Pass me or I'll sue

Oh, this is just priceless.

A graduate at Queens University is suing the college because, get this, he reckons his human rights have been breached because he didn't do quite as well in his degree as he expected.

Andrew Croskery got a 2.2 degree in electrical engineering. What with the state of the current economy and the rampant grades inflation at work across the entire educational establishment, Mr Croskery no doubt realises that his degree won't permit him to study further and won't impress would be employers.

After all, they're already lining their waste baskets with CVs from people who actually earned first class degrees and masters degrees.

The poor diddums hasn't accepted that perhaps he should have hit the books a bit harder. Obviously, it's not his fault that he didn't do particularly well. Of course, it's the university's fault for not providing him with 'better supervision.'

I wonder what he means by better supervision. Did he expect the college to provide a mammy surrogate to get him out of bed and to his lectures on time? Or a study coach to sit him down and make him hit the books? I suspect what it means is that he expects them to simply give him the degree grade he wants, whether he earned it or not.

The High Court heard from some lawyer, who's presumably happy to bank a large amount of cash for pursuing this case, that: “It is obviously an important case for the applicant. He avers his employment prospects have been jeopardised."

It's self-evident that getting a poor grade jeopardises your job chances. But let's say he wins his case and Queens is forced to grant him a grade he didn't deserve. Then perhaps Mr Croskery might gain employment on the back of that grade with an employer.

What happens if the employer discovers that Mr Croskery isn't up to the job? Will he sue the employer for breaching his human rights too?

This sorry court case is the culmination of two odious trends in modern society. The first is one prevalent in education from kindergarten upwards - the idea that everybody wins, that no one fails, that top grades should be handed out to everyone for fear of someone's feelings being hurt.

The second trend responsible for this is the creeping culture of entitlement running rampant in society. Mr Croskery feels entitled to a better grade. It doesn't matter to him that he may not have done the work to deserve a better grade. He wants it, and feels it is his due, and therefore he must have it.

It will be fascinating to see how this case pans out. I genuinely believe it's possible though unthinkable that Mr Croskery might win.

What a wonderful precedent that would be. It opens up a second route to academic success - the courts - and slaps down one of the few remaining arenas of meritocracy left in society, permitting those who can afford it not only to access third-level education but also to buy, via a legal action, the grade they desire.

Investing in Education, or Old Skool discos for middle-aged men?

The government's all about education, they say. You know the buzz words - fourth-level learning, research and development, the knowledge economy.

Apparently none of this stretches as far as actually investing in education, of course. We'll be seeing third-level fees re-introduced after a two decade absence shortly (to add to the existing four figure sum 'non-fees' for 'registering' in college.)

And kids in schools with leaky roofs, no hot water but hot and cold running rats and roaches will have to take comfort in the fact that the education minister has secured additional funding this year - for renting prefabs, some of which have been in situ since the Eighties at this stage.

So, in this morass of misery that is the Irish education system, it does one's black heart much joy to see Irish universities hosting major international conferences into ground-breaking areas of research of significant importance to us all.

University of Limerick, take a bow. In these times of recession and Dell lay-offs, heaven knows the Mid-West is miserable now.

So fair play to the eggheads, who last year started something they couldn't finish. But this year they did finish it - two full days of a symposium dedicated to the work of Morrissey.

Seriously, they spent funds on studying the works of the old misery monger for two days. Don't believe me? Here's the awful, academic-meets-Manc-quiff proof of it all:

Stop me if you've heard this one before, but I'm not entirely convinced that indulging fortysomething daffodil-inspired obsessives is where our university system should be focusing its funding and attentions.

No doubt everyone present were charming men, but ultimately, what difference does it make?

Actually, shoehorning Smiths songs into a blog post may be fun, but spending state education funding on this sort of thing isn't justifiable when working class kids are forced to abandon third-level plans and kids are dodging the rodents in their pre-fab classrooms.

Silly and indulgent research events like this one might have been grand at one time, when we as a nation had the cash to be frivolous. But today?

That joke just isn't funny anymore.

President Obama's conundrum

Here's a pertinent little point I suspect might raise a few hackles, but that's what I'm here for, so let's go.

What would President Barack Obama do about affirmative action programmes after he was elected?

Try as I might, as I wade through the positivist verbiage that passes for political discourse in the US presidential election, I can't find a single hard statement by Obama on the issue.

But in the past, he has said he supports affirmative action supporting the promotion of blacks in educational admissions, public employment and state contracting. Then again, he's also said that the black community need to take responsibility for their own fate, and that there is no black or white Americans, just Americans. So, the position is a little contradictory.

But if he gets elected, the future of affirmative action going to come to a head, no doubt about it.

Because a black president would put the nail in the coffin of the theory that underpins the entire process. A black president would be walking, talking proof that there is no glass ceiling for minorities in the land of opportunity. Obama himself holds an undergrad degree from Columbia and a Harvard Law degree, and there is little evidence he entered either institution as a result of affirmative action. He's just a very smart guy.

Whither then, the state-sponsored skewing of access to higher education in favour of blacks?

Equally, a black president, mindful of his core vote while seeking a second term, would be mental if he rolled back on the system whereby blacks are privileged in terms of access to the halls of learning, by way of quotas, lower admission levels, and so on.

It's a perfect checkmate, and one that conservative Republicans would be all too quick to put him in.

Let's briefly consider the concept of affirmative action. Firstly, it's discriminatory and anti-meritocratic. It permits those with lower test results to enter higher education in the United States purely on the basis of their skin colour.

This is based on the theory that black people are in some sense the subject of endemic prejudice within the education system, as borne out by systematically lower levels of educational achievement across the board.

Now, one of three things is causing that lower level of achievement. (Here's where the hate mail begins.)

Either the systematic racism exists, is widespread, and in many cases is being perpetrated bizarrely by (presumably self-hating) black teachers in predominantly black schools.

Or black students are simply not applying themselves to their studies to the same degree white and Asian students do.

Or they can't apply themselves to that degree because they are generally not capable of competing at the same level.

Depending on your position, there's a case to be made for all three explanations. Does racism exist? Sure. But is it really as widespread as to push black student test results around 15% below that of white students in general? Let's say it is. In which case, a country so endemically racist is unlikely to ever elect a black president. We'll see about that come November. But if he is elected, then the country just isn't that racist.

Do black students not take their studies as seriously as other students? Perhaps not. Poverty could be feeding into that, of course. So could gang culture, family breakdown and a few other factors. But Latino students are just as impoverished in general, just as affected by gang culture and family breakdown, and they do better than black students in general. South-East Asian kids are, especially first and second generation immigrants, also impoverished. But they do better than the white kids in general, never mind the black kids.

Are black kids inherently less academically able? (Cue the hate mail.) There are IQ studies that show a clear differential in educational attainment for various races. Ashkenazi Jews score 15% higher than Caucasian kids on IQ tests. Black kids are a further 10% behind. Such studies are often depicted as racist, junk science in the PC media without their ever offering scientifically based counter-arguments.

But they're invariably done by highly respected scientists, who have a lot to lose and little to gain by publicising such research. And simple logic dictates that we are not all born with the exact same intelligence potential.

And simple examinations of post-grad level students, especially in the sciences, indicate a vast predominance of Jewish and Asian (including sub-continental Asian) kids well out of kilter to their predominance within the wider population. And given how many of those are the children of recent immigrants, at least among the Asians, affluent backgrounds don't explain it.

Which brings us back to President Obama's affirmative action conundrum. He cannot support affirmative action in education if his own election demonstrates that America is not endemically opposed to black betterment in society. And he cannot scrap it without alienating his core vote.

If you can work a way out of that checkmate for him, he may well have a job for you as Education Secretary come next January.

Educate the kids together and they won't grow up to shoot each other

Sometimes the best ideas are the simple ones. Like non-denominational integrated schooling in the North.

In the quarter century since Lagan College first opened its doors, thousands of children have had the opportunity to be educated alongside those from the other community, eliminating the likelihood of those children becoming the latest generation of bigots.

In a climate where living arrangements have become dangerously polarised into a patchwork of single community ghettos, school and the workplace have become almost the only environments in which both communities can encounter each other in the province.

This morning, it has emerged that the Catholic Council for Maintained Schools, which oversees the running of Catholic schooling in the North, is set to shut at least 50 primary schools because of plummetting demographics and lack of interest from parents.

And about time too. The old Jesuitical saying 'Give me a boy for seven years and he'll be ours for life' was never more relevant than in relation to Catholic schooling in the North.

In addition to the standard curriculum, far too often children in CCMS schools were educated in non-official subjects, like bigotry, sectarianism, Republican politics and violence.

Of course, the priests and nuns weren't usually to the fore when it came to politics or endorsing violence and paramilitaries. They were probably too busy with their own unofficial curriculum of Catholic guilt and brutalisation.

They tended to leave the overt bigotry teaching to their lay teachers in my experience. One Irish teacher I had used to hold the metre stick out the window when British army helicopters flew overhead, mimicking firing a rocket propelled grenade at it, and telling us 'That's how you do it, boys.'

It came as no surprise to me when it emerged that he was a member of a paramilitary organisation and he later fled to Spain to avoid arrest.

I've no doubt plenty of people went to Catholic schools and had wonderful times with wonderful teachers. I wasn't one of those. But even for those who were, I'd pose the question, did it do you any good not to be educated alongside Protestants?

The CCMS, or Catholic Council for Maintaining Sectarianism as I prefer to expand it, has bitterly opposed integrated schooling, preferring to maintain their own fiefdom over the hearts and minds of impressionable youths.

It's time they were scrapped, and all schools in Northern Ireland made mandatorily integrated and non-denominational. If you want religion taught to your kids, let them go to a Sunday school, and let the CCMS turn their attentions in that direction.

And if you wish to see religious education taught in schools, let the local clerics handle it, like they would elsewhere.

When I switched schools to attend one which had students of at least five different religions attending, they had no problem accommodating everyone in terms of morning prayer and assemblies, or in terms of what version of the religious knowledge exam paper they had to study.

If we ever really hope to see the end of bigotry and sectarianism in Northern Ireland, the best place to start is with the kids. Let's give them a chance to get to know each other before their elders teach them to hate each other.

The best way to do that is to integrate all schools in the province under a non-denominational banner for at least a generation.

And that involves restricting the Catholic Council for Maintaining Sectarian schooling to Sunday, if not scrapping it altogether.