Exam Preview: Today - English: While some things have changed for the better, much of the Leaving Cert English exam paper still requires a radical overhaul, argues Fintan O'Toole.
C.S. Lewis, author of, amongst other books, the Narnia Chronicles, spent some time marking state exams in England. He recalled a batch of answers from a school where the English teacher was evidently an enthusiastic and expert poultry breeder. He knew this from reading the answers to a question about Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, in which the main characters are the cock Chaunticleer and the hen Pertelote.
The poem "was treated by them solely as evidence about the precise breed of these two birds They proved beyond doubt that Chaunticleer was beyond doubt very different from our own modernised, specialised strains and was much closer to the old English barn-door fowl. But I couldn't help feeling that they had missed something."
Looking back on my own experience of Leaving Certificate English, I recall the sense that we had missed something in a rather similar way. We were asked to show our proficiency in literature by being able to tell the precise breed of humanity to which, say, Macbeth belonged.
We spent so much time analysing the characters of fictional persons that we might as well have been interviewing them for a job. It was not the best way to make literature enjoyable or exciting.
Looking at the last two year's Leaving Cert papers, I wondered how much has changed. Students are told again and again to answer the question that they are asked, so the questions themselves determine much of what they can write.
If the questions are dull, it is hard for the answers to be interesting. If the questions make well-worn assumptions, it is not easy for the student to come up with fresh insights. If the questions imply a rather prissy way of reading a literary text, it is difficult for a student to reflect the wild, anarchic experience of reading a great book.
Some things, undoubtedly, have changed for the better. The first set of papers, called Comprehending and Composing, seem genuinely stimulating. At both ordinary and higher levels, students are asked to respond to photographic images, and these appear interesting
Combinations. Contemporary journalistic texts are used in the place of the old Victorian prose extracts that I remember. A much wider range of writing is encompassed, including an interview with a sixth year student and a very funny extract from Ciaran Carson's 1997 book, The Star Factory.
The choice of subjects for compositions is much broader and much less prescriptive. There is no longer a pretence that writing an essay on a non-academic subject is something that the vast majority of students will ever do in real life.
Instead, different modes of address are offered as possibilities. The student can write a political speech, a story, a newspaper article, a spaceship captain's log, a letter to a public figure, and so on. All of this, even in the pressure cooker atmosphere of the exam hall, might actually be enjoyable, especially for a confident student who takes pleasure in written self-expression.
Given the constraints of the situation, therefore the exam setters arguably do a very good job of engaging the student as a writer and reader in everyday life. It's on the other side of the experience of language - the life of the person who reads purely for pleasure - that the picture seems rather more bleak. Here the job is surely to allow the student to develop an aesthetic intelligence. While there are clear improvements in the greater range of texts and the wider opportunity for comparing different books, I'm not sure that many of the questions are of a kind that would make the student a better reader.
The most obvious criticism is that the range of single prescribed texts is still very narrow: the Victorian novelists, Shakespeare and the Greeks, with, at Ordinary level, Brian Moore's Lies of Silence, a Frank O'Connor short-story collection, Brian Friel's Philadelphia, Here I Come!, and Mildred Taylor's The Road to Memphis. A certain amount of this is undoubtedly necessary. Everyone should encounter Shakespeare, Dickens and Sophocles at least once in their life, and the Leaving Cert has to reflect a basic core of common cultural property.
With no disrespect at all to the selection of recent texts, however, it wouldn't be hard to come up with at least one or two that would startle, disturb and possibly thrill students more than the ones on the list.
Why not Friel's dark, strange Faith Healer, poised on the borderline between life and death, which might speak to Buffy fans in a way that the wonderful but perhaps rather distant Philadelphia does not? Why not Moore's vastly better Black Robe where his concerns with Catholicism and colonialism are projected into the unfamiliar space of 17th century American Indian culture? Why no contemporary Irish women prose writers, from whom there are so many wonderful names to choose?
And then there are the questions themselves. The first thing that struck me is how many of them make assumptions about the work being examined. "Far From the Madding Crowd is packed with memorable scenes"; "There are many funny moments in Philadelphia, Here I Come!" "What are the most important changes that take place in the character of King Lear?" and so on.
All of these phrases present an aesthetic judgement as if it is a matter of fact and then go on to ask something else.
They are perfectly valid judgements, but the tone implies that fundamental feelings are not up for grabs. What if you found Far From the Madding Crowd or Philadelphia, Here I Come! woefully unfunny? What if you don't think King Lear has a character (a concept that did not exist in Shakespeare's theatre), or that he has one but it doesn't change at all?
Even more seriously, it is not at all clear that the ghost of C.S. Lewis's poultry-breeding pedant has been banished. Too many questions still ask for responses that ask students to treat fictional characters either as if they are patients on a psychoanalyst's couch or the accused before the judge's bench.
Last year's Ordinary level paper, for example, quotes Gar's line in Philadelphia about the locals being "asylum cases" and then asks, po-faced, "which one of the characters best fits this description?"
The same paper asks the student of Great Expectations to "Imagine you were a family counsellor asked to give advice to Joe Gargery and Mrs Joe about how they might get on better together".
The previous year's paper, in relation to King Lear, asked "was Gloucester a good father to his sons, Edgar and Edmund?" It also asked the most fatuous question of all: "Was Joe Gargery a good man?"
These questions seem to have been set, if not by a poultry breeder, then certainly by a social worker. They treat literature as a casebook of human behavioural pathology. And they ask questions that would never actually occur to someone reading a novel or watching a play.
I've seen Philadelphia, Here I Come! many times but it has never occurred to me to ask what the North-Eastern Health Board's mental health service team is up to and which character will be carted off to the asylum first.
And then there's the old nonsense that we read Shakespeare in order to get lessons for life. Last year's ordinary paper asked: "What did your reading of King Lear teach you about relationships and about how people should treat one another?"
The intelligent student would have to answer "Nothing". Shakespeare teaches us nothing at all in that sense, and if you look at his plays this way, he's not just insufferably boring but a bloody fool.
Macbeth teaches us that it's wrong to kill the king. Hamlet teaches us that we should kill the king quickly and without remorse. Soap operas are much more consistent.
The second paper could do with being re-vamped in the spirit of the first, which is that being examined doesn't have to mean being bored.
Until this happens, the verdict can be no better than aC minus.