College points system corrupts the true meaning of education
I’m sure you’ve been reading, as I have, all the talk in the papers over the past couple of weeks about the end of the points race. For the first time since the system was introduced, there seemed, this year, to be enough college places to go around, and the points requirements for many courses actually fell. Population trends are suggesting it may be some time, if ever, before students face the same pressures for points as they did in the recent past. I’ve even read some suggestions that third-level colleges may have to go out hunting for students in the future.
Well, now’s the time to act. I don’t want to read in another couple of years that points have started to rise again and that students once more are going to be subjected to the absurd and anti-education pressures of this system, the crudest possible manifestation of the law of supply and demand.
In 1916 Patrick Pearse wrote his famous attack on the education system which was then in operation. He called it the “murder machine”, and wrote: “Education should foster; this education is meant to repress. Education should inspire; this education is meant to tame. Education should harden; this education is meant to enervate.” He could have been writing about the points system, which, year after year, reduces everything which ought to challenge and inspire young people to a meaningless hunt for enough points to enable them to continue in education.
In a lecture he gave last year, Professor Donald Fitzmaurice of UCD compared the points race in education to institutional child abuse. In his lecture he said it was time for an honest debate on the need for reform of the educational system in Ireland, “because”, he said, “if the be all and end all of Irish education is to get enough points for a place in third level, then education itself goes out the door”.
He went on to warn that if we don’t do something to stop the abuse of young people through the points system, people who care about education and how our young people are being prepared for life, will be asked in the not too distant future why they remained silent when they should have spoken up and demanded that something be done. Just as we ask now how it was that nobody shouted stop, or blew the whistle on the physical and sexual abuse of children all those years ago, at some time in the future we may be asked to explain why no one stopped the educational abuse which is going on today.
It was an interesting lecture, for a number of reasons. First, Dr Fitzmaurice appears (on his website, anyway) to be a young man, who presumably got to where he is today by means of the points system. He is professor of nanotechnology, a branch of science regarded as being right at the cutting edge. Don’t ask me to explain it — I just about know what H2O is — but I do know that it’s all about working in nanometres (a nanometre is a thousandth of a millionth of a metre, so it’s pretty small). He is also a member of the Government’s Council for Science, Technology and Innovation, a body that numbers among its functions the pressing need to increase the number of young Irish people taking up science as a career.
In short, this is a man you might expect to have a vested interest in the points system. Clearly, however, he, and countless other educationalists, have deep reservations about what the points system does to young people, and how it effectively corrupts the entire approach to education.
Is that an exaggeration? I don’t think so. Education is possibly the only gift we can give our children which sustains itself over their entire lifetimes. It’s also the best possible investment we can make in them. You know that ad that talks about the value of giving blood — a gift that costs you nothing, yet is priceless to the recipient? Well, education may not cost nothing to give, but in every other sense it’s like giving life blood.
BUT there’s another side to it. I’ve never been one of those people who believed in educating young people for the sake of our economy. But there is no doubt that the single most important investment we can make in the future of the Irish economy is to ensure that as many people as possible are educated to the highest standard possible. In educating young people, and educating them well, we’re not just investing in their future, we’re investing in our own.
The points system was established because of a widespread belief that favouritism was rampant in the way young people were admitted to college and the professions, especially to the medical profession.
Up to the time of the introduction of the system, admission to third level was based on the achievement of a minimum standard in the Leaving Certificate (two honours or Cs, when I was a lad), and in some cases on an interview (this is where favouritism came in).
But does anyone seriously believe the key professions are more open, inclusive places now than they were? How many doctors, lawyers, architects, and engineers have you met who came from an economically disadvantaged background?
Does anyone really believe the points system has helped in any degree to overcome the really fundamental inequalities in education, all of which start at much younger ages? It hasn’t.
It never had anything to do with fairness or equity. It may have been designed with that in mind, but it functioned instead as a means of rationing education resources. If the system didn’t provide enough courses, places, or even classrooms, the points system simply raised the bar to limit the number of students capable of being admitted. In the process, it has helped to brutalise a few generations of young people, and pervert the meaning of education. If it ever had any value as a system, it has long outlived that value.
In Pearse’s writings on education, which I referred to earlier, he said: “… The education of a child is greatly a matter, in the first place, of congenial environment and, next to this, of a wise and loving watchfulness whose chief appeal will be to the finest instincts of the child itself … Education has not to do with the manufacture of things, but with fostering the growth of things. And the conditions we should strive to bring about in our education system are not the conditions favourable to the rapid and cheap manufacture of readymades, but the conditions favourable to the growth of living organisms.”
Because of demographics, we seem to have the space right now to think about that. Isn’t it time we did it?
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