At times of extreme stress, I have a recurring nightmare that I am about to sit my Leaving Cert, and that I have to cram all the learning required into some impossibly short time, like overnight, writes Breda O'Brien.
I mentioned this casually once at a talk I was giving, and was amazed when people of all ages nodded and smiled, confirming that they had similar nightmares. It gives one pause to realise that one exam has furnished successive generations with ample material for bad dreams.
The reason this nightmare crosses generations is because students today sit an exam which is substantially the same as the one sat by their parents, or in some instances, their grandparents. This is not to say that there has not been reform and innovation in the senior cycle education. New syllabi have been introduced. Transition year has been implemented, and the Leaving Cert Applied and Leaving Cert Vocational Programme are both well established, though not all schools offer these programmes.
Still, much of the change has been fragmented. Transition year is a good case in point. Many parents still do not understand the concept, and students themselves often refer to it dismissively as a "doss". A colleague of mine maintains that the reason that transition year is seen in this way is because the learning that takes place is so painless that students do not realise that they are learning. Pleasure and fun could not possibly be associated with education. Learning means six hours study a night, grinds and caffeine addiction.
Transition year is optional, so many students never experience its benefits. It also suffers from the fact that it is so utterly different to the rest of what students experience at second level. Transition year drops from the sky for a brief year and then disappears again. How wonderful it would be if the much-mooted reform of the Leaving Cert made use of the substantial insights gained by teachers in transition year into curriculum development and innovative learning.
The reality is that any reform of the Leaving Cert is fraught with difficulties. It is easy to rehearse the flaws in the system. The following is just a sample of those flaws. Students experience inhuman levels of stress. The exam favours those with good memories and the ability to synthesise and represent information, at the expense of those with different abilities.
The grinds industry is a direct result of the narrow focus of the exam, because grinds represent stripped-down teaching ruthlessly centred on passing an exam. However, all teachers are forced into some degree of teaching with the exam in mind rather than teaching a subject, much less attempting to focus on the personal development of the individual.
Innovative teaching methods are very difficult to implement in a system that is so focused on a terminal exam. Any attempts to move outside tight parameters will be met with the suspicious query, "Will this come up in the exam?" It is far easier to get good grades in some subjects than others, which canny students discover very early on.
The whole system is distorted by the fact that it is used as an entrance exam for third level, even though many students do not go on to third level. It is very interesting to see the way parents change by sixth year, even if they start out in first year idealistically wanting a rounded education for their children. Non-academic subject teachers have respectable numbers of parents wanting to see them at parent-teacher meetings in first year. By Leaving Cert, a teacher in a non-academic subject can look forward to getting a lot of copies corrected at parent-teacher meetings as they sit alone, while their colleagues in French or Maths despair at the length of the queues facing them.
Continuous assessment appears in many ways preferable to a terminal exam.
However, if it is continuous assessment in an essentially unchanged system, it merely spreads the stress. It has another major disadvantage. At the moment, most teachers are perceived to be their students' allies in a flawed system. If teachers were part of the system, with the power to determine some of their students' results, teachers would become the enemy. And in a small country, the opportunities for distortions caused by being related to, or close friends of a student's parent, would be enormous.
The case for reform is often presented as a black-and-white choice between continuous assessment and a more traditional exam. However, there is a need to change more than the timing of assessment. Senior cycle education could include more use of project-based learning, and greater use of the opportunities provided by information technology. Wider links with the community could be examined, such as the extension of the work experience provided in transition year so that it is more structured and capable of meaningful certification. At the present, our system is almost entirely weighted towards the acquisition of knowledge. There is very little recognition of the development of skills which enable a person to learn and to be a constructive citizen.
Of course, there are several problems with attempting any kind of reform. The first is that parents tend to prefer the divil they know. Students too can be surprisingly conservative. Secondly, employers will be very cautious about forfeiting the simplicity of Leaving Cert results.
Thirdly, educational reform requires a huge amount of goodwill from teachers. Teachers have faced a barrage of criticism, including snide comments about what exactly punters are getting for their money in giving teachers benchmarking. This shows sublime ignorance of the kind of "change fatigue" being experienced by teachers.
Over the last decade, teachers have implemented not one but many new programmes and syllabi, often without adequate resources and in-service training. They are going to be deeply sceptical about ambitious programmes of reform, and it is hard to blame them. Rickety buildings, poor facilities and cutbacks on so-called concessionary teachers who teach important subjects, all provide more reasons for cynicism than enthusiasm. Yet if given cast-iron guarantees of well-thought out measures backed with the necessary resources, there would be no more eager advocates of reform than teachers, because, more than anyone, they witness the damage done by the current system.