Academic ability shouldn’t be the only measure of success

There was a time in this country not so long ago that only the privileged few extended their education beyond the old Primary Cert; then the Inter Cert became a commendable achievement and finally the Leaving lived up to its name.

But now we’ve moved into a world where academic appears to be the only option and the formal learning curve can comfortably be stretched out into your late twenties.

Because we’ve just moved the bar up another level; now a primary degree is just the new Leaving Cert and a Masters is almost a given – and academia appears to be the only option.

Unless someone pays heed to the advice offered recently by the real Taoiseach, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who revealed her blueprint for solving youth unemployment.

She wants to promote the merits of Germany’s dual system of schooling and work experience – a mix of classroom learning and on-the-shop-floor work experience – as the best way forward at a time when almost six million under-25s in Europe are out of work. What she’s actually talking about are apprenticeships – not just as we know them in terms of mechanics or plumbers, but in terms of all careers in that you can learn more in a hands-on environment as you can in the lecture hall.

But we are pre-occupied with third level when clearly that no more suits everyone now than it did a generation ago.

Of course the reality is that a job in the civil service is no longer an option and there’s no need for apprentices when they are thousands of skilled tradesmen already out of work – but that doesn’t mean we should shove all of our young people into university because we can’t think of anything else for them to do.

Merkel quite rightly points out that we shouldn’t see academic success as the only measure – and the tens of thousands of Irish graduates who are either out of work or living in foreign parts are testimony to a one-track system here.

Germany, in contrast, has halved its youth unemployment since 2005 and they are now in a position to offer a place on a dual system training programme to every young person who wants one.

And that has resulted in a whole generation of skilled workers and master craftsmen taking their rightful place in German society, at the heart of an economy which hardly seems to have suffered because everyone doesn’t go to university.

In contrast here, we have thousands of twentysomethings with nothing more than writer’s cramp to show for sending out endless job applications; inevitable letters of rejections because they are overqualified for the jobs they would be more than willing to take.

It is not just the Government that’s at fault for this – the approach at second-level has become so blinkered that further education is the only serious option.

Everything is geared towards the points race so that you get your first choice on the CAO form; a sheet of paper with your exam results is the only measure of your success or failure for the first 18 years of your life.

But there’s no vision higher up the scale either; the Government came up with a JobBridge programme as a sort of quasi-internship, but in reality that’s just a way of massaging the unemployment figures.

We’ve had huge success in attracting hi-tech multi-nationals here on the back of our graduate numbers, but we’ve also become so fixated with this as the only measure of industrial success that we’ve dumped every other option.

The German idea is a more rounded approach to job creation as well as an acknowledgement that there is more than one measure of ability.

It is, of course, fantastic to live in a city and county with two top-class third-level facilities in NUIG and GMIT and we can never underestimate the value of having such easy access to academia on our doorstep. But, with 440,000 on the dole, clearly something else is also needed – and given that the German economy is the one we’ve already pinned all our hopes on, if they’ve found something that works, it at least demands closer analysis.

Because there’s more than one sort of third-level education – and perhaps it’s time we invested a little more as well in the university of life.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.