Secret Teacher: A love of learning is threatened by the Leaving Cert

As a teacher, I watch students fall in love every day. With music. With maths. With circuits. With baking. Instead of nurturing that love, far too often, we threaten it.

I fell in love for the first time when I was thirteen. I’ve been in the relationship ever since and I don’t see it ending anytime soon. Like every romantic, I imagine my love going on forever.

It began on a Tuesday evening in December 1993. My Speech and Drama teacher was at the top of the table, the glow of the lamp casting suitably theatrical shadows across the posters on the wall.

I could hear the branches of the trees scraping against the glass outside.

She leaned closer, whispered: ‘Wilde wrote the entire thing from his prison cell, got a page every day from the guards. He called it De Profundis: out of the depths.’

My love of literature began in that small rectangular room, away from school, from my parents and my friends. It was just for me.

I listened to that magical woman and the spell she cast made my life immeasurably better. Particularly when I find things hard, words offer me comfort. Something clicks back into place for me and my soul settles. I feel so lucky to have found her — what a gift she gave me.

I now spend my working life either teaching English or writing. But this love of mine, like all loves, has had its ups and downs. Certainly, having babies got in the way. I read little beyond instructions and recipes for a good five years and wrote even less. But the biggest obstacle came earlier — when I was eighteen years old. And I sat the Leaving.

I drank two cans of Red Bull to ease my nerves that day. I ended up jumping between questions, second-guessing myself, writing too obscurely, without focus. When I checked my script again later that summer, disappointed with my mark, I could barely make out my own scrawl. Back in 1999, I was made to believe that the grade I got in English accurately reflected my overall ability in the subject. I believed the hype on the radio and in the newspapers. ‘This exam means everything,’ I told my eighteen-year-old self.

It didn’t.

But it took me until my mid-thirties to get over it. It sounds ridiculous, but the Leaving Cert made me feel like a phoney. The world had evaluated me fairly and anonymously, and I had come up short.

Real learning, a love of learning, is threatened in that environment. I know now that education should be about developing the individual to become themselves, to find their passion, their love. I believe we all have one. 

As a teacher, I watch students fall in love every day. With music. With maths. With circuits. With baking. Instead of nurturing that love, far too often, we threaten it. We surround it with a high-stakes narrative.

We drown out that initial spark. A 2019 survey by Studyclix, of more than 3500 second-level students, found that more than half of Leaving Cert students had suffered a physical or mental health issue because of our exam cycle. How is this acceptable to us?

My own experience of the Leaving lingers. But I know countless others who have walked the wrong road in life because they set out concentrating on what a narrow system dictated, determined by a hierarchy, bound to a specific value system.

I also know that my story of a bruised heart is nothing compared to the stories of those who face the Leaving Cert from a position of less economic advantage — or those who have additional needs. We describe our final exams as a ‘rite of passage’ and ‘brutal but fair.’

But the odds are stacked, and the dice are loaded before any pens hit the paper. It’s no surprise that without the traditional Leaving last year, we saw a rise in students from Deis schools entering third-level courses, from 57 per cent in 2019 to 63.5 per cent in 2020.

I recoil at Norma Foley’s blind devotion to the Leaving and I genuinely can’t believe how long she has kept students in the dark over this year’s plans.

I shouldn’t be so shocked. We relieve pressure on our institutions by keeping things the same for everyone. It’s never been about what’s best for students.

I wish we could stop defining education for young people and let them take the lead and follow their hearts instead. I wish students could narrow their focus from the age of sixteen, reduce their subjects and not have to compete with every other learner.

And yes, of course, they’d have to sit an assessment of some kind, but the types of assessment could vary. Students wouldn’t feel the weight of the country’s expectations on them. They wouldn’t listen to their papers being dissected in the media. They would have time to focus on their chosen subject, no longer stretching themselves across vastly different disciplines.

By the age of sixteen, students know what they love, and what they’d like to pursue next. Simon Harris seems to be the one politician moving in the right direction, tackling ‘snobbish attitudes’ to learning and asking families to look beyond the CAO system. We need to listen to him.

On this Valentine’s Day, I’d like us to remember that love can exist at the centre of learning.

Wilde compares falling in love to someone singing ‘a song only you can hear.’

Imagine that — each student hearing their own music in our schools.