Podcast: Play in new window
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS | More
Daniel Long farming activist and running for president of Macra na Feirme.
*****
Things that seem good aren’t always good, things that seem bad aren’t always bad, and things that really are good or bad can sometimes have the confounding outcomes.
If you get three education spokespersons in a studio, they’ll usually come out with at least four plans to reform the Leaving Certificate. There might be a lot of proposals out there, but they all use the same buzz words and phrases. Too much stress, continual assessment, can’t judge someone by an exam grade, credit for coursework, judge the whole student, no job interviewer will ask for it, reduce exam pressure.
Mix in all these cliches with a few badly thought-out ideas, half-bake them for a three minute interview, and hey presto, you’ve got an education policy.
Yes, there is some merit in some of the ideas that are proposed. And, yes, there are terrible things about the Leaving Cert, they are well-rehearsed, I don’t need to repeat them all, but the thing is that it makes sense to talk about what is wrong with it, that’s how we solve problems, but are we ignoring its good points.
And as for mixing up good and bad, the Daily Mail is a paper with, to say the least, an inglorious track record. Celebrity news and gossip has always been the mainstay of the Daily Mail, but directed by its owner Lord Rothermere, it was an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini, Hitler and nazis in general in the 1930s; it was sympathetic to the racist apartheid government in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s, and the paper still regularly uses any story where it can link immigrants to crime as its splash headline, and it was reported to the UK Press Complaints Commission in 1997 for anti-Irish bias.
Their science coverage is so bad that the British doctor and science writer Ben Goldacre laughed about their never-ending campaign to categorise every substance in the universe into one of two categories, those that cause cancer, and those that cure it.
In the background there that’s the 1990s Punk band Antidote’s track Shock Horror!, no surprise that they pinpoint the Daily Mail as one of the many offenders in stoking up racism in Britain. Antidote won’t be happy to hear that the Daily Mail has now overtaken the Sun as the best-selling newspaper ah best-selling paper in the UK.
The Irish edition of the Daily Mail was launched in 2006, with a simple strategy of using international news and all the celebrity and entertainment content from the British edition, wrapped in a few pages of Irish news provided by reporters here.
So importing a dodgy British tabloid, nothing good could come of that, right. Except, the Irish Daily Mail is building a modestly impressive record of breaking exclusive political stories.
That record was massively boosted at the end of last week with the front-page splash by Craig Hughes about the Beacon Hospital, diverting covid vaccines to some of the teachers in the exclusive private school attended by the children of the Beacon’s CEO, with follow-ups on how the Beacon was offering vaccines as much on the basis of your connections as your need.
I think that the importance of this is not being appreciated. As we have heard on this podcast, many of Ireland’s problems flow from power being held by a cosy cartel of people who protect and look out for each other. And, as we’ve heard on the podcast, Irish journalists are particularly prone to both protecting that cartel, rather than exposing it.
The Daily Mail, for all its flaws, isn’t part of that. It’s parent company just wants to make a quick buck, by repurposing its content for the Irish market. It’s not even a big part of their empire, it only sells about 25,000 copies per day. Their executives probably couldn’t even spell, or even name any Irish political parties, much less care about their fate.
So if a story bumps up the circulation, then it can go in the news section, as simple as that. That’s why, if we get to hear about establishment corruption in Ireland, increasingly we hear it from an often-racist title, whose antisemitic founder was the epitome of the establishment for our former colonial masters.
Good out of bad, maybe.
But what of the bad out of good?
For all the criticism of the Leaving Cert, of how brutal it is, we have to remember one thing. It is brutally fair. Students are judged by someone they have never met, who knows nothing about them, and can’t even identify them other than through an anonymous code number.
It is the only aspect of our whole exam system that is immune to strokes. All the grind schools, extra lessons, private education, winks, nods and even diversity of backgrounds that mean that some kids arrive in school already able to read, while others can’t even hold a crayon, none of that can change the fact that if Mary does a better exam that Johnny, she gets the grade and he doesn’t.
And this is vitally important because the Leaving is our university entrance exam. It is truly competitive, because of the limited number of college places. This is a zero-sum-game, where every benefit given to one student is a loss to another. So anything helping Johnny to get that university place is denying a place to Mary or another student.
With Covid, that has been disrupted, particularly by the input of teachers to assess the student’s final grade. It’s notable that almost all the proposals for reform involve fewer exams, therefore more reliance on assessment by teachers.
That might be coursework marked by teachers, references given by teachers, continual assessment by teachers. Outside the elaborate security of exam halls, the reliance on soft, fuzzy judgements of teachers, not to mention on their integrity is absolute.
I’m sure that most teachers are honest, but even the best of us are influenced by whether someone is likable, known to us or other factors that really shouldn’t sway our judgment, but do.
So any reforms should have regard for the fact that in small-town Ireland, your kid could end up competing for a university-critical grade with a kid whose father helpfully arranged for that teacher to get a mortgage, or get planning permission, or skip the vaccine queue.
That’s a really good reason to stick with anonymised exams.
