Cork's culture of high educational standards

My Leaving Cert: Cork students have always been the best and the brightest when it comes to the Leaving , argues George Hook.

Our Leaving Cert results were published in the Cork Examiner. I think this was a uniquely Cork phenomenon.

Perhaps that culture of emphasis on high educational standards has led to Cork students' success in the Leaving Cert today.

My school, Presentation College Cork, would take out an ad in the Examiner listing the name of every one who had passed. Those who had passed with honours got an asterisk beside their names. I didn't get an asterisk and I think my mother was very wounded about that. It was an especially brutal Tuesday for those boys whose names weren't published at all.

I'm a very good advertisement for Transition Year. I went to school at a time when there was no transition year - we did the old Inter Cert in third year and then went on to fifth year.

In Presentation College Cork they were extraordinarily enlightened and did a transition year of sorts, but I had to skip it (my mother had kept me back in Senior Infants and I was too old to do fourth year).

The result was that I went from being one of the smartest and most confident students in the year to losing all self-esteem and opting out of everything. Meanwhile, my former classmates gained a year of maturity and confidence that helped many of them to excel. I passed, but that was a far cry from coming highest in the year as I had in my Inter Cert.

The great advantage for my generation was that you only needed five passes in ordinary level subjects to get a place in college. You didn't have to pick your course until the first day of college and you were free to study anything you liked, from medicine to nuclear physics.

One successful and distinguished doctor I know chose medicine because the queue was short and he wanted to make it to the cinema in time for the matinee. His method of choice didn't affect his career success one bit. Maybe career guidance is overrated.

My parents couldn't afford to send me to college so I went to work in insurance, first in Dublin and then in London. By the age of 21 I had saved enough money to come home and start a college course.

I took accountancy in Rathmines College of Commerce. I was a lot more mature by then and it showed. I came first in my class every year and was president of the students' union. It proved to me the importance of confidence and maturity in academic performance. I think kids today should do their world travelling before they start college and not after.

Despite my positive experience of college, accountancy was not a good choice for me. I did it because my parents wanted me to. Taking a subject I wasn't interested in set me up for a lot of failures in my life. I always seemed to be doing something I wasn't meant for.

I think parents should let their children do exactly what they want to do. If you're happy, then you'll be successful.

The most interesting thing about my whole school experience is how well it prepared me for life. When I first went to work in journalism I had no problem with grammar and punctuation because I was so well taught.

I've always been very numerate and I put it down to extremely high standards of teaching at Presentation College. My eldest girl was in Mount Anville and she used to complain that Irish was too hard. I took her through Con Buckley's class notes from the 1950s and before long she had no difficulty with Irish at all.

I was dismayed by the Taoiseach's article in this paper yesterday. The idea that learning by rote should be changed is nonsense. Kids today can't add, subtract, multiply or spell because they aren't learning the basics. The great tradition of Irish education has stood me in good stead.

All those do-gooders who think kids should go home and study grass growing in the garden are mistaken.

Presentation College Cork continues to deliver huge high scorers in the Leaving.

We've always recognised Cork people as "cute hoors" and the recent statistics on regional academic performance prove it.

Just as Asian students perform astonishingly strongly in the US because they value education, Cork students and parents place great value on education and on preserving traditional standards.