I HAD never been able to explain how I felt about the negative experiences and obstacles that I encountered as a student from a working-class community in an educationally disadvantaged school until I came across a paragraph in Padraic Pearse’s Murder Machine. It read: ‘It grinds night and day; it obeys immutable and predetermined laws; it is as devoid of understanding, of sympathy, of imagination, as is any other piece of machinery that performs an appointed task. Into it is fed all raw human material in Ireland; it seizes upon it inexorably and rends and compresses and remoulds, and what it cannot refashion it ejects, thereafter accounted waste.”
When I think back on my secondary schooling, this expresses my sentiments exactly. As a parent, I have worked hard to ensure it is not repeated. As my daughter sits in the same school, with some of the same teachers I had, I can happily say that she is having a more positive experience. My eldest daughter — who is 15 — talks of one, maybe two, cool and interesting teachers who encourage her talents for acting and art. The school system, I will admit, has progressed — but not enough. Even with those one or two teachers who empower, the level of expectation when it comes to third-level progression isn’t exactly heartening.
When I think of the attitudes of many second-level teachers, they are simply making people like their inescapable social destiny — as Aldous Huxley describes in Brave New World. Inescapable not only in the sense of the inequality raining down on the lower classes by the ruling elite, but also inescapable in the sense that teachers and communities should be, but aren’t, fighting against it.
As a sixth-class student I remember the day I went to find out what class I was going to be attending in secondary school — crossing everything that I was not in the ‘dumb’ class, although the rumours that everyone in the lowest class got treated to a McDonald’s every Wednesday did act as an incentive to be a little lazy in my entrance exam. That was not all they got, though. What I soon realised was that they also got to skip out on learning a language. You know, because they were dumb. If you were fortunate enough to have French class, this somehow meant you weren’t stupid.
What I realised as an adult is that low expectations from second-level schools added to an already toxic education system. At the young age of 11, your schooling for the rest of your life is determined by an outdated entrance exam that I believe was to be abolished by the Department of Education 30 years ago. Yet secondary schools continue to expect sixth-class students to sit this exam so they can segregate the good students from the bad students from there on in.
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Underlying the much larger problem of educational inequality is the lack of standards and expectation reinforced within disadvantaged secondary level schools. Over the past decade, the number of adults with a second-level education has risen. However, Tallaght West, for example, still lags behind the national figures. Teachers and staff applaud and congratulate one another on a job well done for their students managing to sit the Leaving Certificate yet they fall seriously short on setting expectations beyond this. I would go as far as saying that for some, the quality of a student’s Leaving Cert is secondary to the quantity of students completing the exam.
In the year that the DEIS programme was launched, the Education Disadvantage Committee ceased to exist. Losing this committee got rid of an expert group that was more qualified to address much more than the DEIS programme can address. Reinstating this committee is crucial for the future of second-level education and could serve as a catalyst for a shift from the retaining of students to Leaving Cert to transition to third-level education.
The complacency of schools to accept low levels of education attainments seeps down into parents who think that teachers must know best. The success of my daughter’s schooling to date is that I never have accepted that the teacher knows best. Parents need to be empowered to demand better from their children’s schools.
I often act as a mediator between frustrated parents and teachers. Generally, the frustration is borne from the fact the teacher is educated and the parent is not.
The parents I support often feel that the teacher has the power, and if the teacher suggests the child is not able for a particular subject then the parent has no power to challenge this — probably because they know little about the subject. Secondary schools don’t tend to come up with solutions to problems the child is experiencing. Rather, they remove them from the class or steer them towards foundation subjects. For a lot of people, the solution to a child struggling with a subject is getting grinds, but in situations of disadvantage and deprivation, grinds are out of reach.
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In the absence of schools striving for better and with schools failing to empower students, I would urge parents to be resourceful. Ask more questions and never feel like you are being a nuisance to teachers. In working-class communities, we often view success as keeping our children alive, and keeping them off drugs. This is a big deal. But when we look beyond the Leaving Cert and our children are well educated, trends such as poverty, social exclusion and addiction will become less of a reality for our grandchildren.
Education has a ripple effect, and over generations has the ability to challenge the class system. So we must broaden our goals and empower students and parents to consider third-level a real possibility. Education is a human right and without it we are in a weaker position to exercise all other human rights. As a parent and a teacher, we need to stop making it easy for inequality.
Lynn Ruane is president of Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union