Richard Hogan: Leaving Cert fails neurodivergent students
Student preparing for Leaving Certificate
I thought I wouldn’t sleep the night before my wedding. I worried I’d be sleep-deprived all the next day. I had an image of myself — zombie-like, going through the motions — but sleep I did.
A good couple of years earlier, I had the same thought before my Leaving Certificate exam. I had the same worry — that I’d lie awake all night going over what was about to unfold the next day and be paralysed in the exam from exhaustion.
But, once again, I fell into reverie like a Hindu lamb. It is something I often think about — how does someone like Rafael Nadal sleep before a Wimbledon final? How did Usain Bolt manage his thoughts the night before an Olympic record-setting event? The more pressure that is on us to perform, the more likely it is that we struggle with sleep. And let’s be honest, the Leaving Certificate places an incredible amount of pressure on young minds. I have seen it for so long as a teacher and a clinician — students sitting in front of me, questioning the validity of their entire educational experience, wondering why they are learning the content they are learning, and questioning the fact that they have to sit passively for 8 hours a day for 12 years. They often express that they feel they are being programmed to be submissive and unquestioning. That’s an uncomfortable conversation to be involved in, but a necessary one.
We are only two days into the Leaving Certificate 2022, but the pressure on our young adults is visible to see. The points system and the immense pressure to get the desired college course has to be looked at. I’m not suggesting for a moment that all students should just get what they want, but we do have to look at the points system and how we allocate college places. There is a residual hangover in the system from the accumulative grading utilised during the pandemic. And it has inflated points for college courses. I meet so many talented young adults, who struggle to find a place in such a rigid system. I have to say, as I get older I find myself questioning the formal education experience in this country.
I wonder about what we are really teaching them, in this vast, rote learning exam. Of course, rote learning has its place, we need to be able to learn things by heart and recall them whenever we need them, but the level of rote learning for the Leaving Cert has often struck me as bizarre. There is very little consideration for neurodiversity. What happens if you learn in a different way, and learning off chunks of material doesn’t suit your particular style of learning? Well, our current system gives students the message that they are not intelligent. If you don’t learn like the rest, you are not like the rest and so therefore you are not as bright as all the rest.
Immanuel Kant, the famous German philosopher said that, if the premise of your argument is incorrect, then all the conclusions you arrive at will be false. I can’t think of a more false premise than the one that says we must all learn the same way. If that was correct, we wouldn’t have the innovation we have as a species. We come to a problem and find the solution in many different ways, which is why we have been so successful as a species, to date. So, why is the educational system so slow to take neurodiversity into account when it is thinking about the way it tests its students? Surely the old point system is in its last days. Many aspects of our society have moved on, but we are still teaching and examining students as we did decades ago. Is it not time to revamp the entire experience so that students have more control over what they learn and how they learn? Surely, when you know a particular subject isn’t going to be in your life going forward, studying it to the level of the Leaving Certificate is a waste of energy and time. I know for me, studying Irish was something that caused me a lot of bother. I needed it to go to college. But why? Now I know that has changed slightly over the years, and many people will say my sentiments about being forced to study the Irish language are unpatriotic, but I don’t agree. It wasn’t my passion or area of interest. But I had to keep going with it for 12 years. That just seems to me to be an incredible waste of energy, that could have been used to develop a skill or talent that I was actually invested in.
The Leaving Certificate exam will be over soon and this cohort of students will go off into their wonderful lives. But we have to hear their experience, get their feedback and see how we can improve the educational experience for future generations to come.
