As Margaret Mead said, students must be taught how to think, not what to
think.
We have fabulous, hard-working, and dedicated teachers . . .
who are too often frustrated by the enormous pressure . . . to teach,
not the subject, but how to pass the exam.
Current pedagogical models demand change. The passive classroom is
increasingly being replaced by a participatory model in which students are
encouraged to think through the subject for themselves. This style of teaching
doesn’t fit well within the current system in which the emphasis is on learning a little
about a lot of subjects rather than studying fewer subjects at greater depth and
breadth.
We have fabulous, hard-working, and dedicated teachers in our secondary
education system who are too often frustrated by the enormous pressure—too little
time, too few resources—to teach, not the subject, but how to pass the exam. Two
young people I know, from different schools, recently passed their Leaving Certificate
in English without reading the assigned texts. Instead, they simply memorised the
bullet lists of facts supplied by textbooks and teachers; that is, they left school
qualified but not educated.
Is there an alternative?
The current dependence on the Leaving Certificate exam and the points
system alone as a measure of a students’ suitability to study at university is
problematic for a number of reasons.
1. Exams only measure how well students perform on exams.
Memorization doesn’t need understanding; using that memorised knowledge
does need understanding.
Third-level study requires that students have the skills to make use of what they
know and apply it to what they are learning in order to understand course material.
That understanding and those skills can only be achieved if given time and space—
during active participation in class, and, more importantly, through independent
study. A terminal exam can’t measure that learning and exam pressure cuts into the
time available to learn it.
Alternatively, project work demonstrates not only how well students know their
subject, but how well they understand it and how well they can use it.
Course work over at least the senior cycle has to be part of the assessment at
the end of secondary school. It’s extraordinary that students spend 14 years in
education—almost three-quarters of their lives to that point—but that their
academic future will largely depend on their performance on exams taken during
two weeks in the summer of their eighteenth year.