Fiontan O’Ceallachain
Staff Writer
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
-Mark Twain (1835 – 1910)
Diving into the cesspit of society, experiencing the human stain on truth, we see more than the facade stats, facts and figures can show.
The impact a failed education system could have on society would be phenomenal, even if it failed for just a generation, for it takes only a generation of ignorance to trip stability from the edge of a fool’s paradise. We have become a society living beyond our means, we are ‘moving forward’ by building sand castles from the wet dirt we release as technology, industry and finance. But when these castles become too massive they will crack and crumble upon themselves to be cleaned away by the wash of time. Eventually mankind and all its trinkets will disappear into a universe too cold to laugh, cry or rage, a universe far more powerful than mankind will ever be.
When Van Gogh gave new life to rough canvas he recreated an existence, or what he understood it to be. The harsh and honest flick of his wrist showed us that there is more to our world than we originally thought, he painted mankind’s control over the universe – he showed that mankind can compete with the vastness of nature.
Among the few Leaving Certificate subjects that brushed upon pure thought was mathematics. In response to the declining Irish maths scores in PISA and similar studies, the Department of Education is implementing a new mathematics curriculum named ‘Project Maths’ that has replaced the little pure maths, that was before, with the mathematics of industry, finance and government. This is being done in order to position mathematics in a context relatable to everyday life. Rather than introduce its history, interesting applications and theories, or the clever concepts that so simply show the beauty of maths, we have created a false impression of what mathematics really is – we are cheating our young and preparing them to do the same.
This curriculum is a superficial solution to a misunderstood problem – a highly infectious problem, growing in every part of our society. To fix our education system we must address a wound deeper than we are trained to see, and we must do so before the sand-castles fail.
