HAVE YOU any room in for complacency in your house? I use the attic myself but it's a bit poky. Even the posher new houses ignore the need entirely, and the property pages offers no advice at all. How people cope is a mystery to me.
All right. Down to business. This brave new world touched on the other day, the world where all are perceived as equally brilliant, equally sublime human beings, is also heralded by CORI, the Conference of Religious of Ireland, which has mounted an attack on the Leaving Certificate.
CORI believes the Leaving Cert contributes to the alienation of the disadvantaged, and, no doubt, the disadvantage of the alienated. It welcomes the fall in the incidence of early school leaving but suggests there is no room for complacency (see above).
I knew I would not have to read very far in the newspaper reports on the CORI contribution before coming to the bit about social and personal development skills". But do I not recognise such skills, you ask in wonder? I do. What then are they? They are the qualities, acquired over many years, which allow one to get on with life and with other people. Some are picked up in the classroom, many more in the school yard, one or two behind the bicycle shed, others at the disco, some at dinner parties, a few genetically, and the rest in all kinds of areas and experiences ranging from prison to the civil service, the French Foreign Legion to the seminary, the Irish college to the institution of marriage (God help us).
There is no agreement on what constitutes the perfect set of these skills. They vary tremendously from person to person. That is the way it always has been and always will be. Yet CORI not only wants these nebulous skills recognised but given equal status and equal marks when it comes to the examinations (which will probably disappear anyway if CORI has its way).
I will be interested to see the first exam papers in social and personal development skills (Well done, son! A C plus in S&P); I would even have a go at setting them myself if 20th century pop educational psychology were not a closed book to me.
CORI may well be right in criticising the Points Race but to speak of "unhealthy individualism and competition" is deeply depressing. There go the Olympic Games (and the World Cup - maybe there is something in this after all) for a start - all that divisive and stressful pre qualifying, the shocking individualism, rampant egotism and fierce competition, not to mention the alienation of the physically disadvantaged and the terminally unathletic.
A decent sociologist, if there is one left in the country unaffected by the PC virus, should be able to pinpoint the date when individualism in Ireland was first discovered to be unhealthy. It was certainly after 1916 (Pearse was lucky to get away. Dead lucky) but before the mid 1960s. Noel Browne (even Vincent Browne) might be usefully contacted, or the shade of Sean Lemass.
As for the Leaving Cert being relevant to only parts of the lives" of many students, what else should it be? Relevant to the entire life of the student? Most students have interests outside the Leaving Cert. They don't want or expect the Leaving Cert to absorb them entirely, to relate to every aspect of their lives. Its partial irrelevance is a good thing.
Ignorance is a delicate flower, as Oscar remarked: touch it and the bloom is gone. Eventually we will have no teachers because the notion that young people get anything at all from formal academic education will be seen as entirely patronising. It is just as well then that this country (or at any rate the Limerick Vocational Education Committee) has publicly established the principle of paying full salary to teachers who don't teach, and paying them over 20 years of non teaching, and even offering them early retirement (hardly likely to be taken up) on pension from non teaching teaching jobs.
As for the "absence of support for dealing with disruptive behaviour", many teachers know all about this glaring vacuum. But CORI's concern is clearly less for the teachers affected than for the shameful absence of support for those who indulge in disruptive behaviour a concern CORI seems to view as much more important, relevant, socially advantageous, development orientated, cohesive, enriching, inspirational, multi faceted, caring, integrational and non alienating.
PS: The playwright Eugene O'Neill was not homosexual, as alleged in this space last Thursday.