The exam facing today's Leaving Cert history students will be replaced shortly by a very different exam, based on a new syllabus to be introduced to the schools in either September 2002 or September 2003. Its first exam will take place two years later.
The present Leaving Cert history course has many flaws - it is a very broad, long course with too much content. It is tested at higher level by five essays in three hours, now with 20 more tiring minutes added. In theory, students have a good choice of questions - one to answer out of five questions in each of four sections, along with a "Special Research Study".
In practice, over the years, those setting the questions often displayed a catch-the-students-out attitude, so students were lucky to be able to do one question in each section. (I hope that won't be the case today.)
Not surprisingly, Leaving Cert history has taken a knocking. Extra work, a lower honours rate than other subjects and a high failure rate has meant that many students who love history have voted with their feet and opted for other subjects. The numbers studying Leaving Cert history have declined in spite of the huge public interest in matters historical - best-selling books and films, popular TV programmes, and lively political discussions backed up by (spurious) historical claims.
Leaving Cert history has not been well served by those in charge of it. Part of the problem lies with the input of the universities. Their interests are specific - historians are either medieval, early modern, modern, economic and so on. Each group pushes its own line. Department inspectors have their own angle. They demand wide content so that they can spread questions as widely as possible in the exam. Consequently, a flawed Junior Cert history syllabus is likely to be followed by an equally flawed new Leaving Cert syllabus. But it could have been worse. The first draft of the new Leaving Cert syllabus was a complicated mess which aimed to satisfy the competing interests. In order to turn around the rapidly declining numbers doing early modern history (about 1 per cent of Leaving Cert students), the draft syllabus would have resulted in an exam paper as large as a book. Fortunately, the exams branch threw out this proposal.
However, this was the only major change. In spite of strong criticism of the original draft syllabus, revised drafts have retained substantially the same shape and have added rather than subtracted content. s, no effort has been made to assess the amount of time it will take to teach each section. Other problems include:
The overloading of content will force teachers to pack in information, at the expense of other teaching techniques.
Each topic has been forced into an artificial straightjacket - politics and administration, society and economy, culture, religion and science.
There is a failure to allow class time for the "Special Research Study" - in contrast to other subjects with projects.
The complete syllabus is so long that book publishers are already seeking teachers' views on the topics they are likely to teach - they will only publish the most popular sections.
The opportunity to revise the Leaving Cert history syllabus comes only once in each generation. There is therefore a great onus on all parties to get it right. So far that has not been the case with the revised syllabus, which is virtually complete. If there was one aspect that could still be looked at before the Minister of Education gives it his final approval, it is the volume of content in each topic. If that was set at a more realistically teachable level, then the other flaws in the syllabus could be overlooked.
However, this is the end of a process which began about five years ago. It is unlikely that any changes will now be made.
Dermot Lucey teaches in Ballincollig Community School, Co Cork.