It is the very simplicity of it that frightens me. Hit the right number and your future is assured, your family status bolstered and your self-esteem enhanced. Fall short of that number and your options diminish, you overhear family members making defensive noises on the telephone and your self-esteem goes through the floor.
No teenager chooses to be measured by the numbers in this brutal way. Some adults do: they're called politicians. But when a politician makes the decision to be numerically measured, every three to four years, it's a free choice made in adulthood. For teenagers, there are no such freedoms. There's the points race and that's about it.
Coming back from holiday this summer, I noticed for the first time that if, in August, you ask the parent of a 17 or 18-year-old how the young man or woman is doing, the answer you nearly always get starts from the Leaving Cert and its points.
We don't imagine, when the questioner asks after our 18-yearold son, that the questioner wants to know how tall he's got, how witty and affectionate he is, how good he is at fixing the car.
We don't assume when asked about our teenage daughter that questioners want us to tell them how she's grown out of her allover-black period and is wearing colours again, how she can now be civil, for days on end, to both parents simultaneously. No, we figure the questioner wants to know how he/she did in the Leaving Cert.
In business terms, "if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist". But in human terms, what you cannot measure may be at least as important. Altruism, initiative, openness, self-control, empathy and the capacity to make others laugh don't figure in the points table, but when we select a friend or partner, most of us tend to look for these factors rather than for a 500-plus score in the Leaving Cert.
It may be said that none of these "fuzzy" traits can be taught in school, but this isn't borne out by the experience of primary school educators in Japan, which involves pre-teens in practical work around the school, supervised by other students.
The objectives of this are varied. The experience of setting standards for and with peers leads to independent thinking and a sense of responsibility within the community, as opposed to growing up with the elitist belief that "there are people whose job it is to clean the school".
Isn't it fascinating how readily we dismiss such factors in selecting people for professions like medicine, despite growing evidence that the increasing litigiousness of patients is greatly exacerbated by the failure of some within the medical profession to stress rapport-building?
If something goes wrong with a hospital procedure, the consultant most likely to be sued is the one who hasn't listened carefully and courteously to the patient. Yet we pick our candidates for medicine based only on their points. Never mind the humanity, see the exam results.
While the Irish educational system is now one of the best, it is above all best at perpetuating cycles of privilege and inculcating ways of valuing people based only on exams.
There is nothing wrong with competition, but the points race doesn't start from the same baseline and free education has not changed that substantially. If you come from a home where TV is the constant child-minder, where there are no books and where there is generational unemployment, free education is unlikely to get you to the top of the points race.
Of course there are exceptions. Of course there are exceptional teachers. But exceptions merely underline the generality.
The general picture is that, notwithstanding the Applied Leaving Cert, the points system is the first stage in a simultaneous homogenisation and stratification of Irish society. Homogenising happens every August. The individuality is wiped out of Leaving Cert students and they are reduced to a commonality of panic, parental pressure and peer pressure. The release of the tension often finds expression in "parties", which are little more than the application to the pain of large amounts of cheap alcohol.
Stratification is made by those capacities and talents valued by our society and those very decidedly not valued. Our society will find you interesting if you are an electronics engineer coming up with innovative software while in your early 20s. It is much less likely to find you interesting if what drives you is a practical, hands-on skill.
Newspapers knows that what is interesting to an increasingly business-literate readership are the men (and very occasionally women) whose portraits gaze out from business sections. The movers and shakers. It is heresy to suggest, as I do, that there are other movers and shakers who might be just as interesting.
Let me give you an example. As I drive to Dublin once a week, I am often struck by the radical change in Dublin's skyline. In the last two years, it isn't just that new buildings have gone up. It is that, no matter where you look, the city is straddled by great, single-legged cranes. I have yet to read a profile of a crane driver, whose view is so detached from street level and who is now metaphorically building the new Ireland.
The main problem about criticising the points system is that it is most frequently judged as a guaranteed producer of the right kind of workforce. This doesn't mean that we are turning out thousands of young people with strong language skills, because we're still falling short in that area. What it does mean is that we are producing highly-competent ants to go and work in the ant-hills of the multinational electronics and chemical companies.
It is easy to identify shortfalls in the points system; much less easy to work out at which point it is effective to break into a cycle of deprivation or establish which group can be most effective in counterbalancing the elitist assumptions of the majority.
But we should not underestimate the negative impact those assumptions can have on the lives of young people. It's a long time since I taught very young children, but one of the things I noticed then has not changed: children cop on extremely quickly that the big kudos goes to the kids who are good exam-passers, good points-getters.
If you're not a good exampasser, if your score is low, you know you are less valued by at least some of the adults who shape your life.
Some experts on child molestation believe that the inculcation of high self-esteem is the best possible protection against paedophiles. The court cases of the last couple of years indicate that we need to be wary of laying our values on the line in such a way as to increase the vulnerability of school-goers.
Just what a Minister for Education, or even his commission, can do, I don't know. But I do know that a comparatively young Minister will not be thanked if all he does is tweak a little here or there. It is time our education system reflected more than yuppie values.