"This is the end/Beautiful friend/This is the end/My only friend, the end/Of our elaborate plans, the end/Of everything that stands, the end/No safety or surprise, the end/I’ll never look into your eyes... again.”
It feels like that kind of moment. People who have lived through 13 or 14 years together scattered to the four winds. The dawning realisation that, really, there was little or nothing to hold you together, except for an accident of geography. You could have been born anyplace but it was here. You could have gone to any school but it was this one.
United then by a shared curriculum: playdo that was moulded into shapes to laugh at; singing lessons where you’d twig that the teacher’s pet had a voice like a rusty foghorn (hurray!); races run at the annual sports when you watched the other dude’s clean pair of heels and knew for certain that you just weren’t as fast as your dreams had promised you; essays that were assigned and laboured over and then left pitifully, shamefully unfinished; the tragedy when the girl who got A’s in everything (including gymnastics) lost her mother and you sensed that the world really was a terrible place to live (but the only one); maths conundrums you puzzled over at first and later had to try to explain to the guy who was just never going to get it; a teacher that was a right royal pain in the arse, another whom legend had it was a lush…
And – after all those mad, sad and bad (and, yes, sometimes good) moments crammed into a room like sardines, the smell of one another in the very air you were breathing – it all comes down to this. How many points did you get? How did you fare with the CAO? Are you going to college? In Dublin? Cork? Galway? Limerick? Belfast? Anywhere? Are you repeating? Well, I’ll be seeing you.
The Leaving Cert results are out. The information has been fed into the CAO computers and the first round of college offers has been made. A lot of hotpress readers will have been digesting the scores and plotting their next moves. The news, the self-appointed experts are saying, is positive. The points required for the most popular courses are down. Indeed students have never had it so good, according to one national newspaper. But the hype and the hullabaloo, and the stupid tabloid stories about high jinks among Leaving Cert students holidaying in foreign places, are just a distraction from the issue that matters most: is this really what we want education to be about?
Having observed the process first-hand over the past six months, I had come to more than a few negative conclusions about the system and the style of learning that it imposes on pupils. The kids with high aspirations were being forced into hard labour, coming home and doing three and four hours’ work on top of a full day in school – and more at weekends. They were learning essays off by heart. Cramming the information in, across seven subjects, even if they needed to burn the midnight lamp to do it. Grinding through exam questions so that they would know how to do it on the day. Learning how to write not just fast but faster. Developing a bag of exam tricks.
The private schools, where the only purpose is to coach students in how to get the maximum points, have been at this game for a while. You need six hundred points to get into medicine? Come to ABC college and we’ll give you the notes and the sample answers and the inside track on what to expect this year, and we’ll get you there. Now with the new utilitarian view of education that the points system has introduced, and the advent of League Tables for schools, secondary schools feel that they have no choice but to act like rats and join in the race. Their students want to do medicine, law and dentistry too. The joy of real learning is sidelined. The need to look at the world in a critical light is forgotten. Do what you’re told and learn how to follow the rules and you’ll be alright, is the new mantra.
Well, Ireland isn’t the only place where things have travelled down this particular cul-de-sac. The Observer went with a front-page story this week on the British GCSEs. They quoted the deputy director of the Institute of Education, Dylan William, who declared that the system put far too much emphasis on rote learning of facts – and too little on teaching pupils how to think critically. “We have to prepare them to think intelligently,” he said. “GCSE exams are teaching 19th Century skills because of the way they are assessed.” He also added that League Tables of schools’ performances meant that teachers at all stages of school felt pushed to “teach to the test” rather than offering a broader education.
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Niall Stokes 
