If you think private investment in education is the answer then there are already hundreds of schools you can pay to send your children to at second level.

Thousands of parents throughout the country choose to send their children to fee-paying schools despite the fact that there are always non-fee-paying alternatives.

This whole thread is a red herring.