Scumbags ?

Hmmm.

I'd double the pay for teachers on the spot, and increase the required qualifications for the job slightly. I'd reinstate the capital spending programme for schools and provide capital grants for building new schools or improving old ones in city centres and areas identified as being below the poverty line. I'd crank the educational grant levels up to a more realisitic level, and I'd create a committee of community representatives to advise the Department of Education of problems, the members of which would have to have children in the school system and who would be from each of the areas mentioned above. I'd increase the spending in third-level education back up to the point where colleges like TCD could actually afford to hire professors and lecturers again (they can't at the moment for the undergrad courses and most of the postgrad ones) and I'd increase grants for third-level education as well as for those starting apprenticeships and learning trades. I'd require that the leaving and junior cert syllabi include a new mandatory course which would teach civics, modern politics, the fundamentals of the tax system, the judicial system, human rights, civil rights, basic law, and all the little things that tell you how to live in our society and how that society works and so on. I'd create one or two schools in Dublin specifically for gifted children. I'd provide grants for setting up music schools either seperately or attached to existing schools. I'd make it mandatory that students must take at least one science subject through to leaving cert level and I'd institute a new subject - general science - which covers all three science areas normally taught so that there is less of a lack of knowlege of scientific and engineering matters amongst students. I'd start a programme that paid working stiffs in various industries (not just CEOs) to come to "career days" and actually talk to students about what various jobs entail, and so on, rather than some tired teacher pulling double duty as a careers advisor when they haven't actually done any of the jobs themselves, and drive a lada to work every day. I'd provide grants for preschools/kindergardens on the same level as for other schools, and demanding equal levels of qualification. And I'd raise the dole enough that families weren't living under grinding poverty and chop low-end taxes so that taking a job didn't reduce your weekly income, as it can do now.

I think that ought to cover it for a start, though obviously more would have to follow as time went on.