Irish Teacher: Am I proud of the system I work within? No, it’s still narrow and brutal

Jennifer Horgan says we need a revolution in education

Jennifer Horgan. Picture: Larry Cummins

My friend shared something last week that I’m still thinking about.

She’s recently discovered audiobooks.

‘I love them. I get straight into the story now, without having to do all that work. I get it, I get why you loved reading when we were younger. Reading made me feel anxious. It was just too hard.’

My friend is dyslexic, but she didn’t know that when we were teenagers. She’s also highly intelligent and empathetic.

We’d met for lunch, but it rolled into dinner, as it does with old friends. She talked some more about her relationship with school and reading. She described being a teenager and wanting to avoid me and my university friends because we talked about books a lot; she worried that she’d come across as stupid.’

Listening to her, a small, dark voice in my head piped up.

‘You did think that didn’t you? You thought she was less intelligent than you, that you were more academic. She was good with people, remember? She was good with her hands, but she was never a deep thinker like you.’

My stomach flipped, remembering all the nonsense I believed back then. But it’s not surprising. I was the product of a system that rank ordered students in terms of their ability to read, retain and regurgitate, without any supports for people who were different. I was the product of the CAO points system. We were trained to see each other as competitors. We were trained to judge and categorise one another.

How different is the system now? Does the system support the one in four children with additional needs well enough? Do we celebrate them as much as we celebrate the neurotypical children? As a teacher, am I proud of the system I work within?

No. I’m not.

It’s still narrow and brutal, and it makes too many children feel stupid every single day.

I spoke with Mary Moran after my chat with my friend. Mary has been working with dyslexic children since 1986. She worries about the impact of low reading ages on young people, particularly on boys.

‘These students are not less intelligent, they’re neurologically different. They often make brilliant architects and engineers because they’ve an ability to see finished products. Employers like Google and Facebook often seek them out. Their brains work differently and so they need a structured literacy programme from a young age. Girls wear their dyslexia better than boys, they plod along, but boys get angry. How many of our prisons are filled with men who can’t read?’

I ask her if things are improving.

‘Young teachers are far more interested in helping these children, but schools are using sprinklings of phonics and pieces of programmes. Teachers need to be given more direction and all schools should use a structured literacy programme that goes beyond first class. Dyslexic children need those stepping-stones all the way up. Then they’ll develop into perfectly good readers and once they can read, that’s it. They can fully access the curriculum. They can do maths because they can read the questions. If we did this better, did it consistently across schools, we would need less resource in later years.’

As a secondary teacher I’d also like the broader system to change too. It’s hard to support students once they go past a certain age. The vast majority sit the traditional Leaving Cert and it’s packed with curricular demands, all assuming high levels of literacy. Schools don’t have the time or funding to catch these young people up.

If our assessments were more diverse, uncoupled from third level, more children would fare better, but as a country we’re a long way off that kind of conversation. We were promised a Citizens' Assembly on education by our current government. Too few have noticed that it hasn’t happened. Education is low down on our priority list.

Mary Moran is worried that things won’t improve by the time she retires so she’s keen to ‘make some noise.’

We might not care enough to listen. We might continue to ignore children in favour of maintaining the status quo. This week Donal O'Keeffe reports that nationally, 96,759 children are awaiting therapy. A lack of support means a lack of access to education. So many families are suffering, but the rest of us seem content to carry on, telling ourselves we’re okay because we’re the right kind of clever. Our national voice on education is the exact same one I heard in my head back in 1995.

Thirty years ago, audio books were unheard of. Our education system needs a similar shake-up. It needs a revolution.