Saturday, January 28, 2006

Enda Kenny announces new education policy "sex should be made available for every student studying Irish"

Many people might think that this is quiet a bold and daring move to encourage young males to study Irish. Alas seemingly it was just a Freudian slip from Enda Kenny (he meant to say "experience should be made available...."). He was debating Eamon O'Cuiv in Galway last week as Gaeilge. Enda Kenny was defending his position on the removal of compulsory Irish from the Leaving Cert. His basic point was that he has friends who were teachers and they hate teaching the Irish syllabus because the students have no interest, very poor Irish and were going to do really badly in the exam. Eamon O' Cuiv's reply to that was that basically if something's broken, don't get rid of it, just fix it. Eamon then announced that he was recommending two syllabi to the department of Education. One syllabus would be like French or German for Leaving Cert, based on learning the spoken language. The other syllabus would be very literary, based on Irish literature and history. This caused some debate, but he clarified that only one of them would be compulsory, and that people could do both of the subjects if they wished. He made the comparison between people having compulsory maths but being able to take maths physics if they wished. O'Cuiv's policy is interesting but all together useless. Irish Education needs to revolutionised at primary level not slightly altered at leaving cert level. When will politicians in this country realise that the key to improving education across the board is at primary level not Secondary. Alas they all looking for the quick fix solution. They are all just Band Aids the cure needs to be administered before the age of 10. Here is my thoughts on the Irish language and how it can be approved. Thanks to a good friend of mine who supplied all the reporting for me about this article.

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