The System Is Shaped By Dunces

"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.
The truth is that the GCSEs are civilized compared to the Leaving Cert. In the UK, and in Northern Ireland, you can concentrate on just three subjects (for which you can attain up to 200 points each in the Irish CAO system). In the Republic, the tendency is to take seven subjects, in order to have six that count. No wonder so many of the places in medicine courses here are going to UK students! You can argue that the standards are higher in the GCSE all you like, but the fact is that, given the nakedly competitive nature of the system, if you want to get points high enough to allow you the option of doing one of the ‘elite’ courses, you have to cram, in at least six subjects. The standard in Maths is extremely high. So is the standard in German. And in History. And in science subjects. And cramming often involves missing out on life itself – or on significant aspects of it. There are highly intelligent naturals who are capable of thinking critically and who will do very well following that instinct if they also put the grind in to really know their subjects inside out – that’s not an issue. But there are also lots of people who are rewarded with A’s for merely developing exam skills and soaking up the information to be regurgitated when the time comes.
I’ve seen essays that get As and Bs. I’ve seen the ones that are given to students to learn off by heart. And I’ve seen the cross-over. It is a monumentally depressing thought that this kind of thing earns people good results – but that’s the way it is and most teachers recognise it, because values are skewed in favour of anything that suggests that the information has gone in and can be trotted out.
The fact that rote learning has crept back into the system and that students are highly rewarded for it is bad enough. But there are also all sorts of imbalances in the system. People take subjects just because they are easy to get high points in. Similarly, individuals who are intelligent enough to do really well at maths refuse to get embroiled, because the standard required demands so much of the available study time. And those who do honours maths are rewarded with a far lower average result than applies in almost any other subject. That is grossly unfair and wrong.

Is it that the teachers are incompetent? Is it that the standards are too high? Is it just that it is too much to expect the students to get to the required level while also cramming in other demanding subjects? And why in the end, should the students suffer, as they do in circumstances such as these?

There is another critical issue that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency. Every year we read about the fact that girls have done better in the Leaving. They get higher points. They take up the available places in the elite courses – like medicine. Yet no one asks: what is wrong with the exams – or what is wrong with the way we are teaching – that there is such an imbalance in favour of girls?

Any generalisation in relation to all of this is going to be wrong about particular individuals, but one Leaving Cert student made the point that girls were more inclined to do what they are told. That they are better at accepting things in school, following the rules and learning stuff off by heart. That they are generally less likely to run foul of the system, or to get into conflict with the school authorities. And so they are rewarded by the system, in effect for being ‘good’. For being compliant.

But might there not be an obligation on the schools, and educators – and the Department of Education – to understand that there is a real value in being critical of what is fed to you in schools; that there might just be a value too in refusing to play the game the rote learning way; and that boys are not more stupid, or less capable of learning than girls – but rather that it is a question of what they learn, and how and when, and that this should be taken into account in the structure of what is taught and what is examined (and how)?

Because there certainly is an obligation to manage the educational system in a way that does not discriminate against either sex – and currently the Leaving Cert and the points system do just that.

We need to move to a system that values a wider kind of learning, that rewards originality, critical thinking and a genuine engagement with what’s going on in the world – and that does not require of people that they toe the official line at every turn to do well. Time to really put the thinking caps on because at the moment, it seems the system is shaped by dunces…