THERE IS still resistance to engineering and science training in schools and colleges - a generation after it was first introduced, the Parnell Summer School was told yesterday.
Prof Tom Garvin, of UCD's politics department, said much of the resistance to science and engineering was from young people.
He attributed it to "the general shying away from 'hard' subjects by the children of rich societies", as well as "the rather esoteric and advanced teaching of mathematics and its detachment from concrete scientific and social issues".
The introduction of engineering and science training in Irish schools and colleges occurred with the economic shift of the 1960s, Dr Garvin noted. It coincided with what he described as a political new departure and the ecclesiastical upheaval which was Vatican II. The latter declared the Counter Reformation to be over after 400 years of cultural and religious conflict.
In the 1960s, politicians had come to the conclusion that economic and cultural protectionism would have to be abandoned in favour of free trade and that multicultural capital would have to be used to supplement local capital.
"It was also concluded that cultural protectionism in the form of book and film censorship was stultifying and that, in particular, education intended to produce pious patriots and nationalist priests would have to be replaced by education and training for economic growth.
In 1959 a very different approach to what had been the case in assessment of the educational system was put in place "apparently by direct personal intervention of the new taoiseach Seán Lemass".
He announced "bluntly . . . that the secondary school leaving age was to be raised to 15, as soon as possible, and that the secondary school curriculum was to be reviewed, reformed and extended also with all due speed".
It meant that a policy change recommended by Sinn Féin idealists in the 1920s (among them a very young Séan Lemass) was finally implemented 40 years later in a rather moderate, even cautious form; this was regarded as revolutionary, Dr Garvin said.
Then minister for education Patrick Hillery joined Lemass and announced that ''if we are to overcome the degree of under-development at which we find ourselves we must have more and more education. A large part of the State's responsibility was to foster the country's economic interests and the first essential in this regard was that the system of education should fit the students to face the modern world by, for example, promoting the teaching of science," Dr Garvin said.
