Connect: The points race is apparently finished for most Leaving Certificate students. This has good and bad implications for Irish education. It means that a memory test will count for less in determining eligibility for certain degree courses. But it also means that, for the most part, competition will be less intense than before. Overall standards are likely to slip still further.
Teachers will tell you that the various Leaving Cert syllabuses have been steadily dumbed down. It's still not an easy exam but all accounts say it's not as difficult as it used to be. That's not the fault of students, of course; they can answer only what they're asked. But the dumbing-down reflects changes in society here, not least the rise of PR and the "unacceptability" of "failure".
It's clear that Irish education is becoming more Americanised. There are now third-level places for most students - especially middle-class students - but this means that a primary degree is increasingly the equivalent of a Leaving Cert a generation ago, an Inter or Junior Cert two generations ago and perhaps a Primary Cert three or more generations ago.
Many college lecturers will tell you that a post-graduate qualification is now necessary. A bachelor's degree has become devalued because so many people have one and there's a sense that "real" university work doesn't begin until post-graduate standard. There is a clear link to affluence in the current arrangement, which sees "education" as a form of service industry.
But education, real education, is not like that. "Education," said William Butler Yeats, "is not the filling of a bucket but the start of a fire." So it should be. There are, of course, tedious and boring aspects to any course of study worth undertaking, but if the student doesn't have - at least periodically - a sense of being opened to a world transformed by the study, it is mere bucket-filling.
That's always been the problem with State exams such as the Junior and Leaving Certs: they measure bucket-filling. They don't do this exclusively, but excessive bucket-filling is required for students to
achieve high grades. In many respects, this is arguably as fair a measure as any other - it does, at least, test memory and the extent to which a student has applied him or herself.
But is it real education? Students attend grind schools in the hope of amassing extra points. This is full-blooded bucket-filling but may not ever lead to Yeats's "fire". Indeed, that "fire" is usually equated with securing the desired place at third level. This is understandable, but it cheapens education and makes it a mere test for advancement rather than something to be valued in its own right.
Certainly, today's classes have career options undreamt of by students in earlier years. That's good. Yet, with deteriorating marks in maths and hard sciences such as physics and chemistry, deteriorating performance in basic grammar and punctuation and deteriorating foreign language acquisition, all is not well. Standards have been steadily eroded to facilitate grade inflation.
It's debatable as to whether knowledge of integral calculus, of possessive apostrophes or of the ablative absolute ever mattered beyond an exam paper. After all, what practical use - except perhaps for professionals in related areas - does such knowledge have? Very little, it seems, but an aggregation of such "useless knowledge" casts a mind in a particular way.
That is what's meant by stressing the importance of "useless knowledge". By definition, it's not knowledge readily applicable to solve everyday problems, but it can give its possessor a more enlightened context for the problem at hand. It assures people that there's little new - that the world in 2006 is broadly similar to the world in 1956 or 1856 for that matter.
In that sense, "useless knowledge" stresses continuity. It's no surprise that Yeats, for instance, thought in aeons of time. In doing so, he was able to acknowledge continuity and breaks in human evolution. Nowadays, a historical "period" or an "era" appears to last about a decade or less. Historical time seems to have accelerated not only in the US but in Ireland too.
In future, Indian and Chinese people will become the world's leading mathematicians. Their gene pools are so huge that they will produce sufficiently competitive and competent people. Here in the West, it's likely that students will continue to avoid studying subjects perceived to be particularly difficult. They do not see the rewards for doing so.
So, the demands of the economy are not the same as the demands of education. An economy requires "bucket-filling"; education requires a "fire". Both outlooks are needed. In the past, there was a legitimate criticism that Irish education placed too much emphasis on academic aspects. The danger now is that excessive emphasis may be placed on practical or "training" aspects.
The greatest danger, however, lies in becoming too like the US. Americans are neither more intelligent nor more stupid than Irish people. They have, however, become so isolated under George Bush that
they're in difficulty.
It would be sad to see the same hubris occur here now that the points race is largely finished.