Caroline O'Donoghue: 'Columnists love writing about the Leaving Cert. I’m no exception'
Recently, TDs have been knocking heads together about how they plan to change the Leaving Cert to reflect not just the limitations of academia during Covid, but the inequalities of it.
The fact that not every student has had equal access to a computer; that not every student has parents who are able to go through coursework with them; and plainly, not every student has the ideal space and quiet for learning.
How do you prepare for your English Paper II if you have a clutch of younger siblings squawling in the next room? How are those students meant to compete with only child Ophelia with her own Macbook Pro?
Columnists love writing about the Leaving Cert. I’m no exception. Birth, death and the Leaving Cert: three things that everyone in Ireland will have to think about eventually, and the advantage of the Leaving Cert is that everyone has very clear memories of it.
Like most adults in Ireland, I have sat the Leaving Cert. But unlike most adults, I am now paid to think about it all the time. I write novels for teenagers, you see, and right now my imaginary teenagers are going through their Leaving Cert year.
I’ve been fairly rigorous about researching this. I have been on the CAO to check how many points you now need for medicine; I have checked the number of places in very specific Trinity courses; I have spent hours reading through brochures for tech institutes and art college, to see which my fictional teens might apply for. I’ve even spent a fair amount of time looking through past papers.
The result is that I have spent all of the last year semi-convinced that I will have to take my Leaving again. I dream about the Leaving Cert quite frequently, now.
I have drawn no new conclusions from this research, except to confirm what we already know: that the Leaving Cert is horrible. That it is a terrible thing to put teenagers through, an absolutely exorbitant amount of work and pressure, tremendously weighted in terms of who can perform well in a test-taking scenario.
I was a bad student. But more importantly, I was an extremely unhappy one. My parents, when I tell them this, are often shocked at this revelation. I expect they think I am embellishing for effect, and I sometimes ask this of myself, too. “You always seemed so content,” either my mum or dad will say. “We didn’t have much bother from you about school.” And then: “Except when you stopped going.” I started serially ditching school in Transition Year, where it didn’t feel important to go to school, and then continued the habit into fifth year, when it definitely was.
But more than that, I couldn’t master the stuff of school: I could never fill out my homework journal more than two days in a row, never had the right books for the right classes, never had a pencil case that wasn’t full of parings and dry pens.
It seemed to me like you had to remember too many things, and in too many directions: you didn’t just have to figure out chemical equations, you had to also have nice penmanship, and enough polly pockets for your ring binder, and to learn an Irish poem by heart.
I didn’t understand the people who could do it well. I still don’t. And it made me furious. The whole thing felt so desperately unfair: like I was a flying tree squirrel who was being criticised for not being an engineer.
The feedback from many teachers was, of course, that I was lazy. Laziness, carelessness, lack of respect for them and for education generally. But that wasn’t true. I tried. If I didn’t care, like they said I didn’t, then how come I felt sick every day?
In sixth year I went to a grind school, which were becoming very popular among middle class students at the time. You wore your own clothes and called the teachers by their first name, but in exchange, the teachers were absolutely frank with you about how the school was only as good as its grade point average, and that if you did badly, you were also letting the whole institution down.
I got the points I needed for University – 385, in the end – but it was one of the unhappiest years of my life, during which I got psoriasis, a case of vertigo, and suffered my first ever panic attack when the principal of said grind school accused me of cheating on a test that I had crammed to do well on.
I don’t tell you this so you’ll feel sorry for me. Everything turned out fine in the end. I tell you this because I was a girl who had everything going for me. I was middle class, I came from a nice family, and there was no limit to the resources my parents would have been willing to pour into my – or any of my sibling’s – education. And yet, the Leaving Cert felt deeply unfair to me.
Unfair because I was unsuited to school, unsuited to tests, unsuited to homework journals. Think of the deeper, more systematic ways that it’s unfair: the way it ignore class and wealth and ability. I can’t help but think, as we devise a new system for the Leaving Cert to deal with the exceptional circumstances of Covid, that we can’t strip out the whole thing and start again.
Make the makeover permanent. Covid has not created inequalities in education; it has only exposed the inequality that was already there.
