GIVE ME A BREAK:LIKE A LOT of parents experiencing the Leaving Cert for the first time, I'm watching my child go through a process that seems antiquated and counterproductive. There are no jobs for life any more, and yet the Leaving Cert seems aimed at forcing teenagers to choose careers in a time of uncertainty. Should you take an exam in "higher" or "lower"? Should you drop a subject to maximise your points? It doesn't matter that you want to continue higher Irish or higher maths for the love of it – if you want to maximise points you drop to lower and focus on the subjects you'll score higher in.
This isn’t about education in its broadest, most productive sense – it’s about fitting people in to jobs that in many cases aren’t there any more, and the teenagers taking part know it.
Maximising your points has little to do with the joy of learning, but with increasing your chances in a system that’s ludicrous anyway. So many first-years at university drop their courses when they realise they don’t like the subject, usually because the subject is too narrowly defined. At the very time that adolescent brains are at their most malleable and creative, we’re reducing them to number scores on exams based on memorisation. It’s madly Victorian, and not in a good way.
The brain does not mature until about the age of 25. This delay is more the case with boys than girls. And yet, 17- and 18-year-olds are being asked to focus themselves on careers before their adult lives have even started. Teenagers are being forced to choose the course of their lives because the exams demand it. The education system should focus on how to learn, how to think and how to create, especially in the times we live in, when everything is changing so fast that we don’t even know what the future careers will be.
Instead, our education system focuses on earning the required number of points to pursue specific courses leading to supposed careers that students are not sure they even want, when the focus should be on learning how to think creatively so young people can adapt to change, create change and invent new pursuits that adapt to the world economy.
Asking teenagers to choose a career at the age of 17 – when the world economy is in a mess and we don’t even know what the viable careers will be in five years’ time – is nuts. It would seem to make more sense to be teaching them how to think creatively, and how to combine the arts and sciences, rather than demanding that they choose between the two.
We like to say that the children are our future, but how can this be when our education system is a relic of the past? The future for our children will be about inventing careers through creative thinking by combining physics, maths, languages, literature and art. Being told to choose one area on the CAO and then to hope against hope that you’ll get the points to achieve it goes against the creativity we need now to adapt.
It’s taken the male-female imbalance in medicine – traditionally the highest status course – to find a chink in the armour of the education machine. The Hpat tests, which evaluate candidates for medical school on general knowledge and awareness, rather than points alone, have shifted the balance in medicine from the feminine to the masculine. A year ago 70 per cent of medical students were female, and now the balance is more 50/50. As the mother of children of both genders, I say fair play, but the result leaves me distinctly unsettled.
Why just medicine? Why shouldn’t all candidates for various subjects be evaluated in a wider way? Wouldn’t it be better to give university students the opportunity of a broad education at third level, encompassing the arts and the sciences, followed by specialisation at graduate school? Our children aren’t pegs to be fitted into holes.
In the days when there were guaranteed jobs in the civil service, nursing, teaching and so on, maybe there was an argument for going for a specific job. We now know the mentality of Leaving Cert points leading to a life of security is over.
The current generation will have to explore and redefine the world of work. So our Leaving Cert system needs to adjust to new needs.