Jennifer Horgan: Students pushed into shameful points lottery that defines who they become
System An Grades Grotesquely Cert Are Already Waking Inflated Students Photo: Leaving Year’s Rollingnews Last File More To Distorted In Ie
It’s not ideal — working in a system you’ve lost faith in. I’m a teacher of current Leaving Cert students who doesn’t believe in the Leaving Cert. But then again, I’m an educator with a passion for education. The Leaving Cert has very little to do with education.
Last year’s Leaving Cert students are waking to more inflated grades in an already grotesquely distorted system. This year’s results have been artificially inflated by approximately 7.9%.
Minister for Education Norma Foley made the decision that results this year should match the record-high results of 2022. Such a decision provides some nice photo opportunities for the politician, but it has nothing to do with education and it makes a mockery of my role as an educator.
I’d like results to mean something. I’d like the hours I spend with my Leaving Cert students this year to mean something.
Little attention will be paid to the impact of Norma Foley’s grade inflation on students who might make ideal doctors in our crippled health service, for instance, who will now need to emigrate or divert from an easier and deserved path to do what they love.
My husband, incidentally, thought about doing medicine when he was a student and was told on a visit to our local university that to have the intellectual ability to be a doctor he’d need to be a B/C grade student on average. Apparently medicine has a lot to do with emotional intelligence.
Not according to the Leaving Cert. Not according to the grades and the points we demand from students.
Along with predictable headlines, one national paper leads with a picture of boys from a private school receiving astronomical results.
Fair play to them, no doubt they have emerged from two or three years of gruelling study and pressure. I have no bone to pick with them as individuals. Their school presumably pushed them to excel, pushed them towards excellence, to be the best. They are deserving of praise.
The issue I have is with the system. The ‘best’ in education shouldn’t be so easy to capture in a photograph: an image of economically-advantaged children with the benefit of grinds, capital culture and superior facilities, heading off to the same destination: university.
I’m certain that the school will be very pleased with their placement in the national school league tables. I hope these boys enjoy university. If some are not going to university, all the better.
If their chosen course is what they truly love and desire, I wish them well. We should all have an opportunity in life to do what we love. I just hope that’s where they end up — happy, fulfilled, living a life that is most meaningful to them.
From my experience as a student and a teacher in the current system, I can’t say I’m confident about that. When I look at the drop-out rates from our universities, once the media glare and Leaving Cert frenzy has abated, I can’t say I believe it to be true.
I hate what we have done to education in this country and nothing will change until we have the guts as voters to demand that the Leaving Cert is uncoupled from the CAO. Because the CAO is killing the thing I love.
I want to teach English literature to students so that they go on to appreciate language, how it captures the experience of being human. I want them to read for pleasure throughout their lives.
I don’t want them frantically taking down notes and strategies to get points in order to get into university. I don’t want the grade they get in my subject to prevent them from doing a job for which they are ideally suited.
We must give young people more control and autonomy at senior cycle and far more breathing space to learn. My subject material in English is wonderful and I love teaching it. I just wish it didn’t dictate so many of my students’ futures. I wish they could be granted the space and time to engage with it for its own sake.
I wish some of the students in my school didn’t have to study poetry at senior cycle — that they could have real subject choice. Heaven forbid they should have other interests, strengths and passions at the age of 17 or 18.
Simon Harris is doing his best to tinker with the system. He is offering ways around it and he is trying, against the grain, to highlight further education opportunities. I commend him but tinkering with a broken system is not the answer. The system itself must change.
Fair play to Ryan Tubridy for asking students to have perspective today. Sadly, it is exactly this perspective that our system lacks. I hope Tubridy grasps that his message is contrary to what so many of our young people hear at home, in the media and in school in the run-up to the Leaving Cert and beyond it.
For so many students their points define who they are and who they will become. We have entered them into a lottery, knowing that it’s fixed and meaningless.
Shame on us, a country that continues to boast about its education system abroad when in truth, working in the system feels like working in an under-funded factory. A factory that fails to produce one very important thing: an education.