I started university doing medicine in UCD 6 years ago. Despite being in one of Ireland’s most prestigious courses I found only a handful of people who genuinely liked knowledge and learning. Mostly, it seemed, people did courses like this to satisfy a greedy ego – to prove they were smart to themselves and the world, rather than actually be intelligent and think about how the world around them worked.

Whilst there were plenty of smart people in this course, the prevailing attitude quenched intellectual curiosities and replaced it with endless nights out, unremarkable ideas and interests and disdain at anyone who differed.

I dropped out of UCD after a year, disillusioned with my experiences at University. Luckily I ended up in Oxford a year where I found incredible humility, creativity, and intellectual respect.

What Ireland needs, more than anything, is to learn to respect hard work and intelligence once again, rather than quench it under an all destroying wave of collectivism.

Exams have their place but learning how to learn is far far more important. We don’t learn from mistakes and failure and we never ever ever let the actual consumers of the education decide what they should learn.

We have the cart before the horse and ram the same old bollocks down kids throats harder and harder rather than working out how to educate for the future and not the mythical Ireland that FF keep yearning for.

Paying teachers to teach the same things harder is expensive and wastes talent on an infinite scale.

I have no faith in the ultra conservative ultra conventional “thinking” that goes on here that will ever create a knowledge economy when all resources and the be all and end all is doing the leaving cert better.

To have a smart economy we need to give up “control” and pass the responsibility for learning to the student who can choose without intimidation their own path. It takes courage, free thinking and democracy. Things we are lacking here.

Reinventing education and educating people how to teach themselves in the way they learn is cheaper in the long run than the meat factory that either turns you into an corn fed, compliant academic or throws you on the scrap heap or into prison.

So the usual FF guff of launching a report every 12 months with buzzword bingo phrases is utterly bankrupt. The education system is too expensive, facing the wrong direction and educating for the past.

There is practically no hope of changing it because the resistance to change from the incumbants is enormous.

The smart economy will wake up and smell the coffee and get the hell out of here.