Irish education must spread its wings beyond these shores

WHEN WINSTON Churchill wrote his book While England Slept , he was keen to draw attention to what he saw as Britain's failure to anticipate the challenge of Germany's rising power in the 1930s. Although Ireland faces an infinitely more benign international environment today, I fear future historians may pen While Ireland Slept , detailing how we missed out on the explosion in wealth and power occurring far beyond these shores.

In the emerging markets of east Asia and the Persian Gulf, we are witnessing an unprecedented surge in economic growth. While much has been written about the advances made by Chinese manufacturers or the financial institutions setting up shop in Dubai, there has been an equally strong expansion of the global market in education in emerging economies. It is an incredible opportunity for anybody involved in education, but I fear that Ireland - with a few notable exceptions - is not exploiting this opportunity as well as it could.

There is an immense market for English-language education across Asia, and particularly in China. Chinese universities may be producing thousands of engineering PhDs every year, but most commentators attest to the stultifying nature of education at all levels from primary school upwards, with students encouraged to absorb large amounts of information and regurgitate it.

While the West's education systems are not perfect, the more critical approach that is characteristic of western - and particularly English-language - educational systems, is a powerful selling point in the Asian market.

This gap in the market has not gone unnoticed by major universities around the world. Johns Hopkins University set up an institutional link with the university of Nanjing more than 20 years ago. But this model of partnering with foreign universities has now been superseded as universities create fully fledged campuses abroad. The University of Nottingham has opened a campus in Malaysia and one in Ningbo, a town outside Shanghai. By the start of the upcoming academic year, the Ningbo campus will have more than 3,000 full-time students. The University of Liverpool, together with a local Chinese university, also has a campus in Suzhou, another town in the booming hinterland of Shanghai.

Secondary-level schools have also been active in Asia. The British have been particularly strong there, leveraging the strength of the public school brand. Dulwich College, a secondary school in London, has branches in Shanghai, Suzhou and Beijing. Harrow, a London grammar school, has campuses in Beijing and Bangkok.

The other main centre of educational expansion has been the United Arab Emirates and Persian Gulf. In Doha, the capital of Qatar, there are branch campuses of a number of US universities, including Cornell, Georgetown, Texas A&M and Carnegie Mellon. In Abu Dhabi, there are plans for a New York University campus that will admit its first students in 2010.

Even France, whose public university system is under considerable strain, has managed to expand. The legendary Sorbonne, whose reputation abroad is somewhat better than it is in France, has set up a campus in Abu Dhabi.