Student protests should inspire us all
The case of Shane Donnelly, who is at risk of being expelled from his school for joining a protest, raises significant questions for all of us.
His protest against impending cuts in funding for education strikes me as a courageous expression of citizenship. The over-reaction of the school makes another contribution to the silencing of the critical voice of the young. It is the young people of Ireland who will carry the burden of debt created by the incompetence, greed and cronyism that has corrupted our country. Their expression of moral outrage is overdue.
Education should be concerned with releasing the intelligence of our youth so that they will develop a nose for corruption and incompetence in those who purport to be their leaders.
Young people of today have a far keener sense of the demand for consistency between what they know about the world and what they ought to do about it than my generation exhibited.
The students who walked out of their schools in protest seem to have taken peaceful measures to make a significant point for all of us. They have taken a risk in seeking to draw attention to the creeping injustice that is taking possession of Ireland. The Irish have, for years, watched their country sinking into bankruptcy. The students have made us all sit up.
It is the responsibility of all schools to breathe life into their students. Too often and too easily, schools can drift into the business of creating passive recipients of received wisdom. Students' fertile minds are often strangled by an over-prescribed curriculum.
The youth of Ireland must have reason to believe that the truth and its pursuit will set them free. What they see around them is the death of trust and shame and the use by politicians of all means, fair or foul, to feather their nests.
I do hope that the schools concerned will have the good sense to see this episode as an opportunity for more creative thinking about the point and purpose of education and not just as a threat to the way things are.
My most creative students have always been those who were confident in seeing the world as it isn't, rather than as it is.
Philip O'Neill
Oxford, ENGLANd
Irish Independent
