There is a growing effort on the State’s part to go over the heads of parents in favour of addressing children directly about their experiences, to consult the youth rather than their traditional guardians about how best the State can accommodate and empower them.
A couple of recent reminders of this: a redeveloped primary school curriculum that seeks to help children see themselves as “active citizens with rights and responsibilities, empowered to engage with local and global issues”; a Department of Education tender for expert assistance in helping to embed a “culture of meaningful participation of children and young people in policy decision making”; and State ‘action plans’ to the same effect, helping children and young people to better participate in decision making.
It was also extraordinarily revealing that in a post a couple of months ago about establishing a National Convention on Education, Minister Helen McEntee mentioned receiving input from every kind of person involved in education, children included, with the exception of one, crucial group – parents:
Now, as a father of two young children aged under three, who loves them to pieces and wants the very best for them, I have no qualms about saying that the State should not be seeking to address them, but rather should be dealing with my wife and I when it comes to any and all matters concerning them, until they’re of such an age that they can represent themselves adequately.
If you think I’m exaggerating about the State’s desire to get children as young as mine involved in the political process, think again. In the State’s early childhood curriculum framework, Aistear, babies, along with toddlers and young children, are described as “competent, confident and agentic global citizens”:
“Being agentic means they have voice and influence and that they can make choices about and in their learning. Babies, toddlers and young children have the right to be cared for, nurtured and supported to grow and develop. They can experience democracy by having their voice heard and respected by educators who support active participation. Listening to and learning to respect others and their views is a key part of this. As citizens of the world, babies, toddlers and young children have deep connections with people and the environment, valuing justice and human rights.”
The fact that the above paragraph is written in a State document is nothing other than astonishing.
Babies, toddlers and young children are many, many good things, but agentic citizens of the world valuing “justice and human rights” they are not. I do not need to know the author, as is or more likely, the authors, of that particular section to know that they either have more experience with academic jargon than they do children themselves, or they have experience of children and that experience has been processed through a warped, ideological lens.
The development takes its lead, and runs with it, from Article 12 of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child which asserts the right of the child to express their views freely in matters affecting them, and adds more specifically that the child shall “be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body, in a manner consistent with the procedural rules of national law”.
However, the Government’s current approach goes some steps beyond that vision. In the Participation of Children and Young People in Decision-making Action Plan 2024-2028, the State’s guiding light on the implementation of this trend, the background and context to the plan makes clear that the State desires a rewriting of the child-parent-State relationship across the board.
On the matter of participation, it’s said that the degree of participation the State desires to see “requires that children and young people are involved in decision-making processes in everyday settings, such as at home, in classrooms, in childcare settings, in healthcare, in out-of-school settings, and in national policy decisions that affect their lives”:
“Children and young people are recognised as rights holders and “citizens of today” rather than merely as “beings in becoming”’ (UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2009), and their capacity to participate in decisions that affect them evolves as they grow and mature.
“Children and young people have expertise in their own lives. Adults do not always know how children feel, what they think or what they like, and accordingly have a duty to give due weight to children and young people’s views in decision-making processes.”
It cannot be overstated what a radical reimagining of these fundamental relationships this outlook represents. To refer back to my own, admittedly limited, experience of parenthood and somewhat more extensive knowledge of being a child in the charge of parents, it is understood that not only is it very, very much not the case that children and young people have “expertise in their own lives,” it is far more frequently the case that they have no idea what they’re doing or what they’re talking about.
Children and adolescents should of course be talked to and treated with the utmost respect and dignity – that’s not in question – but what is proposed here goes far beyond that.
And it is, to this writer’s mind anyway, no surprise why it goes far beyond that. It’s because there is a parallel trend occurring in Irish education towards what is known as “values education,” and as I outlined in a previous article, those values are at odds with those held by many of the country’s parents.
That article discussed the radically transformative concept of ‘Global Citizenship Education’ which is sweeping Irish institutions, and is strangely ultimately helmed by the Department of Foreign Affairs, but no less influential is the world of a certain Dr Jones Irwin of DCU, whose work has proven influential in redeveloping the curriculum.
In 2018, he delivered an address in which he described, what he understands to be, the purpose of primary education. The paper accompanying that address was titled “Towards a Values Led Redevelopment of the Primary Curriculum”. Not to retread old ground that has helpfully been covered in some excellent detail here, but in short, it is an approach based on the work of critical theorists in education such as Paulo Freire and Michael Apple, which if adopted in the whole-school manner that Dr Irwin believes it should be, would see the total undermining of traditional education and values.
If that were to occur, the distance between children and their relatively-stuffier parents would make much more sense. No more would parents embody the obstacle they so often do in the face of unpopular political or educational decisions, because the children themselves are who would be consulted about such things, children who’ve been offered values by the State at odds with those held by their parents.
It is an insidious trend, and while not new, it is taking on a new urgency as ideologically-loaded content becomes more and more the order of the day at both primary and secondary level.