It was with a slightly demented sense of having imagined the month of April and most of May - or, even worse, having missed out the rest of 2001 and the first three months of 2002 - that I read of the National Council for Curriculum Assessment proposing that the Leaving Certificate should take account of a student's charitable works and sporting abilities.
What japes! I re-read the report avidly for signs of other April's Fools' gags - that you could get a BA for knitting socks for chilly pygmies, helping old ladies across the road and bringing in the coal for Mrs Murphy with the bad hip, but in vain. The date was May and the report was true.
Alas, no mention yet of a Leaving Cert recognition for gardening, roof-tiling, changing nappies, and those other little skills which are so necessary in life. In the meantime, we might soon have to settle for a Leaving Cert which does indeed give points for charitable works and for sport.
All-round decency
Well, if you think that school exams should be a way of measuring your all-round decency as a human being, there's no reason why your personal virtue and your ability with a football shouldn't be taken into account. If, however, you think that the Leaving Cert is about the education of minds, the creation of intellectual skills and the promotion of mental rigour, you will probably agree that weeding, bathing babies, raising money for developing countries and getting in your first serve was not what Plato was talking about when he taught his pupils in the garden named after the god Akademos.
There are many things important in life. Some of them are covered in the Leaving Cert; but many of the most individually important - honesty, loyalty, affection - and many of the most socially important - kindness to those less fortunate, probity towards one's public duties - are not. That's the way of it. I don't go to a garage to receive lessons in the Renaissance, or to a hospital to know how to scrummage, or to an art college to shear sheep. I shouldn't expect to have my charitable skills or my prowess in goal assessed in my Leaving Cert exam.
It's not as if we have been achieving levels of academic excellence which oblige the teaching profession - not long before the ASTI summer hols begin, chaps: see you next autumn! - to search around for new and more exacting ways of testing the academic skills of their pupils. A lecturer in an eminent teachers' training college told me recently that first-year students on arrival are aware of almost no history, not even knowing even when the first and second World Wars occurred.
Pearl Harbour
And whatever fixes for major historical events which today's students possess come from films. So this autumn's intake will know that there was a second World War - why, it broke out when the Japanese attacked the US Fleet at Pearl Harbour - just as four years ago, students knew that something called D-Day occurred, when American forces landed at, oh somewhere or other, saved Private Ryan and freed the world. Almost certainly, neither group could tell you the significance of the year 1939, nor the dates of the first World War, because no-one has made a film about them conveniently close to exam-time.
If film is the primary source of our students' history, then what are our history teachers teaching? Nothing, apparently. Nor are the two World Wars alone in vanishing beneath a vast and growing sea of amnesia. So too is any sense of Irish history. No matter what school of history you belong to, Kevin Barry is an important figure, if only in terms of iconography; yet when students on Challenging Times were asked a couple of years ago to name the first IRA man hanged at Mountjoy Jail in 1920, none of them knew.
This is not just amnesia: it is cultural death, and academic rigor mortis will assuredly and swiftly follow if we allow a deftness at ping-pong and an ability to rattle a seductive collection box to rank with an outline knowledge of Irish history; yet a mere outline, by current standards, would be considerably more than most teenagers are now leaving school with, and that is almost nothing.
Great War
For decades there was a systematic and almost totalitarian falsification of Irish history, which occluded the hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who served in the Great War. There's no evidence, despite the welcome change in government policy towards the Irish dead of the Great War, that the historical reality is reflected in the Leaving Cert syllabus. Did a single teacher in this country tell his or her students that this week fell the anniversary of the death in 1915 of the youngest British soldier to be killed in the Great War, 14-year-old John Condon, of the Royal Irish Regiment, from Waterford? Did a single teacher know? And even more to the point, with three months of hols a-coming, did just one teacher even care?
At least the contrived ignorance of the past was buttressed by some knowledge about national events of that time. Even that, though steeped in republican mythologising, was based on some historical truths and lay alongside the concealed history, which was occasionally visible from it. It was infinitely better than the ignorance of today, which is penetrated not by those paid to do the job, but by the occasional showbiz searchlight beaming its myths from Hollywood, even as pupils learn about charity fundraising and penalty shootouts.