EducationOpinion

In almost 40 years of teaching, I have yet to find a teacher who prepares Leaving Cert students by ‘rote learning’

There are grounds to criticise the English exam, but it can only be successfully tackled with critical thinking

Leaving Cert exams got underway on Wednesday with English paper one. Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill

Julian Girdham
Wed Jun 5 2024 - 18:30

Earlier this year, in an article called “The classroom needs to change. Here’s how”, Carl O’Brien assembled “leading entrepreneurs, educators, cultural figures and scientists” who gave their views ‘on how to future-proof education in Ireland’.

Two illustrations had an immediate impact. In bright colour, taking up a quarter of the page, was a stock photo of three schoolgirls wearing VR headsets and laughing ecstatically. Further down were girls from the 1950s, trapped behind their traditional school-desks in their grim black and white world, listening to their teacher.

Of course contributors have no say in the choice of illustrations, but these two pictures do encapsulate the regular clichés about Irish schools. In that narrative, our schools are stuck in the past. Schools should be encouraging “21st century skills”, preferably through the use of cutting-edge technology. Those skills come handily packed in alliterative “C” phrases, like “collaboration, communication, creativity and critical thinking”. Our classrooms are still full of the drilling and “rote learning” described in the 1854 novel Hard Times by Charles Dickens, where Mr Gradgrind wants the “little pitchers” to be “filled with facts” in the classroom of the subtly-named Mr M’Choakumchild.

Time to look at some facts. The dismal banality of the phrase “21st century skills” obfuscates what basic critical thinking should show: those skills are indeed crucial to human society, but they are permanent human conditions. Shakespeare would be surprised to be told he would have to wait four centuries to deploy the skills which underpinned the achievements of his great company of actors.

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Typically, commentary on how Irish education needs to be “transformed” bypasses the key figures who would be involved in such a transformation: teachers. No current classroom practitioners at primary or post-primary level appeared in the March 30th article. Current teachers of English and Irish were not involved in the recent proposals to move paper one to fifth year. As Professor Lawrence Stenhouse memorably stated in 1980, teachers tend to be treated as “intellectual navvies, told where to dig without having to know why.”

So let us look not at the received opinion about, but the reality of, classrooms. We need evidence. The only area I can talk about with authority is English. I have been teaching the Leaving Certificate for almost 40 years, and I know English teachers all over the country: not once have I come across any teacher who is preparing their students for the Leaving Certificate by applying so-called ‘drilling’ or ‘rote learning’ in the classroom. That would be not just deadening but purposeless.

There are certainly grounds on which to criticise the course and the examination, and if I were put in charge of English they would look somewhat different, but this is not an exam which can be tackled with “rote learning”. In fact, it can only be successfully approached with that favoured phrase, critical thinking. The language paper tests candidates in the analysis of comprehension extracts, and in composing in short- and long-form: “rote learning” would be a waste of time (and no, you can’t “learn off” an essay and simply reproduce it in early June unless you get an illegal advance peek at the paper). This paper does indeed test creativity and personal expression, a creativity that has been nurtured by teachers in classrooms over the previous two years. Thankfully, the paper one proposal, which would have removed all creative writing from the final year of schooling, has been shelved.

What about literature? Let’s have a look at a single sample question from the 2023 higher level paper two in the comparative section, on three different texts:

Compare how comprehensively similar or different ethical (moral) questions are explored in the treatment of the same theme or issue.

Whatever criticisms you could make of that question, one of them cannot be that “rote learning” will help you answer it. It definitely requires the kind of intellectual fitness which has developed from classroom discussions.

So as this year’s candidates prepare to face into their exams, let us make sure their teachers’ voices are heard in the reform process. There is widespread concern from those teachers that well-meaning attempts to defuse stress in June through Additional Assessment Components in the future Senior Cycle will have the unintended consequence of actually increasing it, as future candidates face a blizzard of assessment in all subjects across two years. Anyone who believes that allocating “just” 60 per cent to the terminal exam will result in less pressure is naive.

In March Dr Katriona O’Sullivan, and Paul Crone of the NAPD, both pointed out that as long as the CAO system, run by and for third-level institutions, remains unchanged, all assessment will be high stakes. The rapids will still be waiting at the end of the river.

Let us also look at just what our students truly need. Technology always glows with seductive promise, but the history of technology in education is littered with over-promise and disappointment. As Jonathan Haidt writes in his important new book The Anxious Generation, children are now swimming in “a firehose of addictive content”. The passivity generated by a screen-based childhood, likely to be exacerbated by AI, is not the way forward in education.

What schoolchildren need is much more mundane. Primary and post-primary schools are struggling with teacher-recruitment, and many are also under-resourced and poorly funded. Sort those out first, and help children discover the miracles of science, the richness of history, the intricacies of mathematics. It is time to stop parading the old hobby-horses about how to ‘transform’ education, ideas which sound suspiciously like they are being trotted out by, well, rote.

Julian Girdham is an experienced English teacher. He writes on books, teaching and education generally at www.juliangirdham.com.

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