Do we understand what the Irish education system is doing to our young people?

Smartphones, the headlines keep warning us, are destroying a generation of young people. The concerns are no doubt justified, but I can’t help wondering if they aren’t also overshadowing wider issues in education. I suspect that historians of the future will look more at our current exam culture, for instance, and deem it all a bit weird. In Ireland, as elsewhere, teaching has to a large extent become a product of the exam system: what we teach is what is examinable, and the “best” teachers are perceived to be those who know how to wring every last mark out of a candidate’s answer paper, those who can game the marking schemes, where a student’s instinct, flair, precocity and even creativity are all sidelined in the interests of transparency and consistency.
Every teacher knows the glazed look that spreads across the faces in today’s classrooms if material is introduced that is unlikely to come up on the Leaving Certificate paper. Because such exams are no longer designed to evaluate knowledge or critical thinking, but to rank and sort students for third level. More and more, the key to being successful in this system is constant monitoring. In the UK a student “flight path” is created to predict what grades a student will achieve when they leave school, a prediction that is then broken into smaller steps to track the achievement of goals over an entire school career.
I started teaching at second level in 1992, when technology in the classroom consisted of wheeling in the TV trolley to show a grainy video of a Royal Shakespeare Society production of King Lear or using an overhead projector to dazzle the class with handwritten notes on transparent sheets. In the years since then I’ve frequently stepped in and out of mainstream education. Each time I re-entered the classroom, the use of technology had increased. Initially, there was healthy debate around this. Computerised record keeping, PowerPoint, YouTube and the occasional use of iPads were all welcomed and of obvious benefit. But for the vast majority of the time, talk and chalk, books and pens, were still the norm.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, however, when all learning went online in the fraught lead-up to the cancelled 2020 Leaving Certificate, there has been not only an exponential increase in the use of technology in schools, but also very little discussion around it, apart from the continuing debate about smartphones.
It’s quite likely I would never have managed to get to university, never mind into teaching, within the education system as it now exists. I was an utterly unregulated, erratic learner. I went off on tangents, always reading books at the cost of homework, studying in bursts and then dossing away a few weeks. In sixth year, I attended public lectures in the National Gallery and a friend and I even made it into the Goethe Institute for a free glass of wine one dull evening, as she was thinking about studying German when she left school. Yes, it was a bit het up come May, with the Leaving Certificate looming, but I look at students now – the motivated ones, in schools and study halls for 10 hours a day, conforming to their flight plan – and I don’t envy them.
This year’s Leaving Certificate Shakespeare play is again King Lear and no doubt students are already scrolling TikTok for predictions about what questions might come up on the paper in June. I wonder, though, if any have pondered just how relevant the play is to the world of predictions, scores and points that they find themselves in. Like them, instead of taking time out to reflect on its meaning at a crucial juncture in life, Lear is consumed with calculating, not CAO points, obviously, but love. “Which of you,” he demands of his daughters, “shall we say doth love us most?” The old fool thinks that he has crunched the numbers and discovered an equation for happiness:
Numbers are what all our systems, including our education system, run on. We live in a world that is oiled by quantification. How many views you gather, likes you attract, steps you take, shares you manage, points you’re awarded, euros you accumulate. In an increasingly chaotic world, there’s something seductively orderly about numbers.
What a shame that a reliance on them, as in King Lear, can lead to disorder and the loss of everything once valued. In the great desire for an equitable and consistent system of assessment, we may be in danger of trimming away the most meaningful aspects of the curriculum for young people – the mystery and irreducibility of certain knowledge – and replacing them with affectless, bland, overly curated material that presumes a passive recipient and is more suited to … well, the parameters of software. The loss may be of individual, independent intelligence. A human being, and particularly one that is still growing, is not merely a set of data. To be human is to be faulty, to have personality, to play, to make mistakes, to goof off and daydream, to have a misaligned trajectory, not a flight path.
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Two reports on the use of technology in schools stand out as important. The Ratoath Report, January 2020, was commissioned as a result of parent dissatisfaction with the use of iPads by students in a school in Co Meath. It identified a litany of problems associated with the manner and extent of their use and it resulted in the purchase of iPads for incoming first years being cancelled. A year earlier, a report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company on the performance of 15-year-old students across Europe had concluded that giving students access to iPads, laptops or ebooks in the classroom appeared to have damaged their learning. Quite likely these would have been the starting points for a bigger conversation, but for the onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the emergency that followed, short-term decisions were made, undoubtedly in the best interest of maintaining connections between school and home. But the pandemic is over. We have neither renewed the conversation nor reviewed our long-term strategy on the use of technology in education, and many schools are in danger of becoming locked into decisions made in a time of crisis.
In the meantime, while we chatter about the Minister for Education’s recent proposal to introduce a smartphone ban in secondary schools, rates of school absenteeism have shot up since the pandemic, artificial intelligence is developing further and faster than expected, and our exam culture seems increasingly like a deliberate propagation of a utilitarian ideology that is nonetheless handed to students as if it is gold, indulging them in the delusion that what they’re learning is all that needs to be known. We may imagine that we understand what we’re doing with this kind of education model – separating the wheat from the chaff – but do we understand what it’s doing to our young people?
In his bestselling book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt laid the blame for what he terms a teenage mental health crisis squarely at the door of smartphone use, referring to social media as a social trap: everyone is compelled to be on it because everyone is on it. He put the current astronomical levels of anxiety down to the elimination of a play-based childhood. He may well be right. But solutions to complex problems are never simple. Andrew Przybylski, professor of human behaviour and technology at Oxford University, has said that the headline-grabbing proclamation by Ormiston Academies Trust that they intend banning smartphones in their 42 schools across England was barely worth the paper it was written on and that what we should be doing instead is holding tech companies to account.
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Driven insane by having his own calculations turned against him, and left with nothing, Lear finally cries out in that great outburst that marks the beginning of his insight, “O, reason not the need!” It is a decisive shift, because he is being forced at last, though too late, to reflect on the emptiness of his efforts to measure love in numbers.
It’s an emptiness that the Leaving Certificate points system – that lottery that has outdone itself in recent years, with students who achieved the maximum still not attaining their desired course – has turned into an annual fetish whose reverberations rumble on far into September every year, before pausing to harvest the new crop of incoming sixth years. But try explaining to students that there is no inherent value assigned by the CAO to any particular course, that it’s purely a matter of demand, and you’ll hit blank stares. High points = good course. Lower points = not so good course. Nothing in here about desire or passion or interest or aptitude, just a crude numbers game.
Cathy Sweeney’s debut novel, Breakdown, is published by W&N. She is a former English teacher.