Doubtless inspired by living in a household that is slowly, slowly, crawling towards the holy grail of the Leaving Cert, that peculiarly cruel ditch Irish children have to hurdle and then endure nightmares about for the rest of their natural, I’ve been thinking about my own education. Or it might be more accurate to say the smattering of enlightenment I received from my convent school, between bouts of nicotine-imbibing around the back of the bicycle shed, writing my boyfriend’s name a thousand times in my homework notebook and learning (almost) how to make suet pastry and line a handmade waistcoat with a fabric that was neither quite purple nor quite silk.
I did my Leaving Cert at the end of the 1970s, the same year that Jack Lynch stepped out and Charles Haughey stepped in, that Pope John Paul II told us he loved us, and that Maggie Thatcher and her handbag swept to victory in the British general election. It’s kind of difficult to believe that a system that was, even then, as unwieldy as a Playtex girdle is still kicking the can down the road nearly 40 years later.
Who’d have thought, as we hulked our heavy satchels down the blustery streets, past people queuing up in boxy cars for rationed petrol, peering into their rearview mirrors to apply their pearly lip gloss and adjust their shoulder pads . . . who’d have thought then that our children would still be traversing the same monotonous scholastic route?
Damned exams
I suppose the difference now is that, unlike many of us who burned our dog-eared copy books and permanently disembarked from formal education as soon the damn exam was over, most of our children go on to third level.
As it happens, continuing education among my particular bunch of mates, back in those disco-ball days, generally meant a secretarial course and a certificate in advanced eyeliner application.
And yes, yes, yes, I know that many, many convent school girls received a fine education. Unarguably so. Going on, in subsequent years, to achieve hugely, personally, professionally and politically.
Look, I’m more than willing to accept full responsibility for my lacklustre scholarship. I was the one skating along those polished floors thinking about halter-necks and henna tattoos; I was the one waltzing in and out of those banana-scented classrooms in my puce-coloured fishermen’s clogs with 10 Grand Parade in the pocket of my school skirt, wondering when I could get out for a fag and a chat about last night’s shenanigans down the back of the little red bus.
I was the one happy to lock horns with the nuns when cosy mythologies about the role of young ladies in society raised their heads in our often politically incorrect textbooks (usually something along the lines of saving yourself for Mr Right in clean cotton underwear). I just never connected up the dots to realise that, despite my penchant for unscheduled debate and my uncanny ability to make the nuns roll their eyes and sigh into their wimples, lousy exam results and utter unpreparedness for the demands of the outside world would leave me in a variety of sluice-room jobs, predicated on powerlessness and locked down by miserable money.
I was talking about school with an old friend recently, watching a lacy snowfall and eating poached eggs on toast (tough at the top, I know). I was asking her to pass the pepper, and reminding her how one of the nuns used to tell us that the contraceptive pill contained tiny serpents to eat our unborn babies alive, when she told me about her 13-year-old daughter’s recent biology lesson.
“What is the most effective form of contraception?” the science teacher asked the class of adolescent boys and girls.
“Crocs,” answered my friend’s daughter.
Crocs, for those of you who haven’t yet had the dubious pleasure, are those very round-toed, utterly flat plastic shoes that come in a variety of unappealing colours, including potty pink (mine are lime green, as it happens), which are, although excitingly comfortable, about as sexually alluring as a cup of cold sick.
“Crocs.”
I nearly fell off my chair.
“What did the teacher do?” I asked, agog, poached egg suspended in mid-air.
“She laughed, then said: ‘You know, you could be right.’”
The system may not have changed; all those nouns and adjectives and prepositions and suppositions and theories and dates and formulas and facts swirling around and around like that momentary flurry of volatile snow. But we have.