Remarks by President McAleese at the opening of the ATECI’s 2008 Conference
Remarks by President McAleese at the opening of the Association of Teacher Education Centres of Ireland’s 2008 Conference
Dia dhíbh a chairde. Tá an áthas orm bheith i bhur measc ar an ocáid seo. Míle bhuíochas díbh as an gcuireadh agus an fáilte a thug sibh dom.
I am delighted to join you to open your conference, and I’d like to say a big thanks to Gerard McHugh, Director of the Dublin West Education Centre, for the invitation to address you here today. Your work touches each of our four thousand schools, almost sixty thousand primary and post-primary teachers and consequently three-quarters of a million children and young people attending our schools - you occupy a pivotal role in our society and your conference today speaks of work that goes further than even those conventional constituencies, as you support a wider educational community engaged in life-long learning and life-long adaptation to the many evolving faces of life itself.
Education is an integral part of the Irish DNA. We always knew its value even when it was the preserve of an elite or when it was accessed only in hedge schools at high risk. Today we know its value intimately because we can see clearly how it has transformed our present and our future. Its results are not always immediate and because education is a long-term investment it needs educational planners and educators who are not only patient but who have a long-range vision.
In the week in which we buried former President Paddy Hillery we thank God that he lived to see the realisation of the plans for education which he set in train back at the end of the 1950s when his deep, republican egalitarianism led him to plan for a thoroughgoing democratisation of access to education. We have him to thank for our community schools, for our Institutes of Technology with their emphasis on science and technology and their wide geographic and urban/rural distribution of access. He laid the ground work for the expansion of the universities and for the provision of free second-level education. Then he waited quietly, unassumingly and patiently for forty years before we, the miracle generation, began to live the results of his dream for us and for our children - prosperity, opportunity for both men and women, an end to emigration, an end to endemically high unemployment, an Ireland confident in Europe and in the world.
We live in an Ireland which has changed beyond recognition and for the better. The key to these new times is no mystery; the key is your vocation, education which harvested for the first time in our history the widespread brainpower of our people, the greatest, the most potent natural resource we have. Ours is a confident, problem-solving generation, no longer insular or underachieving but global and successful. We are risk-takers, entrepreneurs, professionals in a plethora of trades, services and disciplines, we are hard workers, we are an educated workforce, an educated and cultured people with an ambition to deepen and widen our education, to be at the forefront of the knowledge economy, to turn these ten years of opportunity into a century of opportunity with all its twists and turns, whatever its twists and turns.
We face into these heady times with the gathering clouds of economic uncertainty that will test our character and resilience. We have faced worse and with fewer resources. We face into the next industrial revolution with huge worries about climate change, about conscientious sharing of responsibility for our planet’s wellbeing, about using the wealth of the whole world for the wellbeing of the whole world.
We know that just as education opened us up as individuals to our own potential and opened up our country to its best story yet so it is central to the resolution of our world’s many problems. Our own Irish story is really only beginning and education will be crucial in how we write the chapters to come.
The impact of such a giddily changing environment imposes huge responsibilities and pressures on our educators. How you respond and adapt directly translates into how we respond and adapt as a people. Yours is a place of preparation, of packing effectively for the journey ahead. It was our schools which were the first to encounter directly the changes wrought by inward migration. They are at the vanguard of changes demanded by an aggressive marketplace driven by the big juggernauts of technology and science, of commerce and consumerism, of individual ambition and national need. If we are to adapt effectively to our changing world then our education system has to be ahead of the posse, leading the way, preparing, shaping, planning, patiently setting the scene for what our educators and educational planners, from their experience and scholarship, know is to come but which is not yet fully apparent to the wider community. Your network of Education Centres is a vital part of our developing national knowledge equity. The shelf life of so much acquired knowledge is short. The one unchanging job for life, a thing of the past.
Sustaining our success means understanding the need for and providing opportunities for ongoing learning, training and retraining, critiquing, improving, re-evaluating, adjusting. There is now a culture of constructive restlessness in which complacency is paralysing and rapid change is a constant.
Intellectual curiosity is our best asset in this new environment and the stimulating of that curiosity is what these centres do well. Allying that curiosity to a culture of compassion and courtesy is our goal, for without the latter two qualities, no amount of success can compensate for the loss of or absence of humanity and humility.
In a small African country not so long ago I saw children walk for three hours over the most unforgiving mountain terrain to get to school. Arrival five minutes late meant they were sent home, to motherless and fatherless homes where twelve year-olds have become carers of their smaller siblings because AIDS has robbed them of true family care. Their classrooms and facilities are reminiscent of nineteenth century Ireland. The notices on the wall in large print read, “The following (named children) are slow learners”. They and their country are still only at the start of a journey through education, a journey we are privileged to be helping them to travel more rapidly than they could on their own. We have learnt the hard way the truth of “Mol an óige agus tiocfaidh sé”.
We have felt the surging, individual and collective empowerment that courses through civic society when we plug into the education energy grid. Our story inspires others around the world who are still waiting for their day to come.
What you do as teachers of students and as teachers of teachers alters the course of history. It is a phenomenal thing to be able to alter the course of human history. Sometimes in the mundaneness or steady step-by-step of everyday life we forget just how great this vocation is, how it accumulates, accretes in the lives of students, their families, their communities, how it transforms them over a lifetime, how it transforms us across a nation. You have a litany of things that were pioneered through the Education Centres that are now part of the mainstream education system. Today, more than ever, we need people with that kind of innovative spirit, patient planners willing to plant seeds that will bear fruit much later. We are a people with a plan - to cherish the children of the nation equally. You are important charters of the roadmap to delivering that plan. We owe you huge thanks for all you and generations of selfless teachers have so generously and successfully invested in the education, the stimulation, the shaping of our people. The evidence is in of a job very well done. And this conference is evidence of a determination to do it even better still.
I look forward to saying thank you again later this summer in the Áras, at a reception to acknowledge the contribution of teachers, which the Education Centre movement is helping to organise. Meanwhile thank you for your past and present work, and for this conference which will set the scene for your future work and our nation’s future.
Molaim rath Dé ar bhur gcuid oibre inníu agus as seo amach.