What is the name of the current Taoiseach? Who is the EU Finance Commissioner? What does SDLP stand for? These are the kinds of questions that could feature in the first State exam of the brand new Junior Cert subject, CSPE. It was introduced into the school curriculum three years ago and made compulsory two years ago. The Civic, Social and Political Education exam is at 2 p.m. on June 18th, when over 19,000 students will take the paper.
At Leaving Cert level, the revised music and business syllabi will be examined for the first time; but it is at Junior Cert level that the real excitement can be felt with students currently listening to the radio, scanning newspaper headlines and recapping on the major stories of political intrigue that broke during the year - at local, national and international level. A new awareness has been born, thanks to the CSPE programme.
The 70-hour CSPE programme takes "a developmental approach, working from the individual outward", says Mr Stephen McCarthy, national co-ordinator of the in-service training for this programme.
Some 60 per cent of marks in the subject are awarded for work done in the school year and submitted in the form of a report in May. The remaining 40 per cent of the marks are for the written examination. The first section of the written paper will test Junior Cert students on basic general knowledge in the area of civic, social and political life. The second section tests them on concepts such as democracy, human dignity, environment, development, interdependence, rights and responsibilities and law. In the third section they answer a question using what they have learned from their "action project". CSPE was first introduced on a pilot basis in a small number of schools in 1993. The low level of political awareness among young people was one of the reasons why 136 teachers in 57 schools took part in the piloted project of the CSPE programme that year. Two years later, the number of schools and the number of teachers had more than trebled. This year almost a third of the 64,823 Junior Cert exam cohort will sit the exam.
"It replaces the old civics programme which was never examined and which a lot of schools were not implementing in real terms," says Mr John Hammond, assistant CEO of the National Council for Curriculum Assessment (NCCA). "It's a major achievement for schools to have implemented this CSPE programme. It's attracted a lot of attention in Northern Ireland and in Britain," he says. "Its advent here has been quite influential," he adds, pointing to Britain's recent introduction of the Education for Citizenship programme, which will be a compulsory subject at lower second level.
"The emphasis is now on active, participatory citizenship, with a view to students seeing this whole area not as simply a theoretic subject but as something that they can become involved with. It addresses a perceived need within society for young people to be more directly involved in society and with the political process," Mr Hammond says.
Mr Brendan O'Regan, a spokesman for the CSPE Teachers' Association, says the programme aims to teach students about democracy.
Mr O'Regan's students at Arklow CBS in Co Wicklow ran an election campaign in their school to elect a students' council. Students at St Colman's College in Fermoy, Co Cork, prepared submissions for an earth charter arising out of the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit.
Mr McCarthy explains that "the focus of the subject is more on the development of skills and getting children involved in action rather then getting them to learn a whole amount of knowledge". The action projects are "right up-to-date", listing the European elections, the crises in Kosovo, the mobile phone mast controversy in Co Donegal and political bribery as examples of what some classes have examined. "It allows you to exploit current events and issues that are happening," he says.
He says in one Co Wicklow school the students invited the local TDs in and "quizzed them up and down quite vigorously about whether they took bribes. We seem to think that it's only the older age group that are interested in these issues but the 12, 13 and 14-year-olds can be quite political and have a sense of what is just and unjust. By 16, 17 and 18 it is too late to develop that."
