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Galway Advertiser 1998/1998_06_18/GA_18061998_E1_016.pdf
Exams there must be a better way
GAA
right to keep Rule 21
the others and before the GAA can abol ish Rule 21, is reform of the RUC. Since the RUC is one of the most sec tarian police forces in the world, only total reform will do. Its name would have to be changed, it would need many new personnel, it would need a new commissioner appointed from abroad, perhaps from Germany, Holland or Belgium. Only major reforms would bring about confidence among the Northern Catholics. After all the atrocities committed by the British army and the RUC against Catholics in recent years, it would have been madness for the GAA to have gone against the wishes of their Ulster dele gates and abolished the rule. Did the people in the occupied countries in the Second World War play soccer with the SS? To expect the GAA to abolish Rule 21 is as ridiculous as expecting the Irish Government to legalise the IRA and other paramilitary organisations. The next time Joe McDonagh feels like jumping the gun on this issue he should get the consent of his Northern dele gates first. They have far more experi ence of British army and RUC harass ment than most people in the South will ever have. Indeed, the mere sight of them in the street is probably harass ment enough for most Northern Catholics. Yours sincerely, Donal Healy Crannagh, Gort
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s we write this Comment, the young people of Ireland are entering | the last lap of the annual back-breaking, nerve-shattering steeple chase we call the Leaving Certificate and Group Certificate exami-1 nations. The prize is not cash, nor a big floral horseshoe to hang around the neck of the successful competitor, but various combina tions of numbers dignified by the general name of 'points'. And vie-1 tory in this exhausting race has something of anti-climax about it, for unless the vic torious competitors manage to win the correct number of points, they might as well I have not taken part in the steeplechase in the first place. Parents who have watched their sons and daughters turn into bad-tempered or tearful hermits over the past number of months will share our concerns over the value of this annu al horse race. Surely, many of them must feel, there must be a better way of rounding off the experience of second-level education? Perhaps there are also a few, like ourselves, who scratch their heads and ask themselves, "Can this sort of thing be called education at all?" If we existed in a world where our ideals instantly became realities, then there would be J few people who would not pursue the ideal of education as involving the all-round devel opment of our young men and women. While Newman's idea of education may have a few cobwebs hanging off it, his underlying belief that the educated person is one who has read widely, thought deeply, and allowed himself or herself the time to acquire the tools with which the life long process of learning is pursued has as much relevance now as 100 years ago.
Dear Editor, I write regarding your ridiculous Comment (June 4) that the GAA was somehow out of step with the rest of the country when they failed to abolish Rule 21 immediately. A lot of people in this country - particularly journalists and politicians - appear to be living in total cuckoo land as regards their expecta tions concerning the Northern Peace Agreement. Nothing out of this agreement has been or is likely to be implemented in the near future (or carried out), especial ly decommissioning, reform of the RUC, and the deletion of Articles Two and Three. Far and away the most important of these, since it must happen before any of
D E A L I N G
W I T H
S I M O N I N V O L V E D I
I S N N E W
H O M O S E X U A L I T Y
understood and given a false Dear Editor, I would like to reply to two identity with no hope of letters in your issue of June change. They do need to S H E L T E R come to terms with their ten 11. dencies and behaviour and I want to take issue with Nuala Ward, where she help is available for that. Dear Editor, 3. The right to.know the asserts that in helping homo We were very pleased to see the coverage given to the sexuals "a competent coun truth that many thousands of plight of homeless people in Galway by your paper. There sellor will support anyone former homosexuals have may have been a misapprehension, however, that Galway coming to terms with their found help and hope and Simon Community is not involved in the new shelter. As your true self'. One could use that reorientation to live and feel readers will know the shelter was first opened at Fairgreen argument to support child as heterosexuals. almost .20 years ago by volunteers of Galway Simon 4. The right not to be Community, who were forced to take action to do something abusers, wife beaters and rapists in coming to terms robbed of the possiblity of about the level of homelessness in the city. Our involvement with their behaviour as being having a warm loving family has continued to date, including a Working Party which, over an expression of their true unit with spouse and children a two year period, developed the plans for the new shelter, selves! No, we need to say to bring joy and fullness. and now through the Fairgreen Committee, which oversees Teenagers who are still the development of services at the new shelter. In this part that whatever their feelings and inner urges, their behav developing their sense of nership agreement between Galway Voluntary Social iour needs to change for their identity and are confused Services Ltd and Galway Simon Community, it was agree own good and that of society. about their feelings have the that it would be inappropriate for the shelter to be managed Feelings do not constitute right not to be subjected to by either party to the exclusion of the other. one's identity nor does one's gay propaganda that leads It is, however, misleading for GVSS to seek to fundraise in behaviour. Otherwise one is them into the blind alley of a competition with the genuinely independent voluntary chari locked into a situation of homosexual lifestyle. ties working with homeless people, when the board of GVSS My experience as a is largely chosen and controlled by representatives from helplessness and hopeless ness where change is consid Christian counsellor is that Galway Corporation and the Western Health Board, and oper struggling with ates to serve their interests. Both of these statutory agencies ered both impossible and people homosexual tendencies and should get in touch with the Government departments to undesirable. I believe that one of the behaviour can be totally whom they are responsible, and seek to fund this essential fallacies that has done enor changed. For some the service for homeless people properly. Meanwhile, Galway Simon Community remains actively mous damage to homosexu change can be as dramatic as als is this school of thought St Paul's conversion on the involved in the Fairgreen Shelter in a number of ways, and that labels them as having an Damascus road. For others it also continues to offer the services of its many experienced unchangeable identity as is more of a journey with volunteers to the project. We are also currendy undertaking "being homosexual". It is proper counselling and sup research into the true level and needs of homeless people in more true to say that for port. The clear Christian Galway, not all of whom are able to use the Shelter at some, heterosexual feelings message is one of hope for Fairgreen. and tendencies are predomi change, not one of condem Yours sincerely, nant, and for others homo nation to an unhealthy and Pat O Rafferty sexual feelings and tenden unnatural lifestyle. "If any Chairperson, Galway Simon Community cies are predominant. man/woman is in Christ, Corresponding behaviour in he/she is a new creation, the T H I S WEEK. either direction will reinforce old has gone, the new has these tendencies to such an come." Anything less than that is extent that they may take on the strength of seeming to not Good News I appreciate that there are become an unchangeable identity. That is where they those who have accepted a need help to undo that per homosexual identity and don't want to change. That is ception. Homosexuals have right, their freedom to choose. But which include the following: for those who do long for 1. The right to full accep change and escape from the tance as human beings made "hell" and the "lonely void" in the image of God. He your first correspondent made them male and female described, there is a way out. Yours sincerely, with clear sexual identity. Graeme Wylie Where that has been con New Life Centre, fused they can have it Monivea Road, restored. Ballybrit. 2. The right not to be mis
The Murder Machine
As everyone knows, in Ireland we are rather selective about the parts of history we J choose to recall and venerate. For example, there is no figure in recent history who is sur rounded by such an aura of near sanctity as Patrick Pearse. And yet as a number of books | have amply demonstrated, we choose to remember Pearse, the leader of the 1916 rebellion, but - apart from a few notable exceptions - we recall little or nothing about Pearse the edu cational thinker, the man who founded a highly innovative school that bears comparision with any of the revolutionary educationalists - Froebal, Pestelozzi, Steiner or Neil - who have challenged the prevailing notion - itself inherited from a 19th century Prussian model - of the school as a kind of factory production-line, churning out narrow precisionists whose prime function is to reproduce the very system of which they themselves are the lat est products. When the Free State was set up, and later when the Republic was declared, it was not the challenging ideas outlined by Pearse in The Murder Machine - his deadly accurate name for factory-model examination education - that were incorporated in an Irish educa tional system. No. all that happened was that the old English educational system was given a coat of green paint. Nothing at all changed. If anything, those who sat in successive Departments of Education refined the system they inherited, introducing a kind of apartheid that separated those who had 'brains' and went on to undergo the 'Prussianization' of the 'proper' schools that did Latin and gave you the chance to become a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher or a priest, and the despised 'techs', where the dunces went to train as the carpenters, plumbers, butchers and bakers and electricians. If Ireland had, as some maintain, no class system like our counterparts across the Irish Sea, we certainly had something not far off it.
Evaluating intelligence?
To our terribly antiquated educational system, with its absurd notion that a three or six hour examination at the end of a year or two years provided any just way of evaluating intelligence or the mastery of a practical discipline, has been added in the past decade or so the crassness of the point system, which further devalues even the results gained through the end of year exam. Whereas prior to this a good examination result allowed you to hold your head up, now unless you have the right number of points your result means little or nothing. At a time when even the universities, so long bastions of conservative thought, have introduced the notion of continuous assessment, is it not time to examine very closely whether what we require each year of our examination students - the meticulous regurgi tation of crammed facts and formulas over a three or a six hour stretch - has anything to do with education in the way that once noble term was understood by Plato. Aristotle, Newman and Patrick Pearse. There will always be those who thrive on the kind of strenuous competition engendered by exams like the Group Cert and the Leaving Cert. But, so far as we are concerned, these exams are little more than officially-sanctioned quiz shows.
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