Technological economy and education

rigumagoo

The government have been going on about their plans to transform Ireland into a 'technological economy' in one form or another for years. However, we havn't seen much concrete progress made, apart from the attraction of foreign MNCs using tax breaks. This experiment has proven to be a failure, as these multinationals are now leaving in droves towords cheaper nations. Therefore, an alternative plan to technologise the Irish economy is neccessary. Central to this plan must be the education of our people in science.
The best way of doing this is from the ground up, by restructuring our education system. We need to teach science in primary school. We should incorperate a simplified version of the current junior cert science course into the primary school curriculum. Additional to this, we would move most of leaving cert science course back to the junior cert. With this firm foundation, we would be able to teach undergraduate level science to leaving cert students.
People will argue that with all the subjects our students currently have to study, this will put too much effort on students and they will perform worse overall. This isn't going to happen. You know why? Because we're going to drop the Irish language requirement. It is a dead language and it is painful and embarrassing to see its life artificially prolonged like this.
Think of the advantage our children will have with this firm grounding in science. They will breeze through their undergraduate courses (thanks to the free college system). We could have financial relief and incentives for students who wish to go on to do masters and PhD courses, similar to the grants scheme we currently have for undergraduate courses. This would equip us with an army of scientists to work in new industries and research facilities, generating the coveted 'technological economy' and recasting Ireland as an industrial powerhouse at the forefront of scientific research.

Permabear

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Dannyboy83

There is a fairly simple reason why we have so few science graduates - the pay is crapola.

You can implement whatever strategies you like, you can have child prodigies.
As long as the pay remains so poor relative to other occupations in this country, nothing is going to change.

Ask any of the people I went to college with and they'll tell you stay the hell away from science - not worth it !

masteroftherealm

Remove religios education and replace it with IT education, religious education is what Sunday School is for.

rigumagoo

Dannyboy83 wrote: »

There is a fairly simple reason why we have so few science graduates - the pay is crapola.

You can implement whatever strategies you like, you can have child prodigies.
As long as the pay remains so poor relative to other occupations in this country, nothing is going to change.

Ask any of the people I went to college with and they'll tell you stay the hell away from science - not worth it !

The pay is only crapola if you are doing pure academic research or are working for the government. Lecture or go into the private sector (especially somewhere like polymer chem or biotechnology) and you will make mad stacks

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rigumagoo wrote: »

The pay is only crapola if you are doing pure academic research or are working for the government. Lecture or go into the private sector (especially somewhere like polymer chem or biotechnology) and you will make mad stacks

Why would you want to do something stupid like that? You'd be much better off studying something property related - after all, unlike dodgy areas like science and technology, it never goes down in value. Right?

Dannyboy83

rigumagoo wrote: »

The pay is only crapola if you are doing pure academic research or are working for the government. Lecture or go into the private sector (especially somewhere like polymer chem or biotechnology) and you will make mad stacks

Friend studied BioChem, top marks, couldn't get a job in her field the country, she went back into accountancy
Friend studied Chemical Analysis, pay was a joke, went to Australia, hes raking it in
Friend studied Physics, waste of time, he went and did medicine in a foreign country
Friend studied Artificial Intelligence, he went to France
Friend studied Mathematics, works in IB in London
None of my friends who did Comp Sci make more than 28k after 5 years (unless they went abroad). Many of us were double jobbing.
I've had friends leave after years to go back and do pharmacy
I've had friends working in IT who did Carpentry in the evenings and weekends to gain an apprenticeship.
I've had friends with Science degrees quit and join the guards/teachers/nurses, more money from Day 1 than they had after years.
In all that time, I have never heard someone say - I'm leaving X to do Science.

When I did Comp Sci, the points were about 425, now its something like 240.
There is no secret to it, people aren't stupid, there is no money to be made in science when compared to other far more lucrative professions in this country.

If that changes, people will do it.
Until it changes, they won't!

dan_d

No.
We need to reform the way Maths is taught.
And we need to reform the public perception of jobs such as engineering, science, and IT.
Primary school has not got a lot to do with it. All kids need to learn in primary school is reading, writing and maths, to be quite honest. Because if they can't do those, they won't be able to branch out and use those basics in other subjects such as european languages and science (though I do agree we should teach a foreign language to primary school kids)
I'm an civil engineer. Most of my friends are now on 3 day weeks, with paycuts. 2 are gone abroad. And all (including myself) expect to have to leave the country in the next few years.
We can produce all the scientists we like, but we are not a manufacturing economy.We are an export economy, relying on other economies. We also need to change the emphasis in our economy, because it's no good if we have no jobs for these people.

MysticalRain

To be honest, I don't even see a point to this anymore. There isn't much point in training a whole new generation of graduates in technology fields if the jobs simply don't exist. At best, all we would be doing is training a generation of future emmigrants that would have to leave Ireland to find work. If I had my time over, I would probably have ditched technology altogether and done something else. Even a run-of-the-mill job in the civil service pays a lot more than what these so-called knowledge economy jobs are paying these days. We also don't have the broadband infrastructure to support a technology economy either.

That said, I would like the education system to focus less on pointless stuff like religion and Irish and more on European languages as well as teaching kids entrepreneurial skills. I think we need entrepreneurs more so than technology graduates. At third level, the focus should be more on quality, not quantity.