Skills training leaves students unengaged

The historian Roy Foster reminds us that, in his last lecture before he went out to kill and die for Ireland in the Easter Rising, the Professor of English at UCD, Thomas MacDonagh, spoke with rapture about the work of Jane Austen. Talking as if her knew her personally, the soon-to-be republican martyr left his students with the thought that "There's no one like Jane, lads".

It would be hard to imagine a body of work more redolent than Austen's of the comfortable England that created the Empire. Or a hatred of that Empire more absolute than that expressed in the Rising that MacDonagh helped to lead. Yet the gap was bridged by words, images and syntax. The teaching and learning of English is about finding those bridges and discovering ways to cross them.

The Leaving Cert English course, then, has two related functions. One is to help the student to master the resources of the language itself: grammar, syntax and, above all, vocabulary. The other is to show what can be done with those resources both in literature and in the everyday use of words. The first is essentially about the power of language as an expression of one's self. The second is about the power of language in encountering others. For all the immense changes in the forms of communication that are unfolding now, those basic purposes remain unaltered.

In recognition of those changes, the old Leaving Cert syllabus that was shaped in the late 1960s will give way next year to a new, more flexible one, with a larger selection of contemporary writers, a broader set of choices and a greater emphasis on film and media studies.

The new syllabus is more explicitly committed to equipping students not just with functional literacy, but with the ability both to take pleasure in language for its own sake and to use it to intervene in the public dialogue of a democratic society.

But the same essential questions arise with both the new and the old course. Does it allow students to develop a real fluidity with language? And does it encourage them to engage with minds and worlds that are beyond their own experience?

One way of answering those questions is to look at how well or badly students actually perform in the exam. The most recent Chief Examiner's Report for Higher Level English (for 1997), paints a generally bright picture with some unsettling shadows. Nearly 65 per cent of the 32,000 candidates got a grade C or higher. The failure rate was just 3.2 per cent. On the whole, then, the Irish education system is turning out very large numbers of highly literate young people with a good knowledge of at least some classic literary texts.

But it is by no means clear that the course is equally good at producing large numbers of young people who have what the Chief Examiner calls "an element of personal engagement which facilitates critical reading and thought".

Students answering questions on poetry, for example, "tended to resort to excessive paraphrase or summary", sought "refuge in paraphrase" and showed an "over-reliance on background material which was substituted for genuine response".

It is hard to avoid the impression that the system is producing students who are very good at learning and repeating but not so good at analysing and responding. The system passes on skills very effectively but does not, on the whole, encourage students to use them creatively. It meets the first requirement of helping students to master the elements of language. But it does not, in general, provide the materials for the kind of personal bridges between one's own world and someone else's that allows a violent Irish republican to sigh over Jane Austen's landed English ladies.

And this, remember, is what seems to be happening at the highest level. Lots of students don't make it to the Leaving Cert at all and lots of those who do don't take honours papers.

Given the shameful levels of functional illiteracy in contemporary Ireland, it seems likely that large numbers of students are emerging without even the basic skills.

One frequently canvassed solution to these problems is to make the syllabus more "relevant" to the lives of the students. There is some point to this, and the new syllabus quite rightly includes more living writers, more awareness of language in the media and wider range of gender and geography in English literature. But it properly resists the urge to throw out Shakespeare, 19th century fiction and the Romantic poets. There is something terribly patronising, after all, about the reductive idea of "relevance" that is often put forward by would-be liberals.

What, for example, could be more genuinely relevant than sex, death and politics - the themes of this year's Shakespeare play, Hamlet? Besides, part of the point of education is to encounter the unfamiliar, to engage with that is beyond ourselves. The journey a student has to take in coming to grips with Hamlet or Emma is the same journey that leads towards genuine sympathy with other people and real participation in society.

The real problem, of course, is not with Shakespeare or Austen, Yeats or Milton. It's with the mundane and relentlessly unpoetic realities of deprivation. As every teacher knows, the hardest text to unravel is poverty. The Leaving Cert syllabus is not the place to start redressing the failures and injustices that leave far too many kids without the resources to use language as a resource and a playground.

The crucial social and educational interventions have to start much earlier.

What the Leaving course can do is encourage those who do have the skills to use them more critically and creatively. The new syllabus looks like it will do that. The one danger is that, precisely because it allows students to use their own resources, it tilts the balance of educational advantage even further in favour of those who have access to books, computers and films at home. The new course, indeed, cries out for a real investment in school and public libraries. Whether the Government has the critical and analytical skills to grasp that necessity is another matter altogether.