Mary McAleese, President of Ireland, speaks of the contemporary social significance of education in an address to a conference on the European Year of Citizenship Through Education:
Education has a critical role to play in revealing the full extent of the misery we gratuitously inflict on ourselves and others and in challenging the behavioural changes which alone are capable of resolving the sources of that misery. It has a critical role to play in equipping us with the confident cohort of leaders who can help us navigate our way through the intricacies and complexities of modern life, bringing new creative answers to everything from supporting carers or encouraging respectful multiculturalism, to keeping Ireland in the top league of knowledge-based economies. The idea that our education ends when we throw off the school uniform for the last time is now rightly regarded as Luddite. As that great intellectual giant of modern Irish education, Cardinal John Newman said ‘to be human is to change and to be perfect is to have changed often’.
It is no coincidence that Ireland’s economic fortunes began to change dramatically as the effects of widespread access to free second-level education began to kick in. All that vast reservoir of talent which had gone to waste in previous generations suddenly began to spill into every area of life, changing the landscape of personal and national ambition, changing the story of Ireland.
McAleese, Mary. 2005. "Remarks by President McAleese." in Aontas Citizen Learner Conference. Dundalk, Co. Louth, Ireland.