An alternative to post-exam stress

Sir — On the last Sunday before this year’s Leaving Certificate, a debate has emerged over the last few weeks highlighting the pressure on our young citizens about to sit the examination to choose a STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) degree course if they achieve the required points. This pressure has reached an unprecedented intensity, which has been reinforced by a government agenda that has marginalised the humanities, to the point, that any subject outside of the hard sciences is depicted as almost irrelevant.

This agenda has been the biggest political and social force behind the growth of so-called grind schools which have been portrayed as a sure fire way of delivering those required extra points. This is of course, if their parents can afford upwards of €6,000 per annum, a luxury that has introduced an inherent inequality, which has produced a distorted educational narrative.

One of the saddest aspects of this inequality is the lack of pedagogical understanding which underpins the decision of oftentimes frantic parents, to take their children out of a holistic State education system, and immerse them during their most formative life stage, in a system that imparts a ruthless doctrine of exam success at the cost of a balanced education.

Therefore, as a parent of two former LC students, I would like to offer an alternative narrative which is also a passionate defence of the State educational system, it is the narrative of an intelligent and motivated teenager who never had a grind in his life.

This young man worked diligently in a local national school before entering a local community school, where with the help of interested, and interesting teachers, he achieved a maximum LC which was a blend of humanities and hard-science subjects.

Subsequently, this young man resisted multiple external pressures to study medicine, engineering or law and undertook an arts degree eventually specialising in philosophy, a so-called dead discipline. His parents supported his endeavours secure in the belief that if you love a subject you will be good at it, and if you are good at it, there is an important place in society for you.

In April of this year, that young man secured a fully funded PhD scholarship to Colombia University in New York. Colombia is an Ivy League university ranked in the global top 10 of every ranking system that matters; it also prizes lateral thinking and independence of thought above all else.

I suspect, if this young man had taken the easy route and studied what his points (rather than intellect) had indicated he should, i.e., a STEM degree, he would not have been simply unmotivated, but also unhappy.

I will leave it to the reader to decide if this is an allegorical tale designed to defend an increasingly marginalised and underfunded State education system, or whether it is the profound appreciation of a parent who saw the holistic benefits of a community-based education based on student, school and parental cooperation. I offer it merely as an alternative for the hundreds of thousands of stressed parents pondering life-changing decisions for their children. Dr Kevin McCarthy, Co Cork