Why the Irish education system stinks
Posted on Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 08:08 AM
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Last week the results of the Leaving Certificate here examination were published. This is the exam that Irish kids do in June as they finish their last year in secondary (high) school. The results, which arrive in August, determine which university they can get into and what course they can do, or what kind of job they can get if they decide not to go to college (presuming they can find a job, of course).
So how a youngster does in the Leaving Cert opens doors into the future -- or slams them shut. It's probably the most important exam they will do in their lives. The pressure to do well is enormous.
Competition for university places is always intense here, and it's worse than ever this year because of the depth of the Irish recession. With no jobs around even more kids are trying to get into college. What this means is that to get into even ordinary degree courses in, say, arts or business, a youngster has to get very high points.
The reason the points are so high is that we don't have enough college places for all those who want to get in, especially in particular degree courses. The more kids want to get in to a particular course in a particular university in a particular year, the higher the entry points for it will be that year. It's all worked out by the computers in the state run Central Applications Office every year.
Points for university are allotted on the basis of performance in the Leaving Cert exam. The way the system works is that the marks in a student's six best subjects in the Leaving Cert are converted into points and then added up to give an overall score.
A perfect score is 600 points (100 in each subject). To get this you need to have between 95% and 100% in each subject. Many students do seven subjects as a kind of insurance against something going wrong in one subject. But only the results from the six best subjects are counted.
To get into any of the professional degree courses, like medicine, dentistry, psychology, law and so on, you need to get around 90% in all subjects. To get into even run of the mill courses in a main university here, say a general arts degree in English and history or a basic business degree, you need to get nearly 70% in all subjects in the Leaving Cert. And we are talking here about subjects at higher (or honors) level, not ordinary level.
To achieve this level of perfection in one or two subjects is tough. To get it across all your subjects is incredibly difficult and can only be done by hours of after-school study and cramming and weekends spent in grind schools.
And that is what so many Irish kids do, turning their last two years in school, when they are 16-18 years old, into a nightmare marathon. The nightmare of the points race.
Welcome to the Irish education system. It's an absolute disgrace, a system which suits the Department of Education here and the teachers, but turns the lives of too many of our young people into a living hell.
Many kids cope, of course, and a small number even thrive on it. But for a great many it engenders feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness -- to the point where there have even been suicides.
We did away with university fees here about 30 years ago to help poorer kids get into college. It has helped to a limited level, but poor families can't afford to pay for extra tuition for the Leaving Cert, so the poor kids are now at a big disadvantage in trying to meet the required points level for entry.
We introduced the points system to avoid the situation in which kids got in because daddy was a doctor or mummy was a lawyer, and both of them knew someone on the staff in their old college who could get young Sean in even if he was as thick as a plank.
And it has done that, which is good. But the points race that has developed over the years is bad, causing huge distortion and damage in the way we educate our children.
What it means is that a lot of kids now choose Leaving Cert subjects solely on the basis of which ones they think will give them maximum points. An example would be the sciences. We urgently need to get more kids to do engineering in college, for which they should be doing physics or chemistry in the Leaving Cert.
Of the three Leaving Cert science subjects, physics, chemistry and biology, the biggest number of kids who do science take biology. Why? Because it is seen as the easiest one in which to get high points.
It may or may not be relevant to their future careers, but biology is the chosen one. And it's a similar story across other subject groups as well.
There are three core subjects that everyone has to do, Irish, English and maths. A high number of kids do ordinary level Irish as a seventh subject because they hate it and see it as useless in their future lives.
The latest trick among the families who can afford it is to pay a psychologist to say Sean has dyslexia and therefore can't do Irish. These kids (a couple of thousand of them last year) get an exemption from Irish ... but many of them then go on to study French or German!
One of the biggest failings of the Irish high school system is its inertia, its failure to change. You can do classical studies (studying ancient Greece and Rome) or Latin as Leaving Cert subjects.
But you can't do computer science. You don't need a lot of points to know that is stupid.
There are all these teenagers in Ireland (like mine) who know how to do highly complicated downloads, uploads and conversions on their computers and can play all kinds of super-complicated PlayStation games online with people in Japan or South America. But, although there are around 40 possible subjects for the Leaving Cert, computer science is not one of them.
Why? Because we don't have the teachers. And more importantly, we don't have the money to put a computer room into every school.
So the next time you hear an Irish government minister talking about the knowledge economy in Ireland and how good we are at information technology, think about that because that's the reality.
Here's another example of our failure to change -- languages. We start with the huge advantage of being native English speakers.
But Russian or Chinese would be good to study as a second language these days. Or Spanish, which is the second most spoken language in the world today (and of course of growing importance in the U.S.). Or German, since Germany is now propping up the Irish economy as well as the rest of Europe.
So how is this reflected in Irish schools? Last year around 27,500 kids did French in the Leaving Cert, in comparison with 7,500 who did German and 3,000 who did Spanish.
Now I know that Monsieur Sarkozy and his amies think that Paris is the center of civilization, Europe and possibly the world, but the reality is that France doesn't really matter that much any more.
So why are nine times more Irish kids studying French than Spanish, a real world language? Because that's what all the teachers learned when they were in school, it's self-perpetuating and our government is too inept to change it.
Overall, the Leaving Cert course is too literary and too out of date. Most of what the kids have to study is irrelevant to them.
A major weakness is that instead of developing critical thinking and problem solving ability, it involves the rote learning of vast amounts of information which can then be regurgitated in the exam to get maximum points.
All these factors combine in the major problem we now have with maths. So few kids here do higher level maths in the Leaving Cert that the department is now considering giving bonus points for it.
The kids avoid it because they can get the points more easily from other subjects. In this year's Leaving Cert, for example, around 8,000 kids did maths at the Higher Level but around 46,000 did it either at ordinary or foundation level (very basic). This compares with English, for example, with 33,000 doing higher level and 18,000 doing ordinary level.
The maths problem is so bad that it prompted senior executives of U.S. companies here (including Google, Intel and Hewlett-Packard) to have a meeting with the Irish education minister last December in Google's Dublin offices to tell him how worried they are about it.
The Irish graduates they are getting just don't have the think-on-your-feet, problem solving ability they need. It's because students carry on their maths-related aversion into college and avoid degrees in science, engineering and computers.
And it's a problem with its roots in the points race and our Dickensian Leaving Cert system. Our kids know all about Shakespeare but not enough about complex numbers. It's got to change.
15 comments
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sirpeter | Sep 22, 2010, 10:27 PM EDT
God almighty,The Irish educational system is ranked one of the best in the world,It's a tough system, so you have to be very good.Irish special needs kids would qualify for the collages in the states.
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BrendanPKeane | Aug 26, 2010, 02:43 PM EDT
The Irish education system is more like South Korea than New York, and that's a good thing. I was a substitute teacher in Dublin, and I found the students to be disciplined and conversational on class room subjects. It was much better than the public schools I attended in NY. Irish language is good for connectedness to Ireland and for cultural self-confidence. Nothing more undermining in Irish people than a lack of cultural placed-ness. It would be cruel to deny students a chance to learn it on some negotiated basis where one can option for different goals of fluency with various rewards.
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murphy66 | Aug 26, 2010, 02:42 AM EDT
The primary purpose of education is to teach how a man (or woman) acts in isolation and how he (or she) faces the great moments of life.
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GeorgeDillon | Aug 25, 2010, 04:19 PM EDT
lawyer4: "A lot of time and money is wasted teaching Irish to students who are not interested in learning it" ----- You could say that of any subject. The Irish system encourages generalism rather than early specialization, which means that students wind up studying some things--Math, Biology or whatever, depending on the individual--that they're not interested in, because they need to study 7 or 8 subjects. Having said that, I do think it is patently obvious that educational policy with regard to Irish has not worked. I'd be open to making it optional--the question is at what age. And of course now with the huge influx of foreigners, nearly all of whom opt out of Irish if they are given a chance, the situation of Irish is even more critical. Because of timetabling, Often the foreigners who have opted out of Irish are put at the back of the class, ostensibly studying something else while the Irish children study Irish. No prizes for guessing the chaos and disruption that causes.
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lawyer4 | Aug 25, 2010, 03:12 PM EDT
A lot of time and money is wasted teaching Irish to students who are not interested in learning it. Making it obligatory has done nothing to increase the number of people using it.
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WoundedKnee | Aug 25, 2010, 01:02 PM EDT
John Spain should do some research before jumping into the topic of languages & education. He appears not to know that the Irish government made a big effort to promote Spanish a few years ago, and invested lots of money into pushing the language. Similar, though to a lesser extent, was their effort to start Japanese in the schools. They probably should have opted for Mandarin rather than Japanese, but it was a close call either way. A relative of mine in Ireland has a daughter who studies Japanese in high school. Even the textbook was produced in Ireland. That deserves a lot of credit for a small country like Ireland. Check out the situation of foreign languages in England, or even in many US schools, and you won't be so quick to knock Ireland. Ireland also has a lot of elementary schools that teach foreign languages.
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WoundedKnee | Aug 25, 2010, 12:55 PM EDT
archer: You show either your ignorance or your age. "Peig" was taken off the syllabus decades ago. Get your facts right before offering opinions. And do the Irish Gaelic language a favor--stop murdering it on the NYC subway sytem. There are some very good speakers of Irish in Manhattan--many with nothing to do with Ireland--so save them the horror of hearing your puerile efforts.
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davenkeenan | Aug 25, 2010, 12:22 PM EDT
John good article. To the folks making comments, try to comment on the premise of the article and hold back from being an Irish smart ass. The fact is that the Irish education system needs to change, John points out the general reasons why. Anyone with teenage kids about to sit the exam will relate to the emotions John has expressed.
The roth system is a disaster, there have been many calls by industry leaders to change it. We need a system where continuous assessment is the measure of progress and not one big set of final exams. We also need to shift the approach to one of critical thinking and problem solving instead of roth learning. Finally on languages, we should update the choices and make Irish optional.
Thats all !!
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Conjoly | Aug 25, 2010, 12:16 PM EDT
@Fatherpat - couldn't agree more. Are people being educated to be slaves or to be free-thinking, fully contributing members of society.... if companies need the former, there are plenty of more suitable countries than Ireland. Wages are probably lower in those places too.
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michaelidaho | Aug 25, 2010, 12:16 PM EDT
Nice tirade on the Irish education system that was kind of all over the place. Maybe, you should go back and take a few liberal arts classes to fine tune your writing skills. Perhaps, then you will be able to write a coherent essay. Oh yeah, by the way a computer science degree requires a little more skill than performing downloads and playing video games.
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Conjoly | Aug 25, 2010, 12:13 PM EDT
@archer50d - it depends on whether you want people to be schooled and trained or truly educated. The Irish education system is quite good. Despite the polemic drama in John's article.
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archer50d | Aug 25, 2010, 10:26 AM EDT
I agree with you this week John , yes the leaving cert is out of date , way too much emphasis on the shakespeare and Othello ( oh theres those dam ENGLISH again ) and Peig on the Irish front , actually Irish in general is out of date at this stage , fair enough its nice to be able to speak a few sentences of our national language but you will never use it in mainstream 21st century , I dont think its mandatory for a place in the GARDA now is it ??.To be honest , the only time a few of us speak Irish here in NYC is when were on the subway and we spot a smoking hot chick , ( feachaint , cailin go han deas , oh sea ta si go han deas ) >!!!!!!!!
I truly think that the whole leaving cert subjects need to be shaken up a notch , give students a choice on some subjects , introduce computers , and computer software development into the mix . I mean look at it when was the last time you seen someone stop a car on the road and open a map on the hood to see where they had to go , been a while right , its the TECH 21st century now , sat nav , gps , text , apps ,iPhones , droids , blackberry etc .
Your not going to revert back to OTHELLO to fix a virus on your computer now are you . I say introduce a 21st century style leaving cert so that the students are a step ahead when the finish school not 5 steps behind . there are people who wont want to change but change is good , take things from the past ,take them with you to the future .its time for the dept of education to shake it up a notch . By the way good luck to all the people who took the leaving cert, maybe your class will be the last of the old school style ...
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irishfez | Aug 25, 2010, 10:08 AM EDT
You might think it's an 'absolute disgrace' but Ireland has constantly been ranked top in the world for it's standard of education..... there's nothing else that Ireland has consistently been ranked so well for. Some would say it's Ireland's crowning glory. No education system is perfect, so let's be thankful for a semi-decent system. Look at the U.S system. Now that's a disgrace.
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Fatherpat | Aug 25, 2010, 09:47 AM EDT
"Last week the results of the Leaving Certificate here examination were published." Lovely English, John and proof positive at least that your own edukashun leaves lots to be desired.
"Or Spanish, which is the second most spoken language in the world today (and of course of growing importance in the U.S.). Or German, since Germany is now propping up the Irish economy as well as the rest of Europe." Did you ever hear about subject, predicate and proper punctuation in your constructions?
"And it's a problem with its roots in the points race and our Dickensian Leaving Cert system." And for goodness sake do not start a sentence with the much abused conjunction "and"!
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