I’ve been doing a lot of thinking on the education system, my place in it and my feeling towards it. As well as thinking about it, people have started talking about it. The Google vice president of Global Ad Operations in Ireland John Herlihy has said recently that he wants to see a:
Recasting of the Leaving Cert with less emphasis on rote learning, a greater focus on producing nimble and flexible graduates with a variety of foreign languages, and a new concentration on raising standards in maths and science.[1]
To be honest, he is the only person I’ve heard speaking some sense on the matter. He has put forward exactly the problem with the education system in Ireland, the fact that the largest focus is on rote learning of things that will be relatively useless in future, like quotes out of Hamlet. Of course, how could we expect anyone in the department to know any better or even have the power to change anything if they did? They haven’t grown up with the internet as I have, but they live with it every day. Yet they appear to be unable to understand that this is what a normal day consists of for many people across the world. The internet has made rote learning unnecessary to an extent. Don’t misread those words and think that I am suggesting that we don’t need to be able to spell, have a decent vocabulary and do mental arithmetic because I am not. But I for one don’t need to know Hamlet quotes off hand, or even know something more practical like physics definitions off hand, because in the time it takes me to remember it I could have gotten a definition, complex or in simple English, from a reputable source on the internet.
To go with this rote learning, we’re afraid of failure. I watched the particularly amazing speech “Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity” from TED 2006[2], and I think he brought up some very valid points. We are, well I at least, am afraid of failure. It’s drilled into our minds from primary school that if we don’t sit down and focus on our studies that we will get nowhere in life. I don’t know about others, but certainly when I was a child I thought all homeless people were the ones who had dropped out of school at an early age and just couldn’t get along in life because of it. How was I to know the truth? This is how the world was portrayed to me.
Now I am older and I am left in a state of confusion as to whether the Leaving Certificate is just an obstacle in the way of me getting on in life, something to be seen as a means to an end, rather than an education. Of course if this is what’s portrayed as failure by society and the education system I am going to avoid it at all cost, but it was never the entire truth. I think there is no greater demonstration of this fear than the rather odd behaviour of Leaving Certificate students coming up to exam time. They can’t be seen on the streets at all, they’re all locked up in their rooms studying frantically.
More importantly the fear is most probably exacerbated by the fact that this exam is the product of up to 14 years of your education. It determines how good you have become at playing the system, how many Hamlet essays you have learned off, or whether you happened to remember that particular physics definition at the right moment of the exam and not 20 seconds after you’ve sealed the paper in that officious looking envelope.
The final issue that I will highlight in the system here is the Department of Education itself. Every time something negative happens they just bury their head in the sand. They even bury their head in the sand about problems before they arise. It often occurs that schools look for guidance from the Department on an issue and they Department will just fob them off and say it’s up to the board of management in a school to decide on these matters, despite the board of management seeking guidance. This is endemic throughout the Irish government and various semi-state/former semi-state organisations.
I think an ideal would be a complete overhaul of the education system, from junior infants to Leaving Certificate. Unfortunately this change would be so massive that the whole culture of those in the Department of Education would have to change, and that’s not going to happen over night. More so, it would possibly devalue the current qualifications of people who have sat and will sit the Leaving Cert, which would include me and be overwhelmingly negative. There is no quick fix, but going forward we need to change.
I will get around to posting my solution to this at some stage, but I have to work through it completely first to ensure there are no gaping holes!
Footnotes:
[1] — O’Flynn, Sean. “How Ireland dumbed down.” Irish Times 6 March 2010. 12 March 2010 <http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2010/0306/1224265696868.html>.
[2] — Robinson, Ken. “Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity.” TED 2006 Feb 2006. 12 March 2010 <http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html>.
