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What we need are teachers with human qualities who can manage a classroom of small children and teach them, with a bit of inspiration, the basics suitable for their age. Photo: iStock

Dear Editor,

Minister Ruairi Quinn really outdid himself when he suggested that Primary Teachers should have Higher Level Leaving Cert Maths as a pre-requisite for entrance to College. (This is the same Minister who has presided over an actual dumbing-down of the same syllabus for those who really will need high level maths – particularly our engineering students.)

One has to ask: Ruairi, do you actually even know what is on that syllabus? How often will our national school teachers need to state the modulus of a complex number, or integrate a polynomial? Does Minister Quinn even know what these are, I wonder?

What we need are teachers with human qualities who can manage a classroom of small children and teach them, with a bit of inspiration, the basics suitable for their age. That doesn't go much in maths beyond fractions, decimals and percentages. Many prospective primary teachers will have these teachers' qualities in admirable measure, but would be unable to cope with the more esoteric branches of maths. This is not a criticism, but a statement of the realities. Ask any maths teacher. Or lecturer at a teachers training college.

Ruari, if you are so keen on maths, why don't you re-introduce the learning of the multiplication table at national school? And why don't you listen to the colleges and Universities who are despairingly protesting at the proposed watering-down of the Second Level syllabuses that will unfit them for University? In particular, by denigrating 'rote learning' at the very ages when the young mind is able for it, you will be handicapping them in the world after college.

I have taught in Australia and the UK and saw it being foisted on those countries long ago. Is there a special reason why we are ignoring the lessons to be learned there? The Asian countries, who are making their children and young adults work, are merely laughing at us.

If Minister Quinn is trying to bolster his credibility by these absurd and self-defeating initiatives, he could not be more wrong.

Mise le meas

Micheál Ó Fearghail

'Loreto', Sallybrook House

Glanmire,

Co Cork.

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