It’s parents who fail the Leaving Cert stress test – not their children

IF April is the cruellest month, then August is surely the dreariest. True, the sun might shine for a few days but not a whole lot happens. The news pipeline becomes thinner and thinner and threatens to taper off entirely.

And then suddenly it becomes choked – with stories about exams. The island has half-emptied but those left behind are kept awake by whining from every side about the injustice of the whole darned thing.

The Leaving Cert and exams, in general, were never destined to be exactly popular. Teachers have to prepare for them. Young people have to sit them. Heads meanwhile have to mediate between the two and guard their schools’ reputations in the process.

Yes, exams probably do deserve much of their bad press. No one who ever failed one positively enjoyed the experience.

But isn’t life about the bad experiences as well as the enjoyable ones? And, let’s be honest, we probably learn more from the bad ones than the good ones, don’t we?

Yet a small army seems to want to deprive us of all the bad experiences and only have good ones – as if they aren’t all just relative anyway. One person’s minor inconvenience is another’s crisis.

Am I exaggerating? Well, I know a bad hair day is not the worst thing that can happen – but in the grand scheme of things, when some people don’t know where the next meal is coming from, neither is failing an exam.

But that is the last thing any young person must be allowed to do, it seems. Three types of people tend to do well in exams – the rich, the industrious and the clever. Those who do badly are the poor, the lazy and the – let’s just say – “intellectually challenged”.

And it’s a perfectly reasonable public policy goal to try to ensure the rich are not a self-perpetuating elite – or, given that’s impossible, not entirely so. Equality of opportunity is a noble goal and one that must be striven towards.

Dangerous new concepts seem to be entering the discourse, however. Now, excuses must be found for the idle, while the daft – rich or poor – have to be persuaded they were actually clever all along.

Of course, no one admits as much. It goes without saying that everyone in the educational debate claims only to have the best interests of young people and society as a whole at the forefront of their minds. And maybe they do. But commonsense suggests other less honourable agendas are at work too. As in the climate change debate, resorting to science is frequently, well, the last resort. What do I mean? Well, the fact that no two brains are identical – which is kind of obvious – is now put forward as some knock-out punch in the debate. The female brain is different from the male brain – so let’s just scrap the Leaving Cert, why don’t we? Exams are evil because one person’s “cognitive development” is slower than another’s, right? (The latter concept seems to suggest we are all alike really: it’s just going to take some of us a millennium or two to get there).

It would be funny if it weren’t so serious. Rather than seeing exams as a difficult test, a test that requires us to struggle with and overcome our own limitations, they are transformed into insurmountable problems from which young people should be shielded as much as possible.

Rather than pushing and challenging young people to excel, we’ve increasingly come to patronise them. The idea of education as a process of stretching minds seems to have been replaced by the task of protecting students’ self-esteem. Telling people that their work is terrible or they’ve missed the point is out; complimenting them on their ‘effort’ is in – whatever the actual results are like.

Isn’t the truth, though, that if we become too sensitive to the wants and desires of teenagers at their current stage of development, the possibility of pushing them beyond that level is diminished or closed altogether?

We’re told that the criteria for admitting young people into university, and the criteria by which their work is assessed, has to be relevant and appropriate. But what we end up doing is flattering them as if they had already reached the highest standard of which they are capable. Personally, I don’t think young people are really this pathetic.

But heaven forbid anyone should ever be allowed to encounter a little bit of stress. Is it any wonder so many accept all the excuses offered as a way out of doing some work?

Actually, that’s not fair. The people who complain about the stress of exams are not usually the people sitting them but their parents and people their parents’ age: the stress of bad results, the stress of good results, the stress of exams – period (Let’s not forget the stress about the thought of being stressed either, shall we?).

Frankly, what starts as a question about an appropriate assessment system turns into an ongoing worry about teaching methods, parenting methods, the fragility of someone’s emotional state when faced with an exam and, seemingly, the end of the world as we know it.

No doubt there are some very good arguments to be had about the need to reform the exam system and the process of university admission in Ireland. But every argument put forward appears to be premised on the notion that exams should be made easier for young people, preserving their precious self-esteem – no matter what the cost is to their academic achievement. The less we expect from teenagers, the less they will deliver, however.

BUT in order to mean anything at all, assessments – exams – need to indicate that a certain standard is expected, which some will meet, some will exceed and some will fail to meet. Taking assessment outside any peer group or other social context renders it utterly meaningless.

The idea that failure should be eradicated – and exams always necessarily involve some aspect of success or failure – is based on the assumption that all of us are, or were, fragile creatures who will collapse if challenged. Nothing could be further from the truth. Only failure allows us to recognise and avoid the circumstances that led to our mistakes.

The whole point of putting us under pressure at key moments in our education is to give us the chance to show publicly what we have learnt and understood about our studies.

Without the pressure of having to explain ourselves, how can we confront the gaps in our knowledge and understanding? In my view, if we are told that we can overcome our difficulties if we keep working at it, this generally urges us on.

In educational terms, the alternative – to praise whatever students do – is likely to leave them faltering at the first hurdle which is far more demoralising.

So Education Minister Mary Coughlan might appear to be ignoring all the best advice about reforming the Leaving Cert but, by sticking to her guns, she is actually preventing a system from being devalued.

We all want to appear open-minded, but the perfect really can be the enemy of the good. Exams don’t need a health warning.