Junior Cert

“Our Victorian ideology places a number of subjects at the apex of our status and prestige pyramid”

Speaker’s Corner
Áine Ryan

EACH time I do my Junior Cert it gets harder! It must be an age thing. After all, it is over three decades since I first did it. Back then it was called the Intermediate Certificate; remember all the silly jokes about doing the ‘Inter Course’. Cringe.
I should explain that when I say I’m about to do the Junior Cert for the fourth time, I am speaking metaphorically. I’m sure any parent out there who takes more than a passing interest in their offsprings’ formal education will get my drift.
Basically, my youngest is set to sit her first State exams in a fortnight’s time – and while I won’t be exactly sitting in the exam hall with her, I might as well be.
And no, before you jump to the conclusion that I am an over-the-top parent who pushes her children to their zenith in the points race, I don’t. As far as I’m concerned the so-called points system is a load of baloney and should be abolished. Not only is it elitist and exclusive, it clearly fails to serve our post-Celtic Tiger knowledge driven economy. Notwithstanding the lengthiness of our tribunals and the building focus of our recent boom, why is the demand for college places for law and architecture still so high? 
So high, in fact, that last year our little darlings needed to achieve between 500 and 600 points to study law or architecture. On the other hand, if they had chosen chemical engineering, food science or biochemistry, they could have dossed a lot more and gained entry to their course with a mere 300-400 points.
While I am not interested in arguing the relative merits of the above subjects, I categorically contend that they all appear – cursorily – to be of equal importance in our contemporary highly-developed world.
It seems though that Irish society is still suffused by a rather Victorian ideology that places such subjects as medicine, law and architecture at the apex of our status and prestige pyramid. And while I wouldn’t go quite as far as the French revolutionaries, I believe all those silly gowns and wigs that our legal profession like to dress up in should be given the guillotine. Call it a symbolic bow towards egalitarianism. But I digress.
Essentially, our education system hasn’t changed that dramatically since this writer’s foray on the secondary school system. Of course, it is no longer dominated by Catholic religious orders. Nor by the bata or the strap. However, the Playboy of the Western World, Animal Farm and King Lear are all still on the curriculum.
Admittedly, our system has become more ‘student friendly’ with its on-line exam sites, its plethora of revision books, exam papers, crammer schools and courses. However, it still demands learning by rote – French verbs, an tuiseal ginideach, algebraic theorems, poetry and drama quotations, dinner recipes, the elements of the reproductive system.
Okay, certainly this generation’s students are more au fait with the above aspect of biology than their relatively innocent parents, whose teenage world teetered between the fading influences of the Child of Mary Sodality and the liberated images of women burning their bras.
But does that make our teenage children more able for the adult world of the university campus? (Note: The movie Super Bad provides a colourful array of warning signs.)  
And does the fact that they interact in a global village where knowledge of just about anything is stored at their fingertips – rather than in dusty library shelves – make this process any easier? Unquestionably not.   
Our educational system is the primary and formal method of gaining knowledge that informs one’s decisions, choices, futures. Its examination methods and outcomes measure both our economic and social worth and, more subtly and importantly, our sense of self-esteem.
Growing up, reaching puberty, becoming independent is all part of this complex process. It’s not always easy for the teenager – or the protective parent.