'Keeping it Real' by Gavan Titley, NUI Maynooth

national | education | other press Monday April 12, 2010 09:31 by MediaBite

The Media and the Teaching Unions

Dr Gavan Titley of NUI Maynooth has written a guest article for MediaBite in which he analyses media coverage of the teaching union conferences last week.

http://www.mediabite.org/article_-Keeping-it-Real--by-D....html

Excerpt:

"Like the posthumous letters from Gerry to Holly in P.S. I Love You, Irish Times editorials are like missives from the afterlife of the Progressive Democrats (although they didn’t so much die as get ingested spiritually by the political class). In today’s ‘Teachers divided over pay deal’ the key lesson is that teachers can’t be trusted: not just not to spook our bond-age masters, but in their very subjectivity. The INTO conference, having voted as madam desired, is credited with mature, deliberative decision-making. ASTI and TUI, having rejected the really real, are dismissed as suffering from an 'extraordinary' absence of debate. For an editorial that – after Google told the Irish government that too many students were dependent on Google - called for an educational emphasis on critical thinking over rote repetition, this is hardly excellence. And if this reminds you of something, you’d be right: ASTI and TUI members are like headscarf wearing women in France. Unless the enlightenment at the end of the tunnel thinks like me, you can’t be rational or free like me. Irish teachers and European Muslims: ‘wrong-headed’ group-think, just in different ways."

A brilliantly argued piece from GT - exposes many of the untruths that journalists are reciting about teachers (and the whole of the public sector).